15 March 2002, 876 words
In trying to explain and understand reality, human beings generally apply three paradigms: the spiritual, the social, and the scientific.
Spiritual explanations rely on religious authority and/or the purely subjective experience which is termed "mystical". These explanations are always all-encompassing, in that they purport to explain everything from how the universe began to how life originated to human behaviour. Spiritual explanations also offer a "why" about all these phenomena. The spiritual interpretation is also never discrete - i.e. the explanation of how the universe came to be also explains how people ought to behave.
Social explanations aren't so ambitious, and are generally confined to human behaviour and institutions. Except for some post-modernist theorists - usually literary critics - the social paradigm does not claim to explain the underlying nature of reality. Social interpretations claim to explain and predict human behaviour - e.g. an individual behaves in a particular manner because of his parents or because of his culture or because of his peers or because he wasn't toilet trained and so on. The social paradigm also extends into fields like history, politics, literature and psychology, and offers relative explanations about events, institutions and individuals.
The social paradigm is usually discrete, in the sense that its explanations of how society functions are not usually tied to how human beings behave as individuals. However, it is not discrete in the sense that its formally separate disciplines - sociology, history, politics, economics - often draw on one another to explain reality. It often offers, at least by implication, a "why" to its "how".
Then there is the scientific paradigm. Science offers explanations on matters ranging from the structure of the universe to the origin of complex life to human behaviour. However, these explanations are always discrete: physics deals with the laws of the universe, chemistry and geology offer explanations about the Earth, and biology deals with how life functions and why organisms (including humans) behave as they do. Scientific explanations must always be applied at the appropriate level - i.e. Newton's Laws of Motion do not really explain why two bodies come together to have sex.
The spiritual paradigm is the most popular one for explaining ultimate realities. It is also the most useless. Whatever its social or psychological benefits, spiritual explanations don't actually explain anything. The so-called "cosmic laws" are not laws in the same sense that gravity or thermodynamics are laws about how reality works. And spiritual claims about a higher or deeper reality are purely subjective, in that there is no way for the person making such claims to prove them to another person.
All spiritual explanations boil down to one thing: "God did it". The simplicity of this explains why the spiritual paradigm is so popular. But to assert this is to explain nothing. This is why science is superior to spirituality at explaining basic realities. Science explains how complex realities, like the universe or the human brain, could have arisen from simple origins. To make God the explanation does not explain how such a complex and all-powerful being could have arisen in the first place.
The social paradigm, unfortunately, leans more on the side of faith than science. This is slowly changing, but the theoretical aspects of the humanities, particularly in relating individual human behaviours to institutional norms, are still deficient. Additionally, where scientific methods are applied in the humanities, one finds that intuitive social beliefs are often wrong - e.g. research suggests that parents do not socialise their children and that high self-esteem may actually be bad for you.
The scientific paradigm is the least popular of all. Yet it is inarguable that science is the best method humankind has ever devised for understanding and explaining reality. And scientific claims, unlike spiritual claims, are testable. Indeed, a good scientific hypothesis must be logical and should be falsifiable. That is, it must make predictions which, if not borne out, prove the hypothesis false. When a hypothesis has been thoroughly tested by experiment and its predictions confirmed, it is elevated to a theory.
In science, you must bear in mind that the term "theory" refers to a hypothesis which has been proven beyond reasonable doubt; it is not used in the vernacular sense of "supposition". But this does not mean that a theory can ever be really proven, for science, again unlike spirituality, makes no claims of absolute certainty: which is another reason the average person prefers spiritual explanations to scientific ones.
The third reason for this preference is that science, unlike spirituality, does not deal in oughts. But, in this complex world, it is often the case that what one ought to do is determined by what the facts are. And, like I said, there is no better method of understanding the facts than the scientific method. That is why an education in the philosophy of science is so important, and education in spiritual matters is not.
After all, if the parents in Biche village had any scientific background at all, or even some training in logical thought, they wouldn't be arguing that the school is safe because they never smell any gas. You can bet, though, that they all believe in God: and never mind that they've never smelt Him either.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh