“Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.”1 This is the way Alfred North Whitehead introduces Galileo. What profound changes began with the silent wonder of the astronomer gazing heavenward and the stunned silence of a public still convinced that the sun revolved around the earth.
The first practical telescopes appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century. When the world absorbed Galileo’s findings, the shock was immense. The sun did not revolve around the earth.
Not only did the Church eventually have to admit that it had wed itself to bad science and bad interpretations of the Bible but the whole Western mind reeled. How was it possible that so many for so long had been so misled by the most certain and positive testimony of the senses? If Galileo was right (and he was), then reason and human senses were capable of monumental deceptions. How could seemingly direct encounters with the real world turn out to be no more reliable than hallucinations?
The philosopher Hannah Arendt states that one significant result of the invention of the telescope was the rise of the “school of suspicion.”2 The telescope provided incontrovertible proof that appearances and reality can be two very different things.
René Descartes (1596–1650), the French philosopher, spelled out the implications of this with his famous method of radical doubt. To gain reliable knowledge, according to Descartes, one must doubt all that can possibly be doubted until he or she finds something that cannot be questioned, something indubitable. Descartes’s own indubitable was the famous Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). The act of doubting, he reasoned, requires a doubter. Therefore, one cannot deny or doubt the existence of the doubter without falling into contradiction. Starting from the indubitable foundation of the existence of the thinker, Descartes attempted to develop a philosophy of clear and certain postulates.
His philosophy led to a dualism that marked modern thought: there are some things absolutely certain because they are true by definition (these are tautologies). There are other things only probably true because they are known by means of untrustworthy sensory experience. Sensory experiences may not be what they appear to be. The telescope taught humans to doubt the information coming from their senses, although not entirely—not for what are called facts.
The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), refined Descartes’s scheme. He said that ultimate reality is unknowable. One can only know things as they appear to be. What they actually are in themselves is beyond the reasoning capacity of human beings. Among unknowable things are notions of purpose and what the philosophers call “final causes.”3 Human knowledge encompasses only what human senses perceive and human concepts give order to. So what is knowable about nature, human nature, and the nature of social reality includes only “efficient causes” (the directly observable relations of causation). Ideas about their ultimate purpose or final causes are mere opinions. Science cannot say anything about them. People can know how things work, but they cannot know why things exist.
Sociology came into being when the natural sciences had achieved spectacular results by following this set of ground rules for reasoning. Systematic skepticism meant challenging all accepted ideas about the particular subject matter dealt with by a science. Explaining nature scientifically required the elimination of any statements of its purpose. Nature was no longer seen as a good creation of God or as the theater where the drama of salvation was enacted. Nature was part of a world conceived as a deterministic web of forces that were governed by laws—but without anyone or anything creating those laws. Experimentation enabled scientists to test alternative models of the laws of nature. Mathematics provided a precise, abstract language in which to represent the relationships discovered. Research excluded the particular opinions and values of the scientist, who attended directly to the way things appeared within the scientific gaze.
Nineteenth-century sociology modeled itself on the practices and principles of the natural sciences. Over the years, it has increasingly adopted quantitative methods. It now designs its data collection in quasi-experimental forms and seeks universal, abstract laws of social life. A “value-free” ideal governs its research. It insists on settling its disputes based on the weight of unbiased, objective facts. This has not always led to good science or good sociology. There is no doubt, however, that it has expanded human knowledge and understanding of social arrangements. Unfortunately, social realities do not permit the sort of experimentation that some physical phenomena do. Of course, not all physical sciences use experimentation either. The course of the stars and plate tectonics, to cite two examples, are no more subject to controlled experimentation than are the economic relations of nations. Yet this limitation does not prevent good science, as much of astronomy and geology prove.
However, there is one crucial difference between sociology and the physical sciences. Sociology cannot keep notions of purpose out of the process of understanding human beings and their social arrangements. Genuine understanding requires some notion of the purposes guiding people as they create institutions. This includes the purposes that people assign to their own lives. These purposes shape the reasons by which people act and the vision they have for institutions. People hold strong ideas about why and what they are doing as they act in their social world.
Yet appearances and reality are not always the same. People deceive others. They even deceive themselves. They may not willingly or honestly share with an investigator their true reasons for engaging in certain patterns of behavior. Their purposes in doing things may be concealed even from themselves. There may well be forces acting in social settings that are beyond the comprehension of the actors involved. Once investigators say what they think is going on, the actors may change their behavior, change their story, or even suggest that the investigator is deceived. Fortunately for physicists, atoms cannot evaluate the scientists who are trying to determine what goes on inside atoms. Unfortunately for sociologists, their subjects can glare back and say exactly what they think of sociologists and their ideas.
Sociologists tend to be skeptical of what people think is going on in their social worlds. Social common sense frequently is scientific nonsense. Social groups create myths, illusions, and ideologies that mislead. The grammars of social cooperation mask processes of actual conflict and coercion. In such cases, the misleading is deliberate, enabling people to work together without having to confront the actualities of oppression, deception, and injustice. When sociologists disagree with appearances as socially defined by groups, they become unpopular (as unpopular as Galileo was when he disagreed with the bad science of his day).
Science is inherently debunking because of its skeptical attitude. This creates ongoing debates with various publics as discoveries conflict with long-held truths. Ideas that debunk social illusions are an acute problem for sociology. The people who live within the processes and relationships that sociology characterizes and explains know parts of their reality more completely and acutely than the social scientist. They also are more misled about aspects of it than the social researcher. Sociology deals with affairs that are close to the everyday experiences of people. For that reason, sociology generates intense and protracted debates. It is one thing to claim that, contrary to appearances, the world is not flat. It is another to claim that there is evidence that churches teach wives to be subservient to husbands because of the economic advantages gained by men. People are more likely to understand and be upset by social findings and their interpretation than by the highly technical, mathematically obscure findings of physics.
Prestige and authority also enter into the picture. Science as such is the most highly valued sort of knowledge in the modern world. In the popular mind, physical science is more authentically scientific than the life or social sciences. Consequently, laypersons and physical scientists are less hesitant to challenge social scientific findings than to challenge the findings of the physical sciences.
Some consider the social sciences to be ideological in ways not true of the natural sciences. Yet this perception is most certainly wrong. Just look at the ways natural science and Christian notions of what the Bible entails in its teaching have interacted ideologically. Celestial mechanics was ideological in the time of Galileo and Copernicus, as geology was in Lyell’s day. These sciences have all come to seem less ideological as opponents of their findings have changed their interpretations of what the biblical accounts entail. Christians changed their interpretations because the grounds for the claims of Galileo and Lyell were persuasive within the proper competence and limitations of science. Christian convictions include the notion that God made this world and that it all belongs to him. Whatever is scientifically substantiated, whatever is a warranted conclusion about the state of affairs of this world authentically merits the concurrence of Christians. Such science tells Christians more than they previously knew about the sort of world God made and still upholds by his power.
On the other hand, arguments between Christian faith and science do occur. There are several possible options for settling them. Sometimes Christians mistake the appearances of biblical texts that are theological in force and phenomenological in form as scientific statements.4 Christians now uniformly agree that this is the case with Psalm 19:5–7 as to the motion of the earth: “The sun comes like a bridegroom out of his chamber.” Christians no longer suppose that this phrase was ever meant to offer a scientific account of the revolution of the sun about the earth.
Sometimes, however, conflict arises over the larger network of beliefs that properly undergird science itself. Some wed science to a worldview and a tradition of rationality that exclude God in principle or that deny the authority of Scripture as the inspired Word of God. In this case, the issue is a much larger one concerning which worldview and tradition are most compatible with science. Thoughtful Christians (for good historical reasons) continue to claim that Christianity is the most fruitful and adequate worldview for nourishing authentic and creative scientific work.
There are scientists who use science beyond its area of competence, setting it up as an ideology in opposition to authentic Christian faith. There are Christians who use biblical truth beyond its competence, setting it up as an ideology against good science.5 Some preeminent scientists have said that science has replaced their religious faith. Edward O. Wilson, the famous entomologist and sociobiologist, went through the ritual of accepting Christ while his Baptist congregation in Pensacola, Florida, sang “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling.” Two years later, enraptured by the elegance and scope of the theory of natural selection, he gave up Christian faith. For him, evolution was a competing, not a complementary, theory to that described in Genesis.6 In effect, he was converted from Christianity to secular science. Wilson continues to treat science as excluding faith.
So long as one interprets Genesis as teaching a creation of six twenty-four-hour days no more than ten thousand or several tens of thousands of years ago, then scientific theories will appear contradictory to faith, and scientific information may well produce conversions from Christian faith rather than greater praise of the Creator within Christian faith. So long as one takes science to require a purely naturalistic, secular worldview, so long will religious truth appear contradictory to science. We are not trying here to settle what is good science or good biblical interpretation in geology and biology. There are serious problems on both sides of the current debate.7 We are illustrating how science and faith can appear to be mutually exclusive alternatives.
Sociology exemplifies the scientific tradition of skepticism about appearances, and for that reason it is a contested and contestable discipline. It participates in a modern world where doubt is more respectable than dogma and where open-mindedness means questioning all beliefs. As a profession, sociology considers uncovering social facts one of its major tasks. As a science, it must state the facts and nothing but the facts. Yet the contemporary notion of facts is itself a creation of the modern world.8
Pluralization is a marked feature of modern life. Descriptively, it is one of the factual characteristics of the modern social world. Normatively, an ideology of pluralism supports pluralization. Acknowledging the immensely increased diversity created by pluralization, pluralism celebrates that diversity as something that should be approved and cherished. Society should be open to all sorts of people, cultures, races, religions, values, and ideas. Tolerance becomes a paramount virtue in a pluralistic society. This does not mean that there is total openness. Intolerance and dogma are not tolerated.
Of course, there is something intrinsically Christian in celebrating certain sorts of plurality. Cultural tolerance is a part of the Church’s identity as a community that is intentionally universal. The Church is a multicultural reality. It opens its arms to all peoples without erasing or diminishing cultural distinctions. This is part of Christ’s commission to make disciples of all nations.
It is a different matter when pluralism also means religious pluralism. This is the idea that all religions are equivalently true or false or that all lead their adherents to the same God. Equally objectionable is moral pluralism. This refers to the claim that there are only changing ideas of right and wrong, no truly objective moral standards. All must decide what is right for them, and whatever they decide is what is right—for them.
The ideology of pluralism, however, normally does not make distinctions among cultural, religious, and moral diversity. It considers religious and many moral matters to be matters of personal choice and commitment and thus properly private and pluralistic. This is one of the reasons modern secularists are so vociferous in their objections to pro-life people who are attempting to secure public legislation about abortion. For them, such legislation would affect a religious and personal choice that is properly private. To legislate against abortion is to confuse the public and the private.
Pluralism does have one acknowledged limit, however. The notion of facts is a very widespread one. Most of this society’s education, science, and jurisprudence base themselves on it. Those who celebrate open-mindedness and tolerance as virtues of pluralism do not mean to extend this attitude to facts. As Lesslie Newbigin says:
A teacher who asks [a] class whether Paris is the capital of France or of Belgium will not appreciate the child who tells him that he has an open mind on the matter. The principle of pluralism is not universally accepted in our culture. It is one of the key features of our culture…that we make a sharp distinction between a world of what we call “values” and a world of what we call “facts.” In the former world we are pluralists; values are a matter of personal choice. In the latter we are not; facts are facts, whether you like them or not.9
Sociology itself is after facts. That is one of the reasons its central journals and graduate training programs put such stress on high standards of evidence, rigorous methodology, and quantitative tools for analysis. After all, since social appearance and social reality can diverge, then determining what the facts are is not a direct or simple matter. Sociology as a profession buttresses its claim to expert authority with various rituals of objectivity. Many of them are sensible and essential and have led to dramatic improvements in the way people understand the world. Others seem far more related to intimidating nonprofessionals and securing status within the profession itself. Specialization and increasing doses of quantification do not necessarily lead to significant or useful information about human beings or social institutions. Sometimes it seems as though massive amounts of research are carried out only to prove things that seem trivial.
The sins of sociology, however, are not solely sociological sins. They are sins of modern academia and should not draw attention away from the real virtues of sociology. There is elegant and excellent sociology. It has given humans the incomparable gift of much greater understanding of their social worlds. That sociology has not delivered a world of peace, prosperity, and progress as the nineteenth century hoped it would should not overshadow what it has actually accomplished.
Sociology offers an enormous cornucopia of facts. Anyone reading a massive introductory text knows that. Some findings are more surprising than others (although one generation’s surprises become the next generation’s common sense). In the modern world, sociology lines itself up on the fact side of things. Just what does this mean?
The seventeenth century invented the modern notion of facts. The idea went something like this: “Facts” are brute actualities littering the landscape of reality. Human minds are blank slates onto which experience writes these facts. What appears in the mind are the traces of these infinitely multiple encounters with the facts of reality.
Not all of these fact encounters are wide-awake, carefully attended experiences. Nor do facts make themselves apparent in a direct fashion. Some appear in ways that can introduce very misleading ideas into human minds (for example, the stick thrust into the water appears to bend; the sound of a train’s whistle appears to change in pitch as it approaches and then rushes past). Mistakes and errors creep in. Still, language, concepts, and ideas are all composite products of experience.
Science is a highly disciplined method for focusing the mind on facts. Science allows facts to speak their truth into humans’ dim awareness, and it corrects for the differences between appearance and reality. It provides a neutral way of mediating conflicting understandings of the facts by establishing an objective method that settles decisively what the facts are.
In its most powerful form, this notion led to the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s positivist theory of science. Positivism is a sophisticated philosophy and ideology of science. It denies the validity of any nonempirical elements in knowledge. Thus, sensory experience, mathematical logic, and observation are the only avenues to true knowledge, ideas, and concepts. All metaphysics (questions about what is ultimate in reality) are to be thrown on the garbage heap of history as unscientific. They are another sort of “knowledge” similar to poetry or art, and have nothing to do with science.
In positivist models, all forms of science are to follow a single method that is modeled on a natural science grounded in empiricism. Human knowledge is singular. There are not several types of knowledge (scientific, existential, religious, moral). Only that which is verified by the strict canons of an objective, empirical science is knowledge. All else is mere opinion. There is but one path to knowledge and one sort of knowledge: science. “Facts” and “values” in this account are two radically different sorts of realities. Empirical knowledge of things as they are is logically separate from moral knowledge. Moral knowledge comes from evaluating things by what they ought to be. “Facts” are about actual states of the real world; “values” are about how people feel or ought to feel about the real world.
It is not difficult to see positivist themes as strongly congruent with the ideology of pluralism and the modern boundaries between facts and values, the public and the private, and science and religion. Unfortunately for positivist theories of science, this clear distinction between facts and values is misleading and false in actual scientific practice. Science today is in a postpositivist period with a new watchword: “No observations without presuppositions.”10 What this means is that no responsible scientist now conceives of the mind as a purely passive recipient of brute empirical experience. Empirical experience does not result in mental ideas that mirror the structure of the external world in a purely objective and direct fashion.
Scientific knowledge, along with all other kinds of knowledge, is dependent on certain nonscientific, metaphysical presuppositions. Some of the presuppositions in all systems of knowledge are values. Science itself operates according to a set of empirically unverifiable norms and values. The primary goal of all science is the extension of certified knowledge.”11 This endeavor is supported by two sorts of values. Science places technical or cognitive value on empirical adequacy (for some sciences, this means the ability to predict phenomena) and logical consistency. It places moral or social value on universalism (the impersonal evaluation of research and evidence), communalism (the free flow of information), disinterestedness (the curbing of personal bias in research), and organized skepticism (the suspension of judgment on a matter until the evidence is conclusive).
The cognitive values and norms specify how to study the subject matter. The social norms structure the relationships between fellow scientists and the public. A scientific profession extends collegial recognition when a work meets these values and norms. When a work also displays originality while contributing to an extension of the knowledge of the science, it is recognized as good science.
The practicing scientist knows what many laypersons do not. Good science is a practice that follows a set of values. In addition, good science is not a blind expedition into the world looking for a new load of brute facts. Good science happens on the basis of prior ideas about the world and an intention to put that set of ideas to the test. Theory is the name for that prior set of ideas. A theory is an interconnected web of propositions and presuppositions about given states of affairs in the world. A theory offers to explain those states of affairs. Some theories are simple and elegant and explain many things. Einstein’s E = mc2 is among the most famous theories. Others are more complex. Robert Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy” is a good example.12
Michels’s theory claims that an elite minority controls power no matter how democratic the ideology of a group might be. Beyond this simple claim, the theory contains a series of other propositions. These offer details that support and explain the basic claim. They include propositions about the tendency of groups to split between their mass base and the small group that dominates. Other statements describe the social psychology underlying the veneration of leaders as well as the efficiency and benefits of having few decision makers for meeting challenges that threaten group survival. Another proposition deals with certain individuals’ lust for power and privilege, which motivates the monopoly of instruments of domination, and so on.
The political sociologist no less than the physicist undertakes observations of the “real world” within a tradition of theories and concepts. Traditions focus attention, structure the questions asked and answered, suggest what sorts of evidence might be important or even crucial. What turn up as “facts” are the products not only of what is there to be seen and heard in the “real world.” “Facts” are noticed and interpreted because of what the tradition of a given science suggests is there to be seen and heard. “Facts” are always combinations of experiences of the real world and the interpretative schemes brought to those experiences. “Facts” are given the status of facts only within a given theory tradition (also called a paradigm).
This is a highly simplified explanation of why the seventeenth-century definition of facts and the scientific tradition based on them are no longer valid. Philosophers are still at each other’s throats about the logical details of how science actually arrives at knowledge. There are a number of philosophical accounts as to what a “fact” is and how it differs from a “value.”
Sociologists cannot pretend to solve the philosophical issues involved here. But sociology has a unique contribution in making sense of how science happens. Sociologists examine the actual activities and practices of people to see if what they say they do is what they actually do. Sociologists of science study scientists to see empirically how scientists use facts and values. A number of such studies show the variety of ways in which science involves far more than simply gathering facts.
Karin Knorr-Cetina, for example, studied a microbiology lab. Her results offer scientific evidence for the way in which physical science is a social construction.13 Something is a social construction when its existence is the result of the activity of a social group. Some things are pure social constructions in that every facet of them can be traced back to the creative activity of a group (the French language is an example). Other social constructions are a reshaping and refining of a naturally occurring reality—for example, the purified chemicals used by a biology lab. The research materials used by the microbiologists are not substances that someone can simply find in nature. Rather they are “socially constructed.” The source materials are artificially grown and selectively bred by a group of people under controlled conditions. The substances used are highly purified products purchased from a few industrial companies. Without other social groups creating and selling these substances and organisms, they would not exist.
The questions posed to those materials are also socially constructed. They are developed through consultations among the various researchers. This involves deciding what is already known and what is theoretically interesting in microbiology. The questions that get asked are the result of a social process of debate and negotiation.
The physical set-up of the experiments is the result of a social tradition of available techniques, earlier investigations, and what are taken to be their outcomes. The jumble of information that pours out of the readings from the lab instruments in the experiment is often ambiguous. Lengthy arguments about what has actually been seen occur among the investigators.
The elegant paper summarizing the research in a scientific journal gives the appearance of a process that was unproblematic. The findings look like unambiguous experimental results developed by objective observers. What the smooth rhetoric masks is the empirically demonstrable process of social agreements that mask the complexity of the actual experiment. Nothing is said about false starts, failed experimental attempts, ambiguous data interpreted in only one of several possible ways, and so on. The sociology of science confirms the notion that there are no “brute facts” but only what scientists, given a scientific tradition, take to be facts.
This social and cultural foundation of science does not prevent it from creating precise and powerful sorts of knowledge. Scientific activity is a tremendous aid to the fallible common sense of human beings. Science becomes dubious when it pretends to be infallible, rather than simply a less fallible knowledge than common sense. Science has not fulfilled the seventeenth-century drive for facts and nothing but the facts. That does not denigrate its value or importance. No knowledge available to humans fits such a model of facts. Knowing that science is a social construction enables humans to be less messianic in their hopes about what factual knowledge actually is and can do. It also means they can challenge the hard-and-fast division of the world into facts and values or into science and religion. These things are not identical matters, but neither is there an unbridgeable gulf between them.
Another benefit of the sociology of science is humility. Virtually all introductory texts and elementary works in sociology and other sciences hide the amount of controversy and uncertainty that exists in these fields. It is much easier to recruit a new generation of scientists from college students when they feel they are embarking on a journey that quickly arrives at fully certified truth grounded in incontrovertible facts. The myth of seventeenth-century factuality is a common way of dressing up twentieth-century findings in introductory texts. A little knowledge in the sociology of science goes a long way toward recognizing this shell game.
Fortunately for the practicing sociologist, the philosophical issues underlying the nature of facts and values or science and religion need not be tidy before getting on with social research. But they are very important matters when one seeks to build a bridge from Christian faith to social science and back. Then the footings for careful thought need to be strong in both faith and science. A philosophy of social science and clear-headedness on the nature and function of worldviews are crucial.
Facts remain an important commodity, even as a scaled-down, provisional, theory-connected account of the state of affairs of the world. People cannot live or think without facts. Yet it must always remain clear what facts are and what they are not. They are mental maps of the world and of history. They are socially constructed accounts of real events and actual states of affairs. They are not isolated, brute actualities, unconnected to values or worldviews. They are used to explain what people believe, but they are always socially arranged accounts of the real world, and they serve social interests. Atheists can arrange them to make it appear that there is no God. Christians can arrange facts so it appears (to them) that there is a God.
The next chapter maps some ways in which sociology and its social facts involve and use values and worldviews. The reader must not misunderstand what is being said here. None of this discussion pretends that sociologists or Christians can do without facts. Facts simply cannot do all the tricks that the seventeenth century tried to train them to do.
Facts, however, cannot be banished from Christian sociological thought. That is a cheap response to a very real state of affairs in sociology. Many sociologists practice sociology as a secularized discipline that excludes religious facts and assumptions. They do so on the supposed basis of the facts of sociology. Sociologists who suppose that any person with rudimentary intelligence and two or three sociology courses should abandon faith are victims of the ideology of pluralism and probably positivism. The authentic dispute that these sociologists have with Christian faith is not genuinely over facts or facts versus values, with sociology firmly in the fact corner. Rather, it is over what worldview or symbolic universe provides the rationality tradition within which one can make sense of the full range of human social experience.
There are, of course, disputes over facts as well. Some contest the facts of the history of God’s activity in creating the nation of ancient Israel, or the facts surrounding the incarnation and life of Jesus Christ. These are authentic disputes that must be settled by carefully marshaling the evidence as to the authenticity and reliability of the witnesses who reported these events in the texts of Scripture. But much of the debate is not genuinely at this level. Rather, those who dispute Christian faith come with a prior conviction that certain kinds of “facts” cannot be facts at all. If they appear in the eye-witness reports, the eye witnesses are pre-judged wrong by definition. These people are actually engaged in a dispute about the nature of reality and the sort of universe they live in.
Such a dispute is actually over the appropriate relationship between religious and scientific knowledge. However, the tension between Christian faith and sociology has an unusual sharpness to it. If sociology is of any use, it ought to help understand that tension. Thus, one needs to look with sociological eyes if one wishes to explain the concentration of indifference and hostility to religion in the social sciences. The next chapter does just that. Such understanding will help show how a positive and constructive relationship between Christian faith and sociology is possible.
1. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern Mind (Baltimore, MD: Pelican, 1926), p. 12.
2. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 260–263.
3. “Final causes” explain something by looking at the goal or end for which a thing exists or was brought into being. Aristotle distinguished four “causes,” and their relationship can be seen in this example: Michelangelo (the “efficient” cause) sculpted his David by making changes in marble (the “material” cause); these changes created marble formed so as to show the characteristics of a strong young man (the “formal” cause) in order to produce an object of beauty (the “final” cause).
4. John Calvin, in his Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), Vol. 1, p. 86, put it simply: The spirit of God in Scripture seeks to enlighten all humans, learned and unlearned. The Bible’s subjects are matters intelligible to all. So Moses “wrote in a popular style things which…all ordinary persons…are able to understand.”
5. Howard J. Van Till, Davis A. Young, and Clarence Menninga, Science Held Hostage: What’s Wrong with Creation Science and Evolutionism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988).
6. Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 123.
7. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991).
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, in Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 357–358, says “fact” in English renders the Latin factum, a deed, action, or event. Such a notion was, of course, around prior to the seventeenth century. What is new is the notion of “fact” as a realm “independent of judgment or of any other form of linguistic expression so that judgments or statements or sentences could be paired off with facts, truth or falsity being the alleged relationship between such paired items.”
9. Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 7
10. W. G. Runcimann, A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. I: The Methodology of Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 56.
11. Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), Chap. 13.
12. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1962).
13. Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981). See also Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979).