Truth
Science for the Perplexed Christian
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 11 September 2002
Science
People are fond of saying that truths are of different kinds, such as scientific truth, religious truth or poetic truth. What, though, do these truths have in common for them to merit the single word “truth” to describe each one of them? If truth is so arbitrary that it differs in different situations or applications then what is true about it? Surely whatever the yardstick of truth is, must apply everywhere for truth to be true. Science has such a yardstick, whereas the so-called other types of truth like religious truth are no more than opinion, even if a lot of people share it.
The word, science, means knowledge not nonsense. Some people think there are types of knowledge that are not science, like thought transfer, thaumaturgy and theology, but these are nonsense not knowledge. The central point about scientific knowledge is that it is not just a collection of disconnected facts. Science is interlinked knowledge and structured knowledge, and it is discovered systematically not just decided by whim or authority.
Science does not pretend to be able to prescribe truths on demand, but the point of science is to approach asymptotically to whatever the truth is. It successively approximates to the truth as new facts emerge and old hypotheses have to be refined. it follows that science does not claim ever to have the truth. Immanuel Kant stated:
Hypotheses remain hypotheses—suppositions, the complete certainty of which we can never attain.
An asymptote is only ever reached at infinity, and that means that it never is in practice. Neverthless, it can be approached to whatever degree of closeness is required subject to the laws of physics themselves. Religions, however, deal in certainties—in absolutes—but for all their certainty, no one can certainly demonstrate them. Science is a humble practice. The respected American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, summed it up as:
The conclusions of science make no pretense to being more than probable.
Science is never certain and does not, like religion, claim to have access to absolutes, but given the patience to keep trying and refining hypotheses, any level of certainty needed can be achieved—if not new discoveries will.
The system for finding scientific knowledge allows new knowledge to be predicted in the form of theorems that can be verified and used in reality, thus confirming the scientific laws and rules used to derive them. Religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity are fond of their prophets. But only science has a confident record of prediction of the future using theorems derived from its laws and hypotheses.
Although for convenience of study, scientific knowledge is partitioned into fields, the central principles and and theories of science cross these boundaries so that scientific knowledge is a single body of knowledge not a disconnected assembly of different bodies of knowledge. This interconnectedness makes scientific knowledge stable and assured. Nothing that is not at the frontiers of science is in doubt. The validity of science is confirmed across the whole scientific structure within the boundaries that are prescribed—the boundaries of applicability. These boundaries are the frontiers of scientific knowledge where discoveries are still being made.
Truth and Honesty
We are able to exchange information and therefore our criteria of truth by the symbols we call language, and ultimately our ideas of truth are concerned with linguistic expressions. The correspondence theory of truth is the one that is common sense and is the notion of truth that science builds itself on.
A true sentence is one which states that a state of affairs is so and so, and the state of affairs is indeed so and so.Alfred Tarski.
Thus scientific truth is an expression of a state of affairs that can be tested by examining the actual state of affairs. If the state of affairs examined is found to be so and so, and that is what the scientific statement said about it, then it was a true statement.
No scientist can build up a reputation by publishing lies because it is the worst crime that a scientist can commit, and as long as science is a free and open endeavour, lies will always be discovered by others testing scientific statements. Karl Popper said the search for truth presupposes ethics, and so it does in science. No dishonest scientist can expect to find or contribute to finding truth.
All scientific reports should give a precise description of what was done so that any other scientist can repeat it precisely. Any scientists setting out to repeat an experiment must repeat it precisely. Any inclination to improve the procedure must be resisted until the previous work has been successfully repeated, or has been proved by precise repetition to be ineffective.
Scientists are expected to be honest but dishonest ones are exposed from time to time. It sometimes happens, especially when a scientist has an elevated reputation, that their work is simply accepted. Since most such scientists have their reputation because their work was good, such acceptance is rarely wrong, but on occasions it has been. Sir Cyril Burt, who invented his results on the IQ of twins and even invented two co-workers who did the supposed field work, was not challenged because he reported results that simply seemed to confirm in spectacular fashion what IQ testers believed anyway. Only after his death were his results found to be statistically impossible and the fraud was exposed. Similar problems can arise in some fields that are on the fringe of science. Poor understanding of scientific method, a refusal to apply it properly, and the vested interests of the learned professors and doctors in post can close a field to serious error. Historical dating in the ancient near east is quite possibly such an area.
Scientific Method
It is a popular delusion that science works by induction. In the nineteenth century several philosophers of science, including J S Mill and Karl Pearson, thought it was so, but William Whewell showed that science really worked by a hypothetico-deductive process. The hypothetico-deductive method is simply “trial and error” in less grand language. Today, no scientist or philosopher thinks that science is inductive.
The strategy of scientific discovery is nothing more than the systematic application of common sense. To apply scientific method in everyday life when my electric cooker does not work, I do not use induction to solve the problem. I make a hypothesis to explain what has gone wrong and test it. Faced with a fresh and unfamiliar problem, the method might not be so systematic, but that is where experience in science comes in.
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Hypothesis 1: Someone has switched the cooker off at the wall socket.
- Test 1: Check the wall switch. It is on. Hypothesis 1 fails.
- Hypothesis 2. Someone has altered the timer and the oven is in off mode.
- Test 2. Check the timer. Twiddle it round all 24 hours. The oven remains off. Hypothesis 2 fails.
- Hypothesis 3. The wall plug has fused.
- Test 3. Touch the plug. It is hot.
- Test 4. Remove the fuse and put it in the washing machine plug to see whether the washer is working. The washing machine does not work. The fuse is faulty.
- Test 5. Purchase a new fuse and put it in the cooker plug. Cooker now works fine.
Testing a series of hypotheses led to the answer to the problem. Scientific method is essentially nothing more than this. The scientist has to consider several factors that are in conflict. Naturally reason helps. I might think immediately that the plug had fused because I was using the oven, and suspected I had overloaded the cooker circuit, but unless I know that it is switched on, it makes sense to check the obvious first. I might have been inclined to check the fuse immediately, but checking the switch first takes no effort and that might have been the simple solution.
Induction played no part in any of this but it does play a part in field trip observations where the behaviour of an object or animal has to be watched and noted before any hypotheses can be made. I checked all the swans on the river Frome and they were all white. Now in the inductive theory of science, the observations led to the induction of the law that all swans are white. In the hypothetico-deductive method, they led to the same hypothesis—that all swans are white. The difference is that notionally a law is true but a hypothesis is falsifiable by testing. This is not a true law because there are black swans, although I did not see any on the river Frome. So induction leads to falsehood. My hypothesis however is not a law and is falsified as soon as someone reports a black swan. If no one ever reports a black swan, the hypothesis might eventually be felt to be so well established that it becomes regarded as a law.
Some religious critics of science claim that there is a leap of faith in formulating scientific laws because their understanding of scientific method is wrong. They stick to saying science is based on the the inductive method, knowing that they can claim the inducing of a law from observations always must involve a leap of faith. Their argument then is, of course, that they put their leap of faith at the beginning of their thinking and otherwise there is no difference between scintific thinking and religious thinking. Both, they say, require faith. In fact, any induction necessary in science simply leads to a hypothesis not a law. Scientists then seek to test the hypothesis. Providing that it is not falsified, it remains valid until eventually enough confidence exists in it to call it a law. Even then, the new name is just an honorary title for a well established hypothesis. There can be no leap of faith in science like that in religion because nothing in science is absolutely true, as we have seen.
What though of the deductive part of the hypothetico-deductive method? Sextus Empiricus, a third century philosopher, criticized deduction on the grounds that all deductions beg the question (the logical fallacy of petitio principii). Sir Peter Medawar illustrates it using the popular logical syllogism beginning with the premise, “All men are mortal.” Now in science this might be a hypothesis that I had formulated from observing that every man I ever knew died. The syllogism proceeds:
Socrates is man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Sextus Empiricus complains that nothing has been discovered that was not already presumed in the premise. So nothing new has been deduced in concluding that Socrates is mortal. If I thought I was finding out something new in using this syllogism then Sextus Empiricus would have been correct. The point though, is that I have formulated a general hypothesis from the sample of men that I have ever known, and I can use it to make a prediction about a certain man called Socrates.
My hypothesis tells me by deducion that as Socrates is a man he must be mortal. I check the records to test the hypothesis in this particular instance and find the Socrates died by drinking hemlock, thus poisoning himself. He therefore was mortal and my hypothesis that all men are mortal is upheld. Had he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That report about the hemlock is wrong!” I would have had to revise the hypothesis.
By having the hypothesis, indeed by having the law, since this is a hypothesis that is so well established that it can be considered a law, I can predict that as I am a man, I will die. This is the important value, and most often the purpose of science. It permits predictions to be made.
I can use the same law in relation to Jesus, a man considered by Christians to have been a god. The Christians tell us that actually Jesus was a man, all right, but he was God incarnated as a man. Very well then, as all men are mortal, and Jesus was a man—even if he was a god incarnated as a man—he must have been mortal. It follows that Jesus died and remained dead. Mortal men die. That is what mortality is. So Jesus died.
Of course, if the Christians were wrong about Jesus being God incarnated as a man, but was simply God pretending to look like a man, then Jesus was not a man and need not have died because gods are immortal. That might explain his being resurrected, but it also means that he was not God incarnated as a man, and God could therefore never have experienced what a man suffers in the situation of suffering that Jesus was in.
The Christian might claim that Jesus is a man and he is immortal so he is indeed an exception to the law. The scientist would honestly consider that, but would require uncontrovertible proof that it was so, if it were to overthrow a law based on the deaths of millions, indeed billions of men. If Jesus is not dead then he can be produced for the scientists to examine and it would quickly be established that he was incorruptible. That would settle any doubt about Christianity. Jesus, though, has always been reluctant to come forward. It is easier to think that the reason he does not is because he is in fact dead, and Christians are simply deluding themselves, and trying to delude others.
Multiple Methods or Just the One?
Medawar tells us very positively that there is “no such thing as the scientific method” because, if there were, any scientist ought to come up with a result by applying it. Apparently then some scientists do not come up with a result by applying it, but then some actors do not come up with satisfactory results by applying Stanislavski’s acting method. Having a method does not automatically mean success. Skill at using it is needed too, and anyone who has been trained to the stage of being called a scientist ought to have it.
The method for opening locked doors is a very simple one that most people can use with little skill. They use a key. First, though you have to have the key and it must be the right one. For most people, no particular skill is required in using a key because they are familiar with keys from an early age and most have learned the skill necessary to use them, but if someone did not have the skill, it might take a time for them to work out in their heads what the purpose of it was. So besides knowing or being able to work out a method, skill at it, equipment, experience and perhaps luck might be needed too. That is why a scientist is not guaranteed to solve a scientific problem simply by knowing the scientific method.
The scientist is most often in the position of having a large number of unknown factors in the problem they are solving, and each has to be teased out before the overall solution is gained. No one, except Medawar in this moment of lapse, thinks science is easy, method or no method. It was a lapse because it was so stupid for such a learned man. There is a method of batting in baseball and in cricket, and there is a method of bowling in each game. They look simple to an onlooker, but few people are actually any good at any of these skills, and of those who practice them sufficiently to become professionals, most never get beyond the journeyman stage. Few indeed become heroes of the games. Science is no different.
Medawar says there is no scientific method because there is a host of them. He is lumping together the central method of science—its strategic method—with a large number of tactical approaches used to effect the overall strategy. Scientists often call these methods or procedures in their scientific papers. Perhaps this repetition of the word method is a cause of confusion. The specialized approach, method, procedure or technique used in particular experiments are not the scientific method. Experiments are set up to collect data to test a hypothesis. It is the rational sequence of experimental testing and hypothesising that is the scientific method, not the particular circumstances or equipment needed to test any hypothesis.
Suppose I am faced with a locked door and my task is to get it open. First I make some observations of the door. I inspect it and, from what I observe, hypothesize that it is padlocked. My test is therefore to take a sledgehammer and break the padlock from the door and its frame. The padlock falls off and the door opens. My hypothesis is verified. Instead of testing the padlock hypothesis with a sledgehammer, I might have used a crow bar, or a hacksaw, or a set of skeleton keys, or a bent wire depending on my skills. More delicate tactics might have been necessary if a condition was that the door should not be damaged. All of these are not different scientific methods, but are different approaches to testing the hypothesis I made.
In a more scientific example, an organic chemist might be given the structure of a natural product that a colleague had elucidated by physical methods. In fact, the proposed structure is a hypothesis that has to be tested by synthesis and checking that the synthesised substance has the same properties and structure as the original. The experienced organic chemist has a large variety of synthetic methods at his disposal, and a large number of intermediaries that he could use as stepping stones to the structure he needs to synthesize. His skill is to know which ones offer the best bets—which ones are most likely to come up with the goods. Whatever route he choses, he is making a hypothesis that this is how the target product can be made in the laboratory and not in a plant or a liver.
After trying 150 different approaches over three years, the organic chemist writes up a long paper describing all his efforts and the reasons for them, and confesses they all failed! It is not, however, necessarily a scientific failure. Someone might read it because they are doing similar work and realize that a simple change in some condition in one of his attempts should work, tries it and succeeds at the first try. On the other hand others might try to repeat the results and find the same level of success—failure.
The conclusion might have to be that the product cannot be prepared in the laboratory using currently available methods. All the proposed hypotheses for making the substance are indeed wrong and have been falsified by a lot of patient work. It might send the biologists back to find a natural intermediary or an enzyme in the original plant. Once found, it itself might turn out to be easy to make, and that makes preparing the substance easy. Many people do not realize that rejecting hypotheses in this way is just as valuable to science as confirming them, in that it is leading the explorer to their goal. It might turn out that it is the enzyme that is the valuable substance here not the original natural product. Such serendipity is also a feature of science.
Medawar says that there is no scientific procedure that can be logically scripted. Presumably he means that a computer program cannot be written that will replace scientists. If it is true, it is because the methods needed by science to test the hypotheses they make draw upon too vast a manual to be put in a sensibly sized programme, but that is itself only a practical and not a theoretical limit. If all practical limitations are considered overcome then it seems unlikely that scientific investigation cannot be programmed relatively easily.
At present scientific progress is fairly simple in its central strategy, and fairly arbitrary in that two scientists independently solving the same problem will probably soon take different routes. This is no more than admitting that chess players do not see any chess board in the same way. Nevertheless some moves are obvious to anyone who is not a tyro. If a single move gives checkmate then that is the move to make.
In trying to open a locked door, I might hypothesize that the key is under the doormat or in the letterbox, and, finding a key in either one of those places, test the hypothesis that this key will open the door. What about the hypothesis that the door is not locked. Try opening the door without a key. It does not open. Is it simply sticking? Give it a firm push. Intelligence based on human experience seems essential at present to scientific discovery. Even accepting this, much of the logic can be programmed so that by interacting with the computer, the organization of the process of tackling the problem is made more systematic and less arbitrary. Diagnostic programs already are common to help medical doctors identify symptoms methodically. That is a hypothetico-deductive method. Games like Dungeons and Dragons probably are too!
The point of all this is that it is a good idea when tackling a scientific problem to take an overview first in which particular hypotheses are considered from the outset. These can be prioritised in terms of ease and expense, and likelihood of success. Eliminate any hypotheses at the outset, if they are easy and cheap to test, even if they seem unlikely. It might save embarassment akin to finding the door unlocked or the oven switched off at the mains! Judgements will have to be made on whether to do expensive and time consuming experiments that seem likely to yield the answer, or try a number of less likely but quicker and cheaper options. A separate grant application might be needed for an expensive option when it becomes unavoidable.
Science is an empirical method in which experiments are devised to test hypotheses. The daily work of scientists is to do experiments to decide whether some hypothesis corresponds with reality, or to collect data to allow such a judgement to be made.
The Scope of Science
Francis Bacon, in New Atlantis, considered that science should be thought of in terms of “effecting all things possible.” Since those heady days, scientists have been bullied and browbeaten into their ghetto where they are taunted mercilessly by talentless hacks toadying to the corporate media bosses. Bacon also thought we should use science to get power over nature, but such ways of thinking had been indoctrinated into people in the Middle Ages, and most scientists in Bacon’s time were clerics because they were the only people with the spare time and wealth to do it. Nature, at that time seemed so vast that it would never have occurred to anyone that humans could seriously harm it. To control it was the aim. Now we know that we cannot control it but we can harm it.
Bacon is Adelphiasophist in The Great Instauration when he advised “all in general” that they…
…take into serious consideration the true and genuine end of knowledge. That they seek it neither for pleasure, or contention, or contempt of others or for profit or fame, or for honour and promotion, or such like adulterate or inferior ends, but for merit and emolument of life, and that they regulate and perfect the same in charity.
He wants the aim of knowledge to be charitable. Quite so, and that should be to the whole of life not just to humanity. To make the world a better place to live in has, as an aim, so far been applied only to certain humans, but now we can see that such selfishness actually erodes our whole place in the world, and eventually we shall collapse into the pounding sea of extinction. The world must not be made a worse place for anything to live in. “Better or worse,” people might ask, “What do they mean?” In this context, the only suitable meaning is that the “better world” is the “more natural world.” That is the meaning of conservation.
A big problem with the scientists is that even clever ones like Sir Peter Medawar are convinced by anti-scientific propaganda that:
Political and administrative problems are not generally scientific in character, so that a scientific education and a successful research career do not equip one to solve them.Medawar, The Limits of Science
That firmly puts scientists into their own ghetto, but apparently sociology lecturers, failed businessmen, the idle sons of successful businessmen, bishops, lawyers, and even Mrs Margaret Thatcher, a lapsed scientist, are sufficiently well equipped, even for high office in government. Scientists in general should not participate in the democratic process, or if they do, only as voters, because of their lack of equipollence for anything more directly administrative. This is absurd in every regard.
Scientists have the same rights as any other citizen. Even if their training and profession did not equip them for political office, it is not a reason why they should not aspire to it. Why should a grocer or a coalminer be suitably equipped but a scientist not? In fact, science is ideally suited to equip people for such matters. It is a rational method for solving problems and offering proof and explanations. It is a practical method not merely literary or theoretical. Inasmuch as science is a profession that demands honesty, a scientist might be a breath of fresh air in the rank and fetid corridors of power. Perhaps, though, power corrupts scientists too.
It is true that scientific evidence is not the only evidence the scientist will have to deal with in the wider world, but more scientists in government might mean that they demand better evidence and less fiddled statistics from civil servants. Besides that, scientists have their training in assessing evidence. Scientific training should be just as good as legal training in this regard, and lawyers are considered ideally suited to parliamentary office.
If an issue arose such as fluoridation of the public water supply to avoid tooth decay, the epidemiological evidence for its effectiveness might be overwhelming. If that were the only criterion the scientist would have no qualms about approving it. The good scientist however would not be going on the epidemiological evidence alone. That only answers one question, but there are other questions too. The scientist ought to be better at appreciating the related issues that the fluoridation issue raises than lawyers and grocers.
Even such as the cosmetic effect of the fluoride in the water ought to be better considered by the scientist than the lawyer, especially the corporate lawyer whose employer will get a useful way of selling industrial waste. The fluoride might reduce decay, but what use is that when everyone then seeks dental attention to remove the brown blotches from their teeth.
The scientist might also want to be sure even of the sources of the epidemiological evidence. Is it sound or is some of it commissioned or conducted by fluoride companies? If it is, it cannot be trusted because of their vested interested in the outcome. Assessing the scientific evidence is something the scientist should obviously be good at, but it is an insult and a calumny on scientists that they cannot treat other forms of evidence scientifically. That is wrong and foolish for any scientist to argue.
Ultimate Questions
Only a failure of nerve could prevent the progress of science, so Francis Bacon thought. Sadly, the nerve of scientists seems to have failed. Scientists who are willing to debate with religionists and media hacks can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Sir Peter Medawar is too ready to concede that some questions cannot be answered by science. Popper calls them “ultimate questions” and Medawar calls those who disagree “doctrinaire positivists.” Liberal scientists like Medawar seem reluctant to use words like “doctrinaire” on the people who actually originated the word. People are taught that above all liberals do not attack people’s beliefs, but, when they are liberal scientists they can join in with the religionists and the hacks at sniping at their own profession. If having principles is doctrinaire then it is an insult to be proud of.
If these questions are beyond the competence of science, then they are beyond the power of any other field of study to answer. Science cannot answer these questions because they are not subject to empirical study, so what other study allows us to answer them? They are the very questions that religions claim they can answer. Well, answers can be given to any question providing that no one cares whether the answer is true or not. That is the religious situation. Children and immature adults get anxious about what happens when we die and where we came from and what is the purpose of life. Churches give them answers that satisfy them, because that is all they want. They are not bothered whether the answers can be shown to be true or not. Reassurance is what they seek.
Positivists tell us that the “ultimate questions” are meaningless questions that “only charlatans of one kind or another profess to answer.” Medawar says dismissing the “ultimate questions” in this way is unsatisfactory because they mean something to the questioner and to the “charlatans” who claim to answer them. This is extraordinary. Medawar is happy that religious clergymen offer these answers even though he does not believe them himself because he sees some merit in reassurring these anxious infants. In this he must be again in error.
Science is concerned with truth. If it disturbs people to know that they actually cease to be when they die, according to every bit of scientific evidence ever collected, then it is a shame, but it is not for the scientist to water down what they have found because people have been misled by others. There would be little anxiety about death if it was faced up to honestly throughout life.
What is worse, is that if these bogus answers are admitted, then the credentials of the charlatans who give them are upheld. Commending their answers as useful in some way justifies the vast and cruel industry, with its murderous history, called Christianity. Approving their answers benefits in the material world the cynical and greedy caste of priests and ministers who suck the blood of the anxious and ignorant by pretending they know what is unknowable. Immanuel Kant meant by “transcendent” beyond the realm of sense experience, and therefore science empiricism and common sense. Anything transcendent cannot effect us, except, perhaps, in the head, and there it cannot be distinguished from psychosis.
The Purpose of Life
One “ultimate question” is, “what is the purpose of life?” It is a favourite of religionists even though Medawar puts it beyond the scope of science. Put as a straightforward question, science can answer it thus:
If life has a purpose at all, it is to perpetuate itself.
Of course, it is called an “ultimate question” because it is not meant to be answered in this sensible way. No Christian will accept it because for them the answer is not the answer already contained in the question. For them, purpose is a property of a conscious creature. Since there were no conscious creatures when life set out, something else must have had a purpose for them and that something is God. So there we are. It is an “ultimate question” because the only answer can be God.
Really, the scientist faced with such reasoning has to ask, what then is the purpose of water running downhill? What is the purpose of positive attracting negative. These are simply properties of natural things. One might imagine that water flowing downhill seems to have purpose, but who needs to believe it has. The same with positive attracting negative charges. Why is it necessary to think that life has any more purpose? Like charged particles, it just does what it has to do. It shows the dishonesty of these “ultimate questions.” They look relatively innocuous but presuppose God in the only way that the believer will accept them answered.
As soon as life can sense something important to it, it will react to it, and that will be interpreted as purpose, even though the amoeba or rootlet being studied is not thinking about what aims in life it has. When anyone accidentally touches a hot iron they react by pulling away their hand. It is called a reaction. There is nothing conscious in it, so to what degree is there purpose in it? The answer is to the same degree as all life reacting to its surroundings. If this reaction is defined as purpose, then so be it, but it has only latterly in evolution become conscious, and even conscious animals still behave unconsciously and therefore without purpose in the conventional sense that Christians demand.
The sense of purpose of “reacting to the environment” is something that evolved itself from purposeless activity. Consider again the flow of water down a slope. It is drawn downwards under the pull of gravity on its mass. Suppose the slope began as a smooth polished slab of limestone. Water poured onto it meanders at random. Suppose it is poured on for thousands of years. By the end of the period the water will have disolved the limestone to give itself gullies to flow in and the meanders will have disappeared in favour of “purpose.” What began as random meanders ended in having definite directions conditioned by the gullies. This is an analogy of evolution.
Certain behaviours in the primitive life forms were selected simply because they were better adapted to the environment, quite by chance. Reacting to the concentration gradient of a substance in the water was one such selection. When the concentration gradient was of a substance characteristic of food, then the organism was effectively smelling food and heading towards it. Such an organism would have had more chance of feeding and a better chance of surviving. It can now be said to have purpose, but all it is doing is following a concentration gradient in its environment. Purpose had evolved from random favourable advantages the organism had in its environment. Life can evolve purpose, but God did not evolve. How did he get His purpose?
Assorted Ultimate Questions
An “ultimate question” is, “Is there life after death?” Every scientist can answer it.
When you die life goes on, but not yours because you are dead!
It will not do for such as Christians however, because it is not the answer they want. Here is a question. “Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?” Is it an “ultimate question?” It is meaningful to the child who asks it, whatever age they might be, and is similar in structure to “Is there life after death?” Life is recognizable. So is a pot of gold. Death is apparently difficult to recognize because you are not dead when you seem to be, according to Christians. Equally, the end of a rainbow is hard to determine. Neverthless, it will not be an “ultimate question” because it does not imply God, and that is what “ultimate questions” do. Here are more:
- Can geniis live in bottles?
- Do angels dance on the head of a pin?
- Does the wail of the Banshee mean death?
- Was Jesus resurrected from death into life?
- Did Joshua make the sun stand still?
Should any of these questions that make sense to the questioner be dismissed? Doubtless some will not be classed as “ultimate questions,” and they can be dismissed, but the criteria distinguishing them are not easy to discern. For God all is possible, Christians tell us, so the answer depends only on what God decides. The only people who know what God decides are the professional clergy of the churches, so the answer to them all is whatever they decide.
The answer to the last of the questions above, for a Christian, is an obvious, “Yes!” For God all is possible. The scientist, on the other hand, cannot be a believer in Christianity if it is necessary to believe this because scientifically it is impossible. If the Christian bishops say it is not necessary to believe it, then why is it being taught as if it were true? Admittedly, if this is an “ultimate question,” it need not be dismissed, but its ultimate answer should. It is a lie, and yet the Christians persist in it, and some of them even say they are professional scientists. So, the Christian charlatans still teach this in Sunday school and confuse youngsters in the name of God.
Even more important for the “charlatans” is the penultimate question, but it is no different from the previous one. It is quite impossible for a scientist to accept. All men are mortal!
The first three however, will probably be dismissed even by Christians. They will now readily accept the debates of the schoolmen were insane but they will not accept that the rest of their ideas were too, because they are the basis of Christianity. Banshees and geniis, even Christians dismiss as mythical creatures, but they are utterly unable to regard their Jesus in the same way.
First and Last Things
An inductive law is simply an hypothesis and so cannot be an absolute law. Deduction can do no more than bring out explicitly information that is already there. If I observe the orbit of Mars, I can deduce Kepler’s third law of planetary motion because the data contain the law. Medawar concludes from this that there is no way of knowing the answer to “ultimate questions,” one of which is, “How did everything begin?”
Yet, if Kepler’s law is in the the data of orbit of Mars, why cannot the answer to this “ultimate question” be in the data pertaining to the cosmos that cosmologists are presently studying? They have worked out what the universe was like only fractions of a second after the big bang. There does not seem far to go to reach the ultimate.
The same is true of last things. Observing part of the trajectory of a baseball allows its full trajectory to be worked out. It can be traced back to when it was hit, and it can be traced forwards to when it is caught or lands in the stand. Why is the universe any different? Collecting cosmological data, and studying the physics of interacting objects lets clever people work these things out, and they are doing exactly that.
Another problem Medawar invents is that we can see the origin only from one side because there was nothing on the other. That introduces some unstated scientific problem. If the baseball was created at its point of impact, nothing preceding it, and was destroyed when it was caught, nothing succeeding it, its full life was plotted from only part of its existence. There is no need to know the before and the after. There was not either.
Medawar comes out with quite silly arguments such as that the axioms of Euclid cannot tell you how to boil an egg. He assumes that science is in a different book from religion just as Euclid is in a different book from Delia Smith’s books on boiling eggs. It is not an assumption we need to share. Science can consider any question, and if it is unable to answer it, it will say so and give reasons, or state what needs to be known for it to be answered.
Not that Medawar is defending religion. He denies that any knowledge has ever been had from revelation. It is simply that he refuses to engage the religionists and show them to be the “charlatans” that he says the positivists describe them as. Why should any scientist refuse to engage religious crooks, unless they have lost their nerve?
The Two Cultures
C P Snow used to write novels set in British academia about the two cultures—science and humanities. They did not meet. In what seems a curious and persistent English snobbery, the arts and classics are considered superior to science and engineering. Most science and engineering students feel obliged to make a study of poetry, literature or philosophy, even if it is a token study, but the humanities students show nothing but utter disdain for science. The snobbery persists into post university life where humanities students finish up as administrators, civil servants and managers, mainly well paid, while scientists mainly remain in laboratories badly paid whether in industry or academia. Meanwhile Britain slides down the economic performance charts.
The truth is that science is far more a difficult study than most humanities and requires far more application and discipline. Scientists actually have to show in their essays and projects that they have learnt something, and cannot merely waffle around some outrageous and provocative opinion to impress a tutor looking for some spurious originality. Humanities, these days, are chosen as easy options by many students, yet the rewards for their laziness are greater.
Evidence of this is that scientists do make some effort to learn some art subjects, and it is possible to do so, but the reverse is hardly ever true. Humanities students are mainly just too thick and too lazy to comprehend even simple science. It is proven by the hacks and program makers on TV. The level of science in TV quiz shows is puerile. The comprehension of it by prominent reporters in newspapers with well known by-lines is abysmal. Newspapers have to have “a” science correspondent, even in these scientific times. It is time that the science correspondents were given the editorships of newspapers and we might get something more meaningful than the scandals and sentimental “human interest” that today flood the media pretending to be news.
Much of this problem comes from universities dumbing down, and refusing, even today, to ensure that all their students have an understanding of science. At one time it was considered essential that secondary schools should teach some “civics,” so that people emerging at sixteen knew something about democracy and government. Even that is not done now. To have a systematic approach to enquiry can only benefit all students, and the system that has proved its worth is the scientific one. It does not mean forcing bored philosophers and French literature students into doing a few afternoons of titrations or dissections of dead frogs—though that might be valuable in fact—but to teach how scientific method has worked in science practice, and, more especially, how it is practicable in any field of endeavour.
Non-scientists, and even some scientists, might argue that there is no universal scientific practice, but that is simply rubbish. Not all science can be studied, like physics, in the laboratory. Laboratory experiments is one tactic of science, and other sciences use other tactics, but all use the same strategy. That is the scientific ideal of observation, hypothesis and testing, a method that is essentially common sense and therefore applicable to anything that requires common sense—most things in life. People can be taught it without science being mentioned until they have finished the course when they can learn they have been practising scientific method. Some colleges have tried to force attenuated science courses on to arts students with little success, but a course perhaps called “Solving Problems” can be used as a course in scientific method. When they have done it, it is hard to see that they will not have found it useful, and will understand the way science works a lot better.
The ignorant hacks who are proud of their lack of science are fond of blaming science for diminishing the humanity and environment of man! Wars are blamed on to scientists. If a woman poisons her faithless husband with paraquat then the scientist is to blame. If an infant finds the paraquat in a lemonade bottle and drinks it, the scientist is to blame for the child’s death. If the infant eats a handful of laburnum seeds thinking they are peanuts, God is not blamed and neither is the peanut marketer. If the wife batters her drunken husband with a frozen leg of lamb, no one blames a farmer, a butcher or the electricity company.
Scientists are employees, employed by governments and corporations to do their bidding. Science is not responsible for the national jealousies and aggressive patriotism that is stirred up by ambitious politicians to foment war, even though scientists were paid to make cordite and aeroplanes. Science is not responsible for the decisions of corporate bosses and city mayors to cover pristine countryside in oil tanks, power stations and chemical plants—scientists cannot be blamed for New Jersey and Philadelphia. Capitalists exploit scientists no less than they exploit the countryside, and bribe city bosses and state governors. Scarcely a Senator in the US has an independent voice. Lobbying is the political process and it means free lunches and anonymous brown parcels passed under the table. That is modern democracy.
Environmentalists base their complaints about the despoiling of nature on scientific studies then blame the scientists and not the decision makers, whom they campaign for in the Primaries and help in their party rooms. Scientists should refuse to accept their status as scapegoats for the greed and lunatic irresponsibility of industrial and political leaders, and ordinary citizens should realize that they are falling for the misleading propaganda of the transnationals and their hired newspaper hacks who blame them. The scientists need their own lobby!
Explaining Science
Science requires disciplined study by those hoping to practice it in whatever field is chosen, partly because it is not arbitrary or merely opinion but is indeed a collection of truths that have to be learned and understood in relation to others before progress can be made extending them. Science has specialized languages in each of its fields to make it more economical communicating with each other and they often look too cryptic for others to understand. Scientists therefore have a duty to write articles and books regularly for non-specialist audiences, as well as their learned works written for academic journals. If they cannot express their work in conventional language, it is legitimate to ask whether they really understand it themselves.
Failing to address popular audiences clearly but unpatronizingly is one of the reasons why scientists are often badly regarded and misunderstood by the public. Science is such a large field of endeavour now that the variety of people it employs, in terms of skills and temperaments, covers the whole gamut of human types.
Many scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and some are artisans. There are poet scientists and philosopher scientists and a few mystics.Sir Peter Medawar
In this large array of talent, there are ways of expressing scientific truth for any popular audience. Not that the truth expressed differs but the ways of presenting it can be suited to the audience, as any other message can. Scientists must be more ready to do it.
Scientific Spin Doctors
Science has produced immense benefits for humanity, but it is no fault of scientists that the benefits go only to a few. Scientists have also also produced nuclear power and GM food but scientists are a lot more cautious about their discoveries than politicians and capitalist CEOs are. Unlike religious leaders, scientists have never had any authority over what is done with scientific knowledge, except in odd instances on the rarest of occasions. Politicians and corporate bosses control the use of science, even though science properly has to be an open process to work successfully. Scientists cannot therefore be justly blamed for the outcome of scientific discovery being put to wrong purpose in the world.
It is a curiosity that scientists are blamed but few scientists are beneficiaries of the scientific conspiracy supposed by many popular pressure groups. Regrettably, the ones whom the public hear perhaps do often benefit, because they are scientific spin doctors, not honest scientists, only too often. They are paid by the corporations and by governments as spokespeople. Their job therefore is often to reassure the public, and the public is not usually so stupid that they do not know that reassurances are usually needed only when there is something to need reassuring about, implying that something is not right.
It is plain from the warnings given to people about how to shelter from a nuclear attack, that the civil servants, who issued the warnings on behalf of their political masters, had no idea about the scale of atomic explosions. Yet these administrators have scientific committees to advise them. These committees often are nothing but tokens of scientific rerspectability for governments, and when they are not, their recommendations are not only ignored, they are often refuted in ignorance by ignorant politicians, or worse, they are quoted selectively, thus putting the opposite spin on the advice from that intended.
So, people assume that what a scientific committee recommends must be wrong. It might not be judging purely on the scientific evidence but also on the needs of their employers whether governments or corporations. The public however are not so stupid as to fail to notice that scientists working for tobacco companies declare smoking good for health, and independent hospital doctors say the opposite. The bribed and hobbled scientists are the ones that get science a bad name by following the political line that the public are dunces. It must be worth it to them.
Fox-hunting lobbyists and animal rights lobbyists can both quote expert opinion to show respectively that, when hunting ceases, fox populations shoot up, or that it does not make a bit of difference. Again selective use of evidence means that both can be right at the same time depending on the terms in which the results are presented, but that is another reason for scientifically training the general population. The scientists presenting these results should be more insistent on taking on commissions without strings. It should be a question of honour that the results are presented properly and fairly. Whoever commisioned the study should have one right only, and that is to shelve it, if they do not like the outcome. The people will draw their own conclusions then.
Among the attitudes essential to science is skepticism: “Nullius in Verba.” That should also be people’s motto. “Take no one’s word.” One suspects that this is indeed the very reason why science is so badly taught in the public schools. Politicians, like clergymen, prefer gullible not skeptical people.
Scientists
Ordinary scientists feel no more powerful than any other ordinary citizen. Why should they? That is what they are—members of the general public—and the governments of the world do not seem to realise that there are plenty of scientists being spun to. Who do non-committed scientists believe? They must know that when there is a vested interest the results cannot be trusted. Reports might not be positively fiddled but they will be selectively presented and cited. Only the original data would show the truth and no one will get to see that.
If the public are dunces at science, then scientists have a duty to voice reservations on behalf of the rest, based upon their own sensible assessments of risk, not just the governments’ spin, and should join popular protests more often. They will find that the public are not as stupid as politicians think they are.
Scientists above all should feel that what science can do, does not have to be done when the risks are too high. It is impossible for most scientists to believe that nuclear power—bearing in mind the immense cost of “cleaning up” after decommissioning, because of the hugely long radioactive half lives of the waste, and the impossibility therefore of making the waste safe for perhaps millions of years—can possibly be justified. Politicians justify it for military not scientific or civil reasons. They are not bothered what happens to the world when their venal careers are over.
When there are strong moral doubts about some action proposed by a corporation or a government, then scientists should say so. As in the example of nuclear power, scientists are often better placed to appreciate and therefore argue the true risks. Yet all we hear are the scientific spin doctors. Science is, as Sir Peter Medawar says, “a great and glorious enterprise—the most successful that human beings have engaged in.” Not only should scientists be proud of it but so should us all, but it does no good to ignore the blemishes that are there, or imagine that the insane decisions of politicians and managers have to be upheld by those who know the truth. Science has a proud record but it is not improved by scientists thinking they are independent of the human race when leaders use it wrongly.
Religion began as a scientific enterprise, and priests were the scientists of their day. They advised kings and told farmers when to sow and reap. They studied the heavens hoping to learn meteorology, and found them occupied by gods! Now the heavenly gods can be ditched, but only by not succumbing to earthly devils instead. Let us show that science is worthy of veneration!
