For my write-up today on Jules Witcover's Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, I'll use as my starting-point Witcover's quotation of Spiro Agnew on page 75:
"Truth
to [young liberal protesters on college campuses] is 'revealed' rather
than logically proved, and the principal infatuations of today revolve
around the social sciences, those subjects which can accommodate any
opinion and about which the most reckless conjecture cannot be
discredited."
I sometimes feel this way. Whenever biblical
scholars liken themselves to brain surgeons----as when they criticize
people who think that they can read the Bible without the guidance of
biblical scholarship, when these same people wouldn't try to perform
brain surgery on their own but would consult experts----I'm somewhat
skeptical. I just have a hard time putting biblical scholarship into
the same category as brain surgery, since biblical scholarship seems to
me to be rather speculative in areas. I've wondered at times if
biblical scholarship and the humanities in general are sometimes like
what Agnew says about the social sciences----that they can accommodate
all sorts of different opinions, and they have their share of reckless
conjectures.
There is a strong part of me that sees sciences such
as biology, chemistry, and physics as objective, while regarding the
humanities are more subjective. A professor of mine once commented that
I had a bias that regarded the physical sciences as more stable than
the humanities, but that my bias was incorrect, for the physical
sciences change quite a bit. He may be right on that.
Agnew's
comment also made me think about Kant, postmodernism, and
deconstruction. I've long thought to myself: What is the point of
students learning about these things in college? So there are
intellectuals who doubt that there is objective truth. How do students
benefit from learning about this sort of perspective?
I think
about an experience that I had in college. A friend of mine was
pre-med. He was on a bus with his debate-team coach, who was a
postmodernist, and she was trying to justify slavery from a post-modern
perspective. He contrasted that with what his biology professor did
when my friend turned out to be right while the biology professor turned
out to be wrong: the biology professor admitted his error! My friend
gained a fresh respect for the physical sciences, as opposed to the
humanities.
I can guess about how some of my acquaintances who
study the humanities may respond. They might say that the humanities
have a system of peer-review, and that keeps out crazy perspectives.
They may also suggest that I must not know much about the humanities, to
question that they are real sciences. Well, let me say this: I
acknowledge that there is real science that goes on within the
humanities. There are ideas that accord with the facts and that come
out of a rigorous methodology of seeking truth. Facts are facts. Facts
accord with some ideas better than others. But there have been plenty
of times when I have read articles or books on biblical studies and I've
thought to myself: "That sounds pretty speculative to me!" These books
or articles may rest on facts, on some level, but there's a degree of
speculative interpretation going on there, as well.
I'll stop
blathering right here! I guess that, if I have a policy, it's to listen
to what people are arguing. Even if the humanities may strike me as
rather speculative at times, there may be times when they are getting at truth.
NOTE: I find James McGrath's thoughts here to be helpful. I actually wrote this post before I read McGrath's post.