Consider the difference between a lawyer in the courtroom and a scientist in the university. The scientist is encouraged to share research with colleagues and ask for advice. Unless the scientist is working on confidential research, openness and camaraderie are essential parts of scientific research. Scientists must follow the evidence, even if that evidence leads them away from a cherished hypothesis.
Contrast that with how the lawyer works. The courtroom is an intentionally adversarial environment. There is no collegial give and take between the opposing sides of the issue, no meeting of the minds, no compromise. If I’m paying someone to represent me in court, that lawyer must present just one side of the case—mine. I want that lawyer to be biased and argue very effectively about just one side of the issue. Evidence is valuable only to the extent that it supports the lawyer’s side of the argument.
The opposition does the same thing from the opposite viewpoint, and a judge or jury decides the merits of the two cases.
The concept of double jeopardy (someone can’t be tried twice for the same crime) applies in the domain of lawyers, but there’s no equivalent within science. A hypothesis or theory is always provisional. Any claim can be revisited.
The thinking of the scientist contrasted with that of the lawyer is brainstorming vs. winner take all. It’s forum vs. battleground. It’s a search for the truth vs. a presupposition of one’s rightness. Scientists should be open to changing their mind and backing another hypothesis, while courtroom lawyers are obliged to stick with their position regardless of the evidence.
There’s nothing wrong with lawyer thinking in its place. But let’s not confuse it with scientist thinking. The mistake is using one when we imagine we’re using the other.
I once attended a debate in which an atheist and a Lutheran pastor debated “Does God exist?” At one point, the pastor, an old-earth Creationist, turned to the topic of evolution and demanded that we follow the evidence. This sounded bizarre given his rejection of the scientific consensus about evolution, but this was his way of giving himself license to make conclusions himself. He has no doctorate in biology, of course, but he pretends that as an armchair biologist he’s entitled to weigh the evidence and reject the results of 150 years of scientific research and the consensus of tens of thousands of people who actually are practicing biologists.
This is why I have little patience for philosopher William Lane Craig prancing around in an imaginary lab coat and playing make-believe as a scientist (more on that here). Or take the Reasons to Believe ministry, whose mission is “to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.” They cherry-pick the science to support their preconceptions. This is lawyer thinking, not scientist thinking.
A popular Christian apologist is J. Warner Wallace. He’s a cold-case homicide detective, and he does his best to argue that the courtroom is a great analogy to how we should evaluate the evidence for the claims of Christianity. It isn’t. The courtroom is precisely where we shouldn’t go for an analogy.
Note that the lawyer’s approach isn’t necessarily unjustifiable outside the courtroom. One might wonder, “If we applied some smart minds to the God question, what supporting arguments could they find?” That’s a reasonable question as long as we don’t pretend that it’s a quest for the best explanation.
Lawyer thinking feels natural. Our imperfect brains are saddled with biases—one example is confirmation bias (noticing only the evidence that confirms what we already believe). These biases make lawyer thinking a natural rut for us to fall into, but it begins with the conclusion rather than following the evidence where it leads.
Lawyer thinking is like religious thinking, and they’re both like advertising. You focus on the good points in your case and ignore any bad ones. Admit to yourself when you adopt this view, and don’t pretend to be thinking like a scientist. Too often, these two positions are conflated or confused.
We all have biases. None of us enjoys being wrong, and each of us probably needs to rein in our lawyer thinking. That goes for me as well.
Too often I’ll read something with the unstated theme, “Here’s how I interpret the facts to support my presupposition.” More useful would be, “Here’s where the facts lead.”
In science it often happens that scientists say,
“You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,”
and then they actually change their minds
and you never hear that old view from them again.
They really do it.
It doesn’t happen as often as it should,
because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful.
But it happens every day.
I cannot recall the last time something like that
happened in politics or religion.
— Carl Sagan
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/12/12.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia
