- So we have Stefani Ruper
who's a fourth year DPhil candidate.
And she's in the religion
and science cohort
and the religion faculty at Oxford.
And she's written,
well you're writing your thesis
on the religious cold case of science.
Maybe a bit unusually
for a DPhil candidate,
she's a twice bestselling author
in the field of women's health.
And she's also hosting a podcast called
The Meaning of Everything.
So she's gonna be talking about
the kind of knowledge
that eats other knowledge.
- Mmm.
(audience laughing)
Yeah so I am in the religion faculty
and I do have a thesis,
but I will not be talking
about my thesis today.
Instead I will be talking
about my next book
which entails a thesis about ambiguity
and uncertainty in the modern world.
Specifically I will be
attempting to summarize
the chapter on science.
It's hard.
I will try to take 23
plus or minus two minutes.
I want to give you a couple
of caveats before I start.
I have index cards.
One, I do talk about a model.
It is not a model
embedded in the discourse
on models of science in
the study of science.
So for those of us who like the social
scientific study of science,
please forgive me.
The model is not intended to depict
how science is conducted
with any degree of nuance.
It is rather intended as a pushback
against popular models that we find
in the popular science literature,
and is also intended to be
a heuristic for thinking
about how we as a society
relate to science.
I will also, as I said to
my friends earlier today,
be attempting to break a record for the
number of unsubstantiated claims made
in a Linacre seminar.
(audience laughing)
So I'm going to open with
two different scenarios
that are seemingly quite different,
but they actually have some fundamental
underlying similarities
that I think demonstrate why
this thesis is so important.
Okay, Christian fundamentalism.
In 1910, a pastor named Reuben Torrey
distributed a number of essays
titled The Fundamentals.
This was after decades of rising tensions
between liberal and conservative
churches in the states
for a wide variety of reasons,
a phrase I will say many times today.
And they basically promoted
a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Right, so they decried anything
that might encourage you
to question the literal
truth of the Bible,
such as philosophy or science.
A few years later,
a man named Curtis Lee Laws
coined the term fundamentalism
to designate people who
were willing and I quote,
"to do battle royal for the fundamentals".
As a paramount example of
one of these fundamentalists,
William Jennings Bryan
went to court in 1925
to try to keep evolution
out of public schools.
So this is a fight that has been ongoing
for almost a century.
And there is no end in sight.
Fast forward precisely 100 years
and we arrive at Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is a, I need
both hands for this,
public intellectual,
who really loves science.
In 2010, Harris published a
book called The Moral Landscape,
How Science Can Determine Human Values.
A few years later,
a book about spirituality and science.
Now in the former book,
he made the argument that
science can determine human values, right.
Morality should be
considered, in his words,
an undeveloped branch of science.
In the second book,
he made a similar argument
about spirituality
saying that it should be
practiced in a scientific manner.
Now the enfolding
of things like spirituality
and morality into science
is something nowadays called Scientism.
Harris definitely practices Scientism.
And science is for him,
this is actually a chapter in my thesis,
the only time you'll hear about my thesis,
science is for Harris something
that is deeply central.
It orders his world.
And I argue in my thesis
that it is something
that he is deeply emotionally attached to
because it cuts through the ambiguity
of many questions in the modern world.
He has said this
and he has also said things like,
faith is the devil's masterpiece,
and religion is a place where people can
reap the fruits of madness
and consider them holy.
He has said this because he hates things
that threaten science.
He deeply is threatened.
He is deeply threatened by
things that threaten science,
including religion.
Now what do Harris and
Christian fundamentalists
have in common?
Clearly there are many differences
between the two groups.
Their epistemologies,
the way they make sense of things,
how they live in the world.
But I argue
something that they have in common,
the one thing,
the important thing
that they have in common
is something that
Richard Bernstein in 1983
called Cartesian Anxiety.
Now Cartesian Anxiety is the longing
for firm foundations to knowledge
that you know on some
kind of subconscious level
don't really exist.
Bernstein so named these after Descartes
because Descartes sought
firm foundations to knowledge
and did not find them.
I mean, he thought he found them,
but we're now pretty sure
he did not find them.
And so this Cartesian Anxiety entails
attachment to a belief that you know
in some way or another
is actually pretty specious, right.
It can be attacked.
And so you can become defensive and angry
when you are attacked.
And this is one of the arguments
about what fundamentalism is.
Of course, people have been
able to be fundamentalist
throughout human history,
and are across the globe for
a wide variety of reasons.
The reason I bring up Cartesian Anxiety
is because there is a question
about the modern west.
Why here, why now?
It was once thought
that after the Enlightenment,
society would progress to
a stage of civil discourse,
and debate, and reason,
and logic, and secular stuff.
But that has obviously not happened.
One of the reasons I argue
that it has not happened
is because we exist in a
mood of deeply unsettling
uncertainty and ambiguity
that gives rise to Cartesian Anxiety
and which causes people to
react in unfortunate ways
and experience unfortunate feelings.
Obviously there are more
reasons than uncertainty
for this as well.
There are many sources
of modern ambiguity.
There is a chapter in my book on each one.
We can talk about them at
any given point in time.
Today I am talking about science.
Science is a particularly
interesting source of ambiguity
because it is something
that we normally think of
as providing firm foundations, right.
It's something we think
of as providing knowledge,
as providing some kind of certainty.
But my argument is that there is actually
another side to science
that actually has the opposite function.
Current popular models of
science don't account for this.
And so I am going to spend
this talk talking about
another way to think about science
and then why it is important.
And a brief note,
I really like science.
I'm not saying science is bad.
This part of science, this
other side of science,
isn't a bad thing.
It's very important.
But it is something we
need to pay attention to
if we want to understand
the way that our society
responds to science.
So arguably the most popular
model of science today
is one I call the Teleological Model.
You could call it linear, progressive,
or the theory of everything model.
And it's simple.
Knowledge, scientific knowledge,
begins at some point
around the 16th century,
and then it gradually
accumulates for a while.
And then at some point in the future,
we will arrive at a point at which
we know pretty much everything
that is important to know
about the universe.
Now in this model, we have
increasing understanding,
increasing knowledge, certainty.
This is so much so the
case that Stephen Hawking
in his 19, I don't know the date, 89.
Anyway in his book, A
Brief History of Time,
he concluded the book with
an argument that with science
we would one day know,
and I quote, "the mind of God".
And this is unfortunately
the funniest part of this presentation.
So a current theoretical
physicist named Marcelo Gleiser,
apparently it does not stop,
(audience laughing)
has taken a look at this model
and called it the
fallacy of final answers.
Gleiser has written a book on this,
The Island of Knowledge.
In this book, Gleiser argues that
the previous model is
over-interested in the idea of certainty.
In Gleiser's opinion,
science is actually much
more about questions
than it is about answers.
Knowledge does grow for Gleiser.
This is a body of knowledge.
And it does have an increasingly accurate
depiction of science,
depiction of the universe throughout time.
But as it grows,
so does the surface area
against which it is
bounded by the unknown.
And so an example of
how this could happen,
say you discover the proton, right.
You don't end there.
You don't have an answer.
You're not like peace
guys, bye, I'm goin' home.
You have multiplying questions, right.
What does a proton weigh?
What is its charge?
What is it doing next to a neutron?
What is made out of?
Now you could of course
say that hypothetically
at some point in the future,
these kinds of questions
would come to an end.
Gleiser's argument is that
that assumption is false.
And we have no reason to believe
that these kinds of multiplying questions
that we have continually
encountered in science
would ever come to an end
in part, though not exclusively,
because the universe is 13.7
billion light years across.
Okay, so I really like this model.
I appreciate the open-endedness of it.
I like the way it pushes back
against what I sort of think
of as the allure of finality
of the previous model
that I just talked about.
But something that I think
needs to be added to this model
if we want to really
understand or depict science
and especially how we
interact with it as a society
is to focus on the way in
which knowledge is constantly
being recycled by the sciences.
I have called this the Ouroboros Model.
Unfortunately it's hard to pronounce.
I had to Google how to pronounce it.
It is so named after the
snake that eats its own tail.
Another way that you could look at this
is like the loading symbol
that is currently utilized
by a number of technological platforms.
Now, we all, many of us know
that in 1962, this is annoying.
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn revolutionized
the way that we think about science.
He introduced the idea of paradigms.
Before Kuhn, it was pretty much assumed
that science had some sort of access
to capital T, Truth, right,
and they were progressively
moving towards it.
And Kuhn demonstrated
that science actually
is more about shifting
theoretical paradigms, right.
Shifting theoretical models.
Science is conducted in a
way in which people tinker.
They operate under a certain
theoretical apparatus.
They realize there are
some problems with it.
They think really hard.
They die, people replace them,
and then they come up with a new one.
And that he called a paradigm shift.
And so in this way,
scientific knowledge,
it is progressing in a sense.
But it is also recycling.
And every time we adopt
a new scientific theorem,
an old one dies.
We take pieces of it with us
and we let the old one die.
Again, this is not a problem,
just something we want
to pay attention to.
We can easily map on top of Kuhn's idea
the fact that knowledge is
not just scientific, right.
We have knowledge in our society
that comes from a wide variety of sources
and it is all subject
to scrutiny of all sorts
including scientific scrutiny.
Now there was once a time
when all knowledge was known
and not through science as an institution
with a capital S at all period.
We inherited knowledge
from wisdom traditions,
through narratives,
from our shamans.
And it's actually not until very recently,
a few hundred, or a
few thousand years ago,
that we developed institutions
that encourage us to systematically
question, analyze,
deconstruct, fallibilistically test
and repeat our information, right.
So this is a very, very new phenomena
in terms of the arc of humanity.
And all knowledge is subject
to this exact same process
of being what I think
of as churning through,
or tilling, or eating if
you want to be Freudian,
churning through this process.
And this is important.
I'm gonna make an argument for why.
Why does this matter?
Why does it matter that when we do this,
science is deconstructing
our knowledge, right.
Why does it matter
that in a sense,
things are not stable?
We are constantly deconstructing
things that we know.
And in a way,
there is actual uncertainty
that is deeply felt
and in some sense ontologically,
or epistemologically real in its wake.
Why does this matter?
It matters because humans
are monstrously bad
at managing uncertainty.
This is something
psychologists have known,
or an idea that psychologists
have played with
for a very long time.
In 2016 it was
shown in a particularly
elegant, I think, experiment
precisely just how
uncomfortable uncertainty is.
So Archy de Berker and
colleagues in London actually
hooked some participants up to
a variety of measurements of stress,
skin conductance,
pupil diameter,
cortisol levels,
and asked for their subjective assessments
of the experiment.
And then they had them
play a computer game
in which they had to predict
if snakes were under rocks.
And if there were snakes under rocks,
they would be shocked and it would hurt.
Their findings were interesting
because what they found was not that
it was the situations in which
they knew they were going to be shocked,
in which they knew they
were going to be in pain
that they were most stressed out,
but actually the situations
in which they had
the most uncertainty, right.
And so people experienced the most stress,
to reiterate,
not when they knew they'd be in pain,
but when they didn't know if
they were going to be in pain.
So this demonstrates in one way
how deeply uncomfortable
uncertainty can be for us.
Now the psychology of
uncertainty is very complicated.
But generally speaking,
it's not something that humans
are particularly good at.
A man named Jerome Kagan said
that uncertainty resolution,
50 years ago,
said that it was a primary
determinant of human behavior.
More recently, a famous
psychologist named Arie Kruglanski,
has talked about a need,
generally speaking,
although it is very
culturally conditioned,
that humans have for cognitive closure.
Now we really like cognitive closure
in the sense that we like to have
a world that makes sense to us, right.
We like cognitive closure so much
that we spontaneously
generate explanations
for phenomena in our environment.
Of course we do this.
This makes sense.
We do it so automatically,
we don't even know that we're doing it.
But we are constantly generating
plausible explanations.
It also makes sense that
these plausible explanations
are generated from information
that we already have.
But what's very interesting
about when we do this is that
both the information that we resurrect
to account for this phenomena,
and the explanation
for those new phenomena
become somewhat cemented as
they like come together, right.
They become somewhat cemented.
They are mutually reinforcing
because they provide the sense of closure
that is so comfy to us,
and because the prospect
of losing this closure
is so uncomfortable.
In fact, generally speaking,
when people have a high
need for certainty,
which is circumstantially dependent,
when people have a high
need for certainty,
they will reject new evidence
if they have recently formed an opinion
precisely because they
have formed an opinion
and it has in some sense become cemented
in their cognitive and
emotional infrastructure.
So I want to ground this conversation
in the modern world, right.
Why am I talking about this today?
Why now?
It is my hypothesis
that there is a certain kind
of knowledge that we have,
that people have historically had,
that is
more uncertain today
than it has ever been.
And it also happens to
be a kind of knowledge
that is deeply embedded
in our cognitive and
emotional infrastructures.
And so what is this type of information
that is deeply embedded?
Goodbye 7:00 p.m. friends.
Please feel free to leave.
There's only a few minutes left.
They are cognitive defaults.
So a cognitive default is something
that in the cognitive science
of religion literature,
is something that is very
easy for a human to do.
It comes very naturally to us.
And it's simply a remnant
of evolution, right.
It's a byproduct, or a hangers on,
of some sort of earlier
evolutionary process.
Now there are many different
cognitive defaults.
The most popularly studied one
is the tendency to over-detect
agency in the environment,
or what we might say more colloquially,
is the tendency to believe in God.
Now I say agency, we are agents, right.
We have will, we have desire.
We have intention.
And we tend to impute
this on our environments.
We do it, it's second nature to us.
An example of how easily
we detect agency,
we might say the hydrogen atom
wants to bond with the oxygen atom.
Now we know that it
doesn't actually want to.
But this is a kind of language
that we can't really help but use.
Another interesting example
of how we tend to revert
to believing in agency,
if you put atheists in a very stressful,
or surprising,
or say they're reminded of
their death environment,
they will revert to
using, invoking agency.
And this isn't to say
they stop being atheists.
But it is to say that
in these circumstances,
they are stripped of the education
that they have given themselves,
or experienced in their environment
that makes them atheists,
and they revert to
these default conditions
of invoking agency.
Now there are many other
cognitive defaults.
The way in which cognitive
scientists of religion
account for the believe in an
afterlife, it's interesting.
We have systems in our brains that
predict and calibrate
responses to people's behavior.
Now again, the account in this field
is that when somebody dies,
the system just doesn't shut off.
This is the same as if
when somebody leaves a room,
we still think they exist.
And when we're kids, when
we're playing peek-a-boo,
we stop having fun because we realize
the person we're playing
with still exists.
We tend to believe that the mind
is separate from the body
for a very similar reason.
We tend to believe that we
exist as coherent selves.
I believe that I exist as a coherent self.
This is an idea that is being
significantly challenged
by neuroscience as we speak.
We also tend to believe that
we have access to what's
good and what's evil,
and that there is purpose.
And obviously, I am way over-summarizing
a very complex field.
But the important thing is
that when we look at this list,
we see things that are
very important to people.
We know that they're
very important to people.
We see them all around the world.
We see them all across religions.
We all personally, probably,
are invested in some of these questions.
Like is there a God?
What happens when I die?
Do I have a soul?
These also happen to be things
that have been seriously disrupted
by a number of things
in our society today.
Again, a number of things,
one of which has been science.
If you think about Newton,
you think about Darwin, especially.
You think about Crick.
You think about all these
different scientific experiments,
discoveries, and ideas
that have posed significant challenges
to the cognitive defaults
that I just mentioned.
Science is a process of asking questions.
And again, to reiterate,
that's very important.
But we understand now that in this model,
the current knowledge we
have that is disrupted,
has been historically disrupted
significantly by science,
includes deeply cherished beliefs
that rest on cognitive defaults.
I have called them pillars
of existential sanity.
I need a catchier term.
And so this is essentially
why I believe this model
of science is important,
why the model itself isn't
really important at all,
and I will not be publishing it
in any academic journals.
Science is one institution among many
and movements in our society that has
posed a significant challenge
to the types of things that people
hold most dear to their hearts, right.
And so it makes sense.
It makes sense in a way
that we then experience
some kind of...
We are challenged.
We experience some kind of
ambiguity or uncertainty
with respect to these ideas.
I mentioned Cartesian Anxiety
at the opening of this talk
and different kinds of fundamentalism.
And does it not make at
least a little bit of sense
that now that we have
experienced all these things
historically as a culture
that we would respond with
some degree of anxiety
and or anger in response?
There are many, many theories about this.
I don't have time but
we once lived in worlds in which
everybody believed the same thing
and you got your ideas
from some sort of transcendent absolute.
There wasn't a whole lot of
impetus to question them,
at least not like today.
And nowadays,
when you believe something,
if you choose to believe in something,
you believe it because...
Well you believe it and you
have to defend it, right.
You know that there are
thousands of other options
that other people believe in.
You also know that science has posed
a significant challenge to
them among many other things.
There is deep uncertainty.
Is there a solution
to the uncertainty in the modern world
that has done things
like create some impetuses
to fundamentalism, yes.
I do not have time to talk about them.
I only made this slide to
prove that I thought about it.
And in the meantime, I'm
here and we'll summarize
with three quick points.
One, that we are a species
that is deeply unsettled
by uncertainty.
Two, that we live in a uniquely flavored,
and uniquely intense era of uncertainty.
And three, that science
itself is really complicated.
I mentioned fundamentalists of many types
at the beginning of this talk.
Some people love it.
And I would argue that they love it
because it provides the
neat kind of answers
that we're so longing for in this world.
And some people hate it.
And I would argue that they hate it
because it challenges
the neat kinds of answers
that we're longing for in this world.
And so we need to investigate this
in other institutions in our society
if we want to understand
how to transform them for the better.
That is my talk.
Here are my sources.
(audience clapping)
- [Host] So we're running out of time
but we'll take some questions together.
- [Participant] I wonder,
thank you for the talk, very interesting.
I wonder how much science
become a straw man here
in the sense that we know science is
complex in the sense that, you know,
because of falsification,
we can't prove things in the way
that is implied by kind of
popular terms of science.
So actually epistemologically,
it's not too dissimilar from the kind of
narratives that we form of
understanding that way.
You have an opinion,
then it's tested by someone saying,
I disagree because.
And I wonder whether the discussion
is more about how science
is perceived in society
rather than what scientists do.
- Yes.
(laughing)
Please feel free to leave if
you have to leave, anybody.
- [Host] Any other questions?
- Okay.
- [Host] Oh, you have to answer this one.
- No, no, no.
My answer was yes.
This is a talk very much not
about the nature of science,
but the way in which
we perceive it, so yes.
- [Participant] If we have
time for a followup question,
how can we change the way we perceive it?
- Science.
- [Participant] Well in a landscape
that's got an issue with
knowledge and experts,
not to be too kind of
bah-rex-ih-tee about it.
(audience laughing)
How can we realistically change the way
people understand this idea of science
compared to kind of more
socially guided sort of...
(participant murmuring)
- Yeah, so these actually,
these solutions have nothing
to do with what you said.
These are all about uncertainty
generally in our society.
This is a question I've
put a lot of thought into.
People generally answer
with education, you know.
And I often, I actually
find that answer to be
deeply unsatisfying.
Because education is very important,
but it's not gonna give us
an immediate fix, you know.
But I definitely think
that there needs to be
sort of a softening.
I think science,
I think we need to think about communities
that resist science as
resisting a threat, right.
It's not that they're ignorant.
It's not that they're stupid.
It's that there is a threat here.
And so we need to find ways to mitigate
what is being threatened for them, right,
their world views.
We need to find ways to hold
space for their world views,
and the security they
feel in their world views,
while showing them that
science will not destroy
the stability that they have.
I actually do think it probably
will take a very long time.
But that is what I would do.
(audience laughing)
(participant murmuring)
- [Participant] Okay,
is there also risk in
perceiving science in this way
in terms of big issues like climate change
and things like that?
- Actually I went to a
talk in this room last week
where Harry Collins argued that
something we need to pay
attention to in climate change
is the fact that science is
a very ambitious endeavor,
that we need to understand
it as a collaborative,
ambitious endeavor that
is working towards answers.
And so I actually think...
I'm not sure.
There have been many instances in history.
My father, obviously,
doesn't believe that
climate change is real,
and will point to instances in which
there was some scientific consensus
and then it did not, it
was not reached, right.
And so I think a very much
a more nuanced understanding
of statistics amongst the field,
obviously we think climate change is real.
But here is, you know,
here is the complexity.
It's really hard to get people
to pay attention to complexity.
But unfortunately, I think
that's what needs to happen.
And I think that science needs to be
more friendly to people
before they will even
consider listening to it,
like my father.
- [Participant] That's very
interesting what you were saying
about fundamentalism,
and stress.
So does stress cause fundamentalism,
or fundamentalism cause stress?
I mean one would argue that ISIS
is the cause of the
crisis in the Middle East,
but it's the other way around.
- I definitely think it's both.
I tend to think that
humans are deeply embedded
in our environments.
And our environments work on us
and cause feelings in us and attachments.
And we respond to them with
feelings and attachments.
And so obviously growing up
in a fundamentalist world
will cause you to adopt the fears
of that fundamentalist world
and sort of participate in this cycle.
But I think the causality
definitely goes both ways.
- [Participant] I was interested
in your cognitive default conversation.
What that Pascal Boyer
and Harvey Whitehouse?
Or was that more in psychology?
- Yeah, this is all Pascal Boyer and
the cognitive science of religion
theorizing, which is very contentious
in the study of religion as a whole.
Some people love it, most hate it.
I think it's pretty
valid generally speaking.
We can discuss another time if you want.
I have opinions.
They're done, there's no hands, okay.
- [Host] Okay great, thank you again.
(audience clapping)
