Metaphysical agnosticism.

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." -Herbert Spencer

I just got back from an amazing debate at UM. It dealt primarily with evolution and intelligent creation, the age-old argument that’s been burning up the proverbial charts for decades. Events like this always lead to interesting chains of thought post and pre-event, but I’ll get to those later.

The debate featured a microbiologist who believes in intelligent design, Paul Nelson, and an evolutionist, Michael Ruse, from good old Great Britain who is…well…an evolutionist (what more is there to say?) The basic arguments broke down like this:

The microbiologist argued that if we trace the history and composition of what we’ve come to know and conceptualize as life, we know that its most basic component is a molecule called RNA. RNA is involved in the transfer of information from DNA, programming protein synthesis and maintaining ribosome structure, and a plethora of other functions that make it absolutely essential for life to even begin. Nelson argued that in the lab, RNA is an extremely fragile molecule – it breaks apart easily under the microscope and during testing. One of Nelson’s points is that because RNA is so fragile, it would’ve been impossible for it to survive on prehistoric Earth long enough to create any kind of life, therefore creating the need for intelligent design.
He also brought up some really complicated microbiology in ORFan genes. ORFans are in essence hypothetical genes. They show no sequence similarity to those in any other organisms. They exist for no apparent reason, but are in some way essential to the composition of a DNA strand, because without the ORFan genes, the cell dies. The point? Because of this complexity, there very simply HAS to be an intelligent entity that created the natural laws that eventually created these genomic complexities.

These arguments, while they are well thought out, seem to me to be a throwing-up of hands in surrender. It's basically admitting to the limit of the potential of science to discover and uncover properties of the phenomenal world that as of now are mysteries. To so quickly attribute an ORFan gene or the fragility of RNA to an intelligent creator is just plain giving up. But there is a problem with this logically speaking that goes beyond any surface biological issues.

In the same way that the origin or function of ORFan genes are unknown, or unproven, the existence of an intelligent entity as the creative force behind the universe is UNPROVEN. However, the specific function of ORFan genes can be and will be tested and re-tested – probably until we find sound scientific evidence that justifies their existence in the human genome. Intelligent Design is not a valid scientific explanation for ORFan genes – or anything, for that matter – because it is and always will be un-testable, and therefore UNPROVEN.
The science behind the testing of these genes is not seeking to make any metaphysical claims about the origin of the universe. It has one clear objective: to gain scientific knowledge about the role of ORFan genes or to gain scientific knowledge about how RNA could survive in such a harsh pre-historical environment. To so quickly wave the scientific white-flag when it comes to these issues not only violates the traditional quest for knowledge of the sciences, but also inherently involves making a very metaphysical claim that the genealogists who study this problem are simply not making.

Making these metaphysical claims is problematic in the scientific sense because, again, they are not testable. However, for me, they also present a philosophical and epistemological problem: the origin of the universe and the metaphysical questions surrounding it are inherently unknowable - cognitively closed - in an objective sense. This, of course, is right from the pages of Kant. He stressed, more than anything, the subjectivity of what we experience on a daily basis, and refutes that can we can use these subjective experiences to define and describe metaphysical notions. Kant puts it better: "That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt... But... it by no means follows that all arises out of experience."

As an example - there can only, thinks Kant, be one explanation of our a priori (independent of experience) knowledge of the properties of space: the spatial properties of the world must be contributed by the knowing subject. That is, the world as it is in itself is not made up of objects arranged in space. Only the world as it appears to us is spatial, and this is precisely because space is nothing more than our way of representing the world to ourselves. I know it sounds complicated, but its actually quite simple. In Kant's own terminology, space is nothing more than a 'form of intuition [i.e., perception]'. Kant employs a similar argument to conclude that time, too, is a mere form of intuition. Space and time are features of the phenomenal world - the world as it appears to us - only. The noumenal world - the world of things as they are in themselves - is aspatial and atemporal.

The knowledge of these things or rather, the extent to which we can know about these things-in-themselves (as Kant called them) is bound by the limits of human conceptual frameworks and schemas. Aims to gain knowledge of the world as it is in itself is a futile engagement because theoretical knowledge can only be of the world as it appears to humans. If there is an intelligent being that created the universe, that being would undoubtedly fall into the group of metaphysical concepts like that of space and time, which claims to go “beyond” the appearance of experience (the phenomenonal) to grasp the essence of things-in-themselves (the noumenonal), which are not subject to experience. Knowledge of God becomes, in a Kantian scheme, a knowledge that has no object, and therefore cannot claim to be a well-founded knowledge. Kant provides an interesting image: metaphysics appears outside the realm of experience as a dove that seeks to fly without air beneath its wings. For this reason, when metaphysics asks questions about the existence of God, of the soul, of the world, of freedom – all realities that escape from a phenomenal type of experience – it falls into insurmountable antinomies.

Science, however, in its insatiable quest for objective truth, isn't spared from these faults. After all, there is plenty of science that seeks to understand an idealized universal truth. However, there's a convenient trick happening behind the scenes. Whether it acknowledges it or not, science is always studying the phenomenonal because it is studying the observable and testable - that which does fit into the concepts and schemas we derive from phenomenal experience. Religion, or at the very least the ideas espoused by the microbiologist, seeks the answers to something which not observable, not testable, in human experience. It is important to note that Kant's epistemology stands as a critique of both empiricism and rationalism. The empiricist view is wrong, since the mind is not a mere tabula rasa which passively receives knowledge of the world through the senses. The rationalist model of knowledge is just as mistaken, as reason alone can never give rise to knowledge, since knowledge demands both concepts and the raw data supplied by the senses. What we can relay on is science's ability to test the world-as-perceived and interpreted by human beings. That being said, to say that our current lack of knowledge about microbiology is direct evidence of a greater power is giving up. One of science’s key traits is its persistence. And like Ruse (the evolutionist) said in his argument, scientific persistence is impossible if we begin to include the notion of God and creation in and as a theory, because its simply not science!

Religion, for me, is the embodiment of the false metaphysical pursuit Kant warns of. In much the same way as it was invoked by the microbiologist in the debate, religion it is a human interpretation of something that is inherently beyond human comprehension. It tries to form the universe and its mysteries into something tangible, something explainable - and the result is, to no surprise, something ultimately mythical. Again, one could argue that science essentially struggles for the same answers; but again, one must remember the trick of science - its search for truth is inherently framed and bounded by the phenomenal. Religion's search for truth is framed in the noumenonal. That is the fundamental difference between the two. I, for one, don’t think that we as humans will ever have a clear understanding of the universe and its true beginnings and endings in an objective sense. Its just too vast, too uncategorized to fit into the realm of human understanding. As humans, the best we can do is describe the world as bound by the limits of our perceptions - define and understand reality as our reality and stop using vauge metaphysical explanations which, as Kant shows, have a huge epistemological flaw.

There is hope, though. What happens over time is science (and, therefore, as argued, observations based inherently off of phenomenal knowledge) turns many religious concepts on their heads. The sun doesn’t rise and set because of the Sun God’s will, it does so because of the Earth’s axis of rotation; a sacrifice to the Gods doesn’t bring about the rainy season, the Earth’s position relative to the Sun determines it. I think we’re reaching a new age of enlightenment about religious thought – we’re reaching that point, the glorious tipping point that has brought about so many revolutionary changes in the past, where science is catching up to and finally turning many contemporary metaphysical & religious ideas into old, crackpot myths and legends.

"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." - Nicolas Copernicus