Abstract

Monday, 30 May 2005

Karl—I’m not defending the Church—after all the murder and torture they commited, I don’t even see how they could describe themselves as a Christian institution—but the Galileo affair is an extremely complicated one and is not a matter of science vs faith. It is completely different to the Creationists vs. Evolutionists struggles in the US, such as the Scopes trial, which are based on claims for and against the literal truth of the Bible. The Church also accepts the truth of Darwin’s theory and holds that there is no contradiction between the two.

Mike—Things are never as simple as they seem in a few sentences, admittedly, but unless there were a difference over scientific matters, it is impossible to see why it devolved into this issue. By the time of Galileo, the bible had been let out of the bag, and the Catholics became almost as interested as the Protestants in defending it in the face of science. Stephen J Gould had not yet been born to invent his magisteria, and the Church would probably have burnt him, if he had been. As for the Catholic Church accepting Darwin’s theory and there being no contradiction, there is a slight problem over the moment when the evolving apes merited a soul. Otherwise, “sensible” sects like the Church of England (or sensible until recently when the Evangelicals took over) had accepted Darwin’s theory as simply a mode for God to work with. Evangelicals were set up in blatant contradiction to Darwin, and now they have taken over America and are taking over Britain. Since communism was flattened by US economic power, there has been nothing to stop the trend back to the dark ages in the west. With communism as a dangerous adversary, the western powers, political and religious, had to be cautious. Now they do not, and there are no left wingers of principle able to hinder the trends.

It seems to me that there doesn’t necessarily have to be any contradiction between the idea of a Creator God and a world of changing and evolving structures and entities. Maybe God is more of a cook than an artisan…

Maybe, but perhaps He could stop cooking us and let us think for ourselves. After all, we are told He gave us free will.

It seems to me that Darwin’s main adversary is not all Christians but is the protestant descendancy (particularly dominant in the US) that holds the Bible to be literally true. In my view, these people are often so ignorant that they can only read one book and they have a poor understanding of that one book. We don’t need to waste precious time discussing them further, unless you particularly wish to. I’m much more interested in discussing the relations between evolution, survival, and truth. But, before I move on to a possibly lengthly discussion of evolution theory and truth, I want to get some feedback on the above comments, to see what makes sense to you and what does not, and also I really would like to know something more about your pronouncement that “Darwin proves Kant.” What did you mean by that?

Well, they are ignorant but they are an increasingly powerful force in the world, the electoral cannon fodder of the US Straussists. It is worrying to me, if no one else. How does the US contrive to have such amazing people at the same time as having hordes of utterly thick rednecks deciding the outcome of elections? Where are the liberals? In the same place as British socialists, no doubt, all jumping on the right wing bandwagon. All is vanity! The bible comes up with some marvellous quotations, and many are poor old Tyndall’s, but these Christians, as you say, do not seem to read their own bible. I think they perhaps do, but they have gone down the same route as the Catholics of a previous age. They have put the interpretation of the infallible bible in the hands of their own divines, the pastors who tell them what it means using a remarkable form of sophistry to “eliminate” contradictions. And it means something quite different from what it seems to mean from a simple reading of it, complete with contradictions. Blessed are the poor really means blessed are the rich.

Okay, on the question of the metaphysics of physics we seem to be sliding past one another. I’m saying things such as “modern physics is based on the assumption that the principles by which machines work are natural principles” and you are kind of saying that this assumption is justified because the principles by which machines work are natural principles. I’m saying that this metaphysics permits the “test” and “success” of science qua natural science to be reduced to the ability to innovate new machines and provide practical solutions to technological problems, to which you counter that the assumptions of science are shown to be reasonable because science is successful and practical. I’m saying that mechanical realism allows us to treat natural phenomena as if they were machines at our disposal to which you say that this is justified because the wind and sail of a boat forms a machine that we can use to cross water. I guess that you are content to accept the metaphysical foundation of modern physics and you hold it to be true (even if you refuse to see that even you, a proud empiricist and materialist, are under the sway of metaphysics). I really can’t explain my point any clearer than in my book and so I ask you to read it (particularly chapter two) before we continue our discussions on metaphysics and experience.

OK, but, whereas you mock me as always begging the question, what I am saying is that you accept natural principles in natural things but different principles for machines, even though there is no discernible seam between the machines and natural things. I shall do as you say and read the relevant chapter of your book to see whether I can notice where I am going wrong.

For now, I would like move on to questions of evolution, science, religion, and truth. So I am going to throw the proverbial cat among the pigeons… it seems to me that there is quite a strong evolutionist argument in favour of religion—especially Christianity of even the most simplistic and hypocritical variety. Firstly, you argue that science is proven by its success, but you then go on to lament the fact that:

“Otherwise, “sensible” sects like the Church of England (or sensible until recently when the Evangelicals took over) had accepted Darwin’s theory as simply a mode for God to work with. Evangelicals were set up in blatant contradiction to Darwin, and now they have taken over America and are taking over Britain. Since communism was flattened by US economic power, there has been nothing to stop the trend back to the dark ages in the west. With communism as a dangerous adversary, the western powers, political and religious, had to be cautious. Now they do not, and there are no left wingers of principle able to hinder the trends.”

I agree with you (and share your lament), but it would seem that the evangelicals have been incredibly prolific in increasing their numbers and gaining the ascendancy to power and resources. Does it mean that they are connected by reality because they are successful? Does their success mean that they empowered by God? Yet, scientifically persuaded atheists, empiricists, and materialists are decreasing (perhaps even dying out) and the liberal and secular movement of the Enlightenment in the blink of an eye moved from being a self-evident ideal to being the subject of history books. Does this failure imply that they are fantasists, out of touch with reality? Furthermore, “successes” of science, such as steam power, atomic power, electricity, and enhanced health care, are leaving the inheritance of an over populated, polluted world that is perpetually on the brink of self-destruction either in the form of a runaway greenhouse effect or nuclear-biological war. Whilst it leaves us with the view that we are a totally insignificant collection of molecules in a purposeless universe. Has science increased or descreased our survival chances as a species? It seems to be something of an open question from our vantage point at the beginning of the C21st. Moreover, it seems to me that religion could well be false and of incredible evolutionary value. Afterall, perhaps lions also think that they are ordained special ones of a creator god and that the whole of creation is for their use and at their disposal. And, what could be of greater value than the belief that one should fullfil one’s clearly established moral duties in life, whilst having no fear of death? The purity, simplicity, and clarity of such a state of mind, free from doubts, complexities, and ambiguities must be of immeasurable evolutionary benefit. Perhaps that is why they are so successful. Philosophy is much too ambiguous, complicated, and seemingly endless, so lets move on from that and be scientific instead, much more certain, clear cut, and allows definite conclusions, and hey presto after a couple of hundred years of massive efforts in this direction we make practical advances, so it must be true, but wait, science is too difficult, demanding, and has started to show that the world is an ambiguous, complicated, and science might be endless, it is saying the same thing as philosophy did all those centuries before!, furthermore it doesn’t tell us what to do, but religion provides clear cut rules and an intelligible interpretation of the world. We know what the world is! We know who we are! We know what to do! And, hey presto, you have a whole host of patriotic, social organised, clear minded, and self-confident human beings successfully working on common goals, achieving positions of power, authority, and offering others a clear model for success. But does that show that their beliefs are true? Clearly not, if one accepts that there is a distinction between power and truth. After all, as Nietzsche pointed out, civilisation is founded on errors, injustices, and crudities, without which none of our sciences, religions, philosophies, and arts would exist.

You are right in many of your implications here, but they are social implications not evolutionary ones, unless we want to take unnatural selection as possibly being a form of evolution. A pretty crude form of selective breeding is simply to kill all of the types that emerge that you do not want before they have chance to breed themselves. Many societies have chosen this method of getting rid of types they did not like whether mass slaughter or selective slaughter of enemies. It has often struck me that humanity divides into the obedient and the disobedient, and the purpose of religion is to emphasise the former at the expense of the latter. The Catholic church slaughtered a large number of heretics in the thirteenth century and large numbers of witches thereafter. Secular rulers have similarly inclined to rid the world of those they did not like. We have forelock tuggers who are lickspittles of the powers that be, and the surly types resentful of them and ready to rebel against them. There always seem to be a lot more of the former than the latter. Is it because the latter have been selectively bred out of the population by past churches and rulers? If so, I suppose it is evolution. It might however be proper evolution in that we are indeed two types of people, those who kow-tow to the alpha males in society and those who hover about the edge of the clan hoping for a chance to get in and overthrow the dominant male. It seems to be the behaviour of our nearest brothers among the animals, the apes. The social plan of the dominant class in society is to encourage the lickspittles, and the dominant classes have the power and the money to do it by coercion and bribery. For me, the Enlightenment was a rebellion against the superstitions and falsehoods propagated by the ruling classes—the ancien régime—and they have now coordinated their efforts to attempt to turn the tide. They will turn the clock back to the dark ages, doubtless the churches’ preference, or to tyrannical Greece, doubtless the rulers’ preference. That is the plain aim of the US neo-cons with their Straussist philosophy. They have huge resources, and delight in confusing the thought of potential opponents. One of the problems with Enlightened thinking—free thinking—is just what you say, that many unsophisticated people like the idea of God to save them from the trouble of thinking at all. God is a powerful weapon in the armoury of the right. Yet God is plainly a human construct, and must be constructed by particular people and for a particular reason. This has to be explained, if the gains are to be held on to. Similarly, a modern Enlightened religion is necessary to offer people who like to be given creeds. The Straussists are, you will note, atheistic themselves, but profess to be religious for the benefit of hoi polloi. The demolition of education has also favoured the demolition of the Enlightenment. Secular education is allowed to decay into chaos while religious schools are promoted as paragons of virtuous study, but the education that comes with them is conditioned by the superstition that is inculcated simultaneously.

Apropos of your mention of this theme earlier, I read evidence that Catholics do not differ over science and religion in education from fundamentalists is a row that happened in France early in 1994, reported in New Scientist January 1994. It began with Father Max Cloupet, who was the chief administrator of Catholic schools in France, telling journalists that it was the duty of Catholic schools to offer “a Christian view of the world, including mathematics and physics”. The context was rather the same as it is now in the UK, the government planning to fund private schools, most of which in France were Catholic. The reaction appeared in the form of an open letter critical of Cloupet, signed by 140 top French scientists including Nobel laureates, Georges Charpak and Jean-Marie Lehn. They cited the historical incident of Galileo being forced to recant his belief in the Copernican system when the Church called him before the Inquisition, and that Copernicus’s book remained on the papal index until 1835, by which time everyone had accepted Copernicus anyway! Supporters of the scientists’ letter likened Cloupet’s view to that of the US Creationists who wanted evolution to be taught in a Christian way, or at least with a Christian alternative. Cloupet’s response was to label the letter and the attacks on him as political. He admitted that there was no such thing as “Catholic mathematics” but there was “a Christian way of teaching mathematics”. As for science, he pleaded he had always believed in the “autonomy of the sciences”, but that “a Christian viewpoint can shed light” on certain problems of the conscience that science raised. He sounded to be backpeddling but there seems little doubt that Catholics, like protestant fundies, have an agenda of teaching science in a biased way.

Lions no doubt would, if they could, do as you say. Heraclitus said this 2500 years ago, but Christians never noticed. If an argument can be applied in such a general way, it suggests that those who choose to apply it only to a particular case are likely to be in error. It is likely to be of great value to certain people but not necessarily those who think they will end up in heaven for being so obedient. They are the ones who blow themselves up to cause havoc among the enemy, but it is hard for me to see anything in it other than cynical exploitation of naïve people by odious manipulators. It is to their evolutionary benefit that the simpletons will willingly give their lives, whether as suicide bombers or ignorant poor trash picked off the streets as cannon fodder after some brutalising training in Deepcut Camp, or some equivalent place.

So, religion has the evolutionary advantages you suggest but not particularly for the sheep but certainly for the shepherds. It is precisely because there are some objective criteria available for people to get some idea of truth and some measures of it through Nature, and thus have a chance of not being conned out of the only life they are sure of, that I accept science and reject the belief in figments. Contrary to what you imply, it is not a position I hold to force my own view on to other people and get some sort of prize for perceptive thought or even some reward in money or power, but to offer those who would be exploited by unscrupulous people the chance of not suffering it. I fully agree that people should have the right to believe what they like, but I am keen that they should be given some means of judging the value of the options people offer them. Basing the choice on reality and not on prayer, hope or imagination seems to me to be entirely proper. I do not deny that philosophy is better here than theology, but best of all is scienctific method. It might seem wonderful to think that we can let a thousand flowers blossom, but when most of them are deliberately intended to confuse, education is necessary to show they are not all as good as each other. Ultimately that is why I would like some sign that other metaphysics can give an adequate or better basis than the one we already have in science. Merely to advance an argument that science is imperfect for this and that reason, but without offering anything better seems simply to be helping to justify the confidence tricksters in the world to make use of the naïve.

Now, concerning the benefits of science, I agree that science does not automatically confer benefits on to society. Who imagines it does? Society, via its rulers, has to take decisions on what is done with scientific discoveries, as it does with anything new. If wrong decisions are taken, it is not the fault of scientists or their discipline. In the book I wrote about dinosaurs, I highlight the problem of change being greater than our ability to adapt. We are as a species maladapted to the world we live in as a consequence of the astonishing things discovered in the last couple of centuries. The way out we have is our brains. We are not simply at the mercy of evolutionary forces, we are aware of them, and our rulers ought not to be pandering to greed for wealth and power but to the needs of our species. As a matter of fact my own attitude is pessimistic. I am inclined to think that the greedy and power mad will destroy the world around us, and us with it. Nature will survive and will carry on regardless, but we shall not be part of the future. Since the other metaphysical bases you speak of generally support the status quo being the basis of instruments of class power, I am again chary of your thesis.

Letting a thousand flowers blossom is all very well but criteria are needed for most ordinary not very discerning people to choose between them. All criteria are arbitrary, perhaps, but some work and some do not. Which should we choose? I am not trying to force a scientific view down anyone’s throat, but the others are trying to force their view down mine. Science says, "I am best, but it is your choice, and the criteria are these". Christianity says, Christianity is best, but you are immoral if you do not choose Christianity and we do not want an immoral society, do we?" Christianity is menacing because Christians menace you, if you are not a Christian. The other patriarchal religions are the same. People might find the discoveries of science threatening, but they are not menaced by scientists, but by the rulers and the owners of the patents who want to make money or conquer other nations for gain. Scientists, are just lackeys. They have their price, like most people. I would like them to be more principled and united around the moral use of science. I try to argue a case for it, but to say that any other case is just as good strikes me as feeding the vampires. If society is based on errors, injustices and so on, then all of the approaches you mention must be ways to overcome them, stop them, or circumvent them. So, I am following what Nietzsche said.

Also, the fact that comtemporary theologians find complications and problems in questions of at which stage did human ancestors possess souls—which seems to me to be answerable by saying that either the evolutionary emergence of a soul, a fundamental transformation of matter, defined the emergence of human beings, or that all beings have souls but that the human one is the most pleasing to God, or that all beings have souls and are pleasing to God but only human beings can possess knowledge of good and evil due to our level of intellect and therefore only human beings have moral problems, etc This problem does not reveal a contradiction between Catholic Theology and Evolution Theory, no more than the total lack of any fossil evidence of speciation (the transformation from one species to another) shows a contradiction between the paleological evidence and the theory (after all, fossilisation is rare, requiring very particular conditions), no more than electromagnetism and mechanics were in contradiction because the speed of light was a constant in all inertial frames of reference (and resolved by a relativistic conception of space and time). It is a serious problem for which any proposed resolutions will simply transform how the theologians understand the soul and its relation to the body. The problem shows that the human understanding of theology and evolution theory needs to evolve to adapt to one another.

The problem for the Christian theologians seems to me to be the very continuity of development that you highlight. I agree with what you are saying, but the theologian is faced with the biblical pronouncement that we humans are made in the image of God, but—we are back to seams—there is no obvious seam between us as humans and us as animals. When I used the adjective “sensible” of the Episcopal Church, it was because their thinkers are happy to live with the science and leave the theology indistinct—the human soul emerged, and then we were the image of God, or else the expression “the image of God” is an imprecise one that does not mean anything as obvious as it seems to. I think the word used to mean “image” really meant “shadow”, but I am not a Hebrew scholar. However the problem is resolved, it is the theology that must move until, at any rate, science finds some organ or entity called a soul. Christianity needs a soul to justify its post mortem rewards and punishments. It proposes one hypothesis, the soul, to explain another hypothetical construct, life after death. This is what William of Ockham was arguing against surely, it was simply that he dare not or could not apply his dictum to the fundamentals of Christianity. He still was hounded by the Church despite his basic devotion to it.

The problem is that you are adopting an evolutionist stance, without putting things such as religion, philosophy, science, and evolution into an evolving process. It is not the case that science needs to be done away with because it is based on metaphysics and contingent, historical assumptions about the nature of Nature and how we go about understanding it, I did not say that, but it is the case that we need to understand the contingency of science in order to see how it will become transformed, evolve, into something else in the future.

I do not have your capacity for abstract thought. That is doubtless why I am not a philosopher. I can read the rules of a programming language, but cannot begin to understand it until I have a program before me to dissect and learn the basis of. That is why I ask you for an example of what you mean. I can see that science has progressed so far, mainly in trying to extract itself from the religious quagmire it found itself in, but then you speak of it evolving further. The basic methodology of science seems to be mature, but you must have something in mind to speak of it becoming transformed into something else in the future. I am happy to believe that such a transformation is possible, but remain conscious that barn pots will take it to mean we should be allowing God into it somehow, unless something more concrete is indicated.

I’m not an agnostic on questions of the truth of religious claims—such as the nature of God or the nature of Jesus—merely for the sake of being an agnostic. For me they are not questions that I can answer one way or the other, without arbitrarily doing so, so even though I accept that the point of research is to make conclusions—and I have read your books—your arguments only show a (possibily) equally likely interpretation of historical events and the bible, and a possibly more intelligible interpretation for that matter (one which I find very persuasive), but they do not prove the truth of your claims. They certainly do not answer the question of whether Jesus was the son of God, one way or the other. After all, it remains possible that Jesus was the messiah and the son of God, but the disciples and subsequent people have completely misunderstood or twisted the message. Perhaps the crucifixtion was the victory of satan and Christianity is actually the work of the devil. It is not a question that can be answered by experience, and I refuse to pretend that it is. In fact, our understandable desire for conclusions is something that we really should be wary about—especially when we feel particularly satisfied with our conclusions. We are fallible. That is why I am a realist and adopt a dialectical approach to research.

You surprise me on these religious questions in that you equate them with other questions about the material world. Is it the case that one can legitimately question the colour of Santa’s cape or the length and colour of his beard? Can we accept that Puss in Boots could wear boots, but have doubts about its ability to speak like a human? Scientifically, I can see no reason to postulate a Santa Claus or a Puss in Boots, or a Jesus or a God. They are all made up for mythical reasons not scientific ones, and are not in the same frame as questions about Nature. Popper made the distinction between them, and his explanation shows the error of mixing them up as Christians like to do. The approach of science surely is not one of accepting and rejecting things arbitrarily but of considering as real only things that manifest themselves as real in the world. I thought we had agreed this. You might be right in saying that here is a metaphysical assumption of scientific method, but I guess that I am saying assumptions that work in reality must reflect that reality, thus becoming rather more than arbitrary assumptions. Naturally, we are fallible. We are not gods and any metaphysics that allows us to have knowledge by divine methods on the basis that we can be gods merely elevates fallibility into certainty. I doubt that many, if any, scientists think they are gods.

I have no intention of putting forth an alternative scientific metaphysics—I am not Hegel—because I don’t think that reality is like that—it is not the case that science should be replaced by the ideas of one man (ie me), but, what I am saying is that we need to examine the contingency and functions of science within philosophical and historical contexts that are directed in accordance with the implicit values and ideals of an ongoing project of constructing an ideal world. It is my view that by seeing science as part of a greater dialectical and historical process, we can see how today’s science is actually a consequence of a desire for technological power and certainty in a seemingly hostile world. We need to understand those ideals if we hope to understand how we have transformed Nature in our minds in order to make it accessible to investigation by using machines.

That science is a desire for technological power and certainty in a hostile world does not make it unnatural. It can give no power or certainty if it is arbitrary, that is, based on these arbitrarily chosen metaphysical assumptions that will do as well as any others. Similarly, if we have transformed Nature mentally into something that does not actually correspond with Nature, then it cannot be accessible. Whatever Nature is in our heads must correspond with actual Nature, or nothing can be expected to work at all. Not that anyone could disagree with the notion of seeing science as part of a dialectical and historical process.

It is my belief that (unless the people of the present blow us all up, or release some super-virus into the world so they can make a few more million dollars) the people of the future will (kindly) laugh at our understanding of the wind in terms of an abstract notion of force, just as we laugh at the way primitive man felt the presence of the spirits as his sails unfurled and he threw his sacrifical morsel of food or a flower into the water. I accept that the sciences (some more than others) have achieved practical successes, but I do not accept that their truth is demonstrated by these successes. Just as I do not accept that Christianity is proven by its acceptance and the benefit individuals have achieve from accepting it. On the level of truth, both science and religion are arbitrary and contingent, and on the level of power it seems evident that, for a while at least, religion is winning… not only because ninety percent of the world’s population are religious (to a greater or lesser degree) but also because science has completely failed to explain deep and fundamental human questions about reality. The failure of science is because of the absolute and uncritical acceptance of mechanical realism and the transformation of all problems into technological problems—the materialists’ and mechanists’ paradigm of science has damaged true science (in the deeper sense of a more phenomenological wissenschaft—a human science based on dialectical, historical, and phenomenological investigation) immeasurably. If only scientists could see that their positivism, their empiricism, is based on metaphysics, then they could see that they are presenting a very small piece of the puzzle as if it were the picture on the box. If they stopped being so arrogant then people would be less turned off by them, and, perhaps, less turned on by the idea that religion is the only alternative. If only scientists could really feel Newton’s modesty at only discovering a pretty pebble here and there, while a whole ocean of truth lay undiscovered…

I think you have met scientists of a different temperament from me. Perhaps scientists who work in large establishments get a mistaken idea odf their importance, but my experience of them is quite the opposite. Most are too timid to say boo to a chicken. I would wish that they got some sort of scientific trades union, not particularly economical but meant to propagate a scientific self-image rather different from the one that you seem to have experienced, and to spread the scientific method as a weltanschauung worth adopting instead of conventional religion. When Christians say to me that science is based on beliefs just as Christianity is, they are right, and you seem to be saying the same. But whereas you seem willing to accept the metaphysical underpinning of Chrstianity as being as good as that of science, I do not. The whole point of belief is that it need not be arbitrary as religious belief is but can be based on its quality. How it matches up to the reality that we experience every day. You might be right that a future human might laugh at our notion of the wind, but some things, even in science, are pretty basic, and my guess would be that the wind is one of them. Faraday’s lines of force might not be. And if the success of science is not an indication of its truth, then you have surely to give a better indication of how truth might be determined. Perhaps you do it in your book.

Certainly, I agree that subjective or psychological impressions of worth like the worth of Christianity to the individual cannot be an indication of truth because every religion there is would no doubt make the same claim, and religions now discarded will have made the claim in the past. As I say often on the pages, a rabbit’s foot would be just as good to the person who believed in it. Yet you say that both science and the rabbit’s foot religion are equally contingent and arbitrary, a claim that I just cannot see. I cannot see that something that must satisfy conditions set by Nature is arbitrary.

Then when it comes to the competition between the two approaches of science and Christianity, or religion generally to be broader, the comparison must be made with how the world was, any snapshot of the current situation seeming to put science at a disadvantage failing to show that only a few hundred years ago there was no science to believe in, and everyone believed relgion. We have noted the backlash against the Enlightenment, and I agree it is frightening—it is to me, anyway, for I fear for the world my children and their children might have to endure. The religious right are happy to undermine secular education and turn us back to the dark ages to ensure their permanent position in society as the philosophers, as Leo Strauss calls them—the ruling class, in fact. Hoi polloi are merely the slaves of the rulers, something that I would have thought can be seen as undesirable by everyone except the rulers, yet the latter manipulate everyone so easily, as, I think, Hume noted, that the mass of the people do not notice it. I must have been in the wrong camp all my life.

In your final few sentences you speak of the failure of science as it is and the damage it has done to true science. How has science failed, as opposed to the use our rulers have put to some of its discoveries? And what is this true science you speak of, and what metaphysical assumptions does it make? I might be able to understand these concrete examples better than I can understand an overwhelmingly critical analysis of the bases of science with nothing but wishful thinking to offer in its place. I mean, if there were something much better than science as it is, surely someone somewhere would see some advantage in it, and would be trying to exploit it. Airy-fairy New Agers always make claims like this, accusing scientists of some sort of conspiracy to keep spiritualism or whatever out of science, thus distorting it. The batty Christians grasping for the Templeton millions come out with similar sorts of nonsense, but the science they talk about is suffocated in conventional Christianity. It is not science at all, and the ones who claim it is, scientists, they say, but Christians too, are just batty or very poor liars. Finally, if science as it is is confined to only a piece of the puzzle, then what are the pieces it is not addressing, and how should it, while remaining able to call itself science?

ps I read Abbot’s Flatland years ago, when I was a teenager. I was reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity at the time and I remember enjoying Abbot’s book. However, I took the lesson from the book that just as the flatlander’s had misunderstood reality, due to their limited perspective, we may well misunderstand reality when we describe it in terms of our limited perspective. Have you read Husserl’s Origin of Geometry? It is very insightful into the way that geometry was abstracted from practical pursuits.

I too read Flatland when I was at school. The notion that there might be dimensions unseen by us must be accepted by all scientists, I should imagine, but it is no reason for anyone to think that the fantasies of religious prophets and mystics are giving us any insight into them. The symptoms of mystical insight are quite well explained by purely medical conditions without us having to imagine that some people can see dimensions we cannot. Hypotheses like string theory are quite exciting to me, although mathematically they are way beyond me. They are, however, mainly speculation until adequate tests of them can be found, and CERN presumably has that in mind as an objective in building its new supercollider. You will, doubtless, know all about it, from your previous incarnation. So, I agree about our limited perspective, and Flatland is helpful in letting us see the consequences of a narrow perspective on the world. To think that our universe is one 4D membrane in a 10D or 11D multiverse is a further step in putting us off the centre of the world, as patriarchal religions would have us. Exciting stuff. I have not read Husserl’s book.

I’m not mocking you for begging the question. My only criticism of your view (which you are equally entitled to, as I am to mine—how’s that for pluralism?) is that the distinction between “the artificial” and “the natural” is not as seamless as you hold it to be and that this is very apparent when you look at it closely. My argument is that mechanical realist metaphysics are necesssary in order to make it seamless. I accept that you are a mechanical realist, but I’m not trying to persuade you not to be. I am just trying to persuade you to look at it closely, but there is nothing that I am saying which “proves” that mechanical realism is false. In fact, my argument is that we cannot prove that it is true or false and hence modern experimental physics is itself an open-ended experiment that is in the process of creating itself as a means to disclose the truth. Even though your were saying it tongue in cheek, I am not suggesting that reading my book will show you where you have gone wrong. But I do think that it will give you some insights into the way that modern physics works. I actually think that you will be even more committed to your position as a result of reading it. All I want, is for you to recognise and reflect upon the metaphysics that physics is founded upon.

Maybe I read it too quickly. I wanted to dash off a quick reply by way of acknowledgement, now that I am a carer and have additional responsibilities, such as making the tea! I have just written the rest of the reply to you, so I’ll add nothing more here, except to confess I didn’t know I was a mechanical realist. So far, it has caused me no pain!

Our current email exchanges do not actually reflect how close we are on the question of the nature of religion and I would prefer that our email exchange was put into this context before being published. I also don’t want to be on the record as a critic of your position and would rather keep our philosophical differences to ourselves—largely because it would really annoy me if some of the religious nuts that you are arguing with started to use my ideas to justify their own stance against science, as if my degree of scepticism about science didn’t apply to religion doubly so. However, perhaps in the future, you could put some of our emails on your site, but I really would like to have fair warning first, and, at some point, it might be interesting to other others the chance to leap into our debates.

I asked because I knew you would hesitate to have idle musings jotted off over breakfast passed off as considered thought. It is a lot easier when the only thing you can do is muse idly! Even so, there seems to be plenty here to interest the sort of people that come to these pages without there having to be a well reasoned and connected presentation. People like to browse and pick up the bits they like or can understand. I have been amazed how many comment on the discussions I have already put up. They seem to enjoy them more than the pages themselves. Perhaps it is something to do with the soundbite presentation of TV and politics, and people having short attention spans. Or perhaps an adversarial approach is easier to get. If you are adamant, then OK, but it might be an opportunity missed, miniscule as it might be. Since the discussion revolves around the content of your book anyone reading the page is reminded to take a detour to the Palgrave page. It is a good excuse for the link. Think a while longer about it.

However, given that naturally we are social beings then one cannot take our modes of social organisation out of evolutionary context—in fact, it is an implication of your own scientific realism and materialism that only those modes of social organisation that satisfy our organically evolved material needs could persist. Furthermore, our ability to artificially select animals for our own purposes, on your account, must be a consequence of natural abilities and our understanding of natural processes, so it is extremely problematical to hold that there is somehow a clear distinction between artifical and natural selection (but somehow nature and technology are seamless) that allows us to clearly divide the world into “the natural” and “the social”. Moreover, given that the artificial selection of pigeons was Darwin’s primary analogy for natural selection in The Origin of the Species it seems that even the formulation of evolutionary theory depended on the fact that the distinction can be blurred.

I agree with your statement that religions have tended to select out disobedient individuals by killing them (the Nazis and eugenicists went further by trying to stop them breed, based on their assumption that like begets like, an assumption that is contrary to modern genetics). But that is my point. The ability to centralise power and eradicate all opposition is a socially succesful strategy for maintaining and reproducing power, but it does not follow from this that this success proves that such an organisation, succesful though it might be, is based on natural principles or acts in accordance with natural law.

My reference to unnatural selection did not particularly mean selective breeding of dogs or whatever, but was a jibe at your own distinction between mechanical and natural. Perhaps I should have said “mechanical selection”, but perhaps it amounts to the same thing. It is humanity’s use of natural things for its own purposes. So, I do not maintain there is a seamless distinction between them. But the only difference is the conscious brain there is behind one of them whereas the other happens without any conscious purpose. Social modes of living might be treated in an evolutionary way, but, if that is so, the evidence is that none of them that have been tried so far have been successful because no social mode has survived more than a few centuries, or possibly millennia, depending on how you define them. Toynbee took a wider definition of culture than many had previously done and plotted the rise and decline of several such broad cultures, all suggesting that they still rise and decline on a timescale far too short to be of any evolutionary significance. Even so, with the possible destruction of certain genes, maybe even short lived but brutal cultures could alter the evolutionary nature of humanity. If those who openly said religion was bunk were habitually burnt alive tied to a pole, eventually no one would say “religion is bunk”. They would either be conditioned to it, or the “religion is bunk” gene will have been eliminated! Perhaps that is why so many Europeans, otherwise sophisticated people, still believe in organised superstition.

However, it seems to me that your account presupposes that things such as religion came out of thin air—sort of magically appeared—and, somehow, managed to dominant the whole world. But how? How did it achieve this? If it is all just hogwash for the stupid, as you seem to suggest, how did it take hold. After all, as the Soviet Union and China have demonstrated, it is quite possible to brutalise, organise, and indoctrinate massive numbers of people without needing religion, and, furthermore, there have been many examples of religious societies (such as Egypt, Greece, India, and Rome) that have demonstrated that the ability to dominate and control people does not necessarily have to take the form of religious oppression (even though there were cases of periods of religious oppression in those societies, usually for political reasons, their polytheistic structure tended to make such societies more tollerant to diverse religious ideas and practices). Furthermore, there are plenty of examples of religious cults or sects that have shown themselves to be incredibly tollerant (after all, I can’t think of any case of Buddhists or Quakers mounting pogroms, burning heretics, or even demostrating much in the way of fundamentalist zeal).

There are several accounts of it on the pages, depending on the level of sophistication of the people involved. In each case, though, it was made a part of sociaty for the same purposes essentially—to help maintain the power of a class of people. The reason it took a hold in relatively modern societies, those in historical times, is that religion did what science now does much better. It offered people explanations of what were to the people of the time mysteries. OK, the central explanation, to our minds, is no explanation—attributing things to gods or spirits—but it sufficed for unsophisticated people, and with the growing awareness of natural processes among the priesthood, those with the time to make close observations, they were able to give some reasonable approximations to answers. The two guesses in Genesis about the creation of the world and mankind, are pretty good for 2500 years ago, I reckon, especially the first, Persian, one. (What is stupid is to continue to believe it still.) When the priesthood started to give practical advice on the best time to till the fields and sow the crops, the simple folk were no doubt pleased, but they had to pay for the advice at harvest time. They had to thank the gods with some of their produce, and the priests got fatter. The priests seemed to the peasantry to have occult knowledge, and so demanded respect.

On the other side of the coin, I have never denied that there are good people among Christians. The trouble is twofold. First, that the good ones are usually the sheep, not the shepherds. Good shepherds are altogether rarer. Second, that Christians argue and believe that simply being a Christian makes people good. Possibly the sheep are oppressed into conforming, but the shepherds seem to be worse in history than average people. 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.

It seems to me that, even if we are going to be secularly agnostic about religion, that it has a deeper psychological value and function that you recognise. It seems to be psychologically much more than a tool to deceive the ignorant masses, because, otherwise, it is hard to see how it could deceive the masses. Religion must have social and individual functions that are beneficial for human life and human beings can only do away with religion when it has been replaced by something else (ie scientific realism, communism, etc) that provides the same or better psychological and social benefits. So, if we accept that religion has some positive value for human psychology and social organisation then it does not seem all that far fetched to suggest that it has had some value for human survival. If so, then it has had some evolutionary value and you need to analyse its functions for us as an organic social being. Religion needs to be put into its context as a consequence of and participant in human evolution. But, as you point out, we can always find social explanations for the success of any religion and hence we can always deny the truth-status of even the most successful of religions.

A proper objective look at the psychology of religion would definitely be valuable, but the field is ruined by the fake science of religious believers aiming to prove their beliefs and not intending to be objective. I have recommended on the Adelphiasophism site that people should always ask the affiliations of scientists when they make pronouncements because they often have been bought over by corporations or governments and are not offering proper scientific findings, but corporate or political propaganda. (It does not make the science wrong!) The same is true when people pronounce about religion, especially when they pretend to be scientists working objectively. However, the evidence we have seems not to suggest, as religious commentators always like to say, that human beings are intrinsically religious. 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. A young mother here has recently been stabbed in the neck by a lout and paralysed. After a few weeks, it was announced that she was getting back the feeling in her limbs, and she was quoted as saying she could feel God working daily to make her right, or something similar. She might have been a Christian already, she and her husband looked the type, but it amazes me that she will praise God for making her better but have no comment to make about what God was doing when she got stabbed in the first place. Or, six pupils get killed when a school minibus overturns, and the head teacher appears on TV saying, “Thank God it was not worse!” There is some psychological misbalance working in the response of humans to religion, or perhaps just the way we respond to difficulties. Maybe we are much more inclined to give thanks than to curse and seek revenge. Perhaps that is why villains in dramas are so attractive to us. They are people unlike most of us, and it fascinates us. So, the comfort that religions can give is no doubt beneficial to people living their lives, but the rabbit’s foot gives the same comfort. It is an illusion of comfort. It is not a psychological necessity, as clergymen and other types of bloodsuckers maintain. In the twentieth century, religious observance faded away in advanced countries generally, in some cases like the UK, quite markedly. It does not suggest that people need religion. Religion survives in places where people are ignorant and scared. That includes a lot of middle America.

Regarding the truth status of science or religion displayed by their success or otherwise, we are back with the distinction between nomos and physis. Religions are like fashion, a function only of what people decide upon, and having no permanent basis. Sometimes beards are fashionable and sometimes they are considered disgusting, and razor sales are high. The success of science in finding out about reality is quite different from the success of razor manufacturers, or religions. So we can deny the truth status of religions but science is not so easily dismissed.

Moreover, even though, as Nietzsche pointed out, the religious person is the exception in any religion, we need to make a distinction between religion and the abuses of religion. For example, we need to make a distinction between Christianity and the Christian right of the US in order to show Christians how just how unChristian the Christian right of the US is. We need to make a distinction between Christianity and the Catholic Church in order to show that such institution, point after point, runs contrary to even the most cursory of readings of the New Testament. We need such a distinction to show Islamic fundamentalists that the Koran explicitly states that Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship the one same god and that it advocates tollerance towards Christians and Jews. Most importantly, we need such a distinction to show religious people how they are being lied to by cynical individuals who are perverting their religions in order to fool people into believing that they know and are performing God’s will.

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. No amount of showing Christians how unChristian the Christian right is will get you anywhere because the Christian right is Christianity in the form that Christians want it, or is nearer to it by a long chalk than the message of the son of God. The Catholic Church is the same. A Catholic wrote to me saying how wonderful the miracle of transsubstantiation was, even though he knew it was irrational. We are back to the psychology of it, and nobody has tried thoroughly to understand what it is. I have said many times that the proper study of religion is psychology not theology. For me, there is something about patriarchal religions that is grossly evil, and even good people fall under its spell so that it is so very easy for the cynics you speak of to use them. That is the power of religion for the ruling caste.

Whilst I completely agree with you that religions are in most part based on superstitions and the lies that power seeking elites have propagated, and that the Enlightenment, for better or worse, was an effort against this, it is evident that the Enlightenment is failing and religion is winning. However, religions have been successful because they provide explanatory power and purpose, but, as you no doubt agree, the wordly success of any religion does not prove its truth. My point is that the practical successes of science does not prove its truth either. Science involves much more than making machines—it aims to explain how machines can be made—and, historically, the explanations (in mechanics, optics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics) have always followed after the “trial and error” invention of machines they attempt to explain. The explanatory success and social use of any scientific theory does not prove that it is true. And, just as you cannot base the truth of any successful religion on an account of evolution theory, nor can you base the truth of any scientific theory on evolutionary theory. Moreover, given that evolution theory is a scientific theory, you would be begging the question if you were to give an account of the truth of science on the basis of the truth of a scientific theory.

It seems to me that just as much as a knowable God is a human construct, so is an objective reality accessible only by scientific methods. It just signifies a change in the priesthood and in the rituals. Nothing more.

If it is begging the question to explain why scientific method works because the explanation is a scientific explanation, then there is no way to explain it, because using some other method such as religion or channelling or whatever is no explanation anyway. I suspect that Socrates would begin to faintly praise you for your astonishing insights as a master sophist, but I am not clever enough to do it myself. Suffice it to say that Kant used philosophic reasoning to arrive at the notion of categories without which we would not be able to recognize the world outside, and I am saying that evolution explains why the brain has structured itself in that way. If there were not a close correspondence between our understanding of reality, and reality itself, we would not be able to live for long in the world. What we now do to get an idea of the truth is precisely a trial and error method, the scientific method. We try something, and if it fails we discard it and try something else. By doing this in an orderly way, recording our successes and failures we accumulate our successes, and the successes are successes because they correspond with reality. Our explanations might be imperfect representations of reality but still work, and different concepts might be equally good. Force fields sufficed for a long time, but might now be conceived as the warping of space-time. We are refining our understanding, like peeling off the layers of the cosmic onion, but that is much better than having to accept that some duff explanation revealed by the holy spirit as holy writ is infallible. One of the best features of science is its corrigibility, and one that religious bigots hate most, and try to decry most. So your analogy between science and religion is well off the mark.

One can always find an example of a religous person who wishes to use their political influence to inflitrate their religious doctrine into the education of science. But then one can also always find examples of religious persons who use their political influence to provide children with an education in the sciences. There are numerous examples of how the quaker industrialists in C19th England, with their beliefs that practical science is based on God’s laws of nature and it is of benefit to man, spent huge proportions of their wealth on schools dedicated to teaching poor children science. C’mon, man, not all religious people are evil, manipulative dogmatists, who are seeking to befuddle and bewitch for their own purposes, or stupid morons who believe what they are told. Which category would you put Reverend Martin Luther King into? There are many Jesuit Catholics who provide children in the third world with the only chance of an education that they have, and a pretty good one at that. Of course many Jesuits teach their religion, but they do so because they hold it to be true, not because they want to extend the domination and influence of the Catholic church. I have also been to a school in the north of Argentina in which Catholic nuns and Wichi teachers jointly teach the Wichi children (the Wichi are an indigenous people) how to read and write Spanish and their native language, maths, basic hygiene, practical science, and practical arts and crafts. Because of past excesses by Christian fanatics, Anglicans in the case of the Wichi, the nuns do not teach the children Christianity at all. They want them to become Christian, because they believe it to be true, but they allow the children and adult Wichi to come to them. Some Wichi have become Catholic, but the majority follow their own animistic tradition (which they hold to be true and of practical benefit). Unfortunately, I don’t speak their native tongue nor Spanish well enough, and they are very secretive about their religion, so I don’t know very much about it apart from that it is readily classified as animistic and shamanistic. I certainly don’t know enough to conclude that it is true or false. My point is that Catholics have done good things in South America, as well as many awful things, but it seems to me that (even though I am not a Christian) the kindness that the nuns have shown the Wichi is recognisably Christian is the same way that the brutality that the Catholics inflicted on the Incas was not.

Well, I agree that from your description, they are doing good work, but nuns are mainly particularly docile and dependent sheep rather than shepherds despite them being half a step up the Catholic hierarchy from the layman. I know from the direct experience of my friends and cousins who were brought up as Catholics, and recently highlighted in some films, that nuns can be stern and strict to their charges to the point of cruelty. Anecdotal evidence can be called for either cause. I repeat that I do not categorize all Christians as “evil, manipulative dogmatists who are seeking to befuddle and bewitch for their own purposes or stupid morons who believe what they are told”, but the ones who fall outside these two categories are a relatively small proportion, and many are a dubious mixture of each. Most bishops, I should imagine, believe their own propaganda, but still know how to use it to further their own and their institution’s ends, and those lower down the rankings will come out with some degree of befuddling and bewitching, even though they do not know the purpose of it.

Humility was another of those qualities that Christ advocated that few Christians would dream of having, but some are genuinely humble people sensitive to the needs of those less able than themselves, and freely giving of their love and compassion. Having said that, I cannot be certain I can think of one, even among the lower ranks. Pope John XXIII is often cited among the higher clergy, and perhaps it is right. In any case, citing education by Jesuits or whoever as a benefit of Catholicism is a bit far fetched. For a millennium the Church did anything but educate the people. It wanted to keep them ignorant. The instances you cite have all come about since the dominance of the Church in the west was broken by the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. I genuinely fear for the future if these great movements are swamped again by Christian superstition, so I think they are worth defending.

It does not matter, for the sake of my argument here, who religion might have evolutionary value for. After all, since when has natural selection been democratic or egalitarian? Evolution theory is all about advantage and power. As a matter of historical record, science has been just as much placed in the service of creating advantages for the power elite as religion has. This is increasingly evident and political “heretics” will tend to find themselves classified as “terrorists”, or dumped in mental hospitals, or more commonly, unemployed, ignored, and impotent. Just as much as religion is defined by its uses and practices, so is science.

You are right, but my point is that the advantages of science do not go to scientists by and large. Scientists are not a caste of the ruling class like priests, taking tithes of a tenth, and so on, but they can obviously be bought by the rich, and asked to make statements that are invalid, but assumed to be true because of their scientific credentials. And the ones who punish dissidents are the bosses. Most scientists are in the same boat. They are lackeys with no power at all. So, why blame them and their discipline for the faults of capitalist society? Rulers are past masters at finding scapegoats, and scientists are the scapegoats of the present rulers. Science is certainly used by the ruling elite, but it can be used otherwise. It could be used to benefit us all much more than it presently is. Funds need to be diverted from massive prestigious projects into more useful ones, and methods that have shown no sign of producing anything useful despite billions of expenditure on them, should be abandoned in favour of many more smaller and more utilitarian ones.

But such thoughts are utopian when the ordinary people are perpetually kept in a state of confusion by this plugging of choice by our rulers. Choice is ultimately confusion unless people can judge what to choose, and even then many people would rather be saved the bother. Who wants to choose a school for our kids or a hospital when we are ill. Our local schools and hospitals should be as good as any other, and choice then superfluous. When I had pancreatitis last year, I couldn’t care less about choice. I just wanted the pain alleviating, and my life securing. I might have liked a large choice of cakes at a patisserie when I could eat them, but most of the time it did not matter a jot which one I chose. Having 30,000 brands of Christianity might be a great idea for Christians, it does not bother me how many there are. What bothers me is that society will not recognise that people are mainly not Christian and do not care a fig about Christianity. Let them keep to themselves. It might be a sign of marvellous plurality in society to have a large number of alternatives to science, but let us have the right criteria to judge something that is so basic to all modern societies, and let people be educated about it.

You talk about “reality” and “scientific method” as if these were divine revelations. The first thing one learns from the history of science is that there is no such thing as a scientific method—there are in fact, lots of scientific methods that do not follow any general principle. In my view, you have a lot more in common with the man of faith than you accept. But, for the record, I certainly did not mean to imply that you are trying to force your beliefs on others. Not at all. I don’t quite see why you would think that I was. As far as I’m concerned, you are only putting forth your opinions, sometimes more persuasively than other times, and you are clearly leaving it up to the reader to make up his or her own mind. I don’t think that you are a dogmatist. Not at all. But I do think that you have a reductive view of religion which either forces religious people into the camps of manipulative or stupid. I think, even though there are cases in which this is true, it is generally false and I think that you are being somewhat unfair. And, before you point out all those cases in which self-proclaimed religious people have been unfair, as my gran used to say (who was both deeply religious and very lovely)—two wrongs don’t make a right. She was a Christian who never menaced anybody.

No doubt she was, and my mother, though never a practising Christian, keeps telling me when I mock religion, “Well, I believe in God, Michael”. She always calls me Michael when she is narked. There again, neither your gran nor my own mother, delightful as they are, are the fount of knowledge on these matters.

Perhaps, as a youth, philosophy often seemed boring to me because it seemed to get bogged down in tedious detail before I had even gotten a grasp of where the philosopher was going. The same applies to any argument if every exception or special case has to be specifically exempted before the general point is made. When that is clear, it is perverse to highlight the minority of exceptions. When the applied mathematician says that for the accuracy he requires, he will consider the whole weight of the pendulum to be in the bob, it is perverse to observe that he has neglected the weight of the string. We know it has weight and it will change the mathematics, but he has said already that he is not seeking that level of accuracy. He gets a result that is true for many uses of simple harmonic motion.

Accusations of being reductionist are usually meant as an insult, but science does reduce things, and that is what I admittedly do, like the applied mathematician. Indeed there are good Christians, but Christianity seems to have nothing to do with their goodness. They are good despite the vile history of their belief, and good Christians are usually naïve ones because no one good could read about the enormity of Christian history and remain a Christian. The naïve ones know nothing of Christian history, and that is why they are Christians. So, I do not think I am being unfair in general, though plainly there are relatively a few Christians that I am unfair to. The psychology of making exceptions is that everyone thinks that they are among the exceptions. As soon as you say something like, “the trouble with the world today is that nine out of ten people are selfish”, you will get widespread agreement, but few of them will think they are among the nine. They will put themselves among the exceptions, so any attempt to get awareness for selfishness only gets smiling mods of assent. You say that an aim of your book is to make scientists think twice about their attitude, or whatever. I am doing the same to Christians, or rather those who are already liberal thinking enough to read what I have to say.

I make the point that I am not trying to force my views on others because Christians are, and because several comments of yours like the one here about divine revelation, and the equating of science and religion earlier, suggests that I am interested in doing the same as them. I dare say that much of what we know came to us in a flash of gestalt, and that is perhaps the origin of the notion of divine revelation, though, in the past, it usually came in a dream or vision. I much prefer to think of Nature as divine rather than imaginary fathers and sons, but by that I do not mean that Nature has any consciousness. It is simply a way of impressing the wonder and importance of Nature to us, and I often say that shit is divine to an E coli bacterium. So, I suppose I shall have to admit some feeling of reverence for reality, but not in the way of the Christian reverence for something entirely in their heads.

As for scientific method, I have read the same as you that there is no single scientific method, but unfortunately these historians have confused method with technique. There most certainly is a dominant scientific method, and that is the hypothesis and deduction method. It is the trial and error method mentioned above recast in better sounding language. The method, irrespective of the specific instruments, experiments and observations needed is simply to formulate a possible hypothesis based on a prelimary assessment of the problem, to make a deduction about a consequence of the proposed hypothesis, and to test whether the postulated consequence obtains using whatever is necessary to do it. The range of ways of testing the hypothesis seems to me to have been confused by non-scientist historians for different scientific methods. In a sense, the method is a constant strategy and the tests are various tactical ways of realising it. If this is faith, then so be it, but it is faith based on a very simple and useful method, a method that could usefully be taught to anyone learning any discipline and be useful to know, yet so very simple in essence because it is a systemization of common sense. It seems to be quite different from faith in the supposition that a god disguised as man lifted himself up from death 2000 years ago as a demonstration that we shall all live forever, as long as we give up the free will that God had previously given us. Are those who believe it sure this was not the Devil in disguise and not God. They are sure certain it was God, but they have no idea why they are sure!

I also think that I am doing I little more than:

“Merely to advance an argument that science is imperfect for this and that reason, but without offering anything better seems simply to be helping to justify the confidence tricksters in the world to make use of the naïve.”

But, given the evident truth of science, I really don’t see what you are so frightened about. After all, no one who uncritically and stupidly accepts that the Bible is true (because they are naïve and manipulated) is likely to find much confirmation in my arguments. I don’t think that they could even follow a page of my argument. It just wouldn’t make any sense to them. Nor would they use my work to deny the validity of science. I am just as much concerned with the truth as you are and if there is anything in my writings that undermines the claims of scientific realists then that could only be because those claims could be undermined or at least shown not be as evidently true as the scientific realist would have us belief. At best my efforts can only be in the service of truth, and at worse they do nothing at all. Sometimes, you sound like the religious man who chastises the critic of religion because they might aid the servants of the devil. Science, like religion, either stands up to criticism or it does not. And, if it is true then it will stand up to all criticism, won’t it? And if it fails to then it is probably false, so you are better off not believing it.

I am sure you are right that the Christians of whatever tribe they are in would get nothing much from your book, and I do not think they will be rushing to read it. What I am saying is based on what you have said here, not what I have read in your book, which I have scarcely begun. No, it is not a question of them using any of your detailed reasoning, but simply the implication that science is not valid, not perfect, not based on sound principles, and so on—generally no better than religion. Those Christians who call themselves creationists, and fundamentalists, and evangelicals, and the like, who have an argument with science, will use your authority to feed their sheep more denigration of science. Denigration is not just criticism. Christians are fond of authority rather than experiment for settling questions. They would not want to use arguments themselves, but would simply cite you as the philosophical authority who has shown science is bunkum. Since many Christians are not noted, either, for even checking what is said in their own bible, there is no fear that they might turn to your works for confirmation. Protestants obey the interpretations of the bible given to them by their pastors or ministers, or whatever they call them, and Catholics obey the directions of the Catholic divines and doctors. Even when they can be bothered to read the holy word, they are predisposed to believe it means something other than what it says, as I have already said. A lot more of them might be quite nice people doing useful deeds, like your nuns, if they actually followed the directions given them by the so-called son of God.

And, as I have said already, my arguments are more likely to confirm your beliefs than undermine them. My purpose was merely for you to think about your beliefs. Whether you still believe them or not is quite frankly your affair. I don’t care either way. I’m certainly not going to keep my mouth shut for fear of helping anti-science propagandists. They really don’t need any help from me. The “godless” things that scientists such as Richard Dawkins says are far more helpful for the neoconservative right than anything I could say, and, to be honest, when scientists, despite all the warnings and reservations, go on ahead with cloning animals and humans, they do science much more harm and the religious right much more good than any philosopher ever could. Science has proven to be its own worse enemy and it is largely the fault of scientists that people are turning against it. Scientists built rockets and atomic weapons and declared that science is value neutral and hence it is not their fault if they are used for ill. Oh, surprise, surprise, they were used for ill. Now, even with the lessons of history, they want to develop biotech for corporations and the military, but it is still value neutral and it is not their fault if anyone does anything bad with it.

You are quite right, of course, not to be bothered that anti-science propagandists will find some succour in your work. I am not suggesting that you should voluntarily suppress it, but, knowing how it might be used you can be ready with some counter arguments or articles to those who use it thus. The trouble with science that you have highlighted is that it can be used for good or ill—what cannot? All we can do is have guidance about these things and, if necessary, have laws to prevent their misuse. When it is the lawmakers who misuse something, we only have democratic protest to use against them. You are in the position of taking a stance generally for or against science, even though it is not a science that you would prefer. If your book is meant to suggest science can take different directions in the future, under a different metaphysics, then you must be for it as it is, in the hope that it will evolve into something better, and for the same reason you must be against any attempt to rub out science in favour of superstition and a dark age because then there can be nothing to evolve in the future.

No doubt Dawkins thinks the same about the “Godless things” he says as you do. He has the right, and perhaps the duty to say them, even at the risk of alienating many Christians further, to give others an option they might not otherwise have. And in speaking of “scientists” who indulge in cloning, you sound as if scientists were themselves a breed or a political party or a religious congregation who uniformly approve cloning of human beings. Plainly some do, but my guess is that many and perhaps most scientists would consider cloning human beings, if not animals, a step too far. Many scientists would oppose it for scientific reasons. It will narrow the gene pool and make humanity more subject to extinction. Your agglomerating of scientists together is more gross than my distinction of two classes of Christians. It makes no distinctions between scientists at all. Scientists are ordinary human beings. They do not claim, as a tribe, to have divine goodness and love at the back of them. Christians do. Scientists therefore can be expected to be simply a representative sample of humanity. Christians claim they are not merely representative, but represent something better than the human average. Scientists do a job for an employer, not for a God. I quite agree with you that scientists who want to devise horrific weapons are reprehensible. It is not something I would want to do, and I had the chance because I was assigned to work experience at the UKAEA when I was doing a degree. But I am proof that some scientists, and I would guess there are a lot of us, think like you over these matters. Are we all to be ignored and simply lumped in with the ones you rail against.

I think the scientific method is value neutral. How can a method make value judgements? But scientists do make value judgements, and some do it because they believe they are doing the lesser of two evils. They agreed to develop an atom bomb because it would be worse for us all to be enslaved by the Nazis and the Knights of the Bushido. Maybe you would have done the same given the same circumstances, and especially if your family had been starved in Belsen, say. I agree that we need a scientific code of honour, backed by some association or union with some economic power, but the trouble is, of course, that there are plenty of scientists—especially in the US—who would imagine any such organization was itself a threat to freedom!

If genetic crops destroy the worlds delicate ecosystems then it is not their fault. If human cloning produces horrors and turns human life into a commodity then that is not their fault. In fact the right wing Christian facists have gained their whole platform as being the only source of opposition to scientific endeavours to clone human beings. It seems to me that it is the irresponsibility of the scientists that has empowered the religious right. So if science ends up with its funding slashed (or completely transfered into the corporate sphere) then the scientists are to blame. They have brought it on themselves and now the rest of us have to suffer those bigotted bastards in the US government for four more years because of the arrogance of some scientists. Quite frankly I’m sick of them. We are only just learning about the side-effects of burning coal, let alone nuclear power, and still these scientists are bleating about the resistence to biotechnology and how they are going to do it anyway. Irresponsible bastards. Despite example after example to the contrary, they still insist thay they can control it. In my view, these scientists are much more of a menace than any religious fanatic ever was.

You continue to talk as if scientists had one mind, and that is too irrational for a philosopher. I doubt there is anything in your litany of wrongs that I would disagree with, but presumably you must say that I am untypical of scientists, whereas I would say that I am fairly typical. On the other hand, the real control of all of these things is in the hands of those who have oppressed us all in the past, the boss class and their puppet governments. You are like tha man who got bad news so shot the messenger. Scientists are simply in no position to counter the damands made of them, except as I did, and perhaps you too, as an individual choosing not to do certain types of work. But what I refuse to do in my time on my principles, someone else has a principled reason for doing in their own time and on their own principles. If you are a Russion scientist fearful that the US, who already have the bomb are going to use it against you pre-emptively, as the call was just after the war, you might have been willing to help develop a Russian bomb. I think you are not taking all the circumstances into account when you rage against scientists in general. I oppose planting GM plants in our fields, but there are obviously plenty of people who think differently including scientists won over by the propaganda that GM will feed the world. I think they are thick, but they think I am. It’s my turn to say c’mon! C’mon, Karl.

Of course scientists do not have one mind or constitute a single class. I did not suggest that they did. Nor did I suggest that scientists share a common moral code or agenda. Scientists are ordinary human beings and are a diverse and differentiated as any other collection of human beings. Also, you are quite right to point out that what one scientists will refuse to do out of moral principle, another will be driven to do out of moral principle. I disagree with your claim that scientists are “simply in no position to counter the demands made of them”—they are as responsible for their own actions as any other human being is.

You were using the words “scientist” and “science” and the pronouns referring to them as if they were monolithic to an uncritical reader—scientists do this and that rotten thing, or science does. I realise you cannot have meant they all did, but it sounded as if you did. And, yes, scientists have the choice of not doing certain work, but, as you say, they are representative of the human race, and, like humans generally, many scientists are not in a position to be defiant. They can be constrained by the vicissitudes of life (they might have become parents!), or can be bought if the price is right. Moreover, science education is demanding and scientists often come out of the educational mill ignorant and naïve politically, so they are themselves easily used. There is a greasy pole in science, as in any career, and scientists want to get to the top of it, being clever and ambitious, but they often do not realise what they will have to end up doing when they start out. I actually think the same about some politicians. They start out with sincerity and principles, but have to ditch them to get to the top of the greasepole. I do not excuse any of them, but ask for some recognition of the reality of our corrupt society. Individuals cannot solve such deficiencies. It requires concerted group action.

The idea of science being value laden does not mean that the scientific method (whatever that might be) makes value judgements. Where did you get the idea that it does? It means that the methods and research goals of science are premised on value judgements and thus the direction and content of science is value laden. Even a relatively cursory study of histories of science show case after case where scientific work is value laden. The idea of science being value neutral is something of an impossible ideal, at best, and an empty mantra, at worse, which is neither consistent with nor correspondent to real scientific work. Scientists, as you say, are a representative sample of humanity, and, science, as the product of that representative sample, can be no more value neutral than that representative sample.

Again, it is your speaking of “it” bitterly as being considered “value neutral”. I think we should be clear that the “scientific method (whatever it is”, if you like) is just a method. We agree on that, and I have already agreed with you that the direction and content of science is not generally decided by the scientists but is prescribed by corporations and governments. It is our social organisation that is faulty, not science as a method, or scientists particularly as a group of people. Inasmuch as science and scientists reflect the desires of society, it is society that needs to change, must change, if we are not to make the world into a desert.

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