On the accessibility of Humanism

People require a personal theory to act as a foundation for their interpretation of the world.  When we apply this understanding of human psychology to the piece of human existence known as “religiosity,” it seems that both sides of the religiosity debate take sides about the truthiness of their own positions:

1. There is no god so everything that religion offers is worthless
2. There is a god so everything that the other non-religion offers is worthless

People require a structure upon which they can build their own understanding.  When I was releasing myself from being catholic, I tried to find something else that would replace it.  I was criticized and punished by my parents when they became aware my attempts to locate a belief system with which I would be able to align myself.   I think most people are like that, though.  I think most people require a certain type of legitimizing foundation on which they can then begin to establish their worldviews and I don’t think hardcore atheism is enough.  There needs to be some sort of a humanistic, religion-supplanting view that people can use to find community while being able to disagree about certain things.  The humanist ideal is one that people can agree on for the most part while disagreeing about processes of psychology, sociology, biology, and the like; there is no *one* humanism, but humanism gets everyone involved.  It’s like evolution in the biological sciences.  Not everyone agrees on the mechanisms and timelines required, but they all accept the basic evolutionary understanding.  Humanism is like that: there are many ways to approach the particulars, but in general we all agree.

The Benefit of the Scientific Worldview

Dr. Dossey, in his article The Scientific Method: An Educational Train Wreck? is correct in stating that we need to rearrange our education of science to the children of today – this is obvious since looking back at the last 60 or so years of science education (and the results of that education) forces us to acknowledge that science educators have obviously missed a key piece in doing so.  But what is that key piece?  Is it the scientific method such as Dr. Dossey seems to believe on account of Mr. Rifkin’s analysis?  Hardly.

The scientific method is definitely in the need of a tune-up.  Firstly, trying to assert how it is “nearly deified” is an obvious miscalculation.  Who says that once something is shown to be the best way of doing something that we need to ascribe it the label of deification?  Those philosophies that force people to think in a certain way about certain things are, in fact, products of deificationary ideals – but this is not the scientific method.  Anymore, one would be wise to use the phrase “scientific process” rather than “scientific method” – with process, there is an ultimate goal with variable ways of approaching it; with method there is a necessary sequence of steps that one must go through in order to reach whatever may be on the other side.  Method implies that there is only one way to get to a certain type of result, but obviously this is not the case.

Many scientists do not follow the paradigm of the scientific method – analyze theories; propose a new question; perform an experiment; analyze results; fit to theory – when performing their own work within the scientific community.  In fact, many people develop several questions, decide which one to try out, see how it works, drop it, and figure out why it went wrong.  Others simply ask a question without completely analyzing the theoretical situation beforehand and try their best at interrogating nature to the point that they can extract some piece of information about how nature works.  Others follow different patterns, but in the end, what they do is see what kind of results they got through their experiments.

One of the neatest things about getting results of any sort of experiment is that they can have statistical analyses applied to them to determine the likelihood of their occurrence within the realm of possibility.  When you begin to compound those probabilities, you begin to see a world that begins to make sense in a cohesive way – if the foundations on which the questions where applied were wrong, it would be likely that the new information would be wrong too; however this is not always the case.  We can begin to predict how future experiments will pan out and we can begin to interpret the past through understanding the results of these experiments – this is one thing that the traditionally deified ideals are unable to do at present, and unlikely to ever be able to do.

As for asserting that kids being taught how to perform science and how science is performed are somehow becoming “psychologically scarred” by “[seeing] themselves as foreigners in the world of science,” well that is just preposterous.  Every child has an innate curiosity that can either be cultivated or sequestered and subdued.  Depending on how they are raised, they may become strangers to the world of science, but they will still retain the potential to ask questions and express curiosity when given the right amount of open-mindedness and skepticism that is necessary to navigate the real world.  Practicing scientific analysis and reasoning is the only way that we, as humans, can traverse the world of which we are a part.  Some philosophies can get us by, but we cannot begin to approach the luxuries of the lifestyles that we hold currently without the advancements of people participating in the scientific process.

Furthermore, Dr. Dossey appears to imply that thinking scientifically about the world and participating in the scientific process somehow separates us from nature and the world-at-large.  In fact, he claims directly, “the separateness, distance, and aloofness required to do science is a repudiation of the relational, embedded, networked way they view their place in the world.”  In response to this statement, I am not sure where to begin!

The scientific process is the most intimate, communicatory, and explorative relationship that we can participate in with the world in which we are a part.  When I examine the cellular structure of plants, animals, and bacteria; the chemical structure of that which we consider “life” and the items that we do not; the atomic structure that produces those chemicals and the chemicals found elsewhere in the universe; I am overcome by this most awe-inspiring realization that we are as both Carl Sagan and Baruch Spinoza understood, “the universe coming to know itself.”

The scientific world is not a world that is “cold, uncaring…, devoid of awe, compassion or sense of purpose.”  It is a world in which we create our own purpose in examining our place within it; it is a place in which we can place the feeling of awe at the core of our desire to understand it; it is a world in which compassion for every living thing boils up from the common origins we all share and the common hardships we all face; it is a beautiful experience of which we are all so lucky to be a part.

Obviously we need to take more care to get our children interested in science and in taking part in the world scientifically.  This does not mean that we have completely failed in the past, however.  Our limited ability to inspire those of us in the present to explain the beauty of the scientific process and the beauty of living in a scientific world is indeed itself what inspired us to do so.  Each new generation builds off of both the successes and the failures of the past generation – I am excited to see what the next will bring.

–          Eric Haaland