Science and Religion: Nature of the conflict (VI)

Knowledge and Conviction
The reader who may be reflecting on these things for the first time might well have an immediate reaction of the following sort: “If knowledge really is relative, as you say, then where does the sense of certitude which I possess come from?” The fact is that we do have seemingly deep-seated “feelings” of certitude about many things. In particular, the sense of our own existence or self-identity, and the sense of the objective reality of the physical world are two feelings which seem to be quite universal. Yet, the mentally ill frequently lose their sense of identity and existence. Even normal people have moments in which they have a sense of “unreality” about things. After all, we really could be dreaming and the world may be a monstrous illusion. The belief in the unreality of our existence or of the physical world is unscientific since scientific inquiry has led us to feel that the assumption of the reality of these things is considerably more acceptable than the contrary. Yet, if we are honest, we cannot rule out the possibility of having to revise our assessment in the future. How far it is from our everyday common-sense experience of matter (from which our sense of physical reality is largely derived) to the rational and scientific view of matter as energy, protons, electrons, etc.!

Thus, the “feeling” of certitude which we have is a psychological state. Our convictions may not really be as deep as we perceive them to be, and we may lose them in the future even though such a thing be inconceivable to us at the present moment. The feeling of certitude is not equivalent to knowledge, for knowledge is the process we have described in some detail above, but a sense of certitude can be had even when there is no knowledge.

I think that we can say something like the following concerning the relationship between knowledge and conviction: If our intellect accepts a concept as true, then our emotions begin to organize themselves around the idea, focusing on it, and “depending” on it. When this happens, the concept ceases to be a mere intellectual hypothesis or assumption. It becomes part of the way we live and expect things to behave.

Of course, an intellectual concept may be new or it may be an explication of a principle previously assumed on an unconscious level. Thus, there may already be considerable emotional orientation around a principle before we are able to make the principle explicit even to ourselves. Progress in knowledge frequently occurs when unconsciously assumed hypotheses are made explicit.

For example, from infancy our experience of the world leads us to expect unsupported objects to fall. This common expectation which we make in a more or less unconscious way can be explicitly formulated in the theory of gravitation. But the purely intellectual part of this theory does not express the emotional upset we would feel if suddenly it happened that an unsupported object did not fall. It would be only the most objective scientist who, observing an instance in which a dropped object did not fall to earth, could overcome his natural emotional reaction to the event and consider it merely as an intriguing counterexample to the present theory of gravitation.

There is nothing unscientific about this emotional and subjective dependence on our assumptions. Psychologists have shown this dependence to be so great that even a slight physical environmental change, such as being plunged into total darkness, can result in psychotic behavior in a short period of time. We are so constructed that dependence on our assumptions is an inextricable part of our makeup. Our freedom lies in being able, through independent inquiry, to obtain knowledge and thus modify our conceptions and ultimately our emotional orientation.

The very depth of this emotional attachment to our concepts serves as a pressure to force us to keep our concepts as close as possible to reality, because we are in for emotional shocks if our expectations are not fulfilled.

(All above are excerpts from an article “The Science of Religion” by Dr. William Hatcher which I liked very much so to share it here with you.)

(To be continued…)
"Science and Religion:Nature of the Conflict(VIII)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the Conflict(VII)"

"Science and Religion:Nature of the Conflict(V)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(IV)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(III)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(II)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(I)"
Ref.: The William Hatcher Library