Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour
Chapter 3: Similarities and Differences
I. History in Science and Religion
1. Historical Explanation
How might one compare historical explanation with scientific explanation? Five distinctive features of historical explanation have been proposed.
1. The Interpretive Viewpoint
The interests and commitments of historians influence the way they select from among the myriad details those that might be relevant to a historical account. Changing cultural presuppositions also affect
perceptions of what is significant in the social world. The historian Carl Becker writes, "The history of any event is never precisely the same to two different persons, and it is well known that every generation writes the same history in a new way, and puts upon it a new construction."1 A historical narrative has a coherence of meaningful patterns and unifying themes that are partly a product of the narrator’s vision. Meaning
always depends on contexts; historical writing exhibits a dialectic between individual events and larger wholes. The American Civil War, for example, can be seen variously as part of the history of slavery or of federal union, states’ rights, regional economies, ethical concerns, or democratic ideals.
But despite the presence of interpretation, the historian cannot ignore the demands of objectivity understood as intersubjective testability.
Scholarly integrity requires open-mindedness, self-criticism, and fidelity to evidence. The interaction among historians provides some correction for personal limitations and individual biases. There are common
standards, which go beyond private judgment. Historians are held responsible by their colleagues to justify their inferences and
conclusions by the citation of historical evidence. We can acknowledge such constraints while recognizing that the standards and
methodological assumptions of historians, like those of every
community of inquiry, reflect intellectual assumptions that vary among cultures and historical periods.
In historical inquiry, subjectivity and cultural relativism are more
evident than in scientific inquiry, but I submit that this is a difference of degree rather than an absolute distinction. The data of science are theory- laden, while the events of history are interpretation-laden. Objective controls are less prominent and variations in individual and cultural interpretation are more evident as we move across the disciplinary spectrum from the natural sciences, through the social sciences and history, to religion. Such a continuum reveals significant differences, but no sharp lines can be drawn.
2. The Intentions of Agents
It has sometimes been said that to explain a human action means to account for it in terms of the ideas and choices of the actors. To answer the question "Why did Brutus kill Caesar?" one must study Brutus’s experiences, dispositions, loyalties, and motives. The philosopher
William Dray writes, "There is a sense of ‘explain’ in which an action is only explained when it is seen in a context of rational deliberation, when it is seen from the point of view of an agent."2 R. G. Collingwood
maintains that only by imaginative identification with persons in the past can the historian enter into the meanings and intentions that governed their actions. Only by sympathetic reenactment of past lives can we reconstruct them. Such empathy is possible because we are human beings ourselves; introspection and self-knowledge provides the basis of our understanding of other persons.3 The linguistic analysts, however, remind us that thought and language always occur in a social context. Individual actions must be understood in relation to the rules and expectations of the society in which they occurred, not in relation to our rules and expectations.4
If historical explanation were limited to accounts of the intentions of agents, it would exclude any history of nature. Some historians have in fact portrayed a strong contrast between history and science based on precisely this distinction. But the writings of historians include many pages with little or no reference to human intentions. They may portray social and economic forces of which the participants were unaware.
Even in the lives of individuals, decisions may have been swayed by unconscious motives more than by rational ideas. If we recognize that
diverse factors are at work in human history, we can speak also of the history of nature. We can see similarities as well as differences in comparing human history and natural history.
3. Particularity and Lawfulness
Typical explanations in science consist in showing that a given state of a system can be deduced from knowledge of a previous state, plus a set of general laws. Hempel insists that an event in history is explained only when it is similarly subsumed under a covering law: "General laws have quite analogous functions in history and in the natural sciences. In view of the structural equality of explanation and prediction, it may be said that an explanation is not complete unless it might as well have
functioned as a prediction."5 Hempel claims that most historical accounts are "explanation sketches"; they could be made into genuine explanations only by adhering to the covering-law form. Scientific and historical explanation, he says, do not differ in principle, because only one kind of procedure is explanatory.
Dray and others have replied that historical inquiry inescapably involves singular statements about particulars. Every historical event is unique.
Historians do not explain the Reformation by showing it to be a case of reformations-in-general. Generalizations about revolutions throw little light on the American, French, or Russian revolutions; it is precisely the peculiarities of the Russian Revolution -- the role of Lenin, let us say -- that are of interest. Even when historians do propose general
hypotheses, says Dray, they are reluctant to detach them from the
particulars in which they are embodied; the meaning is conveyed by the pattern of details, not extracted and presented independently. If
historians are challenged, they do not invoke laws but fill in additional details in their narrative accounts. Historical explanation is a
configurational understanding of the relation of parts in larger wholes.
The historian tries to establish an intelligible context for an event rather than trying to deduce it from laws.6
It seems to me that both sides of this debate have overstated their cases.
Every event is unique in some respects. No occurrence, even in the physics laboratory, is ever exactly duplicated in all its inexhaustible detail. But this does not exclude the presence of regular and repeatable features. On the other hand, no event is absolutely unique, even in history. The use of language presupposes common characteristics, such as those reflected in the words revolution, nation, and the like. The
individuality of the exact pattern of weeds in the botanist’s garden is trivial, but the individuality of a great historical figure is interesting and important to us. Uniqueness, then, is relative to the purposes of inquiry, not a property of some events but not of other events.
Moreover, historians do use lawlike generalizations of limited temporal and geographical scope, even if they do not use universal laws. They explain particular actions in terms of the conventions and principles by which people at the time would have understood and justified their actions, and this requires generalizations about the culture and period in question (for example, the structures of feudalism in medieval France).
In tracing connections between events, historians also draw on implicit generalizations about human motives for action. They are guided by parallels with patterns in other historical situations and by common- sense observations about human behavior. They may even use theories from sociology, psychology, or economics. While they are indeed interested in understanding particular events, they can do so only by pointing to relationships with which they are familiar in other similar situations.7
4. The Unpredictability of History
The limitations of the covering-law model are further underscored by the unpredictability of history. One source of unpredictability in practice is the occurrence of factors entering from outside a previously assumed framework of analysis: the microbe that brought Alexander the Great to an untimely death; the birth of a girl instead of a boy to Henry VIII; the storm that contributed to Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown; the stray bullet that killed Stonewall Jackson. Another source of unpredictability is human freedom and creativity. The Gettysburg address, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Newton’s Principia were products of the
creativity of particular individuals at particular times and could not conceivably have been predicted in advance. Even when historians refer to the causes of an event, they do not give a set of sufficient conditions from which it could have been predicted but only a few of the
contributing factors singled out in the light of the historian’s assumptions and interests.
Narratives of unpredictable events do indeed appear characteristic of human history, but they also appear in the history of nature. We will see in part 2 that there are irreducible unpredictabilities in quantum physics, thermodynamics, and genetic mutation and recombination.
Unrepeatable events, which happened only once, are studied in cosmology, geology, and evolutionary biology. Why does the Indian rhinoceros have one horn and the African rhinoceros two? No one
claims that such details of evolutionary history could possibly have been predicted. The laws of mechanics permit the prediction of the state of a system at one time from knowledge of its state at an earlier time,
without any investigation of its intervening history. But DNA has a kind of historical memory representing the accumulation of information from many unpredictable events over a long span of time. Even a simple cell has the accumulated experience of a billion years of history encoded in its genes. We have biological theories to help explain regular patterns in these events, but the history of nature can be told only in narrative
form.8
5. Diverse Types of Explanation
The previous points can be drawn together by suggesting that there is a variety of types of explanation within each of the disciplines. Historical inquiry and scientific inquiry are not mutually exclusive processes.
Gordon Graham shows that there is both theoretical and historical
explanation within science. In the former one appeals to general theories and laws, while in the latter one gives narratives of particulars.9 In
dealing with human history, on the other hand, we can recognize many different kinds of connections between events. Sometimes historians refer to the intentions of agents, but at other times they invoke lawlike generalizations of limited scope or refer to economic and social forces or to theories derived from the social sciences. In the chapters that
follow, then, we will give considerable attention to the history of nature, without denying the distinctive features of human history.
Stephen Toulmin says that a phenomenon is explained by placing it within a context that makes sense of the phenomenon. In the natural sciences, events are typically placed within the context of a law; a law is explained by situating it within a theory; and a theory is viewed within an "ideal of natural order." A historical event, he says, is explained by placing it within a series of events. A passage in a text is explained by considering its relation to the text as a whole. The various kinds of explanation and understanding thus each have a characteristic form of rationality.10
Phillip Clayton holds that an explanation makes some area of experience comprehensible, either in terms of its components and
details or by placing it in a broader context within which its meaning and significance become clear. Thus different types of rationality operate in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and theology, but they are all rational because each discipline has criteria of judgment accepted by everyone in the discipline. Standards of intersubjective criticism make possible the discussion and revision of claims. Clayton contends that in theology the criterion of internal coherence is more relevant than the criterion of empirical fit. He accepts Lakatos’s argument that it is not isolated hypotheses that are evaluated but ongoing programs within historical contexts.11
We should note, finally, that these views allow us to do justice to the historical character of science. Instead of understanding science as a strictly logical enterprise, we have maintained that it is historically and culturally conditioned. The philosophy of science should be based on the history of science, not on idealized rational reconstructions. We have seen that Kuhn’s paradigm shifts must be considered historically and Lakatos’s programs can be evaluated only by their fruitfulness over a period of time. Toulmin applies evolutionary concepts to science itself. Scientific theories evolve; new ideas are like mutations which survive if they are selected by the scientific community. While there are limitations to this analogy, which I will point out later, it is a vivid representation of the historicity of science.