Rhetorical Device

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How and Why?

The world is full of animals that understand how to do things, but for most of them — the lion chasing the gazelle, the mouse fleeing the cat, the bird building a nest — the question of why to do these things is too simple to consider: hunger, fear, an unconscious impulse to create. The only creatures who concern themselves with questions of why are large-brained social mammals, for it is they for whom hidden motivations — invisible things with visible effects — are the key to survival. Man is such a beast, equipped with a powerful desire to know why things happen, to derive causality from correlation, to understand invisible things. It is the human child who looks at the sky, sees that it’s blue, and asks, “why?”

When the neural circuitry that evolved to understand why people do things is focused on the natural world, man sees agency and motivation in every part of nature. He learns how to choose the least poisonous plants and animals but wonders why it is so, finally deciding that too much pork causes sickness because God forbids man the pig¹. When man filters these observations through the intuitive sense of fairness and reciprocity that evolved to aid him in social living, his explanations necessarily become more complicated: other creatures are man’s natural victims because man is more like God; the body dies, but the soul lives on; man’s nature is conflicted because he is a union of angel and dust².

Answers to fundamental why-questions, invented by the great storytellers of antiquity, have always informed a man’s decisions about how to live in the same way that the question of why his wife is angry with him informs a man as to how to make peace with her — how and why were long inseparable.

Science

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first to record an understanding of the difference between these two categories of knowledge, the first of which can be assailed with observation and logic, the second of which can only be approached through intuition. Plato³ recognized the shadowy, unknowable character of why, which led Aristotle to focus on questions of how. His insight, which has been carefully honed in the millennia since, was that the stories we invent about why things happen can neither be proved nor disproved because they make no concrete predictions about the observable world — that is, they cannot be tested.

Aristotle’s process, which we now call the scientific method, is to make a series of observations and then wrap them in a narrative framework — a story scientists call a “theory.” A theory that would have predicted our observations in the past, and thus (hopefully) predicts observations made under the same conditions in the future, is considered a good theory. The idea of proof in a scientific theory is quite similar to that of proof in law: if the correlation of theoretical predictions to observations is high enough, if it appears to be beyond reasonable doubt, it’s accepted as truth.

When a theory is contradicted by new observations, it is either modified or rejected altogether. Aristotle crafted many useful stories about the world, most of which have since turned out to be incorrect. Mankind required another two thousand years of lovable, laughable error to realize that Aristotle’s empiricist doctrine was only half right: the stories we tell about how things work can’t be proved, rather they differ from why-questions only because they can be disproved. The scientific method is now understood in terms of falsification: we believe the explanations we have not yet disproved. The body of scientific knowledge at a given moment is composed of the most useful wrong answers yet invented: Lavoisier’s caloric was more usefully wrong than Becher’s phlogiston, Newton’s understanding of motion⁴ was more usefully wrong than Bacon’s, and so on.

Most scientists believe that a new theory that seems true for a larger number of observations must be closer to describing an objective reality that exists outside of human perception, but this belief is the answer to a why-question about the scientific method: it’s impossible to test; one either believes it or not, and that belief is inconsequential to the practical utility of the theory.

When proponents of “Intelligent Design” criticized Evolutionary Theory for being “only a theory,” they were, of course, speaking disingenuously, but there is something important in their claim. They were attacking the story used to explain the observations from which Evolutionary Theory was derived rather than the observations themselves. This is, because the evidentiary requirements of a given statement vary from person to person⁵, a very clever rhetorical strategy that has allowed them to co-opt scientific observations in service of a religious position. The scientific community seems to underestimate the power of this technique⁶.

Faith

The scientific method is unassailable as a means of addressing the question of how to accomplish things, and it has been enormously successful in providing material comfort for mankind, but it has traditionally had little to offer those who are uncomfortable without why-stories, including some of the most brilliant scientific thinkers in history.

Scientists, philosophers, priests and poets — our entire ménagerie of storytellers — have built hardened rhetorical fortresses to defend why-stories, and ingenious siege engines of logic with which to demolish them, but they’ve achieved nothing because why-questions are not susceptible to reason. Why-questions are questions of faith. They can only be answered intuitively and then rationalized: the existence of God cannot be proved, thus deism is faith; the non-existence of God cannot be proved, thus atheism is faith⁷.

The need for why-stories that plausibly answer why-questions is built into the human brain. The strength of that need in a given person is part of his disposition⁸, and appears to be genetically heritable. A person’s disposition interacts with his culture to create a particular view of reality: Christians consider Norse mythology laughable, but react angrily to similar opinions concerning their own religion; many materialists have faith in the literal truth of scientific theories that have an analogical relationship to reality, while immediately recognizing the analogical nature of religious myths.

The mythologies of pre-technological societies are invariably animist, often seeing the universe as a tribal headman, while technologically savvy societies often develop a view of the universe as a mechanical clockwork⁹, but they are all motivated by the same unattainable desire to understand why things happen.

Overlapping Magisteria

In the western world, there has long been a division between the scientific exploration of how-questions and the religio-philosophical exploration of why-questions. This arrangement has been largely peaceful, but — because both scientific theories and articles of religious faith are rationalized using narrative — they come into conflict when their narratives cannot be reconciled. The most famous such conflict arose in the seventeenth century because Galileo’s heliocentric theory could not comfortably coexist with the Biblical account that Joshua¹⁰ “bid the sun stand still.” Galileo suffered terribly, but his ideas ultimately won, as scientific ideas have done in each argument within the domain of how until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species provided, for the first time, a scientific version of Genesis — one that conflicted with the dominant Western religions. Unlike Galileo’s statements, Darwin’s couldn’t be reconciled by rationalizing a few words in a single passage of the Hebrew Bible, and many of the faithful have been unable to do without biblical Genesis, especially those parts with doctrinal implications to man’s special place in creation, Original Sin¹¹, and so on. This disagreement has since been exacerbated by findings in genetics, neurology and cognitive science that provide a speculative framework concerning the human mind that has substantial and conflicting overlap with religious how-stories. The reaction to these discoveries has been predictably violent because many religious why-stories are inextricably tied to foundational how-stories that were, until recently, safe from scientific inquiry. If, for example, one’s why-story of moral behavior is based on a how-story of posthumous punishment that presupposes ensoulment, a scientific how-story of human consciousness that convincingly demonstrates that the mind is an entirely carnal phenomenon¹² is completely unacceptable.

The increased hostility between religion and science is not an indication of increased religious feeling among the scientifically backward, but a symptom of the growing overlap between scientific and religious narratives, a continuing process that will worsen the conflict between the faith of Abraham and the faith of Aristotle, between the Patriarch and Pocket-watch.

Scientists, and secular humanists in general, must recognize the moral high-ground of uncertainty and a willingness to learn from new information. Claiming perfect knowledge and shouting “is so” in response to the evangelical “is not” isn’t going to get us anywhere. A dose of humility and a willingness to leave aside arguments about the unprovable are the only way forward for either side of this cultural divide.