The Scandal of Induction

I’ve been digging into the literature on religious history, in light of the re-emerging spark of religious belief in the western world. It’s particularly relevant in Canada and the United States, mostly because both countries were founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and arguably as were the academic institutions that we hold in such high regard. I wanted to lay out this interesting secular dilemma that I learned of because it’s interesting, and it brings up some food for thought about the metaphysics of our world and its relationship with the world of academia. So, let’s begin by a short recall of the past.

Previously, the typical man, the ‘religious man’ saw the world as acting in concordance with a cyclical idea of time. That is, in some ways, events are not all unique, and often occured, occur, and will occur perpetually. Hence, there’s a repetitive nature of the world. We can see that looming in the back of this belief we hold that we can use our past experiences as evidence to predict the future. It seems that this belief, on some fundamental level, is a necessary precondition for science as a practice.

The story goes, Christianity arrives, not as a philosophy, but as a theology of history. God’s interventions have transhistorical purpose (the salvation of man). Modern people, but critically Hegel, take over this Judeo-Christian ideology and apply it to universal history in its totality. This universal spirit, or secular alternative of God, continually manifests itself in historical events. That opens the world to various forms of historicist philosophies; everything that has happened in history had to happen exactly as it did, in this deterministic sense. Separating from Judeo-Christian thought, this new philosophy holds importance on the historical event of, say the crucifixion, to the historical event as such, absent of any transhistorical or soteriological significance.

Then comes the non-religious, secular man, wishing to pursue science, and life for that matter, after usurping one of its underlying foundations. This new philosophy now deals with an interesting new challenge: the scandal of induction. That is, if the future is qualitatively different from the past—which it is, otherwise it is just the past again and not the future, from this historicist’s lens—then the past isn’t enough evidence to predict the future. The scandal of induction delivers us back to be caught in the waters of this metaphysical sacred, cyclical time.