“Theories are like a pair of spectacles”

Alister McGrath, the Anglican priest and Oxford University theologian who, before earning doctoral degrees in theology and intellectual history, first earned a D.Phil. in molecular biophysics, recalls his youthful atheism:

I was quite convinced that religion demanded disengagement from reality and taking refuge in an invented universe which bore no relation to what I knew through physics.  Religion dealt with a fictional universe in which everything was made up.  Science dealt with things that could be proved — that could be shown to be right.  It was the most secure and reliable form of knowledge.

Alister McGrath, The Big Question: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 50.

He proceeds to say, among other things:

Simplistic talk about “compelling evidence” is seriously misleading for a number of reasons.  It suggests that evidence is a purely objective matter and fails to recognize its complicated subjective aspects.  Human beings are creatures who exercise reflective freedom and are perfectly capable of forcing “evidence” into their preferred and predetermined modes of thinking.  The Lysenko affair of the 1940s illustrates this well.  The maverick biological ideas of Trofim D. Lysenko (1898-1978) were seen as politically acceptable to the leaders of the Soviet Union, and the scientifically orthodox ideas of his opponents were denounced as “bourgeois” or “fascist.”  As the sad history of evolutionary biology during the era of the Soviet Union makes clear, a “groupthink” can emerge which disregards evidence it considers inconvenient, or which accommodates it — often through the application of intellectual violence — within an ideological framework.  (pages 51-52)

Of course, such ideological twisting and suppression of facts can only occur among religious apologists, like those of . . . well, like those of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Joseph Stalin in the 1940s.

It was his studies in the history and philosophy of science at Oxford that brought McGrath, step by step, out of his immature youthful atheism, which had been, to a considerable degree, based upon the unsustainable notion that, unlike such soft subjects as theology and literature and philosophy, science is purely objective and its conclusions always drawn securely and rigorously from indisputable facts:

Later I read N. R. Hanson’s works on the history and philosophy of science, in which he emphasized that observation was shaped by theoretical presuppositions.  The process of “looking at” nature is actually “theory-laden,” in that what we “see” is often shaped by assumptions drawn from our culture or existing scientific theories.  Theories are like a pair of spectacles; they affect what we see.  (67)