Despite the title above, David Ray Griffin (who was an American professor of the philosophy of religion and theology) claimed that he wasn’t “disenchanted” with science, only with what he called “modern science”. However, it’s very difficult to understand his distinction. Moreover, Griffin’s case for his alternative of “postmodern science” is flimsy, hyperbolic and highly general.
[Readers can scroll forward to miss out the following long quote.]
“David Ray Griffin (1939 — 2022) was an American professor of philosophy of religion and theology and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. [ ] Griffin published numerous books about the September 11 attacks, claiming that elements of the Bush administration were involved. [ ]
“Griffin was born on August 8, 1939. [ ] he was an active participant in his Disciples of Christ church. [ ] [H]e became disenchanted with the conservative-fundamentalist theology [ ] Griffin [ ] argued that process theology also provided a sound basis for addressing contemporary social and ecological issues. [ ] He has attempted to develop postmodern proposals for overcoming the conflicts between religion and modern science. [ ]
“Griffin wrote two books dealing with parapsychology: Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration and James and Whitehead on Life After Death. [ ] Parapsychology, if genuine, provides dramatic evidence against the late modern worldview; however, Griffin points out, besides parapsychology, materialistic atheism, when consistent, also ‘rules out not only a (nonmaterial) mind but also those things often called ‘values,’ such as truth, beauty, and goodness’. [ ] His judgement was that people should move to a postmodern worldview that can consistently and coherently recognize the possibility of paranormal events [ ].
— See source here.
David Ray Griffin’s Disenchantment With Science
In the chapter ‘The Reenchantment of Science’, the philosopher of religion and theology, David Ray Griffin, offered his readers the following words of warning:
“If all human life is meaningless, then science, as one of its activities, must share in this meaninglessness. For some time, many held that science at least gives is the truth, even if a bleak one. Much recent thought, however, has concluded that science does not even give us that. The disenchantment is complete.”
That passage will be virtually meaningless to those readers who don’t understand Griffin’s highly-personal take on what meaninglessness is. So, as it stands, claiming that “human life is meaningless” (or that “human life is meaningful”) is a categorical statement that’s vague, emotive and general.
Of course, many people do want human life (as well as the universe) to have a meaning. Griffin himself tells us that
“the final disenchantment of modern science is its conclusion that its own discoveries prove the meaninglessness of the whole universe, which must include the scientists and their science”.
Griffin attempts to “prove” his grand claim by quoting the physicist Steven Weinberg saying that
“‘[t]he more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless’”.
Weinberg explained (in the book Dreams of a Final Theory) his earlier controversial statement in the following way:
“As we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles, they seem to have less and less to do with us.”
Weinberg also wrote the following:
“As long as we don’t know the fundamental rules, we can hope that we’ll find something like a concern for human beings, say, or some guiding divine plan built into the fundamental rules.”
Ironically, Weinberg referred to the time when the physicist and writer Paul Davies received a million-dollar prize for “advancing the public understanding of God and spirituality” from the John Templeton Foundation. [See my ‘Physicist Paul Davies’s Contributions to the Advancement of Religion, As Seen By Father Mariano Artigas Weinberg’.] Weinberg said:
“I was thinking of cabling [Paul] Davies and saying, ‘Do you know of any organization that is willing to offer a million-dollar prize for work showing that there is no divine plan?’”
To get back on track.
Science-with-a-capital-‘S’ (or Griffin’s “its”) doesn’t really conclude the things suggested by Griffin — least of all about the meaninglessness of human life. Science has no position on the meaninglessness (or meaningfulness) of human life. However, some individual scientists (qua theorists or philosophers) may well do so. Moreover, the idea that the meaninglessness/meaningfulness of human life can be proved or disproved is embarrassing.
If Griffin had stopped personifying science for one moment, then perhaps he’d have seen that science and scientists are not the straw targets he wanted them to be.
Yet Griffin was aware of the positions expressed in the last two paragraphs. He “respond[s] to a counterargument that is probably growing in the mind of many readers”. That counterargument is that
“it is not the job of the scientist qua scientist to deal with the true nature of time and matter in themselves and with the question whether the universe is meaningful”.
Griffin put the counterargument, and disagreed with it. One reason for doing so is the view that “an ‘inherently limited science’ does not work in practice” because science is “imperialistic”. And, instead of science’s imperialism, Griffin wanted a world in which there are knowledges in the plural, not only scientific knowledge. That is, he wanted his own philosophy to be a knowledge, along with God knows what else.
Apart from his own philosophy, Griffin cited the knowledges of “metaphysics, theology, or poetry”. He tackled “conscious extrasensory perception”, “conspicuous psychokinetic effects on specific objects”, and “precognition” too. Griffin explained why these areas have failed all scientific tests. He believed that this was so because they are “not under conscious control” and have therefore “attained little repeatability” in scientific settings. (Isn’t it the case that many of the adherents of these phenomena have claimed that they have passed scientific tests, it’s just that “materialist scientists” aren’t paying attention?)
The problem here is the word “knowledge”.
Most metaphysicians themselves would happily concede that they don’t offer knowledge, and the same is true of poets. Of course, Griffin redefined the word “knowledge” so that it did include metaphysics, theology and poetry, as well as extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, precognition, etc.
So why not astrology, astral travelling, pyramid power, the use of divining rods, crystals and angel cards, levitation, spoon-bending… ad infinitum too?
Griffin also believed that science leaves
“no role [ ] in the universe for purposes, values, ideals, possibilities, and qualities, and there is no freedom, creativity, temporality, or divinity”.
What’s more: “There are no norms, not even truth, and everything is ultimately meaningless.”
The first thing to say is that (as before) science-with-a-capital-‘S’ (or science as a whole) takes no position on most — or even all — of these subjects. Individual scientists may well do so, but not qua scientist.
In addition, Griffin artfully listed many subjects which are actually very different from each other. Thus, universal “purposes” is a very different subject than “temporality”, and “creativity” is very different from “truth”. Moreover, some scientists may take a Griffin-friendly position on, say, “creativity”, but not on “divinity”. Other scientists may take a Griffin-friendly position on “possibilities”, but not on “qualities”. Thus, the obviously hyperbolic and rhetorical nature of Griffin’s claims becomes all the more apparent.
David Ray Griffin on Truth
Griffin offered his own views via the medium of other people’s words and positions. Thus, when Griffin told us that, at one point (if not at all points) the truths of science were “bleak”, he was giving his political and religious game away. For Griffin, truth needed to be the opposite of bleak. It needed to feel good. It needed to advance political and social causes. And it needed to tune in to people’s spiritual yearnings. What truth shouldn’t be is bleak. Indeed, it doesn’t matter if (in a manner of speaking) truths are true —to Griffin it mattered how they feel, and what they could do to advance social and political causes.
Griffin also told us that “[f]or some time, many held that science at least gives us the truth”. Yet science-with-a-capital-’S’ got punched in the face for claiming truth. It did so by, well, various of Griffin’s own postmodernist philosophers. In that sense, then, science is damned if it does give us the truth, and it’s damned when it doesn’t give us the truth.
So here was Griffin putting two postmodernist positions in which scientific truth is bleak, and it doesn’t exist at all.
Science really cannot win…
Or, at the least, science cannot win until it allies itself to the philosophical and political values, causes and human feelings Griffin cherished.
Again, many of Griffin’s own postmodernist philosophers, deconstructionists, etc. carried out an onslaught against the notion not just of scientific truth, but truth itself. Indeed, in note 28, Griffin himself told us that “Paul Feyerabend is famously regarded as an ‘anarchist’ who denies that science is true”. Griffin rejected this interpretation. He continued by saying that Feyerabend
“merely offers his critique as a therapeutic attempt to subvert the notion that modern science is the only method yielding truth”.
This is an odd note from Griffin. He put the word “anarchist” in scare quotes, despite Feyerabend being a self-described “epistemological anarchist" (if not a political anarchist). In addition, the statement “denies that science is true” hardly makes sense anyway, except as a rhetorical poeticism. Science can neither be true nor false. Only the statements, theories, etc. of science can be true or false. Finally, many commentators have strongly argued that Feyerabend did have a deep problem with the notion of truth, as well as with the notion of objectivity. Feyerabend can easily be quoted on this score. So here goes:
“[T]heir craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity’, ‘truth’, it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”
Elsewhere, Feyerabend told us that “[t]ruth itself is a rhetorical term”.
As for Griffin’s reference to therapy, perhaps Feyerabend’s philosophy was therapeutic to some precisely because it denied truth.
David Ray Griffin on Determinism
It’s interesting that Griffin’s disenchantment with science is largely due to his disenchantment with what he calls “scientific determinism”. On that score, he’s at one with the many religious commentators who, historically, suffered from the same disenchantment.
Griffin found the kind of determinism he’s against all over the place. He finds it in Charles Darwin, Jacques Monad, B.F. Skinner, etc.
The words “scientific determinism” were used a moment ago. However, Griffin believed that science and determinism are — or were — inextricably linked together. As a consequence of that, Griffin believed that this creates immense problems for the special status of human beings in the grand scheme of things.
Firstly, Charles Darwin.
Griffin wrote:
“[J]ust as Darwin felt that any ‘caprice’ in the world would make science impossible, so that both divine and free human activity had to be eliminated from our worldview, so Michael Ghiselin, a contemporary Darwinian, says that to deny the ideal of predictive determinism by affirming teleological causation ‘is to opt out of science altogether’.”
If we read the word “caprice” in one way, then such a thing would make physics (if not science as a whole) “impossible”.
Some readers may wonder if Darwin himself believed that “divine and free human activity had to be eliminated from our worldview”. Perhaps, instead, this was Griffin drawing epic conclusions from Darwin’s use of the single world “caprice”. (In the note attached to this passage, Griffin cited a single book called Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation.)
Many readers may also wonder what “divine [ ] human activity” is.
As for Griffin’s account of Michael Ghiselin’s views: most readers will immediately spot an opposition between “predictive determinism” and “teleological causation”. On the surface, they may wonder why the old chestnut of teleological causation is being discussed at all…
Well, it’s discussed because Griffin believed that such a thing exists.
In any case, Griffin’s fusion of the words “predictive” and “determinism” seems a little suspect in that the latter word is so loaded and controversial. In most cases, scientists place a lot of emphasis on prediction without ever feeling the need to use the word “determinism”. However, Griffin might have simply argued that you can’t have prediction without determinism. Or, perhaps more correctly, he might have argued that you can’t have what he called “deterministic predictions” without, well, determinism…
So why did determinism concern Griffin so much?
As already stated, Griffin believed that predictive determinism impacted on… human subjects (such as Griffin himself). And that’s why he immediately cited another scientist he took to be a determinist: Clark L. Hull. Griffin wrote:
“‘So-called purposive behaviour,’ said behaviourist psychologist Clark Hull, is to be regarded as a secondary, epiphenomenal reality, derivative from ‘more elementary objective primary principles.’”
Then Griffin tackled the notorious example of B.F. Skinner. According to Griffin, Skinner
“argues that psychology must follow physics and biology in rejecting ‘personified causes,’ and that to be ‘natural’ is to be completely determined by one’s environment”.
What really concerned Griffin is expressed in Skinner’s later quoted words:
“‘A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exert over to the environment.’”
Skinner died in 1990. It can be said that Skinner’s heyday had come to an end by the late 1950s. Oddly enough, then, Griffin wrote about him as if he was still very influential. However, to be fair, Griffin does later write that “[w]hile Hull and Skinner come from a previous generation, and advanced a behaviorist psychology which is now widely rejected”.
All that said, Skinner’s views are still somewhat influential. Yet even his supporters believe that his focus on the environment is simplistic. Relevantly, one can take this critical view of Skinner and still not adopt the postmodern, “holist” and/or “spiritual” alternatives suggested by Griffin himself.
The thing is to argue that there isn’t (to misuse Ted Honderich’s words) “one determinism” — there are many determinisms (i.e., in the plural). That isn’t a reference to many different views on determinism: it’s a reference to the many different kinds of thing which determine.
This is when Griffin got to what he believed is at the heart of the matter. He believed that postmodern science transcends determinism.
Griffin made the provocative point that the belief in determinism is a “presupposition” of science and scientists. (He cited the particular case of Skinner again.) In fact, Griffin focused on Skinner precisely because he’s an extreme case who’s been criticised by other scientists for his own brand of determinism.
Most scientists and many philosophers of science would say that Griffin got it backwards: scientists were led to determinism via what they experienced in nature, as well as by their tests and experiments. Of course, not all scientists are also historians and philosophers of science. Thus, to them, determinism may well be a presupposition — if only to a degree. In that sense, then, it’s a presupposition to such scientists just as “freedom”, “divinity”, meaning, etc. were presuppositions to Griffin himself, as well as to religious people.
Griffin’s Alternative of Postmodern Science
What was Griffin’s alternative to what he called “modern science”?
In one place, he wrote the following passage:
“[T]he postmodern paradigm contends that any explanation devoid of purposive causation will necessarily abstract from concrete facts. *Fully* to understand even the interaction between two billiard balls requires reference to purposive reactions — not indeed of the balls as aggregates, but of their constituents. Because the study of nonindividual objects as well as that of primary individuals and compound individuals requires, at least ultimately, reference to final as well as efficient causes, there is a unity of science.”
Just to get it out of the way: Griffin himself provided a note as to what “final cause” means. He wrote:
“Aristotle’s notion of the ‘final cause’ of a being is its end, purpose, or goal (which need not be conscious or intentional).”
From Griffin’s note, readers may now have a small grip on what he meant by “purposive causation”…
So which physicists would ever deny the following?-
Fully to understand even the interaction between two billiard balls requires reference to the balls themselves as constituents.
What they won’t agree with is the following:
“*Fully* to understand even the interaction between two billiard balls requires reference to purposive reactions — not indeed of the balls as aggregates, but of their constituents.”
Take out the words “purposive reactions”, and everything is (nearly) fine.
So why was Griffin fixing on the term “purposive reactions”?
Is it because it suggests that billiards have minds and/or consciousness?
Yet Griffin, in the note, says that a “a being’s [ ] end, purpose, or goal [ ] need not be conscious or intentional”.
Fair enough, it need not be, but it may be.
Moreover, even if it need not be, the words “purposive reaction” suggest consciousness and intention.
Thus, no matter how differently Griffin redefined the words “purposive reaction”, they still suggest mind and/or consciousness. And, it can be suggested, that was precisely Griffin’s purposive intention.
In any case, in one breath Griffin stated that such purposive reactions needn’t be conscious or intentional, though in the next breath he brought in “panexperientialism (often called panpsychism) [and] [o]ther forms of thought that have attributed experience to all individuals”. Indeed, Griffin provided more helpful details in the following passage:
“An individual was physical from without to others, but was conscious or mental from within, for itself. From without, it interacted with other enduring individuals in terms of efficient causation; from within, it lived in terms of purposes or final causation.”
As already stated, Griffin put his own views via (or through) the words of various philosophers, theologians, etc. That can be presumed because he certainly didn’t argue against them. So although Griffin may not have been a card-carrying Aristotelean, or a panpsychist, etc., he certainly used these views as ammunition against modern science.
Griffin also relied on the work of David Bohm a little. Well, he mentioned Bohm.
Firstly, Griffin advised his readers to
“follow Bohm in replacing the language of ‘laws’ with the more inclusive notion of ‘orders,’ for the reasons Evelyn Fox Keller has suggested: the notion of ‘laws of nature’ retains the connotation of theological imposition, which is no longer appropriate but continues to sanction unidirectional, hierarchical explanations…”
This makes it seem that non-postmodern scientists aren’t aware that the word “laws” is metaphorical and not meant to be taken literally. Yet they’re well aware of this. Of course, Griffin might have argued that they unconsciously still believe that there are “theological” laws out there— and that belief controls and influences all their science.
So is there any non-psychanalytic or non-speculative evidence for this belief in theological laws outside of postmodern literature?
Oddly enough, Bohm’s notion of “orders” can also be chastised for its “hierarchical” implications. On the surface at least, why is the word “orders” any better than the word “laws” from Griffin’s political point of view? Isn’t order itself suspect too?
Yet Griffin himself deemed orders to be “softer”. He also believed that this notion implies that nature is “generative and resourceful”.
Griffin’s position on “modern science” is very similar to Sandra Harding’s. He quotes her (in note 26) as making the false and generalised claim that physics (not even modern physics) “‘looks at either simple systems or simple aspects of complex systems’”.
It was stated earlier that Griffin relied more on philosophers (such as Sandra Harding) and theologians than on scientists to back himself up. However, when I checked, I found out that Evelyn Fox Keller (who died in 2023, the year after Griffin died) was once a physicist… as well as a “feminist scholar”. That is, she started off as a physicist, and then turned to “the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science”.
So Evelyn Fox Keller probably knew more about physics than both myself and Griffin. However, that doesn’t stand for much because the positions that Griffin adopted from Keller aren’t actually physics at all: they’re interpretations or philosophies of physics. In that sense, then, Keller was in the same position as myself and Griffin (if with more scientific credentials behind her).
The common theme here is the politicisation of science by Harding, Keller and Griffin himself. Readers may suspect that they would have argued that science and scientists are already political.
So was all Griffin, Keller and Harding attempting to do is make science political in politically-correct ways, rather than in the politically-incorrect ways of modern science?
Doesn’t this stance turn science into a political battleground?
It’s also worth stressing that most scientists who’re committed to what Griffin called “modern science” uphold various and different political views. Griffin, Keller and many of the people Griffin quotes favourably, on the other hand, seem to be coming at science from a very similar political angle, as can be seen from the quotes Griffin provides.
To put all that in another way. Many — or even most — scientists on the Left, Right and Middle will thoroughly reject Griffin’s postmodern science, his championship of parapsychology (or the paranormal), and even his use of Bohm’s “holism”.
