Scientific Models & Idol Worship

by Asa Boxer

May 26, 2024

**Owen Barfield (1898-1997)** was a member of the Inklings, a group of writers that included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Barfield’s *Saving the Appearances* explores the analogy of idolatry with scientific models, when we forget their nature and limitations as artificial images.

The frameshifting breakthrough of monotheism is locating divinity in conceptual space. Legend has it that the Biblical Abraham came from one of the wealthiest families in Ur of the Chaldees. His father was an idol maker. That would be the equivalent to a pharmaceutical company and an insurance company rolled in one. Idols were prescribed for everything. Building a home? Better get some idols for that! You’ll need one at the gate; one under the threshold, two over the lintel; and. . . don’t forget those house gods! Going on a trip? Don’t forget the idols! Opening a new business? Got sick? There are idols for that. You’re going to need plenty. One day, Abraham’s father tells him to mind the shop. When dad comes back, he finds the whole place smashed to pieces: all but one large statue with a club thrust in his hand. He asks, “Abie! What happened here?” And Abraham replies, “Don’t look at me! The big one took his club and destroyed the rest.”

Today, we wonder at the absurdity of believing in the supernatural power of a sculpture. But try to imagine how it came about. The first sculptor would have likely felt (as would those around him) that he’d found the figure in the wood or stone; that he’d made a discovery; that the deity had revealed itself. Imitations of that first discovery would become a craft. And through convention, the society accepted that these figures were gods. So if you were a member of such a society, idols would be among the things you took for granted. It takes an Abraham to break such a spell— the spell of convention.

In his book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Owen Barfield (1898-1997) explains how the world we perceive is made of “representations”—images that we imbue with a metaphysic agreed upon by the community to which we belong (i.e. conventions). It is conventional today for instance to regard the world around us as composed of particles and waves; to understand sound and music as waves of air compression; to consider human beings as apes; and to regard ourselves as selfish machines. In other words, we don’t merely perceive images (I mean via our five senses) outside a context: we imbue the physical world around us with our models of understanding; we view it all through the lens of our paradigm. We create an inner image and project it upon the outer world.

In case this explanation is too abstract, think about birdsong (one of Barfield’s analogies). You hear a chirp and if you know anything about birds, you may conclude that it’s a chickadee or a cardinal or a grackle (possibly a jay) without seeing the source of the sound. In other words, we don’t merely sense things in a disconnected manner. Instead, we form conventional representations of the phenomena.

You’re likely wondering, What’s wrong with that? You hear a familiar birdsong, surely you can assume it comes from a familiar bird. And once you have that taxonomical handle on it, you can communicate about it, study it, predict some of its behaviour. Indeed. I am not arguing that our paradigms are unproductive, far from it. Think of it this way: the salient point of the analogy is that the bird is invisible and we impose our paradigms, our models, on things invisible, and we do so unconsciously. Here’s Barfield:

But a representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented.

By “unrepresented,” Barfield means the world of particles and waves, of chemistry, genetics, optics, physics, and mathematics—notions of underlying realities that are not perceived by the senses and are therefore thought to exist and persist in the absence of human sensation: in other words, our conventional metaphysics. But Barfield is after something more universal and more widely applicable to paradigms more generally. By “unrepresented” he means to indicate an underlying reality for which we can only make models that we confirm indirectly. So the concept can apply equally to the systems of divination that held the place and prestige of our sciences during the Greco-Roman period, or any other such system involving an appeal to realities beyond our senses. In a way, the unrepresented is unknowable and therefore indeterminate. When we drape our models over the unrepresented, we illuminate some aspects and obscure others. We create representations of the unrepresented.

There is nothing wrong with these impositions until we forget their limitations: that’s when we wind up worshipping idols. Here’s Barfield again: “when the nature and limitations of artificial images are forgotten, they become idols.” He’s referring here to the models of the historical sciences—i.e. those sciences that are not subject to direct experimentation and the scientific method: sciences such as evolution, archaeology, big bang cosmology, black hole cosmology, and the like. When we speak of evolution or of the gradual progression and succession of civilisational development or of the big bang or of black holes or of dark matter or of anthropogenic climate change as though they were sensible realities—when we make models of things insensible and believe them to now be sensible—we are making and worshipping idols.

Barfield’s most remarkable insight concerns the ancient idea of saving the appearances, an issue I’ve discussed before in “What is a Scientific Fact?” According to Pythagorean-Socratic metaphysics, the world of the senses is a world that perishes, a place of illusions; the true world is the eternal world of forms or ideas, which are not subject to temporal change. This world of forms precedes the temporal world and provides the foundations, the archetypes, geometries, mathematics, and laws upon which the physical world is built.

Via Plato and Aristotle—the chief developers and promulgators of the Pythagorean-Socratic school—the Western world came to believe that we could not know true realities by studying the physical world because it is a distorted world of shadows. The best an observer could do was “save the appearances,” a confusing translation of the Greek original, which is better understood as “account for the phenomena.” Consequently, models representing the cosmos were considered to be useful heuristics (helpful devices), but not actual representations of how the cosmos worked. No doubt, they came to this conclusion because the movements of the heavens were confounding and elusive and could never really be accounted for.

It wasn’t till Galileo that this paradigm was challenged, when he insisted that reality itself could be represented by a cosmological model if it accounted accurately for all the associated phenomena. This is what was so radical and controversial about Galileo’s claim. It was a complete paradigm shift. Suddenly right and wrong were re-contextualised. Galileo’s demand was that we relate to the temporal, sublunary world as a true reality. What were the implications for the unrepresentable eternal world, the world of forms, the really true reality?

Here’s where things get confusing. The models made by human ingenuity were the underlying reality, were the structures of the world of forms. We could indeed represent the unrepresented.

Like the first sculptor feeling he’d found a god in the wood or stone, scientists ever since have been working under the impression that their invented models are in fact discoveries—discovered gods, ultimate truths, which today we call “facts” and “laws.”

A further twist to the story is that this confusing marriage (or merging) of the temporal and eternal meant that the material world wasn’t a shadowy distortion of the really real reality: they were one and the same. Consciousness of the fact that we’d erased a distinction faded. The machine metaphor engulfed perception, overwriting our analogical impositions, thereby making idols of the phenomena. Thus we lost sight of the fact that we were relating to our models as primary—indeed as gods, reflecting eternal truths. We became amnesiac Platonists, at once evicting God from the garden (the natural world) and unconsciously re-installing divinity in the essence of our calculations, in our sense of their omniscience and omnipotence.

By happy coincidence, I was reading “Virology’s Event Horizon” by Dr. M. J. Bailey while putting together this article. I hadn’t heard of the reification fallacy before, but I saw at once that this concept encapsulates perfectly the subject at hand. Bailey quotes a Wikipedia entry on this fallacy as follows: “the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing.” That’s idolatry in a nutshell. I felt that if Barfield’s explanation came across to some readers as too arcane, that description might clinch it for them.

I think it’s important to add that I’m not advocating an abandonment of scientific models. I am cautioning against their worship and recommending a more sober relationship with them. Good models are productive. But they are just convenient conventions that necessarily occlude other avenues of perception and productivity. In the case of virology, as recent events have shown, a runaway model can result in mass injury, death, and even tyranny. When we finally appreciate the limitations of our present models, we will encourage the design of exciting new ones. . . productive and limited in their own novel ways.

I’ll leave you with a quotation from psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), one I presented in a previous essay, and worth repeating here:

I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.
from The Will to Believe (1895)

Scientific Models & Idol Worship

by Asa Boxer

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