Thick description of science

Scientists are human beings? They need relaxation and sleep like all other humans.
Each day they also need to resume their work and exert themselves, often under considerable pressure, in order to make progress in their work. Scientists struggle with motivation and direction in their lives like the rest of us.
What makes natural scientists different from most other people, and what often makes their work so difficult, is the fact that they work on topics so far removed from everyday life and try to solve problems that have never been solved, or in many cases even articulated before.

A good analogy would be helpful here. The closest example I can think of is that of an Olympic athlete training for years to break a world record. The athlete also struggles with pressure and motivation and is often pressing the limits of what the human frame can accomplish. In this respect, scientists are like athletes. However, the scientist is not simply trying to gain a fraction of a second or centimeter (although the technologies that sustain modern science often work with even smaller margins). Scientists have to face directly the qualitative difference between the known and the unknown? Certainly this is true of what Thomas Kuhn has termed revolutionary science in contrast to the ordinary process of experiment-construction and data-verification. However, the design of experiments and confirmation of known data can themselves lead to confrontations with the unexpected or unknown. The work of scientists is always just a step away from the unknown. So perhaps the term revolutionary science is overly dramatic. A more ethnographic category like "independent, risky work" [1] may be more helpful in conveying the uncertainty involved in all scientific research. In any case, if we are to do justice to the actual practice of science, and not just its documented results, we must include in our description a consideration of the conditions that enable our scientists to do what they do.

For convenience, I shall refer to such a consideration of practical conditions as a 'thick description' of science. The phrase is borrowed from the work of Clifford Geertz, who argued against strictly cognitive views of cultural anthropology in the early 1970s. Taking exception to the notion that a culture consists in rules of human behavior and interpretation, Geertz argued for a 'thick view of culture that includes the actual contexts that make both behavior and interpretation possible.[2] 

In the case of science-fostering societies, culture is just one of many aspects of such a thick description, and anthropology is just one of many tools of analysis. So there is some semantic stretching involved in extrapolating the idea of 'thick description' from anthropology to our entire project. However, the concept will prove useful as a way of summarising the main points of the following chapters in an easily recognizable form.

Those summaries will have the following form: a thicker description of natural science leads to a thicker description of some area of theology, for example: (1) the relation of God to creation; or (2) the cosmos; or (3) the history of theology; or (4) the attributes of God. This formulation helps to make the overall case that theological questions and options flow naturally out of a consideration of scientific endeavour.

In arguing for a thick description of science - one that takes the life and work of scientists into account - I am tilting against the conception of science fostered by most media and by the teaching of science in most of our schools and universities. In most people's minds and in most science-theology discussions, science consists primarily of scientific 'facts', scientific theories, and sometimes scientific applications.[3] More sophisticated discussions may include simplified scientific methods. But only rarely do students get to know anything about the actual history of science or even about the lives and the projects of the scientists whose ideas they study.

The problem with understanding human enterprises is not unique to science. The usual approach is a little like studying visual art simply by going to lectures and visiting museums rather than visiting artists' studios. Both science and art are important human endeavours, but most of us have very thin views of either. Our culture almost always enforces a separation of the private aptitudes and motivations of producers from the public marketing of goods for consumers. So the problem I am addressing here should not come as a complete surprise.

Some light can be shed on the problem by considering the few endeavours that are exceptions to this cultural norm. Two areas of Western culture that do not generally separate personal aptitude and motivation from public performance are politics (where other kinds of obfuscation are often at work) and sports. To focus on the latter for a moment: it would be unthinkable to publicize a sports event today without conveying information about the health and morale of the athletes. The rigours of the sport and the conditions imposed by the aging process are commonly discussed in relation to the limits of what is physically possible. The contrast to disciplines like science and the visual arts could not be greater. We are used to very thick descriptions of sports events - everything from detailed statistics to Mother's Day greetings. Our understanding of science is rather thin by comparison.

The reasons for these differences among disciplines have yet to be investigated. Clearly the fact that athletes have to perform in real time in the presence of the public has a lot to do with it. But the same is not true for professional musicians. We do not learn very much about the lives of symphony musicians or ballet dancers. On the other hand, we do get to know a good deal about very special kinds of scientists, like astronauts, who happen to fascinate the public. So media exposure is an important factor. The separation of the products of science from our knowledge about the life and work of scientists is a cultural artifact based on the fact that our relationships transcend the traditional limits of small communities: only the mass media are in a position to reconnect producer and consumer and thereby thicken the description of marketable human endeavours. The issue of public knowledge bears further consideration.

For now it is sufficient to conclude this part of the discussion with the following result: limiting 'science to its cognitive dimensions (a set of ideas or theories or methods) is a relatively thin abstraction. If science is viewed abstractly, all kinds of problems naturally arise for the dialogue with theology (also viewed abstractly) - different views of creation, different approaches to human nature, different epistemologies. These are certainly important problems, and they deserve all the attention that they get in current discussions. But a thicker view of science will engage theological endeavour more directly. Apparent tensions between the two disciplines can be viewed in a more positive light when they are seen to result from questions and paradoxes in the description of science's foundations. Then theological endeavour is part of a thicker description, leading to a broader rationality that makes more sense out of scientific endeavour itself.