Making It Up As We Go Along

Science and the Problem of Moral Discernment

There was a joke we used to tell when I was a teenager in the 70’s.

What are the top three clues that you’re a member of a bad church?

1. The choir wears leather robes.

2. The only song the organist knows is “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.

3. There are smoking and non-smoking sections in the sanctuary.

That last clue, the one about smoking and non-smoking sections, was funny but it had only become funny during the preceding decade. Ten years earlier, when I was a really young kid, no one actually smoked in church, but it was completely common, after church had let out, to see men in clusters, scattered around the church grounds, smoking and talking. That kind of residual social acceptability for smokers, which was still an actual thing in the 1960’s, had become a punchline by the 1970’s. If you could have gone back to the 1950’s, no one would have gotten the joke at all.

The decline in smoking among Christians was part of the broader cultural rejection of smoking on the basis of emerging science. The public was made aware of various studies showing that smoking was bad for your health. There were anti-smoking campaigns mounted by various cultural institutions, and smoking thus proceeded to decline among the general population. By the 1980’s, smoking was being actively demonized as a public activity. It began to be outlawed in many public spaces during the eighties and nineties, starting on planes and eventually extending to theaters, restaurants, and government facilities.

For Christians, the issue of smoking was more than a question of health risks. Christians believe that one’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that knowingly harming one’s body constitutes an actual moral failure. Thus the emerging pressure among Christians to stop smoking for moral reasons dovetailed nicely with the scientific argument.

What interests me about the cultural history of smoking is the way in which emerging contemporary scientific discoveries transmogrified into affirmative moral obligations, almost before the ink was even dry on the scientific studies. In hindsight, I don’t recall very many discussions that took place, among Christians, about the advisability of having science exercise a decisive influence over our spiritual and moral calculus.

Flannery O’Connor, writing a generation prior to the anti-smoking enthusiasms of the 1980’s, was not as blasè about the tendency to subjugate Christian moral discernment to science.

“The church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands, and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease.”

O’Connor was reminding us that the materialist presuppositions, upon which modern science is based, are by their nature not up to the task of spiritual discernment. To put it another way, a scientific affinity for controlling how something works, or what materials it is comprised of, falls far short of knowing what that something is for, or what its spiritual significance really is.

It is simply not possible to reason from what is to what ought to be.

But I’m not sure too many Christians were still thinking along Miss O’Connor’s lines by the 1960’s. And during the succeeding years, the grip that science held on the moral imaginations of many Christians became ever more decisive.

By the time Covid hit in 2020, moral and spiritual deference to science was so longstanding and instinctive among Christians that many churches readily cast aside meeting together, even foregoing their holy sacraments, based purely on the flimsiest of so-called science. Shoddy predictive models that don’t actually predict are not science, even if their results are announced with a British accent. Many Christians really had no idea that the so-called “science” surrounding Covid was at best entirely speculative. As we now know, some of the authoritative pronouncements from the scientific community were not merely wrong but were knowingly fraudulent. But by 2020, many Christians had been taking moral dictation from the materialists for so long that they could no longer even perceive what was happening.

So during Covid, materialist Christians invented an entirely new class of moral obligations for their fellow believers. Taking a page from the anti-smoking playbook of the sixties and seventies, they mounted a blame-and-shame campaign directed toward any Christians who had the temerity to question what was really going on. The materialists busied themselves moralizing about previously unrecognized obligations regarding the wearing of masks, and submitting to experimental vaccines, declaring them to be a test of one’s love for his neighbor. (Don’t miss the delicious irony of someone, who would be horrified at the very idea of a Christian smoking cigarettes, who nevertheless insisted that his fellow believers have an affirmative moral obligation to submit to vaccines, the effects of which are entirely unknown.) These modern mutations to our ancient moral obligations were invented completely impromptu, spur of the moment, in response to speculative claims attributed to “the science”. In their eagerness to prove themselves appropriately submissive to the authority of science, the materialist Christians rushed to do the very thing Jesus condemned:

They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

The complicity of the shame-and-blame Christians with their materialist overlords, their eagerness to accuse fellow believers of moral failure, entirely based on speculative conclusions drawn from faulty models, is the thing of interest here.

It is not specifically the failure of so many Christian writers and thinkers during Covid that I am concerned with. What actually interests me is this question: how can Christians remain morally discerning when under pressure from the inherently imperfect and tenuous conclusions of scientific inquiry?

Two things, loom large in my own thinking about this.

• The critical importance of making proper category distinctions and…

• Leavening our opinions with a giant dose of humility.

What do I mean by making proper category distinctions? Well, in part I mean acknowledging the applicable limits of different kinds of knowledge and intellectual disciplines. Listen to these brief comments by noted atheist Alex O’Connor. He is onto something important here:

O’Connor is alluding to something very similar to my earlier remarks regarding the distinctions between spiritual purpose and material form. Knowing what something is made of, or how it works, does not tell you what that thing is, or what it is for.

C.S. Lewis described this issue by observing that knowing a star is made up of gases tells you nothing about what a star is.

“In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Science, by its nature, can only describe and manipulate the materiality of things. The questions of meaning, purpose, and value are definitionally questions that are not susceptible to the investigative tools available for scientific inquiry. Scientific understanding is always and everywhere tenuous and incomplete. That is its very nature. It is, accordingly, a gelatinous foundation on which to base moral imperatives, as (one can always hope) those Christians who acted as self-appointed Covid morality police are now beginning to realize.

These kinds of category distinctions are, I think, important if we are ever going to reason well about moral questions in the midst of a crisis, or even when merely dealing with uncertainty. The pace of techno-scientific innovation is not slowing down. Modern civilizational complexity continues to grow. Had the church maintained a proper view of the limits of science as a source of moral insight, it might have avoided a great deal of harm during Covid.

Recovering more proper boundaries for science as an influential factor in Christian moral discernment is one of the most urgent, though largely undiscussed, issues of our time.

Humility is always an important virtue, but the lack of it is dangerous to ourselves and others when circumstances are complex and fraught with uncertainty. First and foremost, we should be humble because it reflects the only accurate assessment of our limitations. Some degree of humility is the very thing that facilitates and motivates even the possibility of learning. Everyone, everywhere, for all of time, has been a repository only of imperfect and fragmentary knowledge. The smartest data scientist I know, when asked what he does for a living, will often answer, “Well, I’m a data scientist. But we don’t really know what we’re doing.” It is no accident that the most capable people of my acquaintance, for unraveling complexity and uncertainty, are also the most humble.

The imperfection of our knowledge is compounded by the velocity and scale of the information we are being subjected to. But - and here is one of the great perversities of our time - there is something about casually scrolling a newsfeed that nudges us toward the faulty impression that we have actually been informed. Some people even read the New York Times and come away believing that their factual understanding of the world has been improved by the reading.

As someone who has been interviewed by the technology press on occasion - and I hope I can burst several bubbles by mentioning this - I have never once been interviewed on any subject requiring a grasp of technical details after which the journalist published anything that approximated technical accuracy. Not once.

Even in simple matters of factual events, the press will routinely get things wrong. I once witnessed a fatal accident during which an elderly woman unfortunately died. I tried to render aid and ended up giving a statement to police about what I had witnessed. Unbeknownst to me, a local news channel took a video of me at the scene talking with the police. Later that evening, that video ran on the local news channel as the news anchor intoned, “A young man driving in the 1100 block of Alameda Ave. struck and killed a woman as she was crossing the street.” Friends and family throughout the city began to call to express concern about the report that I had apparently killed someone. For days afterward, I had to periodically reassure various friends that I was not a party to vehicular manslaughter.

Wisdom suggests that the strength with which our opinions are held be made proportional to the reliability of the source which informs them. It is foolhardy to adopt overwrought and insistent opinions from sources no more reliable than social media and the press.

An inflated perception of ourselves leads inevitably to bad reasoning, faulty analysis, and poor discernment. Anyone who thinks too highly of himself is ipso facto delusional to some degree. We are, none of us I’m afraid, all that amazing.

Recently, a friend of over 40 years informed me that he had lost all “admiration” for me. Let us set aside the ridiculous notion that my friendship with him should be somehow motivated by retaining his admiration. The source of his disappointment in me was this: I was unwilling to affirm his public denunciations of Donald Trump on social media. My friend had posted some rather unhinged accusations — things that no one without first-hand information could reliably claim. They came across to me as something concocted in the more feverish bowels of social media.

Nevertheless, my old friend concluded that my pointing out the obvious holes in his accusations, combined with my unwillingness to join him in making sweeping denunciations of Trump, amounted to my own abject moral failure. Thus, an unwillingness to traffic in unprovable accusations had become, in my friend’s mind, completely indefensible for someone who calls himself a Christian.

My friend illustrates the problem of allowing the strength of our opinions to be determined by unreliable sources. What my friend was doing to me was essentially what the Covid police did with their own shame-and-blame tactics. It involves inventing moral obligations based on information gleaned from sources that are uncertain at best, and in many cases entirely unreliable.

Set aside the delusion that performative social media denunciations, my own in particular, would make any meaningful contribution to human flourishing. What my friend’s behavior revealed was that he and I have very different ways of knowing. More specifically, we differ in distinguishing between what we actually know and what we merely assume.

Some years ago I had a side gig from time-to-time as an expert witness in technology litigation. I have spent many hours, under oath, testifying in depositions and in open court. The thing is, telling the truth and nothing but the truth, as the oath goes, is easier said than done. Something I learned early on is that most of us have a tendency to fill gaps in our true knowledge with unexamined assumptions, and without being all that conscious of the fact that we are doing it. I have learned through hard experience that if you’re going to be careful to tell the truth, you need to make conscious and clear distinctions between what you know, and what you are assuming.

My friend, whose unsought admiration I have now lost, endorsed several sweeping accusations against Trump that no one without firsthand knowledge could reliably ever make. One of the accusations he believes I am obligated as a Christian to join him in affirming is that “Trump hates immigrants”. Now, aside from the fact that ever knowing such a thing would entail some ability to engage in mind reading, it was an implausible claim. After all, Trump is married to an immigrant, and some of his most influential advisors are immigrants. So there are some existence proofs, in plain sight even, which strongly suggest he doesn’t hate all immigrants, even if he insists that people here illegally should be made to leave. But more than that, there is simply no way I am ever going to make sweeping public denunciations of anyone without having my own direct knowledge of the people and the circumstances. Journalists are unreliable narrators of the facts. Depending on them to calibrate the strengths of your opinions is foolhardy and dumb.

Yet what is happening with my friend is, I suspect, something I’ve seen with other people: his operating assumption is that the things he has seen and read online or in the media corresponds, in some essential way, to reality. My own behavior is inexplicable to him, I think, because I have determined never to be seduced by the idea that my grasp of reality has been enhanced by social media.

I am thus very reluctant to try to impose any of my secondhand opinions on him or anyone else. Besides, the very idea that some pronouncement he or I might make on social media deserves the kind of apocalyptic fervor he is giving it, well, it is just comically absurd. There are one or two areas where I have deep firsthand expertise, and regarding which I am happy to offer my opinions. I will sometimes even insist upon them. Sadly, though, none of my expertise really lends itself toward making sweeping online accusations about the inner lives of people I don’t even know.

Humility provides a helpful corrective for any of us who hope to avoid being stampeded into adopting beliefs that are mistaken, and which will later come back to bite. Numerous Christian writers with large platforms insisted during Covid that it was the moral obligation of Christians to submit themselves - and their children - to vaccines that have ultimately proven to be both ineffective and highly dubious in terms of their longer-term effect on human health. The Christian Covid police, who invented these new moral obligations for their brothers, may argue in hindsight that “we didn’t know”. But that is precisely the point I’m making. The people who did the most damage were those who assumed they knew far more than they actually did. Which is why I’m suggesting humility is a critical component of moral discernment at any time, but especially in situations where uncertainty and complexity are high.

It seems likely that our need for moral discernment in the context of technological and scientific uncertainty is only going to grow, perhaps dramatically, in the coming years. Not repeating the mistakes of the past seems like the minimum threshold we should be shooting for. Learning to recognize and accept our own cognitive finitude; refraining from inventing moral burdens out of thin air, and ones which are based on ignorance and uncertainty; resolving to prioritize the ancient insights of scripture regarding any questions which involve human meaning, dominion, value, and purpose; insisting that the claims of science be confined only to those concerns about which science is truly capable of offering insight - these might be some practices that could improve our capacity for discernment the next time “the science” is used to stampede us into abandoning our principles.

Longer term, more humility might even result in a net reduction to the sum total of stupidity found on social media. Hope springs eternal.