Does it make sense to view religions as Lakatosian Research Programmes?

Question

From Wikipedia:

Research programmes

Lakatos's second major contribution to the philosophy of science was his model of the "research programme", which he formulated in an attempt to resolve the perceived conflict between Popper's falsificationism and the revolutionary structure of science described by Kuhn. Popper's standard of falsificationism was widely taken to imply that a theory should be abandoned as soon as any evidence appears to challenge it, while Kuhn's descriptions of scientific activity were taken to imply that science is most fruitful during periods in which popular, or "normal", theories are supported despite known anomalies. Lakatos's model of the research programme aims to combine Popper's adherence to empirical validity with Kuhn's appreciation for conventional consistency.

A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the "hard core" are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme—they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to "protect" the "hard core". Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme's explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely. The difference between a progressive and a degenerative research programme lies, for Lakatos, in whether the recent changes to its auxiliary hypotheses have achieved this greater explanatory/predictive power or whether they have been made simply out of the necessity of offering some response in the face of new and troublesome evidence. A degenerative research programme indicates that a new and more progressive system of theories should be sought to replace the currently prevailing one, but until such a system of theories can be conceived of and agreed upon, abandonment of the current one would only further weaken our explanatory power and was therefore unacceptable for Lakatos. Lakatos's primary example of a research programme that had been successful in its time and then progressively replaced is that founded by Isaac Newton, with his three laws of motion forming the "hard core".

The Lakatosian research programme deliberately provides a framework within which research can be conducted on the basis of "first principles" (the "hard core"), which are shared by those involved in the research programme and accepted for the purpose of that research without further proof or debate. In this regard, it is similar to Kuhn's notion of a paradigm. Lakatos sought to replace Kuhn's paradigm, guided by an irrational "psychology of discovery", with a research programme no less coherent or consistent, yet guided by Popper's objectively valid logic of discovery.

Lakatos was following Pierre Duhem's idea that one can always protect a cherished theory (or part of one) from hostile evidence by redirecting the criticism toward other theories or parts thereof. (See Confirmation holism and Duhem–Quine thesis). This aspect of falsification had been acknowledged by Popper.

Popper's theory, falsificationism, proposed that scientists put forward theories and that nature "shouts NO" in the form of an inconsistent observation. According to Popper, it is irrational for scientists to maintain their theories in the face of nature's rejection, as Kuhn had described them doing. For Lakatos, however, "It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and nature may shout INCONSISTENT". The continued adherence to a programme's "hard core", augmented with adaptable auxiliary hypotheses, reflects Lakatos's less strict standard of falsificationism.

Could religions be viewed as Lakatosian research programmes? Rather than viewing religions as theories (as discussed in an earlier question), could we conceptualize them as having a hard core of fundamental assumptions, surrounded by a network of auxiliary hypotheses (such as the various denominations or interpretations within a religion)? If so, how might one modify a religious research programme to enhance its explanatory and/or predictive power, allowing it to be considered progressive rather than degenerative or pseudoscientific (see Imre Lakatos: Pseudoscience)?

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NOTE: The inspiration to ask this question came from this answer. A quote from said answer:

Lakatos was talking about science theories, but his Research Programme thinking is very applicable to philosophic worldviews as well. Evaluating the consilience of evidences for or against a worldview, and the overall "life health" of living by a worldview, are how one would apply Lakatos' thinking to worldview competition. Note the "auxiliary assumptions" from Lakatos are the defensive memes of Memeplex theory.

The right way to do an evaluation of competing worldviews is to carefully accumulate the for and against evidences, examine the validity of protective auxiliary assumptions (many protective memes are actually fallacies), and look at the overall utility of the worldviews to live life well. Note that the two commentators agreed that Alex's worldview seemed to be effective and useful in living life, so it scored well on that metric.

Answer 1

There are a multitude of approaches that are taken to doing philosophy. That is why, when someone tells you they are "reading philosophy" that tells one almost nothing about the content of what they are reading. It could be anything from Taoist "flow" treatises, to math theory.

We also have no agreed metric to evaluate utility of different approaches to philosophy.

My approach, of pragmatic empiricism, is a personal choice. It is based on my personal judgement that this is the most useful philosophic stance and school. The circularity this is a "pragmatic" metric of utility, which I then use to justify pragmatism, is not lost on me...

The philosophers who have adopted pragmatic empiricism tend to treat the boundary between science and philosophy as very ill defined, and science as merely a subset within philosophy. The tools of science, which are refinements of the empirical process, are generally applied by them back into the rest of philosophic problem areas. This is what I do as well, and is why I generally use the best of scientific thinking on every philosophic problem that is tractable to them.

Worldviews tend to come in families, they tend to have core and ancillary hypotheses, they tend in practice to be adapted over time to deal with contradicting facts, while still maintaining a recognizable familial resemblance. I at least find postulating a Research-Programme/worldview identicality to be a highly useful conceptual framing.

Religions are a special case of worldviews. Religions arose as speculative efforts to characterize "what is" and "how we should live", which are key goals of science and philosophy. However, in contemporary western thought they tend to be primarily identified as a set of dogmas, or claims. The fixity of this set of dogmas is often asserted by their holders. Fixity is incompatible with the Research programme methodology, as contrary data is not acknowledged, and ancillary hypotheses never incorporated. Fixity leads to religions being qualified as pseudoscience by Lakatos -- or dismissed as irredeemably degenerated worldviews, if you want to keep them within the evaluation tent.

To treat religions as Lakatosian worldviews, one has to, therefore, expand the frame of what one is evaluating. Despite the claims of fixity, specific religions, and also communities of believers, DO tend to adapt their dogma and practice over a time frame of decades or centuries. And this adaptation is generally in response to contrary evidences of one sort or another. The essential Reasearch Programme element of responding to falsifications is actually present when one expands the framing wide enough to discern the sociology of people leaving one denomination and joining another, and of denominations modifying their dogmas.

Returning to my own personal judgement -- despite this moderate degree of adaptability that religious families exhibit, when I evaluate the world's major religions as Research Programmes, I still consider the world's major religions to be terminally regressive, as they still have too many dogmas that have major contradicting evidences that have been known for centuries or millenia. It is instead the frameworks that the religions fall within, such as Monotheism, Di-theism, Polytheism, pluralist spiritual dualism (shamanism), or atheist spiritual dualism (as in most Buddhism) that I would consider to be a possibly viable candidate to be a progressive programme.

So I at least consider it to make sense, and be useful

BUT-- given the diversity of philosophy -- it is not the case that even all pragmatic empiricists would agree with this. And those who approach philosophy with a very different initial frameworks may not even find this discussion relevant to what they consider essential to philosophy!

Answer 2

No. Religious belief doesn't aspire to methodological naturalism. As such, it cannot be a scientific programme. Unlike pseudoscience, religious belief and method have a substantial difference in character that confusing them isn't easy to do in the same way science and pseudoscience might be confused. Christianity, however, adopted natural theology which is an instance of a religion endorsing the methodology of naturalism.

Answer 3

Waiving the dual problems of demarcating science from pseudoscience and religion from non-religion, let us suppose, from a sort of empirical/from-the-ground-up/"inductive" viewpoint, that the following three words closely approximate units of pertinent reference, i.e. are words whose meanings are individual religions (we suppose then that religions come in a plurality):

1. Christian Trinitarianism
2. Mahayana Buddhism
3. Zoroastrianism

These are chosen as representative samples neither (A) because they are the only religions nor (B) because I know enough about all religions to have included other cases but somehow declined to do so. I do have an overwhelmingly detailed familiarity with the Christian tradition. I absolutely can't overemphasize how detailed this familiarity is. As a teenager, I had an emotional interest in the Mahayana concept of swearing an infinite vow in becoming a bodhisattva, and as an avid reader of epic fantasy like The Wheel of Time, I of course enjoy a narrative about a god of good and a god of evil dueling for the fate of the world. But I know much less about any school of Buddhism, and any phase of Zoroastrianism, than I know about Christianity. I have not spent years upon years upon years listening to triumphant non-Christian religious music, not read legions of books from the point of view of Buddhists and Zoroastrians, etc.

So, then:

4. It's hard for me to apply the concept of a scientific research program to Christian Trinitarianism. I've seen naive attempts to do such things, like using "fulfilled prophecies" as a metric of validity. There are also people who, under the influence of chemicals like dimethyltryptamine, undergo the rapture, and the translation of the experience they go with is a Christian one. Aquinas labored long and hard on a rational reconstruction of much Christian doctrine, but neo-Aristotelian science, whatever its merits compared to whatever alternatives at the time, still does not operate in an equivalent way to modern, post-Kantian science. Some seemingly implausible notions, like one god somehow existing as three persons without a violation of monotheism, he handled very well, but his demonstration is more logical-mathematical than physical. But even so, Aquinas was not offering his theory of the Trinity as otherwise debatable, subject to dismissal if a coherent account was not found; in fact, his logic should lead him to the proposition that God is infinitely many divine persons if more than one at all, and he even entertains the (counter)possibility, but because his judgment is controlled by an independent commitment to the official religious narrative, he distorts his understanding at this point and tries to enforce the proposition that God would be exactly three, and only three, divine persons, if more than one at all. If a priori evidence is not good enough to change his mind, scientific evidence likely would have no sufficient influence on him, here, either (or: since the only "scientific evidence" would be the beatific vision itself, at that point all science and all faith would be over with anyway).

As for (2):

5. I have seen how Buddhism and psychology/psychiatry can cross-pollinate. I know that Buddhism has an intricate tradition of technical disputes about epistemology, logic, etc. As for becoming a savior-like figure by making an intense promise, well, as a testable proposition, that depends on whether one's existence does somehow endure beyond death, which one will certainly know only after death (if ever). What I mean is that if you do remain conscious after death and retain memory of the vow, you will see whether the vow empowers you to interact with the afterlife in the intended way, etc. Until then, though, what can be done about it? And Buddhist philosophy, then, is not just Buddhist science (not even Buddhist psychology), but is philosophy, so to resolve the question of evidence in that context, you'd need to do philosophy and not just come up with one empirical research program (although one might hope that you come up with some claims that could be evaluated empirically).

And regarding (3):

6. The problem of evil is supposed by some to be the major defeater for strict monotheistic belief. Switching from belief in one deity all of good to two deities, one of good and the other of evil, is a decent "minimum modification" kind of response to that problem. But are we to imagine turning this into a testable description of the world? How would we nontrivially distinguish between the interventions of either deity? For inasmuch as this faith is meant to encourage virtuous behavior directly, and not in conjunction with moralized sacraments of no intrinsic value, then we automatically judge all good to involve Ahura Mazda, and all evil to involve Ahriman. The later theory that these two were offspring of a deeper god, Zurvan, sprung not from an empirical difference between the polytheistic and the monotheistic versions of the narrative, but from a priori tropes.

If you want a very stark account of why religious extremism is intellectually inconsistent with the scientific method in general, I would recommend A Christian Theory of Knowledge from Cornelius van Til. He openly abhors the willingness of philosophers and scientists to keep asking many and varied questions; he says we must surrender our minds to a totalitarian system of scriptural interpretation, and stop doubting the faith in any way whatsoever, with no prior reason whatsoever besides his literally incredible "transcendental argument for the existence of God." Van Til is a divine illuminationist, to be historically, taxonomically precise, so I would like to quote from the SEP entry on divine illumination in summary:

The theory of divine illumination is generally conceived of as distinctively Christian, distinctively medieval, and distinctively Augustinian. There is some justification for this, of course, inasmuch as Christian medieval philosophers gave the theory serious and sustained discussion, and inasmuch as Augustine gave illumination a very prominent role in his theory of knowledge. Still, it is better to think of the theory in a wider context. Divine illumination played a prominent part in ancient Greek philosophy, in the later Greek commentary tradition, in neo-Platonism, and in medieval Islamic philosophy. Moreover, it was Christian medieval philosophers, near the end of the thirteenth century, who were ultimately responsible for decisively refuting the theory. I will suggest that we view this last development as the first great turning point in the history of cognitive theory.

... It is easy to miss the significance of what Scotus brought about: in part because it now seems so inevitable, in part because Scotus comes at the end of a gradual trend toward naturalism, and in part because until only recently it was generally supposed that nothing of much philosophical importance happened between Aristotle and Descartes. Yet if one looks at the big picture of our evolving philosophical/scientific understanding of the mind, then it is clear that something important happened at the end of the thirteenth century.

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CONDENSATION: Self-defeat

The theory of scientific research programs per Lakatos is a modern theory. It is open to scientists to believe in Lakatos' theory, because it is open to them to believe in new theories as such. A dedicated religious adherent can't believe in a new theory of their religion on this level; coming to believe in worshiping a god, for example, means not worrying about whether Lakatos, or anyone else, came up with a sociological justification for some methodology that is supposed to resolve religious disputes. No religion's God has or even could make the justification for such worship depend on hearing about the concept of Lakatosian research programs in the modern period. For then until Lakatos' concept arrived on the dialectical scene, all those religions would have lacked sufficient such justifiers. Having lacked them before, they could not acquire them after; but the whole idea is somewhat absurd, ultimately.

Answer 4

Nowadays people do research in all sorts of areas not limited to the exact sciences or even the social sciences, so I would venture the following comparison with Nietzsche's take on a religious leader as an Uebermensch; see for example this question on Nietzsche's Uebermensch on this site. According to Nietzsche, such a leader/Uebermensch is involved in a task of developing a new approach to structuring life and belief, and as such is a researcher (perhaps in the psychology of religion?) involved in a research program.

Answer 5

It's a very interesting conception of the situation.

I think Lakatos actually describes a special case of a more general human behaviour, which is that all systems of human reasoning feature some assumptions, whose validity cannot be tested independently, but which are eligible to be adopted because they perform a role in making the system of reasoning internally sound and logically complete in some regard.

Lakatos distinguishes between "auxiliary" hypotheses and "hardcore" assumptions, and the difference is the apparent ease or difficulty with which they may be replaced. Lakatos uses the term "research programme" for a system of reasoning with certain characteristic hardcore assumptions in the context of scientific research.

It seems many or all systems of reasoning contain certain assumptions whose logical connections are so general that the replacement of these assumptions must involve the total revolution of the entire system and resetting of all things within, whereas there are other assumptions whose logical connections are more limited and can be replaced without upsetting so many things.

The effect is that some assumptions may seem to be held only while convenient and are readily dropped too when convenient, whereas other assumptions are stubbornly held, and often appear to gain or lose adherents only on a multi-generational timescale (i.e. assumptions change one funeral at a time).

Ultimately, because the failure of hardcore assumptions must collapse the entire system of reasoning, it is the entire system that is ultimately subjected to the test of whether it is performing its perceived function or not for the holder.

Organised religions then are just another instance of a system of reasoning which may or may not perform a perceived function for an adherent.

If religions are conceived as theories which create some kind of social order and support the practical political management of societies, then its supernatural assumptions may withstand simply because most people perceive that it is working.

Lakatos is so unwelcome amongst many scientists precisely because, by implication, he diagnoses them not as people who are discerning truth or are in possession of a special method, but as people who are fundamentally discerning a correspondence between their theory and their interests (whatever those might be, and may vary between individuals), and that their standards of truth are the same as priests and monks, even if the content of their theories are ultimately different.