Abstract

Monday, 30 May 2005

Karl—You want to have it both ways. On one hand you want to maintain that right to generalise about the badness of religion because same people have done very bad things in the name of religion, whilst denying the right of anyone to make similar generalisations about the badness of science from the bad deeds of scientists. Yet, whilst pointing out all the benefits of science, you insist that when religious people do good things they do so because they are good people and that has nothing whatsoever to do with their religious convictions. Hence you can maintain the equation that “religion=bad” whilst any bad consequences of scientific work are due to mis-uses of science by individual scientists and society, therefore, despite case after case of morally deplorable scientific work, you can maintain the equation that “science=good". Talk about value laden!

Mike—You seem to imagine I pretend to be value neutral, but I do not. I write to criticize religion and to defend science in a society that generally attacks science and defends religion. It is not unfair in the least. It is positive discrimination to right a present wrong. I am considering the institutions based on their histories, not merely the moral rectitude of some Christians and some scientists. There is no institution of science analogous to the Christians churches despite your false analogy of a “change in the priesthood and in the rituals”. No scientific church has ever held any power at all, let alone ruled the known world, as the Catholic Church did for a thousand years of utter misery.

It is not simply that some Christians have been bad people. That is what the Christians are happy to concede. It is that Christianity is bad, and it has a long history of wickedness to prove it, and that in an institution that claims to spread goodness and light. We agree that any sample that is large enough will have the characteristics of the whole. If Christians want to say that Christianity is a group of people no worse than any other, then they are themselves admitting that Christianity has no value in making people good. By pointing to an utterly disgusting history of robbery, murder, oppression, callousness and torture, I suggest that Christianity is indeed untypical of humanity because it is generally much worse, at least in what the leaders are willing to do, and the sheep are willing to accept with no noticeable disturbance to their faith. The wickedness of religion is not merely the fault of a few bad eggs, it is implicit in the whole set up. It is an authoritarian mind-controlling organization set up and directly used by the ruling class of every society it is in to manipulate and to coerce the ordinary people. And when people are encouraged to believe that God is on their side and no one else’s, then they are willing to do anything at all, however disgusting, and maintain that it is God’s will, and they are innocent of wrong. Christianity makes people evil. All patriarchal religions do. The value of science to the rulers of society is its discoveries, not its people particularly.

My point is that the nature of any science, like that of any religion, is defined by what its practitioners do. Thus science and religion are complex, pluralistic, and operate within society at many different levels in many different ways. Neither have a unitary character or essence and the meaning of “religion” and “science” is established through instances of action in the name of either. Also, as you have pointed out the control of science is in the hands of an oppressive ruling class that owns science as its means of production and social control. This is true of religion too. Hence it seems to me to be quite prejudiced to say that “science=good” remains true despite the fact that it is in the hands of such as class, whereas religion is nothing more than the tool of this class and thus “religion=bad” remains true.

Yes, I agree that both are in the hands of the ruling class, and that many of the practitioners are naïve dupes of that ruling class, but the distinction that you do not recognize is that the Christian churches have had immense power in their own hands, and still do have substantial power over their own members, whereas there is no such power in science. The very objective of Christianity is to control people, but science has no such objective, and no way it could do it if it had. Christianity therefore cannot escape its resposibility for the evil deeds done under its aegis. Science has no communal institutions that could be considered its aegis and so no comparable deeds. Science is not intrinsically wicked. It is a tool, and would not need to be changed to be put to completely different uses from those our own rulers want it for. Simply funding different sorts of projects would suffice.

Furthermore, if all religious people are stupid sheep or a naïve sheep (as you more politely implied of my grandmother) that merely follow the dictates of the ruling class and their priesthood, then I am left wondering where heresy came from. And given that, on your account, the views of the heretic are going to be as false as the views of the authodoxy then it seems to me that the case of heresy cause considerable problems for your position. After all, what does it matter whether someone claims that Christ was an advocate of poverty and that the Priesthood of the Church have perverted the message of Christ if there was no Christ at all?

Well, there are two points here that I am sure you are aware of. One is that I am allowed to argue from the tenets of my opponents to bring out the contradictions in their position, just as you and any philosopher does. The holy books of Christianity put quite plain doctrines in the mouth of the one who Christians call the son of God, yet they behave as if they had no idea he had announced them. They are therefore ignorant or hypocritical. Then when it comes to heresy, we have a case of two dogs fighting over a dry bone. Though both happily ignore fundamental doctrines plainly stated, they will willingly murder over trivial or undecidable matters. Did the sheep really care about the hypostasis and ousia of Christ to want to kill those who disagreed with them over it, even though they could never settle the question?

It seems to me that the case of the heretic shows two things that are very problematical for your views of religion:

• not all religious people are stupid or naïve sheep, they actually struggle with orthodoxy, at considerable personal risk, because the orthodoxy does not satisfy their religious convictions;
• if the oppression of heretics is designed, by manipulative people of a ruling elite, to maintain their power (as you have argued) then the persection of heretics is actually a political act where the political elite oppress a religious group because the beliefs of that group threaten the political elite.

A few might struggle with some aspect of this orthodoxy or that one, but now they have the option of myriads of alternative Christian sects, or to start a new one of their own. In the past, it was not mainly a matter of a group separating themselves from the oppressive majority in the way you imply. What more commonly happened was that there was no orthodox view at all over some issue that arose. Then when one was settled upon, the alternatives were dangerous to hold on to, but since the decision was arbitrary, the (now) unorthodox believed they nevertheless had God on their side—they were really the orthodox ones, and so were willing to hold out against the falsely orthodox. In summary, they were rarely dissidents but became schismatics as a consequence of a doctrinal schism. As for politics, it goes without saying that religion—Christianity no less, and perhaps more, than the others—is political. You say that Christianity is not unitary, but it is not for lack of trying to be. To have everyone of the same mind is a great advantage to the rulers of any society as long as it is what they want it to be.

The possibility of the heretic shows that religious convictions can be a powerful, critical force against the established orthodoxy and that it is actually is because of the criticisms from within a religion that the orthodoxy becomes undermined. Otherwise there would be no point in being a heretic (and risking one’s life) or burning a heretic (unless they represented a threat). The RC Church was undermined because it failed to satisfy religious convictions. The RC Church was far more undermined by the efforts of Luther, than it was by Copernicus and Galileo (who remained devout Catholics). It seems to me that some people read their religious books very closely indeed and examine closely the contractions and hypocrisies of the orthodoxy.

We have to be careful not to use modern times as the measure of reactions in less plural times. Challenges to orthodoxy today might be as you suggest, but, in medieval times, they were not quite the same. As I said above, much of the heresy that the Church handled then so awfully was not a challenge to orthodoxy at all. From about the seventh to the eleventh century, the Church seemed mainly unconcerned about heresy, not because there were no heretics, but because they were not a threat. It became concerned when it woke up after the millennium to notice that whole regions were effectively practising a different religion. It set mercenary soldiers and robber barons against them and massacred them. So far as the Church was concerned, there was no dissent, and so far as the heretics were concerned, the Church had not been bothered for centuries. Thereafter, the heretics were scattered and were harassed by the Inquisition, and later as witches. They were in defiance of the Church but not in it, and stuck to their principles at personal risk as the Free Spirits and such. We are talking here of people who thought they would not die. Like the Moslem martyrs in the modern Middle East, they were defiant because they took it that they had the orthodox position and not the Church, and so they would be saved not the Catholics. Eventually they led to the Reformation. So, again, I do not deny that there are some religious people who are good, and brave too, but much of the dissension was not within the Church but grew up outside of it at times when the Church did not seem as callous as it proved to be. It is crimes like those the Churches committed thereafter that should convince anyone Christianity is the work of the Devil.

As you (finally) conceded, religious ideas have explanatory value and it is the failure of orthodox doctrine to explain things, as well as its inconsistencies, that leads to criticism.

It might seem like a concession in this correspondence, but it is a view I have expressed on the pages, though the tense ought to have been past rather than present in your statement of it. I fully accept that religion was the closest thing to science of its day, and such as the explanations of the beginning in Genesis are illustrations of it. What baffles me is why people want to hang on to ancient and inadequate explanations when we have better ones. The sheep are more understandable in their mental and emotional naïveté, but the clever shepherds cannot have naïve reasons for continuing to propagate nonsense. Their purpose is to retain power over their flocks, and science cannot be allowed to have better explanations for fear of that Christian power leaking away to earth.

I agree with you when you say:

“The psychological value of religion is obvious. It is a comfort to people living in an uncertain world, and the more uncertain and potentially deadly it is, the more religious people become. Religion has been fading since the Enlightenment as much because life has generally become much more comfortable and secure for people as that they Enlightenment has given us education and better explanations. No doubt both are true. But as soon as there is some increase in uncertainty, there is a turn back to religion among some people.”

However, I think this this insight should also be applied to science too. Why are explanations, religious or scientific, successful? How do explanations achieve intelligibity? These are important philosophical questions that we need to examine. These questions cannot be be easily dismissed, explained away, by saying that religion appeals to the simple minded and ignorant, and science corresponds to truth, because this begs the question. You can call me a sophist all you like but it still begs the question to say that a method must be true because it is consistent with one of its theories. One cannot “prove” science by using evolution theory to support the claim that science must be true because it satisfies our survival needs. Especially when you reject the idea that any cultural phenomena could be a product of natural selection.

The success of a proposed explanation is a function of whether it meets people’s experience, and people’s experience is partly conditioned. Some of experience is natural such as the seasonal cycle and sunrise, and part of it is conditioned by the propaganda of the day. So when the priests tell the peasant farmer that the gods declare it auspicious to sow because it is the first new moon after the midwinter solstice, or whatever the priest-astronomers have decided upon, and the outcome is a good crop because the growing season has been optimised, then the peasant is impressed and has reason to believe. The priesthood can use the goodwill to claim that their midwinter festival of drumming and building bonfires has driven off the dragon that was consuming the sun, and sure enough the sun recovers, so the priests were again right. Their ritual will equally give them life after death or salvation provided the people are obedient and serve the gods willingly and correctly. And so the scam goes on. It might be explaining it away for believers and some philosophers, but it is a better explanation than religions themselves offer of actual gods and spirits invoked by the appropriate ritual accompanied by tom-toms, organs and hymns. Or I think so, but I am only a natural scientist not blessed with esoteric talents or the brass face needed to lie without smiling.

So long as hypotheses about the world work empirically science is being true to itself. The criterion of truth used in science, namely correspondence, matches our hypotheses with the real world. An effective disproof of science—a reductio ad absurdum—would be that it led to a contradiction of this assumption, but the theory of evolution of humanity does not contradict it, but confirms it by giving a reason why it should be so.

My point about cultural evolution is that it is probably too short a time period to influence human genetics, though I accepted that mass murder, such as that practiced by the Church might have. Cultural traits generally must be conditioned rather than genetic. I said that westerners might be dominantly forelock tuggers today because the surly types opposed to the potentates that rule us have been selectively exterminated by being tied to a pole. I also said, a more likely explanation is that humanity reflects the behaviour of other primates where most acknowledge the dominant male, but dissidents at the fringes await their chance to sling him out.

Science is a modern invention and human beings have been surviving for a very long time without it. And evolution theory is far from proven, even by scientific criteria, and merely remains a theory with considerable explanatory success (but little in the way of predictive power or experimental verification). To insist that the scientic method must be true because it is supported by one of its theories, and its theories correspond to the truth because they are scientific does beg the question. This has nothing to do with philosophical sophistication, it is a matter of logical and reasoned argument, things that I always thought were supposed to be of importance for the scientific method. And to state that unscientific ideas must be discarded because they are false because they are unscientific, begs the question and is merely a statement of prejudice. It is a statement of methodological fundamentalism and that is as much a case of being dogmatic as any adherent to religious doctrine.

Human beings lived for a very long time without agriculture, but they could not survive for very long without it now. We lived an even longer time without mobile phones, and I would be very glad if they were uninvented tomorrow. But they cannot be, and nor can science. If you have a better form of science to replace the one we have, then I should be glad to see it replaced. Evolution is such a long time phenomenon, experiments are largely impractical, though they have been done as you will know, in fast breeding populations, fruit flies being most popular so far. Far more important surely is that the cause of reproduction in the division of the double helix of DNA discovered only half a century ago, confirms and explains the process of evolution itself so well that the the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection, or some refinement of the process, cannot be doubted except by Christian fundies and creationists. Science is not mathematics or pure logic, and nothing can be proven in it until the end of time and all circumstances that will occur have occurred, and even then, as you have said, there might have been things that could have occurred that did not. But coherence is another criterion of truth, and evolution is coherent with such a vast wealth of other evidence and hypotheses that it is effectively proven. Scientific theory is not true because it is supported by its theories except in the sense that its theories work in reality and so correspond with it. That is reasonable and logical. Unscientific ideas are false not because they are unscientific but because they do not have any adequate criterion of truth, whereas science has. To say they are “unscientific” is simply a way of saying they have no objective criterion of truth. It is possible that some unscientific statement is true, but there is no way of knowing it.

Furthermore, the categories that Kant proposed, on the basis of his use of reason and the natural philosophy of his era, have now been discredited on the basis of his universalisation of contingent scientific theory (which has now been falsified) and the attitudes of his culture regarding the universality of morality and rationality. If you want to be consistent in your use of Kant to support your argument then you are going to have to also find yourself, by implication, being in support of the claim that evolution explains Kant’s moral sensibilities too. Of course, you can say that human perceptive capabilities are natural and human moral sensibilities are social, but this would put you at odds with Kant and, consequenlty, problematise your use of Kant to support your argument. And Kant did not say that we get at the truth through a scientific method. In fact, for Kant we cannot get at the truth of reality at all. We can only intuit its existence, but we are limited to the phenomenal, which we structure in accordance with our internal categories of reason. On a Kantian account, we only encounter mental representations and hence his philosophy is an idealist one that does not support realism. Of course, you can tag on a realist interpretation of the origin of the categories by using evolution theory, but that is only an interpretation and, at best, only provides an intelligible account of the possibility of experience. And, as I agrued in my book, intelligibility does not demonstrate truth. A lie, in order to actually work as a deception, is intelligible and false. Any explanation, either a scientific or religious one, can be intelligible and false.

I am sure you are a good teacher and this little digression on Kant is informative but irrelevant. I mention Kant in the connexion of categories because he treated them most thoroughly as mental structures needed for anyone to think of things. Kant’s philosophy might have been idealist but all idealism reflects reality or it is purely fiction or rather fantasy. Ideals are idealised real objects. As you said, a Euclidean straight line does not exist in reality but lines do. So I do not have to accept Kant in toto to use his notion that the mind has structures to enable us to think. The question is “Why does it?”, and the answer is evolution. The essential distinction between philosophy and theology is that philosophy speculates about the real world and not about the supernatural. It means that philosophy becomes a form of theology unless it roots itself from time to time back in reality to find out whether its speculations are fantastic or not. Philosophy therefore ultimately has to be empirical just as science is or be hapless conjecture. Most philosophy therefore “is only an interpretation and, at best, only provides an intelligible account of the possibility of experience”.

Again, merely by repeating the statement “successes are successes because they correspond with reality” does not make it true. There have been many things, including religions and philosophies, throughout human history that were incredibly successful for the purpose of explaining and organising human life, yet are now considered to be false. Modern science has a long way to go before it comes close to outliving ancient Babylonian or Egyptian magic and science. Traditional Chinese medicine has shown itself to be incredibly successful, yet you would consider its basis to be false.

I had not realised that I had repeated it. You did, but then wander off to definitions of success based on different criteria such as popularity or timespan. Science is successful (it works) because it corresponds with reality, whereas religions and ancient magic were successful (popular and long lived, respectively) because they correspond with unreality. I know nothing about traditional Chinese medicine, but, as medicine, must have been empirical and crudely scientific because it treated observable symptoms.

Furthermore, science is about far more than the cataloging of trial and error, it is about explanation and that is a matter of interpretation. Moreover, success depends on context and purpose, and as you were quite adament about in your email, due to the time scales involved, successes within social context cannot be attributed to natural selection. On a realist account, the instrumentality of any idea or practice cannot be used to prove its truth without further conceptual work. This is why I have shown the operation and function of mechanical realist metaphysics because it lays down the precepts and assumptions necessary for technological success to be associated with objective truth.

It is indeed about explanation, and the explanation is the hypothesis which, in trial and error, is the guess at a solution. It is then tried and declared in error or not. The hypothesis is therefore declared successful or not, and the successful ones accumulate into a body of knowledge. I look forward to seeing how you relate technology with it, but agree that technology preceded any formalisation of science and so technology is not merely applied science. Science is just as much theoretical technology, and, I repeat, philosophy is a type of science or, historically, the reverse. The paradigm shifts of science seem to occur when some genius thinks out of the box, thinking therefore far more philosophically than the typical scientist at his bench.

Just as the workability of models of the æther for over 100 years of scientific research made the wave theory of light intelligible and yet those models all proved to be false, so there is no necessary and suffcient reason to believe that the workability of contemporary models are true because they are useful in ongoing work.

Well, sure, but a wave theory needed a medium for the wave, and æther was no more than a speculative medium for the waves. Faraday and Maxwell had not yet provided a better desciption—electromagnetic fields. Now we have moved on further. The truth of the hypotheses is that they offer an explanation of the phenomena observed. They might not be true absolutely but, by incorporating more data, we aim to converge towards whatever absolute truth there is. Plainly enough, if the current hypothesis is inadequate for the data then we are not converging and need a new hypothesis. Lo! Thinkers of a philosophic bent come up with one, and the convergence continues.

So whilst I can understand how for a mechanical realist the ongoing successes in building and explaining machines can lead us to believe that we are pealing away the layers of the cosmic onion, whether or not those beliefs are true all depends on what is at the centre of the onion. So the fact that you find religion to be an aesthetically unsatisfactory route to knowledge is epistemological irrelevant, because whether a religious idea is “some duff explanation” depends very much on whether it is true or not. And that is a different question as to whether it is useful or has been realised by a satisfactory use of reason and evidence. When your Catholic friend says that he found the idea of transubstantiation to be beautiful despite its irrationality that was because he, like you, considered an idea to be rational only if it is based in science. Again it takes considerable philosophical argumentation to support the idea that science is rational, yet long show that rationality must be scientific. Whether or not it is rational to believe in transubstantiation depends only on whether it is true or not. [Added note: Apologies, I meant to write, “Whether or not it is rational to believe in transubstantiation depends only on whether one knows if it is true or not.”] Hence the problem with most religious ideas is that we just cannot know whether they are rational or not and if one takes them to be true without knowing them to be true then one is being irrational. The same is true of scientific theories. If one takes a theory to be true, without knowing that it is true, then one is being just as irrational as the person who accepts religious ideas as truths.

Your definition of rationality as believing what is true is false. As you say, if there are no criteria of truth, then we cannot know, on this definition, what rationality is. Rationality is simply having reasons, causes or explanations for a belief. Merely to assert something with no reason or with no discernable reason is to be irrational, even if the thing asserted happens to be true. Religions assert things as having been revealed by a supernatural source, a source which is not discernable. In science there are criteria of truth, and so scientific hypotheses are rational, even if they subsequently are shown to be untrue by further scientific investigation. Religion is fundamentally incorrigible because its assertions are arbitrary. Science is corrigible because its assertions are subject to testing against a measure, that of Nature, and so correcting.

When I wrote: "Whether or not it is rational to believe in transubstantiation depends only on whether it is true or not." I meant to write, “Whether or not it is rational to believe in transubstantiation depends only on whether one knows if it is true or not.” which as you can see from the passage fits in with the rest of the things that I was saying. So can you change this? However, if you do, you should also remove your sentence, “Your definition of rationality as believing what is true is false.” because that is your correct response to my incorrect and rushed typing -- rather than my meaning in the rest of the paragraph.

OK. I agree that if you know something is true or not, then you have a reason for knowing it.

The corrigibility of science is open to question and so I think that my analogy between science and religion is a little closer to the mark than you would like to even entertain, let alone accept. Of course, like fashion, beliefs change from time to time, but, unlike fashion, people risk their lives for their beliefs because, rightly or wrongly, they believe them to be true. The same is true of scientists and religious people. Scientific theories and paradigms change from time to time, but individual scientists struggle with their theories because they believe them to be true. And, in the case of the Soviet Union, many scientists were willing to risk the work camps and asylums because they held their theories of genetics (which are now considered to be wildly inaccurate) to be truer than the sanctioned theories of the state. In the contemporary US, many scientists in genetics are facing removal of tenure and unemployment for criticising the claims and experiments of biotech corporations. Yet the theories of genetics used by these critics are very likely to be replaced in the near future. Both religious people and scientists have risked a great deal for the sake of their right to question orthodoxy and religious people and scientists have made huge efforts to maintain the status quo. Thus both religion and science has been forces for feedom of thought and the suppression of freedom of thought.

You demonstrate that science is corrigible, even in circumstances where oppressive bosses and governments try to enforce an incorrigible ideology instead of science. You also demonstrate that some scientists are admirable in standing up for the principles of their discipline despite sanctions applied against them, whereas earlier you were speaking harshly of scientists as building rockets and atomic weapons as if they were of a single mind and ideology. You end up on a more balanced note, but I still think you are failing to recognize that this is not simply a comparison of individuals. It is a comparison of ideologies and the institutions that represent them—revealed religion and discovered science. Science is sufficiently open for its paradigms to be challenged. Religion will not accept challenge—cannot accept it without risking losing its distinctive characteristics. And it is no bad thing that science is not so easily correctable that it is subject to whimsy. It is the way that scientists hang on to their pet hypotheses sometimes until they die, that stops science from becoming mere fashion. New ideas have to be shown to be superior to the old ones, and the defence of the old ones by older scientists ensures it.

“In particular, my criticisms are largely directed at patriarchal religions, not nature religions like Hinduism and obviously not atheistical ones like Buddhism. I agree too that Quakers have often been exemplary as Christians, but then Quakers do not have a priesthood to beguile and control the members.”

Putting aside the fact that Hinduism is patriarchal and the many types of Buddhism are theistic, the very fact that you say “Quakers have often been exemplary as Christians, but then Quakers do not have a priesthood to beguile and control the members” means that there is something that is “exemplary” for a Christian to be, in your view, and, consequently, your criticisms should not be directed at Christianity per se, but rather at the uncritical following of orthodoxy—this seems to be something that is more widespread than religion and is more a critique of human beings than religion.

You are mistaken about Hinduism being patriarchal, and Buddhism was unquestionably atheistical at origin, though subsequently gods have been reintroduced in some branches of it. Again, when I speak of exemplary Christians, I can make my own judgement from the principles expounded by Christ about how Christians ought to behave without endorsing Christianity. That is what I judge exemplary Christian to be. Quakers follow more of them than most other so-called Christian sects. Asd a matter of fact, inasmuch as Christianity prescribes a set of principles to live by, there is much in it that I can admire and accept. There are even liberal Christians who have rejected all the supernaturalism, simply taking the principles of life Christ recommended and lived by. They too are exemplary Christians if they stick to these principles. Unfortunately, there are only too few of them, most Christians preferring to believe the supernatural superstructure—meant as a coercive psychology to impress obedience—is somehow real and more important than the living rules it offers. It is this conviction that they are the chosen people of God that makes all patriarchal religions morally unstable. It is the belief that God approves that allows them to act disgustingly and commit the most monstrous atrocities. I doubt that ordinary irreligious human beings could do what religious ones do to others without a twinge of compunction.

If you can accept this then it seems to me that you should redirect your criticisms away from this science vs religion rut, and on to a critique of the oppression of freedom of thought and diversity, from whatever source, because it seems to me that the fact that this oppression has been evident in religion is a matter of historical contingency but does not reveal it in essence. Religious oppression is a product of this deeper oppression of freedom of thought and diversity. So it seems to me that the question of whether a belief or practice is a good or bad one is a deeper question that whether it is religious or scientific. There are just as many religious people who question their “elders and betters” as there are scientific people who question the foundation of science. In fact, in my experience of both, they are about the same in this respect and, hence, the problem of ignorance and bigotry transcends and shapes both science and religion. That is why I completely disagree with you when you say:

“The instances that you cite show that religion is not what it professes to be, and the believers in any religion are plainly not bothered about whatever there is in the supposed holy book. The most cursory reading of the message Jesus had was that poverty was the blessed state, and love of your fellow man the way to get to heaven. Most Christians ignore both of these readings.”

because it completely ignores (in a most unempirical and unfalsifiable way, I must hasten to add) that actually most of the critiques of Islam and Christianity have come from within, based on close readings of their holy books, and you are “willfully” ignoring thousands of years of theological and critical debate within both religions. But then I guess that Sufi and Franciscan readings of their holy books to criticise hypocrisy demonstrate that maybe religious people are a little more intellectually and morally contentious than you give them credit for. Of course, lots of people do not bother to read their holy books and just listen to their “elders and betters”, but ask yourself how many science students try to verifiy the truth of the theories and facts that they are taught. The laziness and conformity of many people is apparent in both religion and science. And I will not accept prejudice and bigotry from either religious or scientifically persuaded people.

Quite right, too, but you certainly seem to have a bigoted or jaundiced view of science and scientists, and in trying to equate religion with science, you are failing to accept the historical facts about Christianity that show it never to have been willing to admit freedom of thought and diversity, even today! Indeed, it is because I agree with you about freedom of thought and diversity that I criticise Christianity here and on the pages. The European dark ages were not dark because they were short of sunlight. They were dark because they were short of enlightenment, the church vigorously suppressing pagan culture and education and not having anything to put in its place except empty and soul destroying ritual and worthless sacraments. People were told God had ordained the order of things and so there was little or no chance for centuries of anyone to better themselves unless they took to banditry. The church practised learned helplessness on the people of Europe for a millennium, until even the clerics got sick of it. The Evangelicals and their kind are doing their best to create the conditions for a return to the dark ages, and everyone should know just what is going on.

As for the critiques of Christianity and Islam, mostly they are scarcely critiques. Where they criticize orthodoxy, it is for not being more obscure and oppressive enough, and often they are simply weaving endless knots of worthless speculation of no value at all. Sufism is bizarre. S Francis was himself a Christ but his own teaching was forgotten in practice within a generation or two, and the Franciscans were as monstrous as the Church generally seeking out heretics along with the Dominicans to roast against a tree. You continue to posit a few individuals against religious institutions and the mass of their members, but you are again wrong when you charge me with ignoring the criticisms of Christianity by Christians. I have acknowledged several times that most of what we know comes from Christian scholars trying to be honest. I accept that there are some who put proper scholarship before their belief, but they are all too few, they are swamped by the dishonesty of their colleages who think God wants them to be liars, and therefore they need a lot of work to find among the dross, unless the dross draw attention to them by decrying them (not uncommon) or they leave the Church themselves in disgust. You miss the point in saying that many religious people just listen to their elders and betters. They are not supposed to do anything else. Divines and scholars in cloisters and anchorages might raise doctrinal points but the congregations are not to do it. The whole objective is to suppress questioning. That is what faith is! As for science students not verifying theorems, the point of science education is to show experimentally that the theorems work even in school laboratories. But even if science students did not have practical experiments and demonstrations, the whole of the modern world is daily proof that science works. Technology and science eventually came together and theory stimulated practice and vice versa yielding for us all the gadgets and medicines we depend upon today to extend our lives while living comfortably.

That is why I argue that we need examine both science and religion in the context of the question of what sort of society that we want to live in. This is a matter of articulating our vision of the world that we would want to live in and how we should go about realising that vision. This is why, as I have now said three times, I have no intention of putting forth a new metaphysics to replace science, but advocate that both science and religion must be subordinate to deeper philosophical questions about who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it.

Not being willing to suggest any improvements means you are being carpingly critical of science, while being apologetically uncritical of religion, just as most of the media hacks in society are, the people who write propaganda for the ruling elites of neocons, Straussists, greedy corporate bosses and corrupt governments. I quite agree that we should think of what society we should like to live in, and that I am doing, but you are giving the people you yourself profess to criticize at core ammunition and authority to continue their promotion of abstactions and obfuscations meant to confuse and control people, and their denigration of the only discipline that is out of their methodological control, and therefore available for beneficial use as well as the uses they want to put it to. You offer criticisms of science but will not suggest how it can be improved to avoid the criticisms you make. That is what cranks and New Agers do all they time. They spread the idea that science is like religion, a type of magic that just has to be practised to make it true, and leads to beliefs in crystals, perfumes, astrology, Tarot and goodness knows what other scams, as well as the great scams of out society, established religions. This is why I said earlier that your work can be used in ways that you might not have considered. They do not need to understand it, they just need to use your name and your conclusions. You have said quite emotionally you are sick of them—scientists—and I am sick of all of the phonies who use lies and trickery to beguile people. There are scientists among them that have sold their souls, but the whole of some organizations are purely to con people. Society does not need to be egalitarian so long as its people are conditioned to be honest, considerate and not greedy, unlike ours. Science could be much more valuable in such a society than it is today.

ps I have thought about it and if you think that any of the stuff in our emails is of interest then feel free to put it on your webpages. But please check for typos first and do not misrepresent my opinion by selective editing. No that I think that you would do with the latter.

Sure, I’ll correct the typos I notice, but don’t then tell me I’ve altered the sense of what you were saying! We all know that top-of-your-head jottings are not going to be as representative of anyone’s thought as a considered and corrected book, but it has the advantage of spontaneity which readers often seem to like. Now I must try to make inroads into your serious writing!

My immediate reflection as a response to your last email was that we are actually making progress to a point of agreement. But we have some way to go yet.

First things first, I have said in an earlier email that I agree with most of your criticisms against religion in general and christianity in particular. However, I did not explain this and you let it pass by. As I told you, I found your books on the subject to be very persuasive. I am also very much persuaded by Nietzsche’s interpretation as expounded in Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Antichrist (which is one of my favourite books). Have you read any of these books? There are many simularities between your interpretation and Nietzsche’s (although Nietzche expresses his with a little more venom!) and, if you haven’t read them, then I wholeheartedly recommend them to you. Personally, I am not religious at all. I too think that it functions as a form of social control to support the power elite and is also a crutch for the weak willed and feebleminded. But I actually rejected Christianity during my childhood based on my reading of one book: the Bible. Not only was it completely inconsistent on so many points, but it seemed to me that the “God” of the Old Testament worked to divide human beings from one another, tryranising human beings into fearful submission, for arbitrarily destructive and cruel reasons, whilst supposedly leaving us defenceless at the mercy of some fallen angel with all its powers and knowledge, especially when we obeyed without question. I actually concluded that either the “God” of the Bible was Satan or it was a badly written fiction. Either way, it should be rejected. I never understood the crucifixtion (yes, even at a young age, I knew the symbolism of the sacrifice of Abraham and the reformation of the covenant) because, given that Jesus was to ascend to heaven, there was actually no sacrifice. On the scale of things, the suffering of the son of God on the cross was less than every new born as they leave the womb (given that Jesus knew his destiny and the meaning of his suffering). It was a lesser sacrifice than that expected of Abraham. Not only is the New Testament inconsistent on several points, but the whole point of the story is weak. It struck me in my tender youth that either the message of Christ was completely misunderstood or that the New Testament was a badly written fiction. Again, either way, it should be rejected. I discussed this (as well as the other consistencies) with priests and reverends, and their response is the same: one must have faith. Well, I don’t and it has always struck me that any creator God of love, that has a personal relation with the created, would not impart irresolute faithlessness in a child who read the Bible, tried to understand it with an open heart and mind, as an innocent, and just could not accept its most fundamental premise—that it is the word of God. I did not then, and I do not now.

As I child (and as an adult too) I loved history and read avidly anything on the subject, especially ancient history, and the more that I learnt about the actions of the Catholic Church, in the old world and the new world, the more I came to consider it to be a profoundly evil institution, concerned only with the acquisition and abuse of wealth and power, that seemed as far removed from the teachings of Jesus as it was possible to be. And the protestant creeds, with all their abuses of children and brutality of women, with their mindless fanaticism and zeal, are not different (merely less institutionalised). As a child, I concluded that Christianity as a religion was actually opposed to the teachings of Jesus. My own view, was that I accepted that, if he existed, Jesus was a holy man, a wise man and possibly prophet of God who had been murdered and thereafter completely misunderstood. It is possible that he was the son of God and was resurrected, but I see no reason to believe it. Especially on the basis of the Bible and the works of Christianity.

Since childhood, I have studied all sorts of spiritual and religious works since then (including those of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and pagans) and when I have tended to find that they all have a profoundness (as did my reading of the teachings of Jesus) in their premise, but this is lost in the elaboration and encodification of their writings into a total system. All of these religions contain wisdom and many important reflections, but they all fall afoul of the need to make these into the totality of truth and exclude all others. So I concluded, somewhat inductively I admit, that all religions contain a piece of the truth, but none of them contain it all. I also am aware that all religions have been used by power elites for purposes of social control and by misfits to justify their misfittedness. But this struck me, since I was a teenager, to all point to one thing: the human obsession with power and superiority.

There seemed to be two paths—one towards wisdom and enlightenment, the other toward the acquisition of power over others. I chose the former and after a crazy teenage period in my personal exploration of this path (the details of which I do not need to go into here) I discovered my interest in mathematics, physics, and cosmology. After six years of intense and fervent study in this area (at both an undergradute and postgraduate level, where I worked with the Delphi Group in CERN) I found that I had deep philosophical problems with the epistemology of science—which lead me into philosophy, a doctorate in the philosophy of science, and writing the book that you are currently reading.

You see, as I said from the onset, at heart I am a realist. Whether or not God exists, whether or not angels exists, whether or not reincarnation occurs, whether or not human beings have souls, whether or not Jesus was the son of God, etc, etc, are human questions for which there are human answers. Whether these answers are true or false, despite the human capacity for believing assertions, depends upon reality. I simply do not know what the answer to the questions are. That is why I am an agnostic. I will not accept anyone else’s answers to these questions, not any priests, and not yours. You can stamp your feet all you like, but your assertion that Jesus was not the son of God is merely an assertion. You do not know one way or the other. I accept that your assertion is based on years of study and thought. Your books present reasoned arguments, based on biblical and historical interpretations, and are both interesting and very persuasive, as far as I am concerned, and I heartily recommend them to open minded people. But your arguments and interpretations, like Nietzsche’s, no matter how persuasive and reasoned they might be are simply arguments and interpretations. They are not proofs and could well be false. But, having said all that, the thing that I want to be clear about, is that I do not think that religion is equal or superior to science. My view is very similar to Compte (in broad strokes, but not in details) and I view religion and science as being a historical and personal stages of development and maturity of both societies and individuals. That is why I do not reject science, but instead argue that we need to place it in historical context as a human pursuit, achieving human forms of knowledge, that we need to understand in the context of human development.

I accept what you say here until you get to the foot stamping. I am not stamping my feet. I have gout, and it is not good for them! What I assert is that if there is no God, there can be no son of God, and so no Jesus the son of God, and God is a communal figment like Mother Goose and Puss in Boots, even though considered more important then them. You know that Popper has described it. Can I prove there is no God? Well of course I cannot, but nor can I prove there is no Puss in Boots, and even if God is more important than Puss, He no more deserves to be believed as actual. Science could hypothesise a God but there is no need for it, and it has no value as an hypothesis for explaining anything, merely deferring the questions. Both modern science and the medieval scolastics accept William of Ockham’s principle of parsimony (Ockham’s Razor) to avoid hopelessly promiscuous progeneration of entities as the Sufis did. Ockham and the Schoolmen began with a belief in God, but now we should use Ockham’s razor to get rid of the need to do it. God is superfluous, and that is why I do not believe in it.

It is a matter of levels. To return to a religious society is a form of retardation. It would be a terrible mistake and doomed to castastrophic failure. To try to force religious societies to become modern secular scientitifc societies is also a mistake because they are not ready.

How do you know they are not ready unless people are given the option, and science is explained fairly to them.

However, we live in a technological society in which science is an intrinsic foundation and, hence, we cannot reject science without destroying our society. My argument is that we need to critically examine the ideals and goals of our society. That is why I argue that we need to move to philosophical reflection upon the human condition and destination as the next level of maturity. This does not replace science or religion. It merely places them in context of a deeper philosophical reflection upon human meaning and purpose. As the next level, it needs religion and science in order to have a real basis for reflection. Of course, historically, philosophy is a very old pursuit, it is a profound aspect of human nature, but it became suppressed by religion and science. Its endless reflections upon human truths do not provide the adamant certainties that religion and science do. But the need for adamant certainty is a sign of intellectual immaturity. It is my hope that we have become mature enough to embrace our history as revealing the uncertainty of human existence and place both religion and science under the gaze of philosophy in order to reflect afresh upon the meaning and purpose of human existence and the nature of the society that we are building.

You are not being too consistent here. We are not ready for a scientific society but we are ready for a philosophical one? Nor do I think philosophy has been repressed, by science at any rate. Perhaps clever people have been inclined to turn to science rather than philosophy as being more fruitful, but many of the philosophers you admire were scientists too, and the scientists you dissect as doing something they only knew they were doing imperfectly were philosophers too. Science is an excellent way of getting people from always wanting and thinking they can get certainty. Whether the presentation of science reflects how it really evolved or not, science is presented as being based on doubt, and that I think is a proper presentation of it because it requires people to think. Doubt is creative, certainty is stultifying. When religions have forced their certainties on to people, society has stagnated. Nor does science claim to get certainty, as far as I can see. It is an optimisation process. If you like, what one of your heroes calls asymtotic realism.

The reason why I defend religion—even though I am quite contemptuous of it—is that I am having an argument with you. You are uncritically pro-science and anti-religion and therefore, in order to promote a more balanced view, I have defended religion against your criticisms. If I were having a argument with a religious person then I would be criticising their faith too.

It seems perverse to me to defend what has had and still has immense amounts of money and manpower spent on its propagation, often when no other view was permitted, on the grounds of promoting balance. As I have said, it is fashionable to attack science today, because it diverts attention from the true cause of social problems. Newspapers do it constantly, and right wing hacks even make money writing books about it in between their boozing sessions in Fleet Street pubs and wine bars. If I seem uncritical of science, it is because it already has plenty of critics, incorrect ones most often, in my view. If I seem uncritically against Christianity, it is because I have indeed spent a lot of time reading about its monstrous past, and have concluded that it does not have enough merits to be worth listing in the face of its disastrous practice. We make judgements on the balance of evidence, not on faith.

But, there is a deeper motivation than just playing devil’s advocate, so to speak, because I think that the adamant faith in science that you express is very analogous to religious fundamentalism. You seem to reject all possibility in any religious truth as a matter or principle. Contrary to your position on religious beliefs, the lack of evidence is not itself evidence. Atheism is as much an unfalsifiable position as theism is (and hence, if we take falsifiability to be part of the scientific method) a completely unscientific stance. It seems to me that, on the basis of science, one should be an agnostic. Of course I respect and value your defence of science against religious fundamentalism (and I would side with you if we were both arguing against such a person) and, as you finally confessed, this is a bias based on your own values. You value science as being a profound benefit for you as an individual and the society in which you want to live. This, for me, should be the starting point for our discussion, but, alas, we have some way to go before we get to the starting point.

I disagree that lack of evidence is not evidence. Lack of evidence is evidence. It is evidence of absence when something’s presence ought to yield evidence. When the absence of evidence has lasted for thousands of years despite the best efforts of earnest men to find it, then it certainly is evidence of absence. It is not proof of absence, admittedly, but only Christian want proof from their opponents but require no evidence at all beyond what they have been told to believe. That is the sort of gross imbalance that I seek to correct. Since we have agreed earlier that spirits, and so forth, ought to be detectable if they have any effect in reality, then the biggest one of them all ought to be. Nor am I finally confessing anything. My views have been presented transparently on the pages so I have nothing to confess to. That my case against Christianity is unbalanced is often said to me by Christian correspondents, but I say the same to them as I just said to you—their case is made ad nauseum. It is utterly superfluous for me to make it again except to ameliorate the case I make against this odious mental strix. I am very happy to have fair debates, but Christians are not. They want it all their own way.

Our disagreement hinges on the question whether science achieves objective knowledge or not. You assert that it does, using cases of practical and technological success as evidence that it does. I argue that this shows that experimental is only capable achieving objective knowledge if it construes machine performances to be the object of this knowledge. This requires a series of metaphysical precepts in order to classify any principles or mechanisms identified and abstracted from experimentation as being natural principles and mechanisms. There is nothing self-evident about our capability to make things such as electromagnetic motors that proves that such devices must be based on natural principles. It remains logically possible that there is an ontological distinction between the artificial and the natural and it may well be the case that human beings have the power to create things and bring them into the world.

If you seriously thought this was a possible explanation of the success of science and presented arguments for it, then I should respect them, though you would have the weight of the Christian establishment on your back even more than science now has, for saying human beings can play God! Without any arguments, however, I shall continue to believe that even though human devices are not natural, they must be based on natural principles, for no one has shown me any way that unnatural principles can be of consistent value over a broad spectrum of interwoven phenomena, including natural ones such as the principles of animal motion.

But, I mean much more than this. The understanding of Nature and natural principles is constrained and transformed when we understand both in technological terms. Thus physics is itself a product of particular modes of human interaction with things and each other and thus we cannot separate the being (namely the scientifically persuaded human being) for which such knowledge is intelligible from the way that such knowledge is produced, without making that knowledge completely unintelligible as knowledge. In my book I discuss the distinction between alethic knowledge and epistemic knowledge and argue that science produces knowledge of the former kind and not the later. This is important because it [shows] such knowledge to be bound up with how it is produced and thus shows how experimental physics is itself bound up [with] technology and the experimental creation of modern technological society. Thus, once we realise the alethic character of such knowledge then we can see how physics is only a way of understanding that is dependent on the presumption that it is good for us to understand the world in this way. Again this shows how physics is implicated in the postulation of the goodness of the technological society and, given that this society is in a perpetual state of innovation, that alethic knowledge is perpetually innovated and its truth-status is perpetually deferred to some future state of completion and perfection. The technological society is directed towards creating paradise on earth, so to speak, and equates truth with technological power. In my book, I argue that this equation requires a metaphysical foundation (mechanical realism) that cannot be itself tested on the basis of experience because it transforms experience in such a way that only refinements of the technological framework can be tested but the framework itself remains unavailable for scientific scrutiny. Thus arguments about the truth of science are, in fact, arguments about the naturalness of technology and the value of the technological society. Which is why I argue that science needs to be placed under the critical gaze of philosophy.

That is why you argue it, but you have persuaded yourself of something that is unremittingly critical of science, and, even if there is something in what you say, nothing emerges from it that could improve what people are currently doing. The reason is, I suspect, that you are just looking at it from a different perspective, and so are doing no more than changing from orthogonal co-ordinates to polar ones. Moreover, since we are at best only embryonic gods, not fully delivered ones, we are unable to give a complete explanation of anything, and so any field of endeavour can be subjected to carping criticism. If science had been describable in your terminology as organic realism because it consisted of model life forms, you would have been able to bring forth some similar criticism. Scientists generally seem aware that they are model building, and you perhaps achieve your objective in forcibly reminding them that their models are mechanical, but having said it, the models have explanatory value, and seem to transfer seamlessly into the natural world. As for your distinction between alethic and epistemic knowledge, I still have not got it, perhaps because I cannot avoid thinking that “alethic” pertains to truth and “epistemic” pertains to knowledge and so you are talking about a distinction between true knowledge and knowable knowledge or knowing knowledge. It highlights a problem with philosophy for we unphilosophical mortals, and that it that much of it ends up, as I said before, as hapless conjecture in which words are invented or redefined to suit the arguments of the philosopher. Quite how that differs in principle from what you are criticizing about science, namely forcing it into a square shaped box then declaring it to be square, I cannot see. You tell me to examine the metaphysical basis of science, but what is the metaphysical basis of philosophy?

We cannot so readily distinguish between the organisation of scientists with our technological society and what the scientific method is. Modern science is a technoscience and its methods are defined by how its practices and ideas are related and not the other way around. The scientific method is the organisation of practices and ideas. It is the organisation of science in our society. This is why I argue that the abuses of people and other beings in the name of science or religion is a deeper problem than the truth of science or religion.

You illustrate the point I just made immediately by extending the meaning of “scientific method” to cover the whole of the social organization of science because it suits your argument. No doubt we shall have to disagree about what the scientific method is, though it would only be because you must have your wider definition of it, for you admit in your book that science is a trial and error method, just as I explained it, even though you say it is a trial and error way of constructing new machines, and not determining anything about Nature. Of course, if Nature can be constructed from six machine elements, then it is just an alternative way of analysing the same thing.

The organisation of the roles of science or religion within society is a question of the distribution of power and the question of who society is good for. Within an unjust society both science and religion will be inevitably unjust and tools for maintaining the power of a social elite. Everything here depends on the question of justice and that is a philosophical question. Of course, many human beings start off with good intentions but end up being corrupted by the struggle up the greasy pole, but that is does not justify their action. It only explains it (perhaps, it excuses it too). But this is a consequence of the fact that only the corrupted are permitted to climb the greasy pole. Everyone else is pushed off. But the decision to climb is a choice and individuals are accountable for their actions. Everyone is in a position to be defiant. Slavery is as much a product of people allowing themselves to be enslaved, as it is the product of people capturing other people and putting them in chains. The slave masters can torture and starve the slaves, but they cannot make them pick up the tools and do the work. It might sound harsh, but every time that someone chooses slavery over death then they propagate slavery because they make it work. And this is even especially relevant when one has children. I owe it to my children to show them how to live life well, being free and happy, whilst being compassionate to others, not so they copy me, but so they see that it is possible. It would be better for me and my children to die, rather than live as slaves. One has a duty to humanity to be as free and happy as one can be. After all, as Socrates observed, for us agnostics, we do not know that death is good or bad, but we do know that to live life against our nature is bad for us.

It is very romantic, but I do not think you have the right to sacrifice even your own children for your theories, though your own life is yours to dispose of as you wish. Your children might easily not be as willing as you are to give up their lives, even though they are not free. They might think so long as they are alive there is the chance of changing things, and plenty of people have been right about that. I, for example, would sooner see the slave owners enslaved than to see them notionally deprived of an income by giving away my own life so easily, while being unsure that all of my fellow slaves would do the same thing to secure a Pyrrhic victory. Many people facing up to the Romans at the time of Christ were willing to die rather than be enslaved. The defenders of Masada were the last of them, but they had fought first. The evidence is that Christ was among those fighting, and that is why he was crucified. People might be in a position to be defiant, but being defiant at a time chosen by your masters might ensure your defeat. And it still assumes that you are actually aware that something can be done—that the situation has possibilities of salvation. My point about scientists being politically naïve is that the politically naïve do not even realise what is going on, and so cannot chose a different direction.

So whilst I agree that collective action is necessary to solve the deficiencies of society, such action starts with individuals. It starts with me. It starts with you. Just expecting some abstract collective action to end social injustice, is akin to waiting for a cup to be thermodynamically formed from random motion. So I agree with you that

“…it is society that needs to change, must change, if we are not to make the world into a desert.”

but you need to accept that (some) scientists have provided the means by which the world can be turned into a desert. That is why (all) scientists need to take responsibility for their work, by placing their work into the context of wider and deeper philosophical and political contexts. Of course scientists cannot know all the consequences of their work and therefore cannot be held responsible for unforeseeable consequences. But they do need to be responsible in the sense that they must follow their work and the uses of their work into the wider world, publically joining the democratic fray about questions of how their work should be used and to what end.

I am glad to see you putting in the qualifying adjectives before “scientists”, even if grudgingly. Once it is done, I agree with what you say, and have said earlier that I would like to see some union or community of scientists willing to stand up for scientific ethics and have a proselytizing spirit. I have a feeling there might have been attempts to do this but so far they have not impacted on me. And, inasmuch as philosophers are a type of scientist, so long as they are interested in seeking answers to real questions and not theological ones, they ought to be members of it too.

When scientists do not do this then they are being irresponsible. This was actually Shelley’s point in Frankenstein. It wasn’t that Hugo Frankenstein was going too far by entering God’s domain. That is actually a poor reading of the book. Her point was that he made no effort to socialise “the creature” or prepare society for “the creature” and thus he created a monster. The story is about scientific irresponsibility as much as it is about human arrogance.

I can also see it as a criticism of God in creating a partial god that is not given the awareness of the responsibilities gods have. But I am happy to accept your interpretation, though we are already agreed that scientists are merely a subset of humanity with all of its faults. The hero or anti-hero was Victor. You are no doubt thinking of the French novelist Victor Hugo.

If a scientist makes every reasonable effort to make sure that his or her work is used for beneficial purposes and criticises the abuse of the work, then he or she has behave as responsibly as anyone could reasonable expect. Of course, if a scientists makes a new type of energy beam on a Pentagon contract then s/he still has behave irresponsibly should they use it for a weapon rather than the information collector that the scientist wants them to use it for. Politically naïvety is not a good excuse. Not any more.

It explains their behaviour, but I agree it is no excuse. There is still the problem of those who think they are doing right by helping to develop such weapons. The ones who sought to develop the A-bomb were doing what you advocated just now—they were determined they would not end up slaves of the Nazis or the Bushido. Perhaps they took your sacrifice further. They were willing to kill everyone in the world rather then accept tyranny. I object to them deciding for me what I should do with my life, so I am not excusing them, but simply wanting to understand them.

So, from many modern contexts, we may well conclude that science provides better explanations of our experiences than religious ones do. I accept this, but only because, as a society we are more scientific than religious because our experiences are bound up with practicality and technological mediation in a way that would be alien to medievals and ancients.

Furthermore, there are many deep and ancient questions, such as why there is something rather than nothing, what is the origin of the world, how did life start, what is the meaning and purpose of human existence, for which religion offers better explanations than science. Science can’t even offer anything but the most vague and handwaving explanation for many questions of deep and profound human importance. This is why religion is still a powerful source of meaning for the majority of human beings and mechanistic science is fundamentally inadequate. Furthermore, without putting science in its place within deeper philosophical questions not only will you be leaving a huge gap in your defences that the religious person can take great rhetorical advantage of, but science becomes as full of empty ritual and tom-tom pounding as any religion that associates physical activities with truth disclosure. It is your absolute refusal to question the foundations of science and its limitations that makes you your own worst enemy in the struggle against dogma, irrationality, and prejudice.

Throwing salt over your shoulder effectively keeps the Devil away. I have never met the Devil so far without needing to spread salt all over the place, but anyone who believed it and practiced it would say I am benefitting from what they do. They are keeping the Devil away from us all! It is an explanation for the absence of devils in our world, but not one that I am inclined to believe. Religious explanations are generally the same. They are not explanation but myths invented to account for the obvious. That God created the world is an explanation that a believer and even a theologian will accept, but it is not one that a scientist would accept, and not one that I can imagine a philosopher would accept either, not least because such questions assume there is an answer. You will tell me whether my assumption is correct. It is not obvious to me that the world had a beginning, and if God can be eternal, then I want to know from believers why the world cannot itself be the same. I would have thought that you would too. In other words religious explanations are not explanations, except, as we have noted already when they happen to be in some sense true by accident. As for the warnings you end with, the fact remains that science does something in the real world, and ultimately that is its justification. If no system can be complete in itself, then there will be some gap in any system, even the science based on a better metaphysical basis you imagine. If any theoretical system must be logically incomplete, then the criterion remaining is whether it continues to work or not.

This is quite evident when you say things such as

“Science is successful (it works) because it corresponds with reality, whereas religions and ancient magic were successful (popular and long lived, respectively) because they correspond with unreality. I know nothing about traditional Chinese medicine, but, as medicine, must have been empirical and crudely scientific because it treated observable symptoms.”

So, if I understand you, if a series of practices based on religious beliefs are successful then that is because they were based on falsehoods and could not be disproved, whereas if a series of practices based on scientific beliefs is successful it must correspond to reality. And in the case of chinese medicine (something which you admit to knowing nothing about) if it is successful then it must be crudely scientific because something unscientific could not be practically successful. So, there is no way that any religious practice could show to itself to be grounded in experience because even if it were to do so then the parts that were practically successful must be scientific. Unbelievable! You have it set up so religion must be false and science must be true—this is completely unfalsifiable, circular, and dogmatic. And you called me a crank!

You are beginning to sound cranky with arguments like this, and, of course, the origin of your remark which is your alignment with New Agers and cranks that I mentioned earlier. You are a philosoper, and a clever one at that, so you are trying to get away with a crude ploy here, and you must be aware of it. It is not a criterion of religious belief that it must be empirical. Of science it is. Plainly then, when medicine, whatever guise it has or name it adopts, uses experience of traction, pressures, stones and herbs to cure symptoms then it is being scientific. I am not the one who decides what religious principles are or even what scientific principles are. All I can do is observe them. Having done so, I can distinguish between them. Since these things are observable, they are falsifiable and are not circular or dogmatic. Dogmatic is a word properly applied to Christianity, from which it has its modern meaning of unarguable. For a man who is often keen on citing the derivation of the meaning of words as part of your arguments, you seem strangely blind over words like these.

Look we need to get past this impasse and look at what it means to be successful in an impartial and reasonable way. This gets us back to the nature of the empirical in science. So when you say:

“So long as hypotheses about the world work empirically science is being true to itself. The criterion of truth used in science, namely correspondence, matches our hypotheses with the real world. An effective disproof of science—a reductio ad absurdum—would be that it led to a contradiction of this assumption… Scientific theory is not true because it is supported by its theories except in the sense that its theories work in reality and so correspond with it. That is reasonable and logical. Unscientific ideas are false not because they are unscientific but because they do not have any adequate criterion of truth, whereas science has. To say they are “unscientific’ is simply a way of saying they have no objective criterion of truth. It is possible that some unscientific statement is true, but there is no way of knowing it.”

My point is that we need to look closely and question what scientists mean by “work empirically” and “correspondence, matches our hypothesis with the real work” and there is historical and contemporary case after case after case (many of which are referenced in my book) that shows that “correspondence” is not quite as simple and immediate as naïve scientific realists believe and would have us believe without question. Moreover, an “adequate criterion of truth” is not inborn or fell from the sky (otherwise there wouldn’t really be much or a need for an expensive scientific education). Thus whether or not scientific criteria are objective is very much the $64,000 question. Whether there is actually a scientific method at all is open to question. Of course, (some) scientists and (some) philosophers will define one for us on the basis of examples, but, the problem is that when one looks at these definitions in detail then one finds that they are not quite a clear cut and objective as it first seemed. Usually they are based on conventions and consensus, and often are full of assumptions and ambiguities. It seems that Paul Feyerabend (Have you read “Against Method”?) had a point when he argued that the history of science shows that there is no such thing as “the scientific method” but instead a mishmash of creative and critical tactics and techniques. Or as Kuhn argued, what constitutes a scientific method changes from era to era (you have read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”? Haven’t you?) I’m not saying that Feyerabend or Kuhn prove anything, but they do raise serious problems and questions about the objectivity of science.

I might as well not have read Kuhn, it is so long ago when he was fashionable, but after I had ceased to be an experimental scientist myself. I like the idea of paradigm shifts, but am quite happy to accept from my own experience that most working scientists do not follow philosophical prescriptions and have a fuzzy idea of the philosophy of science. (My own handbook was The Art of Scientific Investigation by W I B Beveridge, 1951. Beveridge was not a physicist but a doctor, and, you might be pleased to note, as the title suggests, he considered scientific investigation to be an art.) Nor have I read Feyerabend, and had no intention of doing so because my impression is that the guy was insane, but now that you are recommending him, perhaps I shall have to see whether I can borrow it from the library.I think the ones who have tried to find definitions of scientific method have sought it too much in their own particularities, whether some particular sort of scientists or some particular philosophical kite to fly. I have repeated that the essence of scientific method is trial and error, carefully recorded and systematized. You seem to agree up to a point. Both scientists and philosophers will not like it because it sounds too ordinary, but nevertheless that is what it is. The particular circumstances and apparatus are irrelevant to the central endeavour.

“Well, sure, but a wave theory needed a medium for the wave, and æther was no more than a speculative medium for the waves. Faraday and Maxwell had not yet provided a better description—electromagnetic fields. Now we have moved on further. The truth of the hypotheses is that they offer an explanation of the phenomena observed. They might not be true absolutely but, by incorporating more data, we aim to converge towards whatever absolute truth there is. Plainly enough, if the current hypothesis is inadequate for the data then we are not converging and need a new hypothesis. Lo! Thinkers of a philosophic bent come up with one, and the convergence continues.”

Putting aside the fact that you have got the physics a bit wrong (Faraday speculated on the connection between light and electromagnetism but did not provide any convincing demonstrations and he remained convinced in the existence of the æther; Maxwell proposed the light comprised of oscillating electromagnetic waves, but, still held that the notion of an electromagnetic wave still required a medium, the æther, in order to be intelligible because the electromagnetic permeability of space was non-zero. Even Einstein (in his later life) and Paul Dirac conceded that the æther was essential for the intelligibility of the wave theory of light, but by then the whole thing had become so mysterious with the quantum mechanics of photons (something which Einstein rejected because of its unintelligibility) that it was less important and the æther had become irrelevant. There is also a huge body of historical work (some of which is by physicists) showing how there were many problems with the rigor of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the simplistic models of the æther being used at that time. The big question is whether coherence and convergence actually get us closer to absolute truth or not. You should read David Gooding’s “Experiment and the Making of Meaning” for an excellent account of how Faraday invented the idea of an electromagnetic field of force on the basis of converging representations and interventions—I cover Gooding’s work in my book, but he goes into an excellent level of detail on the basis of Faraday’s lab books.

Ah! So many things to do, and so little time to do it. You get to wish you had not wasted so much time when you were younger, but then again, I was too immature to make much of things then. I simply meant Faraday and Maxwell led us away from the notion of æther via electromagnetic fields into the probability fields of quantum mechanics, but I’m happy to be corrected if it was misleading. I gather that efforts are being made to repeat the Michelson-Morley experiment in a definitive way since previous repetitions of it have sometimes shown the presence of an æther, or, at any rate, some reason why the speed of light was not invariant in orthogonal directions. It would be exciting for science if the outcome was not zero. Would Einstein be knocked off one of his pedestals? And again, if coherence and correspondence and utility are all rejected as criteria of truth, do we have none at all? If we have criteria that allow us to pick machines that work, and can then show that machines merge seamlessly with natural motions, then there are still criteria of truth. Evidently you reject this too, and again I have to say you are unremittingly negative in your philosophy. Does anything positive come out of it, or is it meant just to stop anyone from wanting to do science because it is so horrid?

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