BYU Studies: Science as Storytelling, and the Atomization of Knowledge

While looking for something to read during my Christmas vacation, I discovered that the last 2014 issue of BYU Studies contains an article by Barry Bickmore and David Grandy titled, "Science as Storytelling." The article is nicely summarized as follows:

Much [o]f our modern world revolves around something called "science." But what is science? Interestingly, this turns out to be a very difficult question to answer because every definition seems to include something we don't consider science or seems to exclude something we do consider science. In this essay, the authors present their own definition: Science is the modern art of creating stories that explain observations of the natural world and that could be useful for predicting, and possibly even controlling, nature. They then refine this definition by offering seven rules that scientific storytelling must follow to distinguish it from other genres. These rules fall under the following general topics: reproducibility, predictive power, prospects for improvement, naturalism, uniformitarianism, simplicity, and harmony.

Bickmore and Grandy explain that their article originated as part of an introductory science course in order to address simplistic views of science and the corresponding tendency to reject scientific findings that clash with personal, religious, or political views. Theirs is a time-honored attempt to define what makes science unique from other human endeavors.

Their use of storytelling as the central concept of science made me nervous at first because it is easy to dismiss scientists as making up stories. They address this concern and explain their reason of word choice.

[W]e chose the word “stories” to emphasize the idea that the explanations scientists come up with are not themselves facts. Scientific explanations are always subject to change, since any new observations we make might contradict previously established explanations. The universe is a very complicated place, and it is likely that any explanation that humans come up with will be, at best, an approximation of the truth.

I think use the word "story" is fine as long as it is used loosely. For example, if you were to ask how water gets to the faucets in my house, I would tell you a story beginning with the entrance of the main water pipe into my basement, and how the water is distributed to various places by various pipes. Plumbers count on building codes to help ensure that the story is consistent from house to house. However, occasionally they will find deviations or expansions on the basic story. As they attempt to understand these variations, they are basically refining the story of that building's flow of water and acting accordingly in order to control the flow. When pipes are hidden by walls, floors, or ceilings, there will always be a little uncertainty in the story. But with enough probing of the system, the remaining uncertainties become negligible or practically irrelevant.

Unfortunately, the attempt to separate facts from stories (or hypotheses, theories, etc) can also be a source of mischief. It can lead to what I call the atomization of knowledge, where knowledge is broken down into the smallest possible pieces and loses its force because the formation of context and relationships between facts is prevented. Take, for example, the following quote of Hugh Nibley provided by R. Gary in the comments to my last post.

The fossil or potsherd or photograph that I hold in my hand may be called a fact—it is direct evidence, an immediate experience; but my interpretation of it is not a fact, it is entirely a picture of my own construction. I cannot experience ten thousand or forty million years—I can only imagine, and the fact that my picture is based on facts does not make it a fact, even when I think the evidence is so clear and unequivocal as to allow no other interpretation. (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 1, ch. 2, 25-27.)

That's all well and good, but a dedicated skeptic might question whether a fossil is actually a fact, and assert that only pixels are fact--pictures are interpretation. Actually, Bickmore and Grandy hint as much when they write:

Consider fossils. They look like the remains of living things. Is it not reasonable to suppose that they were once living things that were covered and preserved in sediment, just as dead organisms can be covered and preserved in sediment nowadays?

That's quite an underselling of fossils; the evidence is better than that. I'm not criticizing the authors--they were just making a point about the consistency of cause and effect--but it helps to illustrate the problem. It took me about 10 seconds to Google up some creationists arguing that when it comes to fossils, the only facts are their physical properties (dimensions, weight, etc). Scientific troublemakers excel at this kind of game--keeping attention on the most basic indisputable facts so that higher-ordered interpretations appear to be mere guesses.

This all goes to my view that, just as it is impossible to entirely separate science from non-science, it is impossible to entirely separate fact from interpretation, and the judgment of fact vs interpretation will differ based on knowledge-base. That carbon has 6 protons is a statement of fact to chemists because it is so well tested. A non-chemist might consider it merely an interpretation. Maybe I could formalize this as a rule of thumb: if someone seems keen to separate fact from interpretation, there is a good chance that they are selling scientific garbage. This is because specialists will tend to have an appreciation of where accepted facts end and interpretations begin in their field, so they don't need to bang on about it. Further, they will tend to dispute interpretations with additional observations or facts, rather than by getting pedantic about the demarcation between the two.

From the discussion thus far you would be forgiven for wondering how scientists make any progress at all. The rules outlined by Bickmore and Grandy are key here. I list them as they appear in the article.

Rule 1: Scientific stories are crafted to explain observations, but the observations that are used as a basis for these stories must be reproducible.

Rule 2: Scientists prefer stories that can predict things that were not included in the observations used to create those explanations in the first place.

Rule 3: Scientific stories should be subject to an infinitely repeating process of evaluation meant to generate more and more useful stories.

Rule 4: Scientific explanations do not appeal to the supernatural. Only naturalistic explanations are allowed.

Rule 5: Any scientific explanation involving events in the past must square with the principle of “uniformitarianism”—the assumption that past events can be explained in terms of the “natural laws” that apply today.

Rule 6: Scientists assume that nature is simple enough for human minds to understand.

Rule 7: Scientific explanations should not contradict other established scientific explanations, unless absolutely necessary.

Although they are all important, I think rules 1, 2, 3, and 7 are particularly important. I would argue that the remaining rules are simply extensions of those four rules working together.

Well, I've gone on long enough and I don't have a good way to wrap up. So I'll just say go read the article and see what you think.

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Facts and Authority

The Crucible of Doubt, by Terryl and Fiona Givens, contains this quote from Austin Farrer that I liked and thought I would pass along:

Facts are not determined by authority. Authority can make law to be law; authority cannot make facts to be facts.

This would seem to be obvious, but you don't have to look too far to find facts disputed on the basis of authority (i.e. position within the Church). By virtue of their authority leaders of (and within) the Church are entitled to establish law, and I strive to obey the law. But when it comes to facts, authority is not a guarantee of accuracy.

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The Crucible of Doubt: Granting Permission to Believe

Modern science has taught us a lot about how our bodies work. To say it all boils down to chemistry may be an oversimplification, but there is a lot of truth in that statement. What does it mean then, when we feel love and affection for one another? Are our emotions and desires the work of chemicals that manipulate our subjective experience, and therefore not really real? These kinds of questions are sometimes posed by budding rationalists, who wonder what role such chemical reactions should play in their life. A common answer goes something like this: 'We are humans and we have no choice but to experience life as humans. Our emotions and feelings are real to us. Understand where they come from so that you don't make bad decisions based on them, but don't over-think them either. It is not a betrayal of reason and logic to be human. Enjoy life!'

Sometimes we need permission to just be ourselves. One of the messages I took away from The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith, by Terryl and Fiona Givens, is that we should give ourselves permission to believe.

Coming into the first chapter, The Use and Abuse of Reason, I was a little skeptical that I would agree with what the authors would say. It is easy to say that there are ways of 'knowing' other than science and reason. Such statements usually strike me as a kind of epistemic jealousy. Artists and writers may have dreamed up things as strange as relativity and quantum mechanics, but they could never deliver the empirical reality. I was pleasantly surprised that the Givens did not seem to be trying to put science 'in its place' as much as put it in a human context.

The problem is not that science cannot give us direction with life’s most urgent questions. It is because, in actual practice, logical reasoning does not give us much guidance. We don’t really live our lives, in any meaningful way, according to the dictates of logic. And we certainly don’t embrace our most cherished beliefs, values, or opinions on the basis of reason alone—however much we may protest we do....

[A]s moral agents, immersed in a world of human relationships and human values, we most appropriately choose and judge and act as human beings whose desires and motivations and bases for action are deeper than and prior to logic.

I can get on board with that, since even certainty is a feeling.

The discussion in the first chapter connects to the last chapter, where the Givens take up the inevitability of belief and how we channel it. After describing three views of the cosmos (both theistic and atheistic), they write:

...we assemble the scattered pieces of evidence from science, from life experience, from intuition, and from reason into a tentative whole, trusting some sources of meaning and distrusting others. We cannot escape the burden of faith, within or outside the parameters of religious conviction.

So we can't help but believe in something, but what if that something turns out to be wrong? The Givens, in turn, ask if that is really such a horrible thing, and quote William James as follows:

He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. . . . This fear he slavishly obeys. . . . For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world. . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

This is all well and good, but there are elements of Church doctrine where we might suspect that we are indeed being duped. What then? The Givens answer:

Perhaps...one might focus on the message rather than the messenger. One might consider that the contingencies of history and culture and the human element will always constitute the garment in which God’s word and will are clothed. And one might refuse to allow our desire for the perfect to be the enemy of the present good. Finally, we might ask ourselves, with the early disciples, “to whom [else] shall we go?”

The worst risk such a life of faith entails is not that such a life might be wrong—but that it might be incomprehensible to those unprepared to take such a risk.

Perhaps you find yourself unable to abandon belief in certain core doctrines of Mormonism in spite of science and reason. As I read them, the message of these two chapters of The Crucible of Doubt is this: 'You are a human and will unavoidably believe things that go beyond science, and often make choices ignoring it. It is not a betrayal of rationality to believe. Embrace what you find beautiful, good, and compelling in Mormonism. Enjoy life!'

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Voting Your Conscience: Old LDS Edition

This week's U.S. election gives me an excuse to share some material from Church history I recently found.

In the April General Conference of 1907, with the Reed Smoot hearings finally over, a declaration written by the First Presidency under Joseph F. Smith was read to the congregation titled, "An Address: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the World." The purpose of the declaration was to correct misunderstandings about the Church and assure people that even though Mormons believed in revelation to a prophet, they were simultaneously loyal citizens of their countries, and the United States in particular.

Following its reading, President Francis M. Lyman, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, stated that the address was endorsed by the Council of the Twelve Apostles and moved that the address be adopted "as an expression of the principles and policy of the Church that we will advocate and sustain." After the motion was seconded by Elder John Henry Smith, the congregation was asked to signify approval by standing. Then those objecting were asked to do the same, of which the Conference report stated there were none. The declaration was included in the Conference report and printed in the May issue of the Church's magazine, Improvement Era.

The document makes for an interesting read because it reveals the public pressures felt by Church leaders at that time. One of the points addressed was the charge of 'arbitrary power' in the Church. After reciting well-known passages from D&C 121 about the righteous exercise of priesthood authority, the First Presidency wrote:

Nominations to Church office may be made by revelation; and the right of nomination is usually exercised by those holding high authority, but it is a law that no person is to be ordained to any office in the Church, where there is a regularly organized branch of the same, without the vote of its members. This law is operative as to all the officers of the Church, from the president down to the deacon. The ecclesiastical government itself exists by the will of the people; elections are frequent, and the members are at liberty to vote as they choose. True, the elective principle here operates by popular acceptance, rather than through popular selection, but it is none the less real. Where the foregoing facts exist as to any system, it is not and cannot be arbitrary.

The notion that the Saints could freely express their will with respect to ecclesiastical government was encouraged in a number of General Conferences in that first decade. For example, in the April conference of 1905 President Joseph F. Smith prefaced the sustaining vote with these words:

As this is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day on which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, we will present the general authorities of the Church for your vote this afternoon, and I would like to say that it is expected that all the Latter-day Saints will exercise their right to vote for or against those whose names are submitted. We would like you to exercise perfect liberty and freedom in the expression of your own thought and faith and fidelity in the lifting of your hands.

Well, times change and as the Encyclopedia of Mormonism put it,

The principle of common consent has functioned in the Church since its inception, though the actual practices incorporating this principle have evolved significantly.

Most recently we were instructed that there are no elections in the Church and that we do not vote on Church leadership at any level, but rather sustain them. In practice there is probably little difference from over a century ago. I would guess that the sustaining vote of 1905 was about as routine as that of 2014 [1]. It seems clear, however, that Joseph F. Smith's portrayal of the sustaining vote as a non-arbitrary 'elective principle' is long gone.

Notes:

1. Almost. The April report states: "All the voting was unanimous with, two exceptions; and President Smith invited those who had so voted to state their grievances to the proper authorities, and they would be considered."

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Ebola: Fox News Preaches the Truth

Fox's Shep Smith put the smackdown on Ebola fear mongering in a brief but forceful statement.



Unfortunately, some of Shep's colleagues have been part of the problem. I don't do Facebook. But for those of you who do, may I suggest that this video is worth sharing? This is a video that ought to go viral (pun sort of intended, but also kind of hard to avoid).

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Priesthood Session Highlights: Dunning-Kruger and The Eyring Letter

Two items of relevance to this blog in last night's priesthood session of General Conference stood out to me. First, as President Uchtdorf described research showing that people with low skill tend to overrate their own performance, it became clear to me that he was describing the Dunning-Kruger effect. Pres. Uchtdorf didn't mention the corollary, that people with low skill also fail to recognize true competence in others. This bit of psychology is often invoked in online discussions when some ignoramus starts yammering on about things he clearly does not understand, and rejects correction. As Dunning and Kruger put it, in the abstract of one of their publications,

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.

I thought it was great that Pres. Uchtdorf injected this nerdy bit of psychology into Church discourse, and I will be interested to see if/how it is footnoted in the printed text. The overall talk was very good, and I expect that it will be widely used for fourth-Sunday lessons. Maybe we can think of other ways Dunning-Kruger is manifest amongst the Saints.

The second item of interest to me was President Eyring's reference to a letter his father sent to Church leaders about science and religion, and which his father asked his opinion on. Pres. Eyring previously told that story during an interview for a program BYUtv did on his father several years ago. (Alas, it appears to have disappeared from the BYUtv site.) In that program, Pres. Eyring told the story in the context of reaction to Pres. Joseph Fielding Smith's book, Man, His Origin and Destiny. It is therefore likely that Pres. Eyring was referring to Henry Eyring's most famous letter. The full text of that letter and the story behind it can be read here. (It is also possible that Pres. Eyring was remembering one of the other letters Henry Eyring wrote.)

At a minimum, Pres. Eyring's talk is a useful reference if you ever have occasion to tell someone about the letter. However, Pres. Eyring's talk is also a likely candidate for a fourth-Sunday lesson. Maybe you can help liven the discussion by providing the background on the famous letter he was probably alluding to.

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How Climate Change Skeptics Made Me Feel Better About Ebola

The bad news is that the Ebola outbreak is awful and is likely to get worse in western Africa. I'm feeling a little impish, so here are reasons not to worry based on the kinds of things global warming skeptics say.

1. Cases of Ebola are down in some villages, and in most of Africa and the rest of the world they remain at record lows.
2. Disease epidemiological models can be manipulated to get inflated results. They also can't take into account future medical advances.
3. Scientists who study Ebola are totally dependent on government funding. They have an incentive to make Ebola seem like a crisis.
4. The earth, and humans in particular, have experienced disease outbreaks before. They're still here, and they will adapt.
5. Resources sent to Africa are a drain on our economy.
6. The Ebola scare is an excuse to give the government and the United Nations control over people's lives.
7. Even if we do contain this outbreak, Ebola will pop up somewhere else.
8. It could be that other factors like poor nutrition are more to blame.
9. Intervention efforts may actually kill more people than would die if the epidemic was left to burn itself out.

See? Problem dismissed.

Obviously this is satire, but it's worth pointing out that most of the above statements are true. How can they be both true and wrong? The answer is: context.

On the other hand, maybe there really is reason to worry. Just for fun I did a search for Ebola conspiracy theories. Should I be surprised that the Tea Party was claiming that the outbreak is part of a plot to take away our freedoms (i.e. guns)? And for the sheer fun of sheer madness, watch this:




I like how he repeatedly said, "pathenogens".

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Abraham's Myths

This is mostly a note for myself, but I thought I would post it for anyone interested. I've been re-reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by Peter Enns. Although written for an evangelical audience, it applies almost equally well to Mormons. (I've mentioned the book before, and it is routinely recommended by Ben Spackman.) In reading chapter 2 I was struck by Enns's explanation for why Genesis resembles the older myths of other ancient cultures. Before proceeding it is important to know what Enns means by 'myth.'

Myth is an ancient, premodern, pre-scientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?

Enns thinks it all starts with Abraham. (The italics are original.)

It is important to remember where Abraham came from and where he was headed....The Mesopotamian world from which Abraham came was one whose own stories of origins had been expressed in mythic categories for a considerable length of time. Moreover, the land Abraham was going to enter, the land of the Canaanites, was likewise rich in its own myths....

As God entered into a relationship with Abraham, he "met" him where he was--an ancient Mesopotamian man who breathed the air of the ancient Near East. We must surely assume that Abraham, as such a man, shared the worldview of those whose world he shared and not a modern, scientific one. The reason the opening chapters of Genesis look so much like the literature of ancient Mesopotamia is that the worldview categories of the ancient Near East were ubiquitous and normative at the time. Of course, different cultures had different myths, but the point is that they all had them....

What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them....

We might think that such a scenario is unsatisfying because it gives too much ground to pagan myths. But we must bear in mind how very radical this notion would have been in the ancient world. For a second-millennium Semitic people...to say that the gods of Babylon were not worth worshiping but that the true god was the god of a nomad like Abraham--this was risky, ridiculous, and counterintuitive....

To put it differently, God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one.

[T]he question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins....The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship....Genesis makes its case in a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood--indeed the only way.

Although the Egyptians aren't mentioned, they also had a rich mythology. That Enns builds his argument around Abraham is of special LDS interest given our Book of Abraham. However, the argument is equally applicable to Moses. God's covenant people were surrounded by powerful polytheistic cultures and empires for hundreds to thousands of years. It makes sense that they needed myths of their own, and that those myths looked somewhat similar to those of their neighbors.

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