Truth
Science or Delusion
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, March 22, 1999
Notes and comments on Richard Dawkins’ Richard Dimbleby Lecture, November 12th, 1996
Science and Literature
Nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. In Britain, that is. A BBC 24 Hours News presenter called John Sucher is publicly proud of the fact that he cannot even subtract, yet earns more in a year than most scientists earn in ten. To discuss the fall in interest in mathematics, he, or his producer, picked for interview a darts referee because he could subtract! They seemed to think that subtraction was mathematics! The same is not true of our more successful economic competitors, Germany, the United States and Japan.
Could science be too difficult for some people and therefore seem threatening? John Carey, the present Merton Professor of English at Oxford writes:
The annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the abandonment of science among the young. Though most academics are wary of saying it straight out, the general consensus seems to be that arts courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts students would simply not be up to the intellectual demands of a science course.
Carey quoted Donne’s lines to a class of 30 undergraduates in their final year of English at Oxford:
Knows’t thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow,
Doth from one ventricle to the other go?
Carey asked them how the blood does flow. None could answer. One tentatively guessed that it might be “by osmosis”. The truth—that the blood is pumped from ventricle to ventricle through at least 50 miles of intricately dissected capillary vessels throughout the body—should fascinate any true literary scholar. And unlike quantum theory or relativity, it isn’t hard to understand. No intelligent person has an excuse for not knowing, after secondary school, about the circulation of the blood and the heart’s role in pumping it round.
Yet, it is not just ignorance, there is hostility towards science, even from published novelists and newspaper columnists one might assume are clever. Indeed, a feature of the British press is the regularity with which some of its leading columnists return to attack science—not from a vantage point of knowledge! Bernard Levin in Rupert Murdoch’s The Times bragged:
Scientists don’t know and nor do I—but at least I know I don’t know.
Mr Bernard Levin goes on to prove to us how much he does not know:
Despite their access to copious research funds, today’s scientists have yet to prove that a quark is worth a bag of beans. The quarks are coming! The quarks are coming! Run for your lives…! Yes, I know I shouldn’t jeer at science, noble science, which, after all, gave us mobile telephones, collapsible umbrellas and multi-striped toothpaste, but science really does ask for it… Now I must be serious. Can you eat quarks? Can you spread them on your bed when the cold weather comes?
The distinguished Cambridge scientist, Sir Alan Cottrell, replied:
Mr Bernard Levin asks, “Can you eat quarks?”
He eats about 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 quarks a day.
Let us rectify the wrongs of science beginning by closing down Murdoch’s empire of high tech companies. “All right?” Mr Levin. Jeering at science is an old pastime and perhaps Levin likes to imagine he is in exalted company:
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow.Keats
For Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion; Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs.Blake
The results of even such brilliant wordsmiths as these can be appreciated by the dullest scientific plodder, but poor old Keats and Blake cannot appreciate science. Science does not clip the angel’s wings it exposes them to the full gaze of the onlooker. The solution is more beautiful than the puzzle. And while science might conquer some mysteries, it has shown itself thus able to reveal even more profound ones. Unweaving the rainbow into light of different wavelengths leads on to Maxwell’s equations, and eventually to special relativity.
Einstein admitted being ruled by this aesthetic scientific muse:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
John Wheeler, one of the distinguished elder statesmen of American physics today adds:
We will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say each to the other, “Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!”
Even a well known British journalist can write:
I can think of very few science books I’ve read that I’ve called useful. What they’ve been is wonderful. They’ve actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller much more awesome place than I ever realised it was. I think that science has got a wonderful story to tell. But it isn’t useful. It’s not useful like a course in business studies or law is useful, or even a course in politics and economics.Simon Jenkins
So, it is possible for hacks to recognise that science can be wonderful, it simply is not useful! Nor is reading poetry or novels useful in the same sense, Mr Jenkins. But science books are far more useful than any of those mentioned when someone who is interested in science gets a hold of them. It is just as well because Jenkins and other ignorant hacks would not have a job without it.
Scientists as Dull Plodding Nerds
Despite this generation of wonder, some see scientists as only dull and plodding nerds with rows of biros in their top pockets. A A Gill, writing on science in The Sunday Times, prefers the luvvies of the theatre to boring scientists:
Science is constrained by experiment results and the tedious, plodding stepping stones of empiricism. What appears on television just is more exciting than what goes on in the back of it. That’s art, luvvie: theatre, magic, fairy dust, imagination, lights, music, applause, my public. There are stars and there are stars, darling. Some are dull, repetitive squiggles on paper, and some are fabulous, witty, thought-provoking, incredibly popular.
Doubtless Mr Gill is trying hard to be witty. Despite a disparaging nod at the technology of it, he seems not to realise all of this starry stuff depends on the television having a back, the result of dull squigglers too clever for Sunday Times journalists.
Today, most people of average education could baffle not just poets and journalists but the philosophers, sages and prophets of old, if it were possible to meet them. They know a lot more because we have discovered a lot more in the intervening years. Science is cumulative. All that is required is the will and aptitude to study it.
Gill’s “dull, repetitive squiggles” refers to Jocelyn Bell Burnell relating also on television how she first knew in a spine-tingling moment that she was observing something in the universe unknown on earth. In 1967 as a young woman working with Anthony Hewish, on the threshold of her career, she found something not merely new under the sun but a whole new kind of sun—a pulsar—which rotates, so fast that, instead of taking 24 hours like our planet, it takes a quarter of a second. That can only be dull for the dull-witted. (Some of these journalists have been known to appear on TV themselves, often to prove to the world that they are genuinely half-witted.)
People blame science for nuclear weapons and similar horrors. Science provides powerful tools to do evil but equally powerful tools to do good. Yet scientists are rarely in a position to decide what should be done with a discovery. Despite fantasy films about mad scientists, you will be hard pressed to pick any scientist who has been in charge of a country. Scientists are like bricklayers or truckdrivers, not like business moguls and politicians. They simply do a job. If our rulers want the right things, then science will provide the most effective ways of achieving them.
There are critics of science who deny the very possibility of objective truth—those so-called relativists and Christians who see no reason to prefer scientific views over primitive myths about the world. The myths might conceivably be vessels for transmitting moral values but who can accept that the world is a flat plain resting on a giant tortoise resting on an elephant? How can this myth be as equally true as modern knowledge, now that we have seen the earth from space and photographed it. These critics cannot understand that science is not a set of arbitrary beliefs like mythology.
Invading the Domain of Religion
An equally common accusation is that science goes beyond its remit. It’s accused of a grasping take-over bid for territory that properly belongs to other disciplines such as theology. On the other hand—you can’t win!—listen to the novelist Fay Weldon’s rant against “the scientists” in the UK Daily Telegraph.
Don’t expect us to like you. You promised us too much and failed to deliver. You never even tried to answer the questions we all asked when we were six. Where did Aunt Maud go when she died? Where was she before she was born? And who cares about half a second after the Big Bang; what about half a second before? And what about crop circles?
Let any scientist give a simple and direct answer to those Aunt Maud questions and they would be called arrogant and presumptuous for going beyond the limits of science into the realms of theology.
People lose their critical faculties over long-established religions in a way they have no effort in resisting when considering modern sects like Scientology or the Moonies. Catholic scientist, S J Gould, writes on the Pope’s attitude to evolution:
Science and religion are not in conflict, for their teachings occupy distinctly different domains. I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat.
Believers and nonbelievers alike are too conditioned or flabby minded to think this conciliatory position through. What are these two “distinctly different domains” in a respectful and loving concordat?
The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.
Are the claims of the church really so neatly distinct from the domain of science? First, though, the church claims religion has some special expertise to offer us on moral questions. Even the nonreligious blithely accept this, if only simply to allow their opponent a trick out of courtesy.
Science cannot answer a question like, “What is right and what is wrong?”. It is a question, not of nature, but one which requires a moral premise or a priori moral belief. Given such a belief or premise, secular moral philosophy can use scientific or logical modes of reasoning to deduce the implications and inconsistencies of the premise. The premises themselves must come from elsewhere. That is where religion comes in. A premise is an unargued conviction and the religious tell us it must have been handed to us by some higher authority, by revelation or scripture and perpetuated by tradition.
No one uses scripture as ultimate authority for moral reasoning. If they did, they would have to accept all of it, but in practice, even the saintliest pick and choose the bits they like and ignore the rest. They like the sound of blessing the poor but stoning adulteresses, they declare old-fashioned!
The God of the Jewish scriptures is used by the worst Christian bigots as an ogre to scare children into being good. Though he is notionally the same god as the good, loving Christian god, he habitually raged in vengeful jealousy and was racist, sexist and bloodthirsty. Not even most Christians accept him. Their excuse is that the Jewish god was an earlier concept.
And that is the point! Christians today still accept the Jewish scriptures as part of their holy works but freely ignore what they say as old-fashioned. They have some other source of ultimate moral conviction that overrides scripture.
There is some kind of liberal consensus of decency and natural justice that changes over time, frequently under the influence of secular reformists. Wherever that consensus comes from, it is available to all of us, religious or not. Everyone gives it higher priority than scripture. In practice, everyone ignores scripture, quoting it only when it supports our liberal consensus.
Religious teachers may inspire us but again we pick and choose among them, and secular role models might be even better. Only tradition has any merit and that is because it presupposes the continuing selection by the continuing popular consensus of moral standards. As circumstances change, the consensus changes the tradition. We use our secular judgment of decency and natural justice to decide what to follow, what to give up.
Invading the Domain of Science
Does the Pope lives up to the ideal of keeping off the scientific grass? His “Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences” begins with doubletalk designed to reconcile what John Paul II wants to say with the earlier pronouncements of Pius XII, whose acceptance of evolution was grudging. Then the Pope comes to the harder task of reconciling scientific evidence with “revelation”.
Revelation teaches us that man was created in the image and likeness of God, if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God. Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say.
To do the Pope credit, at this point he recognizes the essential contradiction between the two positions he is attempting to reconcile:
However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry?
Never fear. As so often in the past, obscurantism comes to the rescue:
Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seen irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being.
In plain language, there came a moment in the evolution of hominids when God intervened and injected a human soul into a previously animal lineage. When? A million years ago? Two million years ago? Between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens? Between archaic Homo sapiens and H. sapiens sapiens? The injection of a soul is necessary to satisfy Catholic morality. Mankind is permitted to kill animals but at what point did this animal become human? Killing a human being is murder.
Catholic morals have scientific implications, so Gould’s religious net overlaps his scientific net. Catholic morality demands an absolute distinction between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom. That is anti-evolutionary. Either the soul is itself subject to evolution or no animals have souls. The former is the truth because a soul is an abstract construct not any real property of a thing. It therefore evolved with the evolution of intelligence. The sudden injection was when someone posited a soul as a representation of the human consciousness. So it occurred with consciousness. The plain conclusion is that it is consciousness, and nothing other.
Still, having the Pope as an ally against fundamentalist creationism is gratifying.
Gould is wrong that religion keeps itself away from science’s turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims and this means scientific claims.
The same is true of many of the major doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The Virgin Birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection of Jesus, the survival of our own souls after death, all are claims of a clearly scientific nature. Either Jesus had a corporeal father or he didn’t. This is not a question of values or morals. It is a question of sober fact. We may not have the evidence to answer it, but it is a scientific question, nevertheless. You may be sure that, if any evidence supporting the heavenly claim were discovered, the Vatican would not be reticent in promoting it.
Either Mary’s body decayed when she died or it was physically removed from this planet to Heaven. The official Roman Catholic doctrine of Assumption, promulgated as recently as 1950, implies that Heaven has a physical location and exists in the domain of physical reality—how else could the physical body of a woman go there? The doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin is not therefore outside the domain of science. On the contrary, the Assumption of the Virgin is transparently a scientific theory. So is the theory that our souls survive bodily death, and so are all stories of angelic visitations, Marian manifestations, and miracles of all types.
There is something dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of claiming that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the one hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their popular appeal.
But at the same time it is considered below the belt to subject the same stories to the ordinary rigours of scientific criticism. These are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science. But you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways. Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious people, are unaccountably ready to let them.
The Paranormal
Disoriented people recount their fantasies of ghosts and poltergeists. But instead of sending them off to a kindly psychiatrist, BBC and Discovery Channel television producers eagerly hire actors to re-create their delusions—with predictable effects on the credulity of large audiences.
There is mystery in the universe, beguiling mystery, but it isn’t capricious. The universe is an orderly place and, at a deep level, regions of it behave like other regions, times behave like other times. If you put a brick on a table it stays there unless something lawfully moves it, even if you meanwhile forget it’s there. Poltergeists and sprites don’t intervene and hurl it about for reasons of mischief or caprice. There is mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.
Why do scientists often pooh-pooh the paranormal? Parsimony is the answer—economy of explanation. You might believe that your car is driven by psychic energy. But if the engine looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and behaves like a petrol engine, the best hypothesis is it is a petrol engine.
Science does not rule out telepathy and possession by the spirits of the dead as a matter of principle but as a matter of empirical truth. Abduction of humans by aliens in UFOs is one hypothesis of bad dreams, but we can explain them in terms of known natural events. If alien abduction is to be accepted rather than indigestion or neurosis, then we need scientific observations that cannot be so explained. The supernatural explanation is unparsimonious, demanding firm evidence incapable of routine explanation before we believe it.
The truth is that there is negligible objective evidence of such phenomena and even the oddest phenomena have, in the instances where they have been solved, been natural not supernatural. Supernatural explanations are like the old fashioned “God of the Gaps”. As explanations are found for more and more mysteries, the supernatural declines into rarer and more obscure phenomena. For people determined to see no mystery in nature as she is, the supernatural will exist out of the need for the mysterious.
If fortune tellers and miracle healers had the powers they claim, they would win the lottery every week or earn fortunes curing the wealthy. Or they could reveal forces unknown to science and win a Nobel Prize. Why are they wasting their talents doing kiddies’ tricks on television? Answer: because they are really stage magicians doing kiddies’ tricks on television. They, their producers, the TV show hosts and the TV companies are all confidence tricksters and properly should be arrested for fraud.
(See James Randi)
The living are concerned with death and demand everlasting life from their gods. Yet, in death we are the lucky ones—because we have lived. Far more people will never die because they will never be born. The people who will never see the light of day, but could do, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara—more, the atoms in the universe. Those unborn people include greater poets than Donne, greater scientists than Newton, greater composers than Beethoven. The set of possible people allowed by our DNA massively outnumbers the set of actual people. We are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.
It’s often said that people need something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose. Our purpose might be to find out what is here in the material world, before concluding that you need something more. It is certainly not a bad purpose and explains for those who want it why God gave us our brains. What more do people want? If they find it tedious finding out about this world while they are in it, they are going to be bored for an eternity in any everlasting life. Just study what is, and you’ll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.
The appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. That same appetite drives scientific inquiry and it is that appetite that science is best qualified to satisfy.
