Finding Disconfirmation Conditions for My Religious Beliefs – Part 3
What Warrants Disconfirming a Historical Narrative?
"Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative" – Ernst Mayr
The Difficulty in Challenging a Historical Narrative
To successfully challenge a religious belief, one must challenge the belief within the corresponding theological context, or within its corresponding historical narrative. For example, suppose I am talking to someone who believes the biblical historical narrative that the earth, moons, and stars are all less than 10,000 years old. I point out that the farthest star we have seen so far is Earendel, which is 12.9 billion light-years away. This means the light we observe from Earendel took 12.9 billion years to reach us, which sounds like great evidence that the star producing the light has been around longer than 10,000 years. The other person remains unconvinced and explains that the Biblical narrative claims that Eve was created to be Adam’s wife, so clearly Eve was an adult when she was created. Eve’s age was not 0 at the time of her creation, so a star created in a starting configuration with an age other than 0 is not unexpected for someone who believes the biblical narrative.
It can be difficult to challenge a historical narrative because it is not always obvious what would be unexpected in another person’s belief system. Often the other person is unable to imagine what those unexpected conditions would look like either. The genius of Boghossian and Lindsay’s book is their proposed thought experiment gives me the advantage of knowing all the requisite details about the historical narrative I am looking to disconfirm (my own), making it possible to conclusively determine if a disconfirmation condition is truly unexpected for my particular set of beliefs and assumptions. As a condition of the thought experiment, I wanted my disconfirmation conditions to be convincing to me and plausible to a rational person. So, let me first explain why I believe an experiment can disconfirm an entire historical narrative.
From Historical Narrative to Science
For me it is a very short path from my historical narrative to science. Over two decades ago while listening to an online seminar, the speaker said that the theory of evolution teaches death existed before man, so if evolution is true, death cannot be a consequence of man’s sin. That is all I needed to hear to realize that the two historical narratives are entirely incompatible. If death is not a consequence of human sin, there is no need for a Savior to save humans from the consequences of human sin. Stated plainly, if the theory of evolution is true, then there is no need for Jesus. There are many Christians who disagree with me on that and I am only outlining the beliefs I hold and not speaking for other Christians. Since I believe that confirming the truth of the theory of evolution would disconfirm my religious beliefs, an experiment that confirms the plausibility of macroevolution would suffice as diconfirmation for my beliefs. So, this quickly brought me to trying to devise an experiment that would convince me that evolution and specifically macroevolution has occurred.
Historical Science and Experiments
“Observation, comparison and classification, as well as the testing of competing historical narratives, became the methods of evolutionary biology, outweighing experimentation.” - Ernst Mayr
Can one devise an experiment that can not only challenge, but disconfirm an entire historical narrative? It is not surprising that Ernst Mayr and Jerry Coyne find it unlikely that one would be able to devise an experiment demonstrating macroevolution because historical narratives describe events in the distant past. Nonetheless, I pressed on to determine the necessary conditions for an experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of macroevolution. I settled on the following three descriptors of macroevolution:
major morphological changes
viable changes to sexual organs
viable changes to vital organs
An experiment that can demonstrate this within a single human lifetime would satisfy my critical sources of doubt in the plausibility of macroevolution. Advancements in science are making it easier to describe what that experiment might look like, for instance, the evolution of many essential genes in a short period of time. A single repeatable experiment successfully demonstrating the feasibility of these three conditions would convince me that a single example of macroevolution is possible, convincing me that the other examples are possible as well. In other words, this would make all of the “gaps” within “God of the Gaps” negligible conceptually, because they would then only represent apparent gaps, rather than actual gaps in the natural pathway between distinct species.
In this article I explained how I rationalized disconfirming religious beliefs using experimentation. So far in this series, I have excluded much of the details of my personal struggle during this thought experiment, since detailing experiences such as cognitive dissonance is not relevant to the feasibility of the experiment. I find the personal struggle just as (if not more) interesting than defining the scope, details, and plausibility of an experiment and disconfirmation conditions. My next article will focus on the biggest difficulties I experienced while determining my disconfirmation conditions and the strategies I used to overcome each apparent impasse in my thinking.