key: cord-0060034-w9yli9eb
authors: Hastings, Thomas John; Sæther, Knut-Willy
title: A Fallibilist Approach in the Age of COVID-19 and Climate Change
date: 2020-11-06
journal: The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_1
sha: c75dbc1bd3dc4bc1a5667f184a30e0f811597eb7
doc_id: 60034
cord_uid: w9yli9eb

Against the global backdrop of the current pandemic and imminent reckoning on climate change, editors Thomas John Hastings and Knut-Willy Sæther call for a fallibilistic approach to academic inquiry in the sciences and the humanities. They show how fallibilism, as an epistemological approach that supports humility and positive actions, has family resemblances to John Polkinghorne’s “critical realism” and Andreas Losch’s “constructive critical realism.” To illustrate the consequences of a failure to acknowledge the limits of our knowledge and to act on those limits, they report on the case of a certain doctor and a certain president who have responded in radically different ways to the COVID-19 crisis.

Though this collection was written before we were aware of the existence of COVID-19, it appears in the midst of a global pandemic that has laid bare severe inequalities and weaknesses in the medical, economic, and political systems that have been considered foundational or even sacrosanct in modern societies. The pandemic also has imposed unique challenges on the more intimate institutions of family, school, religious community, and nonprofit organization. If modern life is an equation with several variables, which under "normal" circumstances seem manageable even if not always solvable, this global pandemic has introduced many new and, as yet, unsolvable variables to that equation. In the interim, the pandemic has demanded crisis management, and, in the longer run, made the entire human family dependent on a deliverance to come in some uncertain eschaton-that is, when effective treatments and vaccines are discovered, manufactured, and available to be safely and justly distributed worldwide. Engendering apocalyptic levels of anxiety and uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic has led many into a time of lament, doubt, and yearning. In such a troubled moment, when the modern systems and institutions we have taken for granted have been stretched to the breaking point, the perspective of fallibilism and its attendant intellectual and moral dispositions may be worthy of consideration.

For the sake of clarification, our volume is not an exhaustive examination of fallibilism as an epistemological position, but it does explore how a fallibilist orientation to truth claims might help to fund more spacious approaches in philosophy, theology, and religion in our increasingly pluralistic world and, hence, the title, The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion.

Another important caveat: Fallibilism is not another name for relativism. Fallibilism neither eschews quests for truth nor claims that "all truths are equal." Having said that, we should acknowledge that fallibilism has been marshaled to cast doubt on scientific findings, such as the links between tobacco use and cancer or between certain human behaviors and climate change. In our view, such approaches make the mistake of equating fallibilism with relativism and are often a smoke screen for commercial, political, or ideological motivations.

Instead, while acknowledging that we mere mortals will never be in possession of absolute truth, fallibilism supports searches for "verisimilitude" in both the sciences and the humanities. "Verisimilitude" means approaching the truth, reality, or actual in discrete fields of inquiry while admitting that we will never totally grasp the whole truth. 1 We take the term "verisimilitude" from John Polkinghorne who argues for a "critical realism" in science and theology that is very similar to the fallibilist position advocated here. Within the context of the science-religion dialogue, Polkinghorne emphasizes that our approach to knowledge is always via "verisimilitudes," not absolute truths. Broadly speaking, Polkinghorne searches for a trajectory by means of a kind of naïve realism and constructivism, or a via media between absolutism and relativism. We are aware, of course, that critical realism covers a wide range of nuanced differences. 2 Thus, it may be more appropriate to speak of a variety of "critical realisms" specific to the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities such as theology. Variations such as absolutism, relativism, foundationalism, and constructivism are also present in epistemological approaches. 3 We will not examine these important differences here, but just gesture at a possible relation between fallibilism and some basic aspects of critical realism as an epistemological position.

According to Polkinghorne, the motivation for claiming critical realism is that "our minds are so constituted, and we live in a world itself so constituted, that intellectual daring in the pursuit of a strategy of cautious circularity proves capable of yielding reliable knowledge." 4 In short, critical realism involves an ontological claim as well as an epistemological one. The ontological claim says that science actually tells us how the physical world is, albeit never finally and exhaustively. The epistemological claim emphasizes that our way of insight is always subtle and complex. In other words, critical realism is situated between naïve realism and constructivism which, according to Polkinghorne, are nothing less than self-supporting houses of cards. 5 Polkinghorne concedes: "Of course, … knowledge is to a degree partial and corrigible. Our attainment is verisimilitude, not 4 absolute truth. Our method is the creative interpretation of experience, not rigorous deduction from it. Thus, I am a critical realist." 6 We see Polkinghorne's approach as a useful first step that needs further problematization and development. One reason for this is that Polkinghorne seems to rely too heavily on the natural sciences in his epistemology, even though he claims that critical realism supports a multifaceted approach to reality. We are seeking a stronger interdisciplinary consciousness and a more careful navigation that includes the humanities (including religious studies, theology, and philosophy), as well as other fields. One interesting trajectory for doing this is Andreas Losch's "constructive-critical realism." 7 According to Losch, the "constructive" modifier emphasizes that there are different rationalities in play in our search for knowledge about reality, "the rationalities of natural, social, human science and of course theology are different ones." 8 Losch's point is that a verisimilitude-based search for knowledge is interwoven with nuanced cultural and social constructs and conditions, as well as ethical decisions. Constructive-critical realism enforces "the consciousness of diversity on an epistemological level, realizing that if we extend epistemology to human sciences, the recognition of its ethical implications cannot be avoided." 9 Thus, a constructive-critical realism is closely related to fallibilism in its verisimilitude-based approach to knowledge, openness for correction, and its ethical implications.

In our attempt to understand the world, constructive-critical realism opens up an awareness of the need for cautious navigation across different academic fields. By emphasizing the moral and ethical dimensions in the search for knowledge, it gestures at something really urgent in our current multicultural context. Here ethical judgments are brought to the center, and this move exposes deep lacunae in our current multicultural context. 6 Further, we see constructive-critical realism as a self-critical approach that stresses fallibilism in our search for knowledge.

By touching on religion, science, philosophy, and theology, this book embraces an interdisciplinary approach. In the past two decades, academics have often invoked "interdisciplinary," sometimes to legitimize a particular approach or research agenda and sometimes with political or ideological motivations. Joe Moran says that "'Interdisciplinarity' has become a buzzword across many different academic subjects in recent years." 10 In this time of interdisciplinary studies, we find phrases like dialogue, interaction, and mutual enrichment claiming that our particular academic field has to be understood as open and not isolated from other academic fields.

This book embraces interdisciplinarity, both to give voice to different academic traditions, represented by scholars in philosophy, theology, and religious studies, and as an interdisciplinary consciousness embraced by our authors. However, when we approach a specific topic-in this case fallibilism-as individual scholars, we do so on the basis of our own scholarly fields. Hence, an "interdisciplinarity approach" is inevitably colored by our particular points of departure.

To return again to the pandemic, COVID-19 has exposed the provisional nature of our current knowledge and skill, but it has also strengthened the blessed truth that some knowledge claims are more reliable than others. As we write, medical scientists have not yet found a treatment or vaccine, yet in their social-distancing prescriptions and painstaking, methodical research, they have proven themselves far more trustworthy guides than certain public figures who have reacted to the pandemic out of political survival instincts. As a glaring but not unique example, while the pandemic crisis was playing out in the United States, an infectious disease doctor proved a far more reliable guide than certain politicians.

As one example, the stark contrast between the public performances of the doctor and the president in the daily COVID Task Force briefings illustrated perfectly the binary of fallibilism and its opposite, infallibilism. In response to questions, the confident yet humble doctor readily admitted when he did not have an answer. He was honest, showing compassion while advising continuation of preventative measures. By contrast, the insecure president waffled again and again, saying that he agreed with the doctor's advice while boasting about his own "perfect" response to the pandemic, refusing to take responsibility, suggesting lethal remedies, pushing the economy to reopen, and blaming his predecessors, the news media, and state governors. The doctor's attention was fixed on finding a treatment and a vaccine, while the president's attention was fixed on his reelection campaign. So there was the doctor, humbly admitting his fallibility as a scientist, and there was the president, adamantly refusing to admit making a single mistake.

Since his supporters included significant majorities of religiously conservative groups who still push back on evolution, 11 it seemed obvious that the president's equivocations on the medical science were a political calculation, not an ideological conviction. With all of the marks of tragicomedy and theater of the absurd, the life and death consequences of these contradictory approaches to the global pandemic were too grave to ignore. And, especially in the United States, an even more important debate that will be with us long after this president is gone is the stalemate about the truth or falsity of the anthropogenesis of climate change. This is another life and death issue where religious conservatives often question the overwhelming scientific consensus. 12 Taking a step back from these conflicting approaches to the pandemic and climate change, on a deeper level, it is clear that certain modern societies like the United States are still learning how to harmonize ancient religious traditions with the much more recent advent of modern science. While much nuanced academic work has been done on the dialogue between religion (or theology) and science, it is clear that public discourse has not kept pace with these discussions. In the media business, drama and narrative conflict increases the number of viewing customers, thus the U.S. news and entertainment business have tended to feature portrayals of religious and ideological fundamentalists, on the one hand, and scientific positivists, on the other hand, who deal with reality in terms of knockdown, "either-or" arguments. These binary public approaches to religion and science have contributed to the increasingly acrimonious discourses of cable news and the social media niche.

Against the background of the culture wars, for those who want to take the contributions of both science and religion seriously, epistemic fallibilism offers a moderating stance that neither claims too much or too little for either endeavor nor forces a decision for one side over and against the other. Of course, the criteria for what counts as "truth" or "error" within religious and scientific communities differ, but to maintain a dynamic position, innovators in both fields have exhibited a willingness to exercise imagination by remaining open to new insights while acknowledging the provisional nature of current understanding.

By claiming that no belief or theory may ever be considered final, epistemic fallibilism also avoids the relativist-absolutist polarity. This approach suggests instead a family resemblance between patterns or modes of knowing in religion and science. To wit, theologians and philosophers have long reflected on the differentiated relationship between what may be called "first-order" experience and "second-order" reflection, and work in cognitive science on the theory of mind suggests, in an analogous way, that we cannot neatly separate "perception" from "cognition" in our immediate experience of and subsequent reflection on objects in the world, other people, or ultimacy.

As for the world's great religious traditions, the fact of their historical development, cultural embeddedness, translatability, and endurance is evidence that embodied experiences of wonder continue to create in some people feelings of awe, being a part of a larger whole, a sense of limitedness in a seemingly limitless cosmos, or other indications of ultimate meaning, purpose, intelligibility, or transcendence. The "truth" or "falsity" of claims of such experiences are adjudicated by means of particular religious traditions, wherein such experiences have, over time, been tested and transmitted across generations and locations via practices, rituals, and teachings, and guided and interpreted within particular historical contexts and sociocultural milieux.

As for the much shorter history of the sciences, their astoundingly rapid development evinces a similar pattern of knowing, wherein embodied experiences of wonder and intellectual awe vis-à-vis the natural world have given birth, over time, to established bodies of field-specific theories, which, based on the standard of experimental reproducibility-in the natural sciences-and phenomenological stability, variability, and generalizability-in the social sciences-adjudicates the relative "truth" or "falsity" of any new hypothesis, experiment, or theoretical proposal. As an example of "progress" in science, while Newton may be surprised to know that his description of gravity as a force could not account for all phenomena, he would surely thank Einstein for being sufficiently bold and imaginative to pose new questions and follow the evidence for the uneven distribution of mass and for proposing the curvature of spacetime as a corrective to Newton's law. And yet, in spite of the massive breakthroughs of Newton, Einstein, and many others, physics today is still seeking a "Theory of Everything."

In modernity, there has been a tendency to see religion as treating private or subjective realities and science as treating public or objective realities. Yet, the presence of dynamism, adaptability, self-correction, and transformation in both epistemic realms points to the pivotal role of curious and fallible human knowers. This suggests that religious beliefs and scientific theories are never, in a final sense, universal, but are forever in need of new light. While evidence for the dynamics of change and development in religious knowledge may not be as easy to trace and theorize as, say, physical evidence for natural selection, the long perdurance of certain religious traditions over time and across cultural boundaries suggests new religious insights or spiritual information. For scientists and religionists, epistemic fallibilism may offer one way of restoring humility to public discourse on vital issues that are impacting all peoples, that is, global warming, nuclear proliferation, economic inequality, artificial intelligence, and so on.

So we return to our title, The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, but of what might this grace consist? Given our ability to acknowledge-at least in part-the limitations of our embodied perceptions and reflections, we could argue that the grace for being fallible is an endowment of nature. Yet, as all religious traditions point out, in the course of our lives we are tempted over and over again to make faulty judgments about ourselves and other people, deciding, for example, that we are good or right while others are evil or wrong. Thus, while natural selection has gifted us with some awareness of our epistemic limitations, we obscure and sometimes obliterate this "innate" grace by thinking, speaking, and acting as if we personally or our particular group of belonging possesses special, better, or even unlimited knowledge. In Bonhoeffer's terms, humans sometimes display a tendency to "become like God, but against God." Thus, we find ourselves in need of grace beyond the shared endowment of nature, grace in a radically different register, or what Christian theologians call gratia extra nos.

To reiterate, the present volume is not a comprehensive exploration of fallibilism per se nor does it provide an exhaustive fallibilist perspective for philosophers, theologians, or scholars of religion. It is rather an interdisciplinary and international exploration of how a fallibilist disposition may be helpful within and across several fields and cultural locations. Each chapter could stand alone, but there are connections, which we will leave readers to construct out of their own locations. The ordering of our chapters reflects an ad hoc trajectory from philosophy to theology and religion.

Situating fallibilism's roots with C. S. Peirce in the philosophy of science, co-editor Knut-Willy Saether in Chap. 2 traces the move from logical positivism to Karl Popper and subsequent thinkers, and to the current picture of fallibilism in certain sciences. Drawing again on Peirce, he continues by mapping the broader philosophical picture and contrasts fallibilism with skepticism. He then explores three areas in theology-dogmatism, the nature of faith, and virtue-and shows how fallibilism sheds light on these subjects. He concludes by considering some of fallibilism's implications for ontology.

Jonas Gamborg Lillebø in Chap. 3 takes a philosophical look at the reception of fallibilist ideas and suggests a move from epistemology to the history of thought via the philosophy of science. He touches on differences between "contexts of justification" and "contexts of discovery" and says that fallibilism opens up new possibilities beyond these traditional contexts. With reference to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, he asserts that "problematization" is Foucault's way of moving beyond traditional epistemology by bringing in the "history of thought" as the focus of philosophical reflection.

Amos Yong in Chap. 4 makes a connection between fallibilist "philosophical" views of the partial, perspectival, and finite character of knowledge and a theological perspective grounded in a strong pneumatology. Rather than engendering absolute certainty, Yong argues that the Spirit sponsors an embodied moral certainty that guides faithful discipleship, which is content to live with finitude that awaits future light.

Chapter 5 by Lisa Dahill deals with historical, political, and religious developments around conceptions of mission and European conquest. Dahill shows how the lack of a fallibilist stance and disposition underwrote extreme and erroneous convictions about cultural hegemony. She critiques a specific historical development of the horrific "Doctrine of Discovery" and the cognate category of terra nullius, by means of which European political and religious forces devastated the indigenous peoples of North and South America and beyond. As a way out of the fallacies of Euro-Christian domination, she proposes three positive guidelines for action.

Rejecting conservative and liberal apologetics for Christian faith and biblical interpretation as reductionistic, Drew Collins in Chap. 6 draws on the work of Hans Frei and others who stress the provisional "fallible" character of Christian theology and the need for a figural reading of Scripture that takes the texts very seriously in their narrative shape and approaches apologetics in an ad hoc fashion. Collins is pushing for a way of reading Scripture and doing theology that transcends rationalist and experiential epistemologies.

In conversation with Karl Barth and Scripture, Paul Louis Metzger in Chap. 7 outlines a fallibilist approach to theology and Christian life characterized by humble faith, earnest hope, and resilient love. These dispositions are, in turn, founded on the Reformed conviction that God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ is sufficient, albeit not exhaustive, and therefore should lead not "to arrogance or ambivalence, but to awe and wonder." Taking Barth's view that Christ himself is the unity of the churches, Metzger offers some positive ecumenical connections for our time.

Speaking as an Asian Christian theologian, Seung Chul Kim in Chap. 8 proposes a "pluralistic pluralism" as a corrective to a western-centric bias in interreligious dialogue and notions of religious pluralism, which Kim sees as presupposing "the all-embracing One." Kim's point is that Asian Christians embody various religious traditions as an "inner other," meaning that religious pluralism for them is not just a new social reality but an existential reality. Kim draws on J. R. Hustwit's "fallibilist hermeneutics" as a way of deconstructing the western-centric bias and making room for a more egalitarian basis for interreligious dialogue.

Drawing on the contributions of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls, coeditor Thomas John Hastings in Chap. 9 argues that the relatively new awareness of Christianity as a translated religion and its demographic and cultural expansion should have by now subverted the enduring pretentions of western-centric theological normativity and given way to a more fallibilist disposition that encourages two-way traffic between Christians from different cultures and church traditions. Drawing on Karl Barth's apologia for a variety of faith perspectives within a "polycentric

he suggests that these new insights are consonant with fallibilism, emergence, and eschatology. Finally, he offers a reevaluation of the pro me and pro nobis dimensions of Christian faith as a way of fostering serious intercultural theological engagements in the future

Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge

Critical Realism and Other Realisms

Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate

Interdisciplinarity. Abingdon: Routledge

Belief in God in an Age of Science

Rationality in Play? A Philosophical Journey in the Current Landscape of Facts and Truth