Truth
After God, Does Don Cupitt Understand Science? 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Monday, 09 February 2004
Theological Myths
Don Cupitt tries to tell us that scientists’ “grandiose totalising dreams” of a “final theory of everything in physics, just like the overblown claims made for the human genome project, perpetuate old theological myths of total happiness through total knowledge and total control of reality”. The old theologian seems not inclined to press this too far admitting rather abjectly that “few scientists may privately swallow the full PR pitch”. And the explanation he gives is probably true too. To get funding from politicians who in the main also do not understand science, the scientific administrators have to hype up the potential results of their work.
Even if some scientists believe the hype, it does not seem to be such a bad crime. Such dreams offer goals and from attempting to achieve them comes new knowledge even if the goal is not achieved. Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who dreamed of solving a four centuries old puzzle—the intractable Last Theorem of de Fermat—did it by doggedly tackling a series of subsidiary problems which eventually led him to a remarkable success. Had he failed, he personally would have been heartbroken but his work would have remained invaluable in mathematics.
It must surely be true that scientists brought up in our Judaeo-Christian religious tradition will have Judaeo-Christian ways of thinking, including the idea of an absolute. They might think that eventually it will all be solved in the “Theory of Everything (TOE)”, but most, as I have already said, recall the experience of a hundred years ago and feel quite humble.
Few scientists would disagree with Cupitt that the purpose of religion should be “a guide for living, not a preparation for dying”. Christianity has been the worst religion possible in that respect. It teaches people that the most important thing to them personally is their “salvation”—a gift given by God not as a reward for righteousness but purely on his whim, or grace, as the church calls it.
The way Christians interpret this curiously unjust system is that God’s grace is earned through faith. Having faith means that Christians do what their theological experts tell them. It is the most wonderful and complete confidence trick ever perpetrated on mankind, as its continued strength after 2000 years of bloodshed and bestiality proves.
Personal salvation is purely selfish. It appeals to the selfishness in everyone, and their individual concern for death. Not many people can actually fear death itself, though they might fear the manner in which it occurs. Death itself should have no fears for anyone, after all people experience something like it every night when they fall asleep. Indeed the biblical euphemism for death which we still use is to sleep (“Jacob slept”). People fear never waking up. They cannot accept that their personality no longer exists, though every atom of their body continues to do so. And people perhaps feel that the world cannot continue after their personal death.
Everyone has a personal world, and that indeed dies. Perhaps there is a real perception that eternal life is essential if the world of one’s friends and relatives is to continue. This fear usually is imagined in reverse because few people can make sense of it the proper way round, so we get to expect to meet all our friends and relatives anew in the “after life”.
This Life
Whatever the psychology of it, the immense desire for personal salvation can only detract people from pursuing what is good and just in this life. This was realised at the very start of Christianity as the New Testament shows. In his wonderful epistle, disparaged by Luther, to mention but one, James the Just tells the faithful that faith is not sufficient to attract God’s mercy. Christians had to do good works in the world. And indeed many Christians do good works in the world but they are the thoughtful ones. Most people, nominally Christian though they may be, are impious and are not interested in questioning such dogmas as the creeds. They have always been taught not to question and for centuries Christians considered ignorance, like filth, a virtue. The impious have felt free to do as they wanted subject to certain serious sins—usually sexual—proscribed by the priesthood. They justify themselves only except when it leads to conflict with good behaviour when they simply confess if slightly guilty or pass on through life unconcerned, because, at least, they believe.
Cupitt advises us that we should adopt a “cheerfully pragmatic view of science” apparently meaning using its ways of thinking without becoming slaves to them. Well I think that most science is already cheerfully pragmatic. Even theoretical scientists expect their conclusions to be tested in the real world sooner or later. The apparent meaning is senseless. Is this a true reflexion of Cupitt’s thinking?
I suppose we can accept that there is a scientific way of thinking, but who is becoming a slave to it? Scientists use science and any way of thinking it requires for the very pragmatic reason that it works. It gives us models of reality that enable us to make accurate predictions. Because we chose to use a methodology that works, are we then enslaved by it?
As we saw above, probably the majority of people with influence in the world, as well as most of those who have none, are either indifferent to the working of science or simply do not understand it. It makes too many brains hurt for it to be a popular study. It is far easier to choose chatty subjects like theology, history of art or politics where you can say any nonsense you like as long as you make it sound convincing. The technique, mastered by the French structuralist philosophers, psychiatrists and many American sociologists, is to adopt a lofty pseudo scientific style which is totally incomprehensible. Those who want such head-scratching wisdom to be considered the equal of practical science are called pluralists. Pluralism pretends that all “wisdom” is equally valid. Soon Cupitt is calling for pluralism.
Cupitt has a very strange attitude to sunsets. It seems he is so strongly influenced by scientific ways of thinking that when he sees one, or a picture of one like that in Turner’s “the Fighting Temeraire being towed to her last birth”, he thinks about nuclear equations, vortices of hot fluids and plasmas, neutrino emission and the balance of gravity and fusion energy. He wants to forget all this and look at the sunset not with the eyes of a physicist but the eyes of Turner. Well, if I were Don I would go see a shrink.
Though not a physicist, I was a physical chemist yet when I see a sunset I see it in Turner’s eyes, not the way Cupitt thinks. The first thing that strikes anyone must be its beauty. If one had a young companion at the time, one might remark on this, pick out the features, perhaps talk about Turner or others that had such skills and so on. One might also consider the awesome processes going on in the sun, its benefits to the earth in providing the energy for life and the physics and biology behind it all. Any responsible adult would take the chance to educate the young, but generally I doubt that many people think of the physics of the sun at any time, sunset, sunrise or mid-day.
Cupitt’s world is a strange one. He can see that traditional Christianity is The Lie and hates to think that there is anything out there that is true. He has therefore made science into his personal nightmare.
Cosmic Democracy?
Cupitt seems to reject truth. It is because truth, such as it is, is revealed by science not by religion. But he claims scientific modes of thinking “alienate us from life and rob the immediate this, here of value”. His solution is “cosmic democracy” consisting of endless debate, frequent injections of new metaphors, etc, etc, to form a human consensus. He thinks that truth is best established by a cacophony of competing voices. Anyone who can seriously think this must be nearing the edge of madness. There is no benefit in any democracy being cosmic if its voters are ignorant, and the only reliable way to establish the facts is by the processes of scientific enquiry.
For Cupitt, the “price of truth is endless openness to criticism and innovation”. The implication can only be that science is not. Yet the essence of science is precisely criticism and innovation. The core of science is criticism—the main activity of scientists is being critical, testing, seeking to disprove something. The result is to confirm or to deny. Hypotheses are upheld or rejected. When they are rejected a new hypothesis has to be proposed to replace the previous one. We have an innovation which often has repercussions beyond the immediate boundaries and further questions must be asked elsewhere. Science has to be in flux. If it is not, it is dead.
Cupitt wants us to acknowledge our limitations. He wants a science “less oriented towards power and control and more able to be imaginative, pluralistic and self-critical”. Now, I feel that Cupitt’s lack of hold on reality is getting tedious—or tedious to argue with. I begin to realise, belatedly perhaps, that his vaunted credentials as a scientist in his youth are non-existent. Nobody can make a statement like this without being dishonest or ignorant. I should not be surprised—churchmen have always been both.
I will not repeat the points I have made above showing that science could not work without being imaginative and self-critical, aye ,and even pluralistic if it is taken to mean ready to test dissenting views. What Cupitt does not like is that science is based on disproving falsehood. Cupitt’s pluralism includes deceits that science cannot accept, having shown them to be false or unnecessary.
Laplace, a Christian, had to admit to Napoleon that he had no need of the hypothesis of God in his celestial calculations. Let us freely admit, as Cupitt no doubt does, that we have no need of the hypothesis of God at all. The scientist therefore has no recourse to the supernatural at all, so it is not difficult for him to “resist the temptation to claim some sort of supernatural origins for our knowledge systems”.
Cupitt actually wrote “objective or supernatural origins” apparently implying that anything purporting to be objective is claiming to be supernatural. But science’s claim to be objective is not a claim of divinity. We have seen that science is a process of peeling off layers—a process of successive approximation. My guess is that few scientists now believe that they will ever get to know the “mind of God” or the TOE. It is an objective, but one which is like trying to get to the absolute zero of temperature or trying to get a massive object to move at the speed of light. We might keep getting closer but never actually get there.
True Pluralism
The objectivity of science is more mundane. It is the acceptance that anyone anywhere else can use scientific method to challenge whatever has been asserted. Therefore no matter what authority any particular scientist might have, he can always be challenged by someone else and if the challenge stands up to scrutiny, it will be upheld. This is true pluralism. Science has no Holy Books, no Aristotles, Jesus Christs or Mohammeds whose word will not be challenged. That is the objectivity of science—it is totally democratic, and isn’t that what Cupitt wants.
This also gives the lie to the nonsense about power and control. Science has its share of power-hungry would-be potentates but science is not orientated towards power—it is orientated towards truth. I admit that the ideal is often not achieved in the real world for the simple reason that everyone has their price. Financial rewards or high status can induce scientists to cheat, but that does not mean that most do.
The essential attribute of a scientist is to be critical. If people were taught science more effectively they too might be inclined to criticise the lies, declared to be scientific and presented by scientists, we often get from parties with vested interests. When a multinational wheels out a scientist to tell us that the company is not polluting such and such a place, one is right to be sceptical and demand independent evidence. The scientists doing independent research are the ones to trust, not the company’s scientists.
Similarly when government statisticians tell us some good news from such and such a survey, we have a right to be suspicious—Governments have to seek re-election and no one can be certain that they are not manipulating the data. The point about these examples is that in reality scientists have no power or control except over their own little committees—corporation bosses and cabinet ministers have the real power and control. Here I at last meet Cupitt on common ground. He criticises modern capitalism and the excess value placed on economic growth. These are the real dangers, and they are the natural outcome of the selfish religion. Economic experts—not scientists—will destroy the world before our eyes.
Science does not have to be driven by the demands of the capitalists. If the world somehow adopted a regime of no growth, science would have even more interesting problems to solve than it has now.
Cupitt seems to think that science is just like religion—it is a choice to be made. Just as you can chose to be a Buddhist or a Christian, Cupitt thinks the dominance of science is just a perverse choice people have made and which could be changed for a better one if people had the will. He doesn’t think anyone will change, but his reason is the enormous resources allocated to science and not the simple fact that it works. That is the reason the captains of industry and governments spend all these resources on it. Science is able to reveal opportunities for money making through invention and exploitation of the earth. The exploitation comes from corporations and governments. Cupitt wants to shoot the messenger.
Cupitt asserts yet again that science has the faults of religion.
The church once repressed questioning to protect its own power. Today the same repression continues under the hegemony of the technological rationality that seeks to reduce all the questions of life to technical problems, all education to technical education and all knowledge to technical skills.
When anyone uses the word “reduce” or its derivatives “reductionist” and “reductionism”, you know that the writer is losing an argument. These words are meant to be insults. They imply that the reductionist—scientists are always labelled reductionists by opponents—is a simple soul who cannot see that the whole is more than its parts. It is an accusation always made by genuinely simple souls like theologians and art graduates in general who have a vague idea of the whole but find the parts far too hard to comprehend. They have a vague idea that a computer is useful for typing and perhaps surfing the internet but haven’t a clue what makes it work.
Scientific Analysis
One of the techniques of science is, of course, to analyse things. Analysis is taking things apart to see how they are made up. If analysis is reductionism then scientists are reductionists—but then so too are graduates of the humanities who also have to analyse things like novels, poems and paintings. The name-callers who like to call scientists reductionists pretend that scientists are happy to break a watch into pieces and then they understand it, as if throwing all the cogs and springs into a plastic bag will make a watch.
The real point of analysis is to discover how to put the parts together to make them do what they do not do separately. Scientists analyse in order to synthesise. If analysis were sufficient there would be no need of the additional and more important step of synthesis.
The name-callers, from their viewpoint of total ignorance about anything other than things which we all can appreciate like great paintings and poems, try to tell onlookers that scientists are reductionists. Chemists are dolts. They do not know that sodium chloride is different from sodium and chlorine. Botanists are dolts. They do not know that wetting a dry seed might make it germinate. Why go on? The argument is fatuous. Captain Kirk is a poor layman and cannot understand that “ye canna mix ma’er wi’ an’i-ma’er, Cap’n” without getting something quite different from the constituents, as Scottie knows because he is an engineer. The scientist is not the reductionist. It is the layman. It might seem a bit of a digression to say so much about one word in the article but it characterises the nonsense that Cupitt propagates.
Throughout Cupitt indulges in that habit of mind called by the psychotherapist, projection. As a modernist in the church he is aware of all its faults and its vile history. But as a committed churchman he cannot accept that anything could be better. Ergo, we have this extended Aunt Sally.
Does anyone other than Cupitt really see this repression of thought by science. As a former scientist I will readily give Cupitt some ammunition by saying that to my mind far too much nonsense is published and Cupitt illustrates the fact admirably. However, I would not want to repress Cupitt even if I had the power.
Cupitt the theologian is jealous of the “hegemony of technological rationality” which has revealed so much to us in the last two centuries after thousands of years of religious obscurantism. The reason it can be described as a hegemony is because it works, not because it is repressing anything. The previous hegemony of Christianity was forced upon people for centuries on pain of torture and death. The proper hegemony for attack is that of capitalism. With Socialism unfashionable there is no opposition to capitalism. Yet without it capitalism will eat up the world like locusts destroying a field. When it has passed by everything will be dead.
The only criticism of scientists is that they are ordinary people with no intrinsic power, employed by whoever will pay them like anyone else. If sometimes they are obliged to lie for the sake of their families, who can criticise them? They do not generally have any false belief that an early death will lead to a quick resurrection in the presence of God. Perhaps if they had, they would oppose their masters more often, but they would do it under a delusion, like the living bombs of Islam and Hinduism.
So scientists are merely part of the human race and have the faults and failings of human beings—40% of them still believe in God. What is more important is that many of them are as blind as ordinary humans even though they are better placed than most to see our direction. It is not particularly science that is destroying the world but the indiscriminate application of its discoveries to the exploitation of the earth for the benefit of the advanced nations and the privileged sections of those nations. They had better enjoy it while it lasts because in a few generations time, their grandchildren will be gasping for air like the Malaysians and the Indonesians are now.
Scientists and theologians like Cupitt ought to unite to seek to prevent this awful prospect for our descendants. But I predict that they will not. Theologians cannot stand the loss of their dishonestly gained and held authority. They will see the world destroyed chanting that it is God’s judgement on the world ruled by the wicked atheistic scientists. They know who will be saved.
The Post-Modern God
Cupitt cites as a philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, another man who just does not have a clue, philosopher or no philosopher. He is actually an anarchistic thinker of the extreme branch of postmodernism, for whom nothing at all is true—everything is opinion. That is why Cupitt calls him as a witness. Knowledge then is merely opinion, or not merely opinion, but the opinion, in particular, of people like Feyerabend and Cupitt! Knowledge is the opinion of pseudo-prophets with a diploma, even if it has been awarded to themselves. They give themselves a title and then write fatuous books telling us what we ought to believe—in their opinion—though they suppress the fact that is is only their opinion. It is meant to be inscribed on tablets of stone and assiduously taught to everyone wishing to pass through university. It is meant to be widely accepted, then they are sure it is knowledge!
Who needs religion when we have a secular priesthood and a college of prophets? Feyerabend tells us that no one can pronounce in advance what is science and what is not. Knowledge is anarchistic, but not even anarchism was anarchistic in the sense Feyerabend uses it. Anarchism is a well reasonaed polticial outlook. It is not chaos, and is not meant to be. Science cannot be chaotic otherwise it is not science. Nor is it merely a set of opinions, like theology and philosophy, however admired they might be. What is scientific is defined by the rules of scientific method. It must be possible to test any opinion for its truth or falsehood for it to become scientific. In the rules of science, what has been tested and not shown to be false is true under the conditions of the test. The body of knowledge called science is the collection of facts and hypotheses that have not been proved false. What makes these facts scientific is that there is a valid test of them, and hitherto, they have passed it. Even if eventually they fail, they are not necessarily discarded because they might still have a range of conditions under which they still are true.
It is not a question of anything that Feyerabend or Cupitt thinks that makes something scientific, even if they are the most clever men in the universe. It is whether their opinions can be tested and verified. They are not clever enough to understand that. Cupitt mentions poor old Simon Newcombe who has become a famous example of this very process. He was a clever physicist who thought he could prove unquestionably that aeroplanes could never fly. The “proof” was demonstrated to be false by two US bicycle manufacturers who made an aeroplane and flew it. The Wright brothers were the scientists. They actually put their hypothesis to a practical test and it passed. That is science. Simon Newcombe was being a theologian. The story also illustrates another key feature of science—it is open. Results are published and anyone can read them and anyone can repeat an empirical test. Patenting scientifc facts is fundamentally unscientific. Patents are for inventions, to protect the inventor. Establishing natural truths is not invention, and should not be eligible for patenting.
None of this is like art or religion. Neither has within it a criterion of truth. The essence of art is variety—anything can be art, if someone wants it to decorate a space. Anything can be religion. It only requires someone credulous enough to believe some central aspect of it with no criterion of truth. Science has such criteria. Feyerabend and Cupitt disgree on the grounds that nothing is objective. That is merely their own opinion. The volume and range of success of science proves otherwise. If there were nothing objective, science would have to be considered the greatest miracle ever. A vast collection of facts hang together as if there were an objective reality behind them, but there is not. That really is the basis of a religion. Clerics always refuse to look. They do not want to be challenged because they know they have no answers.
Cupitt accepts naturalism while rejecting realism. The realism he means can only be the supposed reality of God, which he rejects, but by entangling himself in a load of fashionable twaddle which also rejects the objective world we live in, he finshes up being against science too. He must also then reject naturalism along with it, the world being objective because it is natural. Nature is real. In the end he wants us to be anarchists in what we believe as long as we accept the God of love, even if He is only our own imaginary God, for that is the only one we can rely on. It is a minimal faith indeed, everything being rejected except for this subjective love in our heads. But even that is impossible. We cannot love the murderer of our lover or child, or the one who steals our house, or, worse, our country. Let us allow that all human beings deserve respect and proper justice. Love is asking too much. The best religion is to respect our world, and everything in it, accepting that no God can give us the right to destroy it. We must not offend the earth directly or indirectly. That safeguards us all, and most importantly, should safeguard us from ourselves.
