Fact, faith, and purpose

It is at this point that we touch the central core of our culture, which is an ideal of knowledge of what are called “the facts,” a knowledge that is supposed t be quite independent of the personal commitment of the knower. “Fact,” says Alasdair MacIntyre, “is in modern western culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry.” The aristocrat involved was Lord Bacon, who advised his contemporaries to abjure speculation and collect facts. By speculation, ha was referring to the Aristotelian belief that things are to be understood in terms of their end or purpose. This he rejected. But what resulted from his call was not the activity of a lot of magpies collecting any odds and ends lying about with no rhyme or reason. It was shaped – as any rational activity has to be shaped – by another speculative framework, namely, the belief that things are to be understood in terms of their causes. The “facts” thus understood are “value-free” insofar as the idea of value is related to an end or purpose for which the thing in question is or is not well fitted. Here is the origin of what MacIntyre calls the folk-concept of “fact” that dominates the consciousness of modern Western man. There is in this view a world of facts that is the real world, an austere world in which human hopes, desires, and purposes have no place. The facts are facts, and they are value-free. The personal beliefs and value judgments of the student do not enter into the picture. They have their place in another realm of discourse, in that area where the personal opinions, tastes, and convictions of individuals are freely exercised in a pluralistic society. There is no need for the writer of the science textbook to use the formula “I believe,” because the facts are simply there whether one believes them or not. Science thus relieves one of the responsibility of deciding whether or not to commit himself to the truth of its statements. They are just facts.

And yet this folk-concept of a world of facts is denied by the actual practice of science. At the frontier of research, scientist do have to make difficult decisions whether or not to commit themselves to a new line of enquiry. They have to decide which problems are worth investigating and which are not. They have to make value judgments in the light of a vision of the purpose of scientific activity. The decision may make or break the scientist's career. And the scientist is sustained in his intense mental struggle by a passionate concern to solve the problem he has decided to tackle. His enterprise is not value-free: it is impregnated through and through by commitment to a purpose. And, to return to the school texbooks, even the humblest student beginning the study of physics engages in a purposeful activity. The facts described in the textbook do not simply imprint themselves on his mind. They have to be understood through an arduous enterprise of learning the appropriate skill in the use of words, of ideas and of apparati. And this only happens if there is a preliminary act of faith – faith that the enterprise is worthwhile, that the methods developed by previous scientist are trustworthy, and that the teacher is competent exponent of them.

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, 76-77.