Theology and Science? What about Philosophy? (Cont.)

 

In my last posting, “Theology and Science? What about Philosophy?,” I said that I would show that “Polkinghorne’s perspective actually cannot do without philosophy and that, despite its absence from the title and the first paragraph of his book, philosophy will find a way to creep into his discussion.” I will, it must be said, have to defer a good part of that demonstration as I reread Science and Theology and examine more thoroughly and reflect upon what he has to say on the topic. I will content myself in this posting with the observation that while he seems to be somewhat dismissive of “professional philosophers,” he does not reject philosophy, or it may be “philosophy,” out of hand.

 

Thus, in speaking (p. 15) of “the question of how one hits upon the research programme that will represent the next progressive step [in science],” Polkinghorne tells us:

This was precisely the sort of problem discussed by Michael Polanyi, who was a distinguished physical chemist before he turned to philosophical pursuits. His ideas have largely been neglected by professional philosophers but they resonate with scientists who recognize in Polanyi someone who knew their discipline from within.

 

There is more than a hint here of an argument ad hominem: if you don’t know a discipline from within, i.e., as someone who has (ibid.) served “an apprenticeship in the ‘convivial’ community of scientists,” then your view can be discounted.

 

And, passing to another text, we find him speaking of “critical realism,” the view that the “intertwining of theory and experiment” that characterizes science yields

[U]nique and intellectually satisfying understandings of the physical world of such a kind as to be persuasive that one is actually learning about the nature of things. Yet that is what the history of modern science exemplifies. Critical realism is a philosophical position based on the actual experience of the scientific community, rather than on a claimed abstract necessity that things had to be this way. This basis in experience is why it is the position adopted, consciously or subconsciously, by the overwhelming majority of working scientists, despite the criticisms leveled at it by some of their philosophical colleagues.

 

In other words, he respects the philosophical, or it may be the “philosophical,” reflections of those who, though not necessarily amateur philosphers, are scientists and thus know science “from within.” What I need to reflect upon, as I continue to read and ponder, is whether these reflections are genuinely philosophical, belonging to the autonomous discipline of philosophy, or just “philosophical,” belonging, strictly speaking, to empirico-mathematical science.