There’s a writer whom I really like by the name of Ian M. Banks. If you have time for fiction novels, then I encourage you to read his work. These aren’t light reading as they deal with some massively complex philosophical issues and do so pretty complexly. One novel has alternating chapters preceding forwards and backwards through the time of the story. Hideously complex, but very, very rewarding. Start with Player of Games and/or Use of Weapons, then go on from there.
In one novel, Banks has his fantastically advanced civilization deal with an Outside Context Problem. This is a scenario that we are all familiar with, but rarely consider… which I guess is why it’s considered an outside context problem.
Basically, an OCP is when something happens that is so unusual, so outside of what people are aware of that they have extreme difficulty even recognizing the issue, much less dealing with it effectively. The most common actual example is that of the Central American natives before the arrival of the Spanish. The Americans had no concept of the massive ships, the guns, body armor, maybe even money that the Spanish took for granted. An even more extreme example would be having a native islander of the Pacific watching the battle of Midway or the Guadalcanal campaign of WWII.
The issue, of course, is the people/individuals presented with the outside context problem literally cannot even conceive of what’s going on. It may as well be gods playing some game. It is so far beyond their reality that their brain just shuts down when considering it.
I have dealt with this, from the other side, a lot. In my experience, Christians often experience science as an outside context problem. Christians have grown up and been indoctrinated to think in a certain fashion. Because many of them lead very isolated lives (they hang out with other Christians, they read Christian books and listen to Christian music, they think of the world from an aspect of magic and faith), they cannot even understand the issues and processes of science. Some can, but the real fundamentalists can’t.
This is why you will often see Christian creationists attacking Darwin (he was pro-slavery, he was a communist, etc. etc.). Everything in their entire life is based on an appeal to authority. They can’t conceive that scientists don’t actually think that way. They can’t imagine that Darwin isn’t the pope of evolutionary science. By attacking him, they think it’s the equivalent of an attack on the pope or whomever their preferred religious leader is.
The difference, of course, is that evolution is a science, with data and evidential support. Attacking Darwin doesn’t change any of that. But a religious leader has none of that. He has charisma and an authority that is only granted by the people who follow him. If that person is shown to be a hypocrite, then the entire religion is in jeopardy.
Another OCP area for Christians is that of the uncertainty of science. Everything in science is tentative. Christians grow up being exposed to ‘truth’. The delivery might change, but the ‘truth’ is always there. Again, this is mainly because of the insular nature of Christian communities. Many Christians (from personal experience) spend their entire lives in a single church. Going to another church or even altering the sequence of events can cause near riots in a firmly entrenched congregation*.
So, the concept that science can change or can even be wrong makes it appear to a Christian (or other religious follower) that there is something fundamentally wrong with science. Change is bad, they think. Tentative is bad, they think. Therefore science is wrong.
These (and other) out of context problems are big issues for the relations between the religious and the scientific. How can we talk about science when one side can’t even understand the fundamental principles of science? How can logic be used to change the mind of someone who has not used logic to arrive at a position?
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* True story about my old church. The church was built in late 40s and the majority of the members had attended that church since that time. If you weren’t a founding member or a descendant of a founding member, then you would never be really accepted (including pastors). The average age of the church at the time I left was about 73.
Anyway, we had a pastor leave (left town with his secretary, both of whom were married to other people) and a guest pastor come in. Anyway, this pastor actually dared to put the mid-service prayer AFTER the choir’s song. People, during the service, started yelling about. Needless to say, he did not return.
