Why are creationists creationist? 2 - conceptual spaces

The development of one's conceptual world is not done in a vacuum. As Gilbert and Sullivan noted

...every boy and every gal

That's born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

but of course that isn't true. Liberals, conservatives, Christians and atheists, scientists and creationists are made, not born.

When a child reaches a certain age, they learn many of their base attitudes from those around them. The space of conceptual alternatives that they encounter is restricted, but at the least each child is predisposed ordinarily to learn from trial and error. This is how language is acquired, and how the knowledge one needs to learn to cross the road, eat a meal, and ask for help is gained.

The context into which a child is acculturated includes the educational practices of that society, which are in turn formed out of the conceptual space formed by the traditions of that society. Science is a conceptual tradition, or rather a number of conceptual traditions, passed on from teacher to student at various levels, including the popular discourse of science communication via the media and popular books like Jared Diamond's recent book Collapse or Carl Zimmer's Soul Made Flesh. Mostly, though, interest in science begins earlier, at school or through exposure to instructional material.

At the commencement point of the child's conceptual development, we can idealise the situation such that the child may develop in a number of directions, one of which includes scientific conceptual commitments at the level of sophistication relevant to their age and degree of maturity. The child potentially has a "cone of development" of initial states and outcomes. Their actual developmental trajectory through that space of possibilities will depend very largely on the sorts of factors that offer them fast and frugal inferences. A child exposed to only science-directed cues will develop towards a pro-science outcome. A child exposed to only religion-directed cues (or for that matter any folk-based tradition, including folk psychology, folk taxonomy, and the like) will develop towards the outcome of that tradition.

Traditions therefore offer up the cues that influence the epistemic commitments of the developing social agent. Of course, traditions are not "pure" conceptual spaces in the real world, but the toy world example I give here can be extended to more complex cases. Let us assume for the nonce that "science" is a distinct conceptual space from "religion", and that both are "pure"; that is, both are self-contained and maximally coherent conceptual schemes. We will consider overlapping spaces and minimally coherent and self-contradictory schemes later.

If a child's cone of possible epistemic commitments begins on the cusp of these two spaces, but they are exposed throughout their development to cues from both traditions, the outcome of their development will be the vector sum of the strength of these cues, weighted according to the depth of the cue exposure, by which I mean that earlier cues will bias the trajectory more strongly than an equal and opposite later cue, by affecting the later "location" in conceptual space of the learner. If one is told early on that the Bible is a reliable guide, interpreted according to some hermeneutic (which includes literalism) and theological tradition, then counter evidence offered later in development will be subsequently deflated for that learner.

Contrariwise, if one is exposed early on to scientific results and principles, and is later told that (for example) the Genesis flood is a real event, that will be deflated for that learner on the basis of other cues (such as the dinosaur books they read which told them the world was millions of years old). So far, this is a matter of battling authorities and the subsequent epistemic commitments formed from them. However, if the learner is exposed to scientific practice, such as collecting and classifying specimens, or experimental practice in laboratory settings, the learner will acquire their own epistemic commitment to practical, as well as propositional, concepts.

Now suppose that the conceptual spaces overlap to a degree; that is, in the religion case, suppose that there are shared epistemic values in the religious and the scientific traditions. If the commencement point of independent epistemic development occurs in that intersection, the learner may find that an accommodation between the two is necessary, and seek to develop one. Remember, our learner here is an idealised boundedly rational agent who strives for maximal coherence in their epistemic set. So the outcome will depend on whether or not the traditions are compatible as the learner becomes more broadly aware of the commitments each tradition makes. For example, one might study theology and become, as I did, aware that some of the basic commitments of a theological tradition are in fact incompatible with the results of science, in which case the choice is stark - abandon (that) theological tradition, or abandon (that part of) science.

Each stage of the learner's development is based on a fast and frugal inference from social cues. In the case of the scientific tradition, this is in large part directly or secondarily based also on environmental cues that are not social, which is to say, on empirical evidence and experiment. But from the naive learner's perspective, each decision will be boundedly rational. This remains true whether or not they become pro-science or pro-folk tradition.

So let's diagrammatically show this simple view:

Figure 1: Four trajectories of learner development within a pro-science, and a pro-tradition pair of concept spaces. Vertical arrows represent social cues in the direction of the science or folk tradition outcome. The developmental stages are arbitrarily divided into family-based cues, school-based cues, and those encountered in early and late maturity (where "maturity" refers to the epistemic commitments of the learner, not their biological age). The weight of the social cue is represented by the length of each arrow. The four trajectories shown here are only notional. Depending on the social cues, of epistemic influences, any path within the cone of potential development may be inscribed.

If the scientific social cues are restricted to simple "facts" to be memorised for a test or as a marker of inclusion in the "science-based commuity", however, it would appear that there are few epistemic commitments not also held by the folk tradition. In sum, creationists and pro-evolution proponents will have roughly equal outcomes in influencing learners, unless the learning of one or the other tradition involves acquiring a set of distinct epistemic commitments. In the case where it does not, there is nothing to rationally recommend one or the other purely in epistemic terms, and so the learner's choice will not be forced, or at any rate not by rational inference. Modern creationists realise this fact, and so they have a program of developing a "Christian science" epistemology, ranging from the political (Phillip Johnson) to the philosophical (Alvin Plantinga). Johnson (1995) has painted science as being less complete, due to a commitment to "naturalism", than the Christian approach, which also includes "supernaturalism", or, as he puts it, a "theistic naturalism", a commitment to the role of divine activity in creating order in the universe. Plantinga (1996) proposes an "Augustinian Science" which can self-consciously avail itself of supernatural causes when the metaphysics of the scientist dictate.

In the next post, I wil lconsider what happens when two independent trajectories develop in a single learner, that is, when compartmentalisation fails.

Johnson, Phillip E. (1995), Reason in the balance: the case against naturalism in science, law & education. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press.

Plantinga, Alvin (1996), "Science: Augustian or Duhemian?" Faith and Philosophy 13 (3):368-394.