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ABSTRACT
The following article addresses a recent tendency in popular discourse to unite “science” and “belief.” Following a discussion of the theologian Paul Tillich’s distinction between belief and faith, I claim that what “belief in science” actually means is something rather more like “faith in science”—an attitude which must finally, by making science into an ultimate concern, be detrimental to both terms. Rather than abandoning the injunction to believe, though, I propose the adoption of an attitude that is simultaneously critical and absorbed, an attitude akin to the “postcritque” of the literary critic Rita Felski.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This sort of language is not a product of the pandemic, but it might be fair to say that the pandemic has transformed it from a (bizarrely) divisive political statement into a more urgent appeal—and, in some instances, even into a kind of command. At the end of 2020, the phrase was perhaps most famously a feature of now-U.S. President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric (“I believe in science. Donald Trump doesn’t … ”). More recently, at the end of 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to a “small fringe element in [Canada] that is angry” and “that doesn’t believe in science,” establishing, perhaps, the extent to which “belief in science” had become a kind of collective (rather than personal) requirement. Indeed, it is not unusual today to encounter the slogan “believe science” as an imperative—a demand equal to the seriousness and threat of the pandemic.
2 To be clear, this may well be a political requirement of the disastrous set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. But it is not an emphasis on science that I want to interrogate here; rather, it is the potential consequences of treating science as if it were something in which “belief” might be commanded or coerced.
3 On this subject, see especially Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991).
4 In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2018, for instance, Latour clarified his position, one which he seems to have taken as basically self-evident. “I think we were so happy to develop all this critique,” he says there, “because we were so sure of the authority of science” (Kofman). That such a clarification became necessary at all is something which Latour could not have foreseen—where the regime of “post-truth” would come to undermine the foundation which he (and so many others) had simply taken for granted.
5 The presumption that the phrase “belief in science” (along with its variants) represents what is basically an effort to inspire trust is probably accurate. It is difficult to imagine any kind of dogmatic or cowing intention at work here—pragmatism, instead, is the far more likely stance. And yet, if this is so, why not just say “trust”? It is, I think, worth asking why it might be more pragmatic to ask people to “believe” in such an enterprise than to ask them to “trust” in it, when the two things are all but certain to function in the same way (i.e., to convince those on the fence to, say, get vaccinated).
6 There are countless examples of such practices, but perhaps one of the best-known is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a project which was carried out in the southern United States over the course of forty years, from 1932 to 1972, and which saw hundreds of African Americans left deliberately untreated in the name of scientific observation/advancement.
7 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 1.
8 Ibid., 36.
9 Ibid., 2.
10 Ibid., 2.
11 Ibid., 4.
12 Ibid., 4.
13 Ibid., 36–37.
14 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Three Volumes in One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), I, 211.
15 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 38.
16 Ibid., 39.
17 Paul Tillich, The System of the Sciences According to Objects and Methods (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1981), 33.
18 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 40.
19 Ibid., 25.
20 In the second book of Tillich’s Systematic Theology, for example, we find the following description of the relationship between faith and doubt: “The affirmation that Jesus is the Christ is an act of faith and consequently of daring courage. It is not an arbitrary leap into darkness but a decision in which elements of immediate participation and therefore certitude are mixed with elements of strangeness and therefore incertitude and doubt. But doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. Therefore, there is no faith without risk” (II, 116).
21 This is something that Tillich covers in his work The Courage to Be, where he describes despair as a situation in which “[n]onbeing is felt as absolutely victorious” (54–55). The catch, he notes, is that “there is a limit to its victory; nonbeing is felt as victorious, and feeling presupposes being” (55).
22 Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 22.
23 Ibid., 22–23.
24 As a label, “New Atheism” tends to reinforce a kind of caricature in its own right: a group of figures for whom the theory of evolution and rigid materialism are to be extolled in clear opposition to just about any form of religiosity. The central premise of their detractors is that the members of this group—famously, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—make of religion a straw man which is then easily eradicated. The truth of this is certainly borne out to some extent, but really, one need only look as far as some of their books’ titles to get a sense of what it is that I mean by “strident certainty.” Here are but a few examples: Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (and, less specifically concerned with religion, Consciousness Explained).
25 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 181–182.
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Notes on contributors
Ian Gibson
Ian Gibson recently finished his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. His primary research interest is the overlap of scientific and religious discourses in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. He has published articles with Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and Christianity and Literature.