THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG

Jerry Harkins

                  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one has a right to his 
                 own  facts.                                                                               
                                                                                     –Daniel Patrick Moynihan

            For two and a half millennia, philosophers have worried about whether or not error has any rights.  No one thinks deliberate malicious error –– lying –– has any standing at all although it is often difficult to find a consensus on what is deliberate and malicious.  But the concern has been with inadvertent error, "honest" mistakes that have the potential to result in consequential harm.  By and large, the answer has been no.  Senator Moynihan for example was saying that no one has the right to claim that the earth is flat or the moon is made of green cheese.  Like most people, he apparently thought there is a body of "facts," eternal, unchanging verities universally agreed upon.  There does seem to be such a canon.  The earth is a sphere.  All men are mortal.  1 + 1 = 2 is true and the notion that 1 + 1 = 3 has no standing, no rights, no place at the table.  Sadly, as we shall see, the universe is governed by the Uncertainty Principle and the class of eternal verities, while not null, is infinitesimally small.

            Here I want to consider the place of error in science which is one of the ways human beings have developed to pursue truth.  Other disciplines, including philosophy, art and religion, must also confront error but the challenge is more conspicuous and often more consequential in science which limits itself to empirical truth.  It is also more urgent because of widespread scientific illiteracy which leads some people to repudiate even well established truth.  A truly frightening percentage of Americans reject such facts as evolution and climate change in part because of ideological bias but also in part because they do not understand the philosophy or the methodology of science.  "It's only a theory" is a common manifestation of this ignorance.

            The moral standing of error is particularly relevant in an environment whose leaders celebrate and promote alternative reality.  In effect, this means equal standing in the public forum for any proposition even if it is merely asserted and is unburdened by evidence.  There are in America today tens of millions of people who loudly and proudly reject a wide range of what Senator Moynihan might have been thinking of as "facts" simply because they do not comport with a given ideology.  There are more millions who passionately believe assertions that are at odds with decisive evidence.  They demand equal respect for their views to the point of insisting that they be certified in school textbooks and accommodated or even promoted in the law.  In this, they are supported by a long history of religious doctrine which may explain why so many fundamentalists of all faiths are attracted to irrational and often dangerous ideas.  Finally there are many who lie knowingly to gain political or economic advantage.

            We need to be very clear about this:  truth is never without ambiguity.  The current version of Darwinian evolution is not the last word on the subject.  The discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," did not close the book on either particle physics or theology.  Nevertheless intelligent design and the steady state universe are bankrupt ideas, errors properly consigned to the ash heap of history with the flat earth.  They are errors that once seemed plausible and even probable and the question is do they retain the right to be heard?  If not, at what point did they lose such standing?

            In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there has always been an attempt to make grudging accommodation for inadvertent error which is thought to be tolerable when it does not relate to a grave matter.  Still, Christian moral philosophers begin with the assertion that God has entrusted revelation and all moral truth to the church.  No fault is imputed to one who is "invincibly ignorant" of the law but that is a very high bar.  For one thing, it is alleged that no one can be ignorant of "natural law" which applies to virtually all human behavior.  And, of course, the church is the sole interpreter of natural law.  Secular law is slightly more liberal but the ancient Greco-Roman principle nemo censetur ignorare legem, no one is presumed ignorant of the law, is a foundational principle of Western jurisprudence.  "I didn't know there was a law against that" is no more acceptableas a  defense than "I didn't know the gun was loaded."

            There is, of course, a very good reason for this.  If ignorance of the law were allowed as a defense, it would automatically be invoked by anyone accused of any offense.  The ancient philosophers asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" –– Who will watch the watchmen?  Similarly who will prevent a prosecutor from bringing a case against a celebrity in order to build a public image for the next political campaign?  Who will denounce a county clerk for refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple because Deuteronomy says homosexuality is an abomination?  Who will dare say the emperor has no clothes, the Chief Executive is a liar and a fool or worse?  In a free society someone is bound to think and say everything that can be thought or said and dissent is often valuable.  Inevitably, though, some dissent will be wrong.  Resolving disputes in the political and religious realms is often messy.  In science, there is an empirical process for doing so but it too can seem to be disorderly.

            The world of right and wrong, truth and error is not binary.  Rather it covers the same spectrum as probability theory between the extremes of empirical fact and provable falsity.  As with probability, there are very few propositions that can be decisively and finally placed at either extreme.  Moreover, as our knowledge increases, beliefs thought to be at one extreme or the other sometimes shift in the opposite direction. An example is our understanding of how and when the world was created. 

            As recently as 1658, Archbishop James Ussher used biblical genealogy to calculate the precise date of the creation as Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC.  He and almost everyone else in Europe believed that the Book of Genesis was divinely inspired and therefore without error.  His 1,200-page work was a scholarly tour de force but it was also a spectacular error that remained the majority opinion for two centuries.  There had always been different views, some of them more nearly correct.  In the first century before the common era, Lucretius wrote "On the Nature of Things" which rejected the idea that the gods had anything to do with the creation of the material universe.  Like Bishop Ussher, his reasoning was cogent but, lacking evidence, it led to some fairly muddled theories.  Even when his conclusions turned out to be wrong, however, they were not dead ends but represented progress.  More often than not, they pointed toward truth, a phenomenon that leads to the conclusion that truth is not an absolute but rather a perception that is always evolving.  Sigmund Freud was only half right when he observed, "From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."  No.  From error to error one can get closer to the truth but only if one is on the right track to start with.

            The evidence that knowledge is an always-evolving body of perceptions is obvious even in science, the most empirical, pragmatic and operational of all the ways humans have created to pursue truth.  Perhaps the best example was the theory of geocentricity, the idea that the earth is the center of the universe.  This was a common sense deduction based on the observation that the heavenly bodies do appear to be revolving about the earth and the earth does not seem to move.  Again, there were always dissenters but it was not until the early Renaissance that Copernicus developed a mathematical model that positioned the sun as the center of the solar system.  His work was published posthumously in 1543.  In 1632, Galileo published observational evidence of heliocentricity which gradually became the accepted if only partial truth.  Galileo's model was a paragon of the scientific method.  It turned out to be incomplete but was a crucial step in the direction of truth.

            Galileo's evidence notwithstanding, the church clung to geocentricity because of three Old Testament verses which said the earth is "firm and secure" and "cannot be moved."  In their context, these lines are unimportant.  Their authors were merely stating a "fact" that seemed obvious to them.  The Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine, was himself a brilliant polymath but he did not understand the relevance of the new evidence and he feared the consequences of abandoning so entrenched an idea as geocentricity.  He supported his position with an ingenious and persuasive metaphysical argument about the artificial nature of mathematics that turned out to be irrelevant to the question at hand.

            The spirit of Bellarmine must have been troubled when, in the late 1920's, astronomers developed evidence that the universe had been expanding for about 14.2 billion years and that it had begun from a single point of origin.  Later this became known as the Big Bang Theory.  It was a revolutionary intellectual concept and many scientists sought flaws in it and alternatives to it.  Quickly, some came to focus on what was called the Steady State Theory, the idea that the universe remains always and everywhere essentially the same.  But in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs discovered incontrovertible proof that the Big Bang had indeed occurred.  Most scientists, including Albert Einstein, had long since abandoned Steady State for theoretical reasons but the new discoveries were empirical evidence which rendered Steady State untenable.  Except to Sir Fred Hoyle, a handful of his acolytes and a stubborn coterie of religious zealots who continued to promote the Steady State Theory.

            Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a genius, a distinguished British astronomer and a dedicated scientific gadfly.  He made many important contributions but rejected the Big Bang Theory because it seemed to require an impossible number of improbable coincidences.  He argued that the evolution of the universe and of life had been "guided" by a force that resembled Adam Smith's invisible hand.  He famously wrote that "…a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology."  Although a self-proclaimed atheist, his views are still frequently cited as support for the intelligent design theory.  Hoyle was wrong about the Big Bang.  He was similarly wrong in believing that Archaeopterix, the fossil intermediate between the dinosaurs and modern birds, is a man-made fake.  And he was wrong in thinking that oil and gas do not derive from the decayed remains of living creatures.  In some ways, his career paralleled that of Linus Pauling, the double Nobel laureate whose stubborn advocacy of massive doses of Vitamin C as a cure-all bordered on medical quackery.

            Neither Hoyle nor Pauling was crazy or ill-intentioned.  Some of their theories were highly improbable but not impossible.  At a minimum, the credibility they derived from the main body of their work forced other scientists to be more rigorous and therefore to produce more reliable science.  Error – honest error – serves the vital function of keeping the discussion alive and avoiding the ascendency of dogma.  It has a limited life span but often lingers beyond its usefulness.

            In the remarkable thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us, "For now we see through a glass, darkly;  but then face to face.  Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known."  He is attempting to describe the difference between heaven and earth but he is also making the case that all knowledge on earth is elusive and can never be perfect.  It is not so far from the modern physicists who teach the Uncertainty Principle or the mathematicians who need to develop tools like non-Euclidian Geometry and Fuzzy Logic to describe their phenomena.  Certainly there is no such thing as an alternative fact and no moral standing for those who practice tangled webs in order to deceive.  But it is the duty of the reader and the listener to decide what is deception and what is not and when error crosses the line and becomes untenable.  On one side of that line is the great value of testing truth as stringently as possible which is the same thing as the implacable search for error.  Error is inevitable and uncovering it is close to the heart of the scientific method.