Beyond the Quest for Certainty.

In 1929 the great American philosopher John Dewey published a book called The Quest for Certainty. It was one of his greatest works, but he was a thinker so out of step with prevailing ideas that few people could even understand his message--much less accept it.

Dewey concluded that most of the problems of society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stemmed from the colossal failure of philosophy. He claimed that philosophers had forsaken their responsibility to explain the findings of science as they came to light, and to provide leadership in the continuous forging of a world view compatible with those findings--that they had, instead, lost themselves in the "quest for certainty." The result was that much of the intellectual progress of the Enlightenment era stagnated and even regressed with the reemergence of a belief system that, once again, divided the world in two.

Dewey showed how Emmanuel Kant's "second Copernican revolution" adversely affected the cultural progress sparked by the first one. Thanks to the work of Copernicus and others, the empirical approach to knowing had begun to replace the old axiom-based, deductive science of the Scholastics. However, Kant's transcendentalism reversed that trend. In an effort to reinstate the concept of an isolated domain of immutable substance discoverable by science, Kant produced a model that effectively separated the knowing mind --and the "phenomena" accessible to that mind--from what he considered to be the essentially unpredictable, unconditioned domain of moral choice and action. He succeeded in reviving the older "mind-matter" dualism of Descartes, in updated form. Cartesian dualism had, in its turn, breathed new life into that which had been so long-entrenched in Western culture by the enduring theories of Plato and Aristotle. David Hume's monism--and, with it, his insight about the inevitably uncertain nature of human beliefs--was buried for at least another two centuries in the wholesale rush instigated by Kant to resume the age-old "quest for certainty."

According to Dewey, a major reason why Kant's explanations were so universally welcomed and have dominated our culture for so long was that they provided a means of reconciling religion and science. These explanations made it possible to view science and supernaturally based religion as mutually compatible. They glorified and rendered absolute the "knowing mind"--with its supposedly innate categories of logical thought for analyzing and classifying the "mechanistic" physical surroundings. Kant's explanations also succeeded in isolating that mind and its reasoning capacity from the presumed mystery characterizing the other defining aspect of human beings: their nature as autonomous "agents of morality" within a supersensual and indeterminate "realm of change." Altogether, Kant provided a world view within which science was itself a quest for certainty --but a quest appropriate only for "the inherently rational and immutable domain of material substance." As for that realm of change for which the methods of science are not applicable, humans were advised to rely on faith in metaphysical explanations, with their promise of escape from uncertainty through the soul's ultimate connection to a realm of perfect being.

All the major nineteenth-century versions of rationalistic realism and romantic idealism--including an American transcendentalism popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson--built upon Kant's ideas. But then along came Charles Darwin, with his theory of natural selection, and this threatened to upset the applecart. Unless, that is, evolution could be restricted to what had been neatly categorized as the material domain which, alone, was considered open to logical analysis and thus discoverable through scientific research.

For well over a century we have witnessed a battle, virtually to the death, to fence off psychological, anthropological, and sociological studies from that remarkable ordering paradigm now providing the very foundation for our understanding of all living things. This war has been fought not only by theologians but by many established academics in the humanities and so-called hard sciences. If it could be shown that evolution has no implications whatsoever for the spiritual and practical realms--that is, for human emotions, values, ideals, and actions--then the long-established reconciliation of religion and science in our culture need not be endangered.

One result of this kind of thinking was that John Dewey's naturalistic Pragmatism--and with it, the entire world view of evolutionary naturalism or monism--was buried throughout most of the twentieth century by yet another resurgence of philosophical dualism. Virtually all of the New Age "modernisms" and "postmodernisms" of past decades have amounted to nothing more than increasingly tortured manifestations of the struggle within academia and established religion to make dualism intellectually legitimate in an age of science. The stakes are high. They are nothing less than the issue of whether or not humankind can move beyond the age-old quest for certainty.

We need only recall the fury with which the work of Edward 0. Wilson and Richard Dawkins has been received, even by many fellow biologists. These two scientists are daring to depart from the mainstream by documenting and explaining the interaction between the biological and psycho-socio-cultural. If the evolutionary aspects of Jean Piaget's theories on genetic and psychological development and cultural change had been fully comprehended, he would have been similarly reviled.

Another example of the widespread refusal to accept humans simply as a part of nature is the hostile response to B. F. Skinner by the communities of science and formal education. Skinner was heretical enough to attempt to spell out the precise process by which natural selection could be seen to operate at the psychological and sociological levels of interaction. He accomplished this by showing how the positive reinforcement of responses by the social environment serves to select and perpetuate certain behaviors, values, and ideas within the acting individual and group; while those not so reinforced tend to disappear over time. He concluded that operant conditioning therefore operates as a key vehicle of individual learning and cultural evolution in a process similar to that of natural selection at the biological level.

Humanists should be aware of the extent and ferocity of this current battle over the issue of whether or not Darwinian evolution has implications for the study of human behavior. And we need to recognize that the enemy comprises not merely the creationists and intelligent design theorists but cultural dualism in all its forms. We need to face up to the fact that most of us have trouble shedding our (too often unacknowledged) dualistic assumptions.

Consider the endurance of dualism among recognized scientists, in the face of rapidly accumulating evidence to the contrary. We should be aware that it isn't confined merely to those biologists who tout the Gala hypothesis and the notion of cosmic consciousness. There are also numerous physicists and astronomers--such as Stephen Hawking--who seek an encounter with "the face of God" as the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry.

I even noted with considerable surprise the ambiguous concluding paragraph in an otherwise excellent new book on evolution, Darwin's Ghost, by the British geneticist Steve Jones. Here we find the sentence, "The birth of Adam, whether real or metaphorical, marked the insertion into the animal body of a post-biological soul that leaves no fossils and needs no genes" (emphasis added). The problem with the kind of closet dualism that Jones was either revealing or catering to here is that recent breakthroughs in genetics, evolutionary science, cognitive psychology, and neurology directly contradict this model. In fact, they are calling into question all such attempts at drawing lines in the shifting sand between the activities of self-conscious human primates and other forms of organic life. Imagine the cognitive crippling required for otherwise intelligent people to juggle such logical incompatibilities. No wonder we are producing so many mystics who throw all criteria for truth claims to the winds, while crying blithely, "All, all is mystery. We must learn to live with contradiction--to intuitively `know' the unknowable!" And so many academics who assure their students that science is valid only in the "material" domain, and we must never, ever, mix our domains!

Do we really want to live like this, in an imaginary world of two isolated realms of being with an unbridgeable chasm in between? It appears that modern dualists do indeed feel that it is worth the stress of balancing increasingly conflicting sets of explanations, as they move from school or lab to ordinary life. They recognize that dualism--and only dualism--makes transcendentally based religion possible for thinking people. But they forget the other side of this dubious coin. A dualistic world view also makes any hope for an authentic social science impossible. And it's becoming increasingly clear that it is precisely where the physical and the social-psychological studies overlap that we most need dependable knowledge: knowledge obtainable by no other means than disciplined empirical inquiry. Only the scientific approach applied to all levels of existence--and the facts structured by means of it--can ensure relatively sound conjectures concerning future consequences of current choices. And only such capacity to predict can allow us to judge the degree to which the outcomes flowing from human choices are likely to be either universally fulfilling and desirable or universally destructive over the long term.

If we can agree that one of the greatest threats to the survival of life is our culture's enduring dualism and the quest for certainty encouraged by it, the issue then becomes: what can we do about it? Or is it the case, as some are now claiming, that the emotional need for the illusion of absolute truth--and an absolute good beyond any origin or test in human experience--is so deeply embedded within the human psyche that we couldn't shed it even if we wanted to?

I agree that humans are all involved, at some level of awareness, in a search for the truest possible explanations of the way things are. But this need not translate into a quest for certainty. And it's obvious that people who think about things at all cannot function in a world devoid of meaning. We tend to be satisfied only if a particular truth claim or value makes sense in terms of what we already believe--that is, if it fits into our current "meaning frame." But that need not imply a meaning frame that is immune to incoming evidence. Granted, we all have to explain our own brief voyage through life and the moral goals which guide that voyage in a way that brings us emotional and intellectual satisfaction. But what provides such satisfaction is determined largely by our early socialization rather than the immutable nature of things. And the problem is that, from infancy on, most of us have been taught to accept without question those unchallengeable explanations about the essence of humanity which happen to operate as the dominant sources of meaning in our culture.

Why is there so much resistance to acknowledging the impossibility of certainty where truth about "the real" and "the good" is concerned? Part of the answer may indeed lie in our genes. Survival, for our primitive ancestors, may well have been furthered by a propensity to explain their experience in terms that would provide a sense of security and the emotional comfort and satisfaction flowing from it. Some theorists have even gone so far as to postulate that this means humans are hard-wired for religion.

I suspect, rather, that what is referred to as religion here is our deeply embedded drive for emotional and intellectual security, manifested in a quest for certainty where explanations are concerned. In the magical conceptual world of our early forebears, this innate need for security would have been satisfied only by some kind of assurance that they, as individuals, had a specially designated cosmic purpose and moral value. Because they sensed themselves to be creatures of will and purpose, the only way they could explain the workings of the universe was by projecting a similar will and purpose into it. Once they did this, humans became convinced that it had been the other way around--that it was their gods who had, instead, created them. And those gods had provided Revelation, for those with the will to grasp it, as the timeless source of truth concerning the "good" and "true." Thus, the religions invented by needy humans served to provide continuing reassurance of their God-given cosmic role. And it was this role, they believed, that marked them off from other forms of life as uniquely worthy, thereby giving human lives a special meaning and eternal existence not shared by other animals or inanimate objects.

It is possible that only explanations of this nature could have assuaged the fear of death encountered by humans once imagination and memory and self-consciousness had evolved, and connections could be made between the deaths of other living beings and their own inevitable fates. Our primitive ancestors lived in a world fraught with unknown dangers, with little control over external circumstance and little awareness of cause and effect to guide them. It is easy to understand how they might have longed for the security of magical parental beings housed in the bodies of key predators or prey, or in the towering rocks above their caves, or in the "heavens" from which issued the thunder and lightning that signified the power of the Almighty.

We can think of such traditional cultural myths as "conceptual caves" into which people could retreat for safety from the seemingly arbitrary events of daily life. It's possible that those who held fast to such truths--and to their own important role in the nature of things on which these truths were predicated--would have acted with greater confidence and been more willing to assume the risks associated with hunting and fighting off marauding neighbors than were those who cowered within their literal caves overcome by the insecurity and fear that their situation probably warranted.

And, of course, the rituals devised to celebrate those religious beliefs would have served, in turn, to reinforce them. So the true believers might well have survived in greater numbers to produce progeny with similar propensities and acquired habits and to affect the subsequent beliefs and social behaviors of the clan or tribe as a whole. We can only guess whether the evolution of this successfully adaptive behavioral pattern within the group was primarily genetic in nature or modeled and imitated anew within each generation and reinforced by prevailing environmental challenges, sociocultural as well as physical. It doesn't really matter because, in fact, what the process of natural selection is all about is this feedback causal interaction between environmental contingenci