Aims and Arguments

Last year, Professor Garber gave a talk at the Aquinas Lecture at Marquette (the lecture has been printed as What Happens After Pascal's Wager?: Living Faith and Rational Belief, and I would recommend it as a relatively short but thought-provoking read). I think I had talked about it then, but it's relevant to some stuff that's been on my mind as of late.

The point of the lecture was this: Pascal asks us to first engage in Christian practice, and then we will come to see the Christian faith is rational. The problem, though, is that there doesn't seem to be any link between the practice and the rational justification, in part evidenced by the fact that other groups claim the exact same thing (to simplify the argument for my present purposes and memory). But the question came up afterward: don't scientists do the same thing, in having their practice which gives them their aims which then they go on to rationally prove? So my concern is, what is the difference between the (ideal) scientist and the (stereotypical) apologist?

We do have to have aims before we go to work on anything, and we do have to be embedded in a practical context. We're finite creatures; we can't seek everything at once or start from a positionless point, and so we have to start from somewhere going in some direction. This is the condition for all inquiry. So, we criticize the apologist for having her goals already set before she starts seeking the truth. She has already decided where she will end up. But, as someone brought up after the lecture, the scientist already wants some result from an experiment. What is the difference?

The difference (in two abstract cases away from the complexities of actual human behavior) seems to be to be this: the apologist seeks the goal while using the means, and the scientist seeks the means while using the goal. The apologist must reach her goal, and arguments must be shaped accordingly, despite how they appear at first glance. The scientist needs to orient herself, and uses aims and desires to do so, but once oriented, she looks at the evidence (again, ideally). She displays detachment to the goal, while the apologist is very strongly attached.

Of course, science doesn't actually proceed in this way. One piece of evidence can always be reinterpreted, and it takes a lot of difficulties in interpretation before one gives up a scientific cause. So the scientist has her research program, with some pieces that can be changed without throwing away the program as a whole. Doesn't the apologist do the same? Perhaps, but there seems to be much more reticence to give up the program in apologetics. Scientists take a couple generations to give up a deficient program; apologists perhaps several centuries, if at all. The idea of giving up the program is valid in science, even if costly; it is invalid in apologetics, causing a rift between the former apologist and colleagues.

Apologists do not seem to be doing the same thing as scientists, then. But they do seem to be similar to artists: they see their idea, and they plan out how to enfold it in some sort of matter (that of logical arguments, in this case). The apologist is therefore creative (or should be), and this is a good thing for communities. Science tells minimalistic and unstable stories, after all, and fuller, more constant (though flexible) stories need to be written for a community's narratival life. The only problem is when the apologist attempts to claim that such creativity also bears the marks of objective science. One can only claim such if one is willing to completely subject one's aims to the evidence, to argue as if one's position can actually change as a result of research.