Truth
Criticizing Science
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 21 August 2002
Understanding the Present
A right wing hack called Bryan Appleyard wants to help us how to understand the present. The trouble is that he does not understand it himself. Like most Fleet Street scribblers, he is proud that science is quite beyond him, and believes that because of that he is eminently qualified to criticize it. Appleyard thinks he is sufficiently qualified because his father was once an engineer, and he had some vague dead relation he never knew who was a physicist.
The question is why is Appleyard trying to blame things on science that are not science’s fault. Appleyard is suspicious of liberalism, and science is liberal, egalitarian and value-free, bad news for people who do not like that sort of thing. He seems to be simply trying to find a scapegoat for things that have gone wrong for the right under our political system. His thesis is that science has eroded human values and human dignity:
- Galilei Galileo removed humanity from its rightful place at the centre of the Universe,
- Charles Darwin reduced humans to a variety of naked ape,
- Albert Einstein produced a theory that showed how the nuclear bomb could be made,
- Stephen Hawking showed that God was unnecessary.
His attack hardly follows a new theme. Science is arrogant in always believing it is right, objective and free of “leaps of faith”. Science has led to a moral decline of the society of which it is a part. It has to be humbled—brought down to size so that humanity can avoid divorce, have children in wedlock, stop taking drugs, help old ladies across the road, and begin to go to church again.
Science is no more and no less than one way of systematizing knowledge, and modern science is a successful and lasting way of compiling knowledge because it is evolutionary, flexible and internally consistent. Despite this faint praise, problems with the practice and application of science arise for two main reasons:
- The assembly of knowledge and classification systems, such as laws, are intrinsically useless, but have to claim utility for the pursuit of knowledge to be funded. This leads naturally to the usual lying, cheating, thieving and wholesale fraud by scientists in pursuit of fame and money.
- More important, science can be subverted to meet narrow political ends. Tony Benn explained the politician’s attitude to science on the BBC programme Pandora’s Box, “If the scientist helps the politician with his ideology, he uses him. If not he disregards him”.
Science generates simple, believable and understandable car-bumper slogans, such as: E=mc2, the universe is expanding, DNA is the blueprint of life, smoking causes cancer, and so on. Uttering politically useful slogans that sound the same, but are not true, is thus all too easy
Science does not corrode human values. Industrial and political developments that claim to be based on science do. The road builder for example, claims the support of objective science for his case by saying the road is needed “for economic development, improved safety and environmental protection”. None of these reasons stands up to scientific scrutiny but may be needed to justify political decisions helpful to industrial interests. Yet such decisions erode democracy and destroy communities.
Appleyard’s thesis is flawed, and his complaint is misdirected. Science cannot fairly be used as the scapegoat for the decision makers whose policies based on false claims of scientific support have led to the break down of communities and values. Science, like art and religion is an important part of society.
David Holbrook
David Holbrook, a Cambridge literary critic, under the guise of being concerned that some scientists are wasting time and resources finding intelligent life in distant space, launches a typically ignorant attack on science and scientists. Holbrook’s article is another example of people with a taste for philosophy being worried that answers to life’s imponderables will be found by science. Like Appleyard he seems to think that science is somehow destroying the mysteries of life, an idea spread by the empty headed chatterers of the newspapers and weeklies.
Holbrook is not a scientist, though he admits it instead of finding risible credentials, like tha hilarious Appleyard. He does claim, though, to have read a lot about “biology and some philosophy of science in seeking to grasp the impact of these on the humanities and our ideas about human nature and existence”. Science is so easy for these hacks that having an unknown relative who did it, or reading a few biology books is all that is necessary to get au fait with it. The reverse, of course, is quite different. Scientists cannot pick up a pen without getting their sentences entirely wrong, splitting infinities, ending sentences with prepositions, and totally misunderstanding subjunctives. Such fools can never be allowed the column inches of the professional hacks and pedants.
Holbrook notes that the dominant theory in modern science is an evolutionary theory that assumes that life came into existence by chance, and that it evolves by a strict process of surviving, or not surviving, according to effectiveness. All teleological considerations are expunged from this kind of thinking—there must be no discussion of purpose, certainly not of God’s purpose. Yet he insists there is a kind of teleological element even in strict Darwinism, since there is an implicit goal—of survival—everything is directed at surviving, whether as a species or as a form of gene or as an individual.
It is a common failing of critics of science that they cannot extrapolate back in time, and in as much as they can succeed in it, they do it mechanically. They therefore accuse scientists of being mechanistic. In fact, they essentially imagine the world always as it is now—as they see it, perhaps tweeked with old clothes or bizarre animals like dinosaurs. Evolution was not initially teleological at all. The earliest lifeforms did not aim to survive in the same way that people go to work every morning. Survival is not an initial goal of evolution. All life has variety. It differs and in the differences are the seeds of survival or extinction automatically with no need for any sense of purpose.
Small fish escape being caught in a coarse net. They have not set out with the aim of being small to do it. Survival is no more than that. It is what happens to organisms that are suitable for their changing environment. Suitable lifeforms survive. Unsuitable ones do not. There is no teleology. What happens is that animals evolve mobility and senses, at first rudimentary, and these give them the chance to seek out resources for life. One can say at this stage that life has evolved purpose, but it required evolution without purpose first. Plainly, Holbrook cannot understand this.
He declares that Darwinian hypotheses do not explain how life came into being in the first place, nor how life developed, and is held only because there is no alternative—and that is the truth! The great literary men we have expounding to us do not know where language came from, though they are supposed to be experts at it. Yet these intellectuals think evolutionary biologists have not noticed that the origins of life have not yet been explained. David Holbrook is needed to tell us. Amazingly, he was writing in the New Scientist.
The theory is also only held because there is no alternative, a neat confession that this man is out of his depth. All good scientific explanations have no alternative—no alternatives that are as good, that explain things as well and are as fruitful. As soon as a better one is formulated, science, utterly unlike religion, enthusiastically joins the new bandwagon—or the younger generation of scientists do. It does not hang on to ancient creeds.
For life to emerge, Holbrook tells us, matter had to operate against one of its fundamental laws, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything is running down towards equilibrium.
So, Holbrook is not just a literary critic, and a biologist but is also a physicist. He sees a violation of the second law of thermodynamics in the notion that molecules can form complex lifeforms. The argument ignores the energy from the sun which arrives at the Earth’s surface. Chaos theory shows that energy fed into a system, driving it far from equilibrium, spontaneously yields complex structures and processes. Nobel prizewinner, Ilya Prigogine, wrote a whole book about it called Order our of Chaos. Sunlight powers life on Earth today trough the food chain, and there is no reason to think it could not have been instrumental in the rise of life without violating any law of physics. If not sunlight, it might have been the heat of sub-oceanic fumaroles or the light of any other star. Life might be pervading the cosmos, even if it is not as clever as Appleyard and Holbrook.
Holbrook thinks that the arrival of life from space is just God emerging in a new guise. Or rather he thinks like Francis Crick and Eric von Daniken! Crick apparently thinks life was put here on Earth by some kind of extraterrestrial intelligent beings. Holbrook cleverly notices that this only postpones the question, since it leaves the problem of the origin of the intelligent beings. It is not a problem that normally troubles deists.
Achievement
In the debate on evolution one often finds assertions that anything can happen given enough time, Holbrook says. He declares it nonsense but syas it is argued just to avoid teleological problems. To suppose that there is life elsewhere, he thinks is to offer a hypothesis which derives from a mechanistic, positivistic science. About as original as a hundred monkeys, he comes up with an old chesnut.
The essential theory behind modern science depends on a kind of belief akin to the well-known assertion that a thousand monkeys, typing away for long enough on a thousand typewriters, would eventually produce the work of Shakespeare… Are we to suppose that radio would have been invented, on your monkey-typewriter principle, without a Guglielmo Marconi? Surely these inventions are achievements of a great human community and tradition? It is strange that science should so implicitly undermine itself, by supposing that these things, from lasers to scanning equipment, should have come into being not through the magnificent efforts of individual minds and the whole structure of civilised science—but by “accident”, or at least by inevitable processes.
Holbrook announces that “the trouble with the mechanistic theories on which all this depends is that they cannot recognise achievement”. The scientific impulse to search for life out there in the universe implicitly denies achievement, he says. For Holbrook, the elephant, flight, and human consciousness are achievements. Polanyi says, “life strives”, and for the clay to grow up into creatures which behave and make choices, even microscopic ones like amoebae, is a fantastic achievement. As he notes, the question is—whose achievements? And what impels them? The primary question is why should life strive?
Needless to say, this clever man can tell that no theory can recognize achievement. True enough but does he mean that achievement should be recognized within the theory? Achievement could not be recognized at all until life itself got clever enough to recognize it. Who then recognized achievement when flight evolved. Is Holbrook trying to get round to God without admitting it?
Why are we not still dinosaurs? There is no answer to this question in modern science, which refuses to recognise “higher” and “lower”. Holbrook notes also that human beings are conscious, they live in the immediate response to their surroundings, they know past and future, here and there, they understand symbols, they relate to the other. So, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence implies that this tremendous achievement in mankind has occurred elsewhere—by accident! This could be extremely doubtful, unless we assume that all life everywhere follows, inevitably, a certain “gradient”. Yet this, of course, is utterly heretical to Darwinism.
And then, given consciousness, why are we not still in the Stone-Age state? This draws attention to another kind of achievement, not only of life, but of human life—cultural evolution. This depends on individual human minds, on the complex interchange between culture and individual intelligence, on the operations of knowledge, the “eureka” phenomenon. Once a thing is known, like the way to make an atomic bomb, the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Yet how we know is something that has eluded philosophers since Plato.
The assumptions behind the search for intelligent beings and that they are trying to speak to us probably have subjective roots. We find the responsibility for being the only intelligent knowers in the universe almost unbearable. But it may be our predicament, and we may need to become able to bear it. For we know we could destroy ourselves as the only conscious beings which give the universe meaning.
The conclusions of Darwinian theory seem to be that life and the human race “had to happen” and so must have happened everywhere. It could be that what has happened here is unique. It would seem likely that the great achievements of human civilisation, from a symbolic culture, to radio, lasers and scientific empiricism itself, are the gains made from our passionate application of our special gifts. This civilisation indeed may be something that has never appeared elsewhere in the cosmos. To think of that possibility is awful, but yet it is moving and tragic. The “search” business seems a last kick of scientific optimism—and could be deeply absurd.
Holbrook seems to be saying that modern science is antithetical to recognition of the creative genius of humanity. This thesis gets a lot of press coverage. But the argument is nonsense. In a sentence his argument is:
Surely blind evolutionary forces cannot have produced something as wonderful as me?
Something must have understood what achievement was and pushed us towards it. God, presumably. The counter argument is:
You could not give yourself any credit for your wonderfulness if you were designed by something else.
If we were designed, then our creators take the credit for radio and flight and Chartres Cathedral, and the blame for Hiroshima and the Amazon rainforest. But we were not designed. We evolved. Hurray for us all! Evolution it is that allows us our own credit—and blame. That is the Adelphiasophist outlook, not that of Christianity that demeans our good works—it is God doing it—and leaves us to blame for all the bad. We are wicked.
The search for extraterrestrial life is a celebration of this feeling. As Holbrook says, the intelligent aliens may not have evolved yet, or may have not have bothered with radio. Or there may simply not be anyone out there. But to deny that we should look because it debases our humanity is to get the argument exactly wrong. It celebrates out achievements, seeks to place them not merely in a terrestrial context but in a truly universal one.
Science is a critical part of those achievements. It makes the faxes and the phones and the colour printing that propagates the anti-science views of these know-all chatterati. Science actually works. And it is this practicality that drives science to look for ET life, not just argue about it.
Holbrook also seemed to overlook the fact that any “God”, or cosmic purpose there might be, might be genuinely cosmopolitan. If life is not simply an interaction of the chemical constituents of a primeval soup, and it both strives and is impelled onwards towards some unspecified goal, nowhere does this justify the assertion that life on Earth is unique. If Holbrook is secretly defending God, he is defending a peculiarly medieval and anthropocentric one.
Holbrook ended with the question:
Would not a cheaper way of approaching this question be to hold a philosophical conference on the implications of the search itself, and on the possibility that there are philosophical reasons for considering it wasteful and futile, as I believe?
Words! Not for nothing is Holbrook among the elite of the chatterers. For over 5000 years people have talked about whether anyone else is out there. Literary critics and theologians talk. Scientists hypothesize, observe and test. We have had enough talk. Let us go check it out.
It might be true that the search for extraterrestrial life is wasteful. Even if the universe is swarming with life, the nearest beings that could talk with us by radio will probably be many hundreds of light years off. A dialogue would be impossible. It seems equally likely that we are at the apex of possible intellect, and that all such life self-destructs at about this level of sophistication—intelligent life might have in it its own seeds of destruction. It happens often, but never is able to actually make any contact, or does so too late. Thus Timothy Ferris writes, in The Mind’s Sky:
Not that we shall discover there is but one intelligent species in our galaxy but that there is none… not that aliens will be different from us but that they will resemble us in the ways of which we are least proud—that they too will turn out to be brutal bullies, only armed with bigger clubs.
The point is though that the bullies destroy themselves before they ever get anywhere near deep space travel. If astronomers do find extra-terrestrials, they can only announce that they exist. Most people will not be astonished because they already believe that they do. The beneficiaries of the discovery would be those who peddle phony religions under the guise of UFO quackery.
Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley wrote sensible books on philosophic topics until she had the same experience as the hacks and clergymen who realized that science was actually revealing truth without any assistance from pundits, prelates or philosophers and so she began to join them in attacking science. In fairness to her, she only claimed to be attacking those scientists that she said propagated “scientism”, but few people would be able to distinguish the difference between that and science, and theologians and hapless scribblers everywhere supported her gleefully.
She began her criticism by highlighting that some scientists wrote confidently about understanding God and creation. She claimed:
They are crediting science with power it does not possess.
She spoke of the “increasingly strident claims of cosmologists” that they are close to understanding creation and providing a “theory of everything”. Specifically she cited Stephen Hawking, who concluded in his celebrated book A Brief History of Time, that cosmology was bringing us closer to the mind of God. It was a tongue in the cheek statement pandering to the popular conception of a Creator God, but it is doubtful that Hawking meant it other than metaphorically: “We are getting closer to understanding the creation of the universe”.
Ignoring that, or not getting it, Midgley wondered, in a curiously inexact musing for a philosopher, what such statements reveal about the mind of science! This might seem like a lapse but in her article she attributes various qualities to science—soul, mind, instincts, and powers. Science makes claims and practised modesty. Innocent personification, and normally excusible perhaps but sloppy for a philosopher.
Evidently she sought to question the cultural ascendancy and “function” of science.
At issue is not merely what cosmology can—or cannot—say about creation (or the mind of God), but the excessive claims that scientists and others have made about the scope and capacity of science as a whole. The doctrine of scientism—with its implied belief in the omnicompetence of science—has been steadily gaining ground in our culture throughout this century.
Scientism
The hub of Midgley’s argument is the presumed failure of scientism. Scientism for Midgley, as for most people, is a pejorative word for making excessive claims about science. The motivation of her argument is the perceived growth of scientism and the overconfidence displayed by certain scientists, particularly cosmologists, in claiming ever more ground for science to illuminate with its dispassionate glare.
Midgley seems to recognize that the theologians have lost the old debates but seems to feel sorry for them and wants to help them fight their corner. A bit of practical philosophy should make all the difference. Modern problems belong primarily to science and have nothing to do with religious criticism of science. They are practical problems, such as they are, and the fear that science has far more answers than empty theologizing and philosophizing.
The philosopher Karl Popper tried to gouge holes in science and ultimately was unable to, but clarified an important point of scientific method in his attempts—that science can only disprove hypotheses—it can only verify them in specific instances, not universally. Indeed in 1972, Popper stated that science is “perhaps the most powerful tool for biological adaptation which has ever emerged”. Midgley thought this was a “startling claim”, doubtless because it was by a philosopher and not by a scientist. Worse still for Midgley was the “strident” pronouncement of the philosopher Rudolf Carnap the 1930s:
When we say that scientific knowledge is unlimited, we mean there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science.
We should coin a new word, philosophism, to parallel scientism. Scientism is properly the fault of some scientists to pronounce on fields in which they have no authority as if they had the full esteem for them they have been granted for their successes in their own field. Everyone, scientists or not, are entitled to pass their opinions about anything they choose or are invited to pronounce upon, but it is scientism when they do so claiming an authority they do not have. Philosophism is similar. It is lesser philosophers pronouncing upon greater ones as if they had the greater authority. All philosophers are entitled to do it, but the careful reader will be more inclined to believe the greater philosopher.
Midgley emphasises in Carnap’s statement the words, “No question”.
Not, for instance, “Who killed President Kennedy?” or “Is life still worth living?” or “If so, why?” or “What should we do about prisons?” or “Is this will legally binding?” or “Do your feet hurt?” Not anything.
Midgley tells us:
The territory claimed here is not just that of the religions. It is the whole area of organised and everyday thought.
She has forgotten already that the claims she quoted were by philosophers not scientists. Some scientists make the same claims but she immediately attributes the whole argument to the self-serving practice of science.
And science, as a claimant for that territory, means essentially just physical science. Though the doctrine is sometimes expanded to include technology and social science, these extensions are foreign to it.
One does not expect writers on philosophy to use dishonest methods common in fallaceous arguing, but Midgley is setting up a straw man. She hopes to be able to call scientists reductionists as these feeble debaters always do, but the real point about extending science into what are not presently considered its subject areas is to extend the practice of scientific method into those areas. It is to teach everyone sound principles of scienctific investigation to invite them to use them in their everyday lives. Scientific methods work and need not be limited to scientific fields.
The Competence of Science
Midgley gives examples of questions that she thinks are outside the competence of science. The questions she invites us to consider can be dealt with by science, or by applying scientific methods.
- “Who killed president Kennedy?” Is she serious? If the answer is ever to be found, it is most likly to be found by forensic science. Does she expect it to be answered by a psychic investigator?
- “What should we do about prisons?” Does Midgley count sociology and psychology to be outside the bounds of science. They are good examples of how the scientific approach can help even social affairs.
- “Is this will legally binding?” What is the doubt about it? Science can check whether or not it has been forged. Science could enable wills to be more easily authenticated.
- “Do your feet hurt?” Science can verify you are telling the truth. If you were unable to say, science could help you answer, or compare your brain activity with others to give an independent view.
- “Is life still worth living?” and “If so, why?” These are prime examples of the sorts of questions that theologians, and evidently philosophers, think are outside the remit of science. On the face of it, they are personal questions that are also not within the remit of theology or philosophy, but inasmuch as they are questions about personal psychology, they again fall within the remit of science rather than anything else.
If the latter questions are meant to have us consider what to expect after death, then science has evidence and religion has nonsense. Heaven sounds wonderful for those who are promised it, but what evidence for it is there and who will get the promise of it? The churches of this world simply do not know. If they ever say they do, then they are just lying. If the finality of death seems harsh, the belief in anything else is delusion. That would not be bad in itself were it not for the fact that a caste of mendacious thieves live comfortable lives out of this lie
Midgley seems not to have given her questions much thought. As Peter Atkins, the physical chemist, summarises:
Science, in so far as that means facts and the elimination of falsehoods, is a superior guide through the exquisite opportunity of life than the deceits marketed by religion.
Holbrook or Midgley would pounce on the phrase “exquisite opportunity of life”, for how can science and scientism leave room for joy when life is a mechanism, and has no external purpose? Why must the success of science in exposing the workings of the world eliminate the responses that brain and body have to life’s events? A cow pat is heaven to a dung beetle. Anything that has evolved to suit its surroundings must find utter joy in them. Knowledge of it can only add to the joy.
From a historical perspective, science has shown it can spread. An important cultural advance occurred when Newton applied mathematics to nature and showed that humans could predict the future, at least in small domains of expertise such as the swing of a pendulum and the trajectoiy of a planet. The promise was that the world would become orderly and explicable. Darwin made another giant step forward in demonstrating evolution. Rational thought could be applied to the living world too.
The scope of science has continued to grow ever since. In the physical sciences, understanding has been driven back to within a fraction of a tick of the beginning of time. The succesaful advance of science towards an understanding of cosmogenesis can hardly be held up now. In the natural sciences, the understanding of development and decay of species has been immeasurably enriched by molecular biology. Even that last resort of human wishful thinking, the brain and its singular property of consciousness, is slowly giving way to scientific exploration. Noting “the dazzling pace of scientific advance”, physicist, Paul Davies, writes:
For centuries, such topics as the birth of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of time and consciousness, and the final destiny of the cosmos lay outside the scope of scientific inquiry. But today they form part of mainstream scientific research. Scientists find themselves tackling questions that once were the exclusive preserve of priests and mystics.
This is precisely what the religious hacks and hackettes, stabbing their poisoned pens at science do not like, though Davies, too, often sounds as if he is making a bid for Templeton gold by implying that some intelligence, presumed to be God, is behind Nature.
Science and Religion
This promise of universal explanation outbids the explanatory offers of any religion, both in scope and certainty. Midgley makes out that religions are modest in their claims:
The religions habitually admit, indeed claim, that they deal in matters not fully knowable by human beings…
Science is not modest. It offers fully reasoned proof for all answers to all possible questions. This, philosophy (or is it theology?) declares is bad for people because they are far more vulnerable today than they were in former times. Then, explanations were simple but now people are muddled. One might comment that they are muddled by the obtuseness of supposed thinkers who muddle things for them by continuing to talk about ancient inadequate explanations instead of moving on with science to modern adequate ones.
Religions once tried to provide explanations, but today they are neither adequate nor universal. Science is universal, or potentially so, if muddlers stopped confusing people about it. Science, in an important sense, does carry its benefits across cultural barriers, and in so doing it offers a new unparalleled hope of inclusiveness, an ultimate background against which all human problems can finally be resolved.
It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty of insanitation and illiteracy of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.Jawaharlal Nehru
Midgley asks, “Alone?” The exclusiveness of such grandiose claims for science is seldom intended—better political and economic systems, less corrupt administrators, a more just distribution of privilege, a wider general education, a more practical approach and more generous sympathies are all needed too, but Nehru took these other resources for granted. Yet the application of a scientific outlook has the prospect of improving most or all of these additional factors.
In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins writes that since we now have modern biology:
We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems—Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?
At a public debate about the impact of science on faith and spirituality (an occasion, Midgley archly observes, on which he surely weighed his words), the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert ended his speech:
When we come to face the problems before us—poverty pollution, overpopulation, illness—it is to science we must turn, not to gurus. The arrogance of scientists is not nearly so dangerous as the arrogance that comes from ignorance.
Midgley, plainly irrational in her outrage, sarcastically notes that “the only alternative to scientists is, then, utterly ignorant ‘gurus’. No other kind of expert exists”. She has quite lost the purpose of the debate from her mind. It was not the impact of experts in general on faith, but of science on it. Plainly someone had made the point that Midgley, Holbrook and Appleyard make too, that scientists are arrogant, and Wolpert rightly contrasts it with the ignorance of all religious gurus whether they are Christians or otherwise. Like most of the critics of science, Midgley cannot argue honestly even though she pretends to be a philosopher. She is a theologian.
Peter Atkins, the chemist, replied to these arguments with this plain fact in mind.
Fear seems to me to be what motivates authors to write with the stridency illustrated by Mary Midgley about the encroachment of science on the tender patches of the soul. There is indeed room for some people to fear, for those who seek to found their lives on the vaporous precepts so favoured by religion now find themselves teetering on the brink of an abyss wherein lies truth: the truth of our mortality, the truth of the absence of a benevolent intercessor, the truth of the absence of soul and the truth of the ultimate insignificance of all human activity. These truths are so consuming as to inspire subconscious fear and to generate the only resort of the vanquished and disarmed: the stridency of protestation.
Revealing the real reason for her outrage, Midgley says Steve Jones, a geneticist and former Reith lecturer, claimed in a newspaper article defending the business of science:
Philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex.
If Midgley cooled down and restored any reason into her head that she ever had, she would see that Jones’ simile is particularly apt. Pornography is fantasy sex and philosophy divorced from reality is fantasy science. One can reason as Einstein did by doing thought experiments, but sooner or later experiments have to be done in reality, otherwise the philosopher is just intellectually masturbating. It does not mean that philosophy is useless any more than pornography necessarily is. But both are useless self-gratification until they are given a respectable purpose in the real world.
Purpose
Midgley now tries a different tack. The astonishing successes of science have not been gained by answering every kind of question, but by refusing to. Science has deliberately set narrow limits to the kinds of questions that belong to it. It has practised an austere modesty, a rejection of claims to universal authority, to earn its unparalleled reputation for effectiveness. Some cosmologists now forget Galileo excluded “purpose” questions from physics.
Atkins replied that the concept of purpose is a human invention and that seeking purpose in the cosmos is a childish fantasy. The invention of the concept of cosmic purpose by theologians is, apart from the brutality towards individuals that they have inspired, their most serious crime against humanity, for it has directed sharp minds away from real problems.
Science clarifies the evolution of the world by seeing that all its rich complexity can emerge from purposeless collapse into ever greater disorder. Darwin effectively swept purpose aside in the living world and Boltzmann swept it aside in the inanimate world. All reimpositions of purpose are artifices of the religious to feed their faith. Humanity should accept that science has eliminated the justification for believing in cosmic purpose, and that any survival of purpose is inspired solely by sentiment.
Midgley was partly correct in her belief that scientists are trying to blur the distinction between “how” and “why” questions. All “why” questions are allied to questions of purpose and admit the possibility of a teleological answer. Yet science seeks answers that are not grounded in the fundamentality of purpose even if they lead to the appearance of purpose. It is not a diminishing of science to deconstruct all “why” questions into a concatenation of “how” questions. Such deconstruction is too cumbersome for daily use, but arguably no knowledge is secure until the “how” is answered.
Midgley concedes that scientists have every right to explore questions outside scientific territory, but commands that they cannot do it effectively without changing their methods. “If they do not take the trouble to acquire new ways of thinking about their new subject matter, they are liable to get conceptually lost”. This is remarkably brass faced for those who cannot be bothered to get to understand what science is doing or even how. She ought to tell this to Holbrook and Appleyard, and ought to take note of her own advice.
Atkins says that Midgley correctly points to the modesty of science—that it has set narrow limits to its domains of discourse. The limitation however does not mean that some questions must remain outside science. Setting limits is a practical matter, central to achieving reliable information and groping towards understanding. How different this procedure is from religion’s approach to understanding. Contrary to Midgley’s earlier statement, religions are not modest. Their modesty appears only where their failure becomes obvious—the purpose of evil cannot be explained, and so remains a mystery of God. Despite such “modesty”, religion claims knowledge that no one else has. Religion claims understanding but fails to deliver anything but words. Science claims cautious progress and can show success.
The prevailing assumption, Midgley says, is that the coming together of such poweriul theories as relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory easily frees science from the restrictions imposed by Galileo, and that physics really has evolved to the point where it can answer every sort of question without losing the special authority which arose from sternly limiting its scope.
General relativity though conceptually so simple, Atkins points out, lets us map the trajectory of the universe from its birth to its death. Quantum theory has proved itself wherever it has been applied, though it is still not fully understood, for it so undermines the paradigms of understanding that arose in classical physics. Chaos theory reveals that although we may have a deep understanding of the behaviour of things, we may still not be able to make reliable predictions.
The Responsibility of Scientists
Determined to project her own fear on to scientists, she asks, “How much of the vast responsibility that scientism loads on them do scientists actually want to shoulder?” The sweeping claims of scientism arose out of tribal disputes over intellectual territory either between academic disciplines or against the churches. Plainly, she is still allying herself on behalf of philosophy with the theologians, but she also draws in everything else, and why not? Science has an interest in it all.
On she goes. Scientism drew a hierarchical picture showing all other ways of thinking as reducible to the sciences, and ultimately to physics. They gave short shrift to the distinctive uses of history, law, linguistics or logic, theology, ethics, geography, political theory, or the psychology of motive. Scientists never considered what they should do if they were suddenly victorious and had to answer all possible questions, but that day may now have come.
No doubt her own fears impel her to think this but few scientists do. Such social victories rarely happen so suddenly. They require a good deal of evolution, even when they arrive by a revolution, as E H Carr knew. Once people are properly trained to it, what should be so terrifying? Why should any scientist be concerned about it? It is like saying no one would want to be a train driver because they would have the weight of responsibility for the world’s rail safety on their shoulders. The argument, like most of these criticisms is abject and not worthy of the supposed status of the author. Are Midgley’s views ghosted by Brian Appleyard?
Concepts must be considered at a pragmatic level. Questions will always be formulated appropriate to the level of discourse. History, law and so on, will never be superseded, any more than all discourse in biology should be in terms of particle physics, but all of these disciplines can be improved now by the proper application of science and most are being.
She wants most of the large claims of science withdrawn, and her reason is that philosophers like Popper have proposed forms of scientific minimalism. Far from being an ogre trying to take over the world, suddenly it is just a store of facts, a record of hypotheses that have been experimentally verified, or at least not falsified—which turns scientists into humble operatives in an immense, impersonal falsification factory. Even talking of truth and falsehood is too flattering for science. It is merely a way of arriving at theories with a high problem-solving effectiveness.
The reader can hardly have failed to notice the change in attitude here towards science. Either it is an ogre with real but dangerous claims to omnicompetence or it is a feeble problem-solving algorithm. Midgley actually argues exactly like a theologian. Theologians have no scruples, no standards and no honesty and will try every possible weapon in the armoury of polemic with no thought to internal consistency. They can do this because they know that their sheep will be happy to accept whatever arguments impress them from the assembly of inconsistent ones presented. They will do this because they are brought up to believe a whole gamut of inconsistency in their religions, and do so happily. Philosophers ought not to be so dishonest. Now we know they are.
Scientific Method
She tells us that the myth of a single scientific method can be abandoned, because different theories help for different problems, and so the various sciences can use varying methods—as in fact they do!
The obsession with reducing everything to the pattern of physics can be dropped, taking with it the primacy of physics itself. Indeed, the stark separation between science and nonscientific ways of thinking begins to look mistaken.
The great philosopher has not noticed that scientists know that there is no single scientific method. The scientific method is accepted by scientists as being a collection of linked and related methods. It is a scientific strategy. Midgley is the reductionist not the scientists. Would she consider it important to tell writers that the myth of a single method of writing can be abandoned because various writers can use different methods, as in fact they do? Do fine artists have to be told there is no single method of painting? Should musicians be reminded that they are not confined to a single way of playing a tune? Midgley is carried away by her own pretentiousness.
She tells us that the obsession with reducing eveything to the pattern of physics can be dropped. It is not an obsession that scientists have, even physicists—perhaps especially physicists. It is an obsession that those who think they know about science have. It is the obsession she has, Holbrook has and Appleyard has, not to mention almost every theologian you can think of. These are the people who should stop telling others lies about science and scientists. If she wants to pursue her own particular brand of mendacity, she should retrain as a vicar or a politician.
The stark separation between science and non-scientific thinking is one which is perpetuated by people like these abject scribblers. She wants us to return to the Mushroom Ages when science was unknown and clergymen kept everyone in the dark feeding them bullshit. She calls it a retreat:
How should the retreat be carried out? By far the most popular idea is the positivist one that we should keep only the facts; everything nonfactual is nonrational, subjective, intuitive, somehow soft.
By far the best idea is to continue the scientific revolution to its logical conclusion. Everyone should be trained in scientific techniques. That would solve the stark separation between scientific and nonscientific ways of thinking. All thinking would be scientific.
No, she insists on going backwards like all reactionary thinkers, but this initial thought of confining science to facts will not work. The line separating fact from non-fact is far too loose and variable, so she realises it cannot be applied. The instruction to confine science to the bare facts is so unrealistic that it almost inevitably produces hypocrisy and doublethink.
So, having mentioned it, she rejects this idea. Combining the prestige of omnicompetence with the minimalist’s freedom from responsibility will not do, she tells us. What scientists need is to develop their general ideas and express their imaginative vision openly—not overconfidently as part of a wide campaign, but realistically against a background of rational criticism. Apparently, then, they do not do this at the minute.
Atkins says only the fearful would seek the fragmentation of the scientific method into city states that are designed to cope only with local skirmishes. The procedures in the physical and natural sciences are different, but at the core of the scientific method is the principle of cautious progress through experiment and observations to formulate quantitative theories that work in practice. Midgley emulates Machiavelli in calling for divide and rule. Urging fragmentation simply seeks to thwart progress by encouraging division.
The fact is quite obviously that the vast amount of scientific work published attracts no attention from anyone other than other scientists. What attracts attention is the scientism that she complains about, but it sounds very much like “developing their general ideas and expressing their imaginative vision openly”. Doubtless that is why she added the qualifiers about overconfidence and realism.
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
She is particularly offended by the “enormity of overconfidence” of scientists (in this instance specifically John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle) lucky enough to get a publisher to publish their weekend musings—what she calls “fantastic prophecies put forward by eminent cosmologists, not as a hobby or a sideline, but explicitly as part of physics”. There is nothing to stop weekend musings being explicitly a part of physics, because these cosmologists are not writing about growing leeks or defending the dogma of the resurrection.
Though these fantasies are only a small part of the scientific output, they seem to me a highly significant one. They attract much attention and indicate a euphoric faith shared by many who would not themselves put it in print.
Midgley declares that what they offer is cosmological pie-in-the-sky. From her commendation of the modesty of religions which offer non-cosmological pie-in-the-sky, it is not the pie-in-the-sky that concerns her. The Anthropic Principle is the notion that the physical universe is old enough, and of the right kind, to have evolved the human life needed to observe it. Midgley tells us that Barrow and Tipler add the ingredient of purpose.
Here, among a thick forest of equations, it is explained that the universe probably exists to produce us—not for any of the reasons that might occur to most people as providing the point of human life, but solely in order that we shall do physics and observe things through appropriate instruments.
Human beings have a duty because of their luck in being in a universe just right for them to observe, to spread via machines into outer space, not just part of it, or a few neighbouring galaxies, but all of it. Barrow and Tipler write:
At the instant the Omega point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end.
Midgley assures us that this story radically diverges from Darwinian notions by positing evolution as an immense escalator designed to culminate in humanity, but it converges with another bizarre claim propounded by Freeman Dyson, the founder of quantum electrodynamics, that the human race can and should be made literally immortal by colonising all across the universe—a process which he considers necessary if our life is to have any meaning.
She reveals that many who have examined the Anthropic Principle dismiss it pretty sharply. She cites the physicist Heinz Pagels. A scientist? Pagels says it is “not subject to experimental falsification” and so not a true scientific theory. Quite so! It is a set of interesting observations which means little other than what is obvious. The conditions must be suitable for life. Atkins confirms that the Anthropic Principle is not an argument for purpose. That the fundamental constants of physics are optimal for life does not mean that there is a teleological explanation of their values. They are entirely explained by evolution. They are the environment necessary for life in this universe, just as much as water is necessary for life on earth.
But Midgley is criticising scientists for speculating on it—extrapolating, but not laying down any divine laws—while any number of clerics and theologians, having read about it, shamelessly use it as proof of God. Isn’t this woman a bit confused? Or, perhaps just bigotted.
Her sad conclusion is that these predictions do not fit the traditional image of sternly reductive scientists denouncing self-deceiving gurus for promising pie-in-the-sky as consolation for the harshness of human life. She takes these speculations to be scientific. They are scientific only in the sense that they use current scientific knowlege. They are simply imaginative extrapolations of it, and even a philosopher should know that extrapolating is a risky matter. Let her extrapolate 2, 4, 6, 8 and she will be more likely to get 10 than “who do we appreciate”. Then again perhaps not, because she will have read it before, being so wise.
But Midgely is right to see Barrow and Tipler’s engaging extrapolation of current cosmology as a sign of the euphoric faith that scientists have in their powers. Cosmology, which now includes particle physics as well as general relativity (another sign of the maturity of the subject) is becoming so well established that there is no harm in exploring—so long as it is firmly understood that all is extrapolation—possible consequences for the distant future. Contrary to what Midgley seems to think, such speculations are only science fiction, and it is foolish to mistake them for predictions. Yet, if one hopes for some form of immortality, it is better, surely, to base it on established knowledge rather than on discredited figments.
Midgley claims she, a non-scientist, is trying to put science back in context—to show its borders not as sharp, defended frontiers, but as complex interactions with other ways of thinking. She does not want to directly attack the physical theories which have been the intellectual weapons used to extend the scientific realm so unrealistically. She thinks they are too academic to lie at the heart of thc current over-confidence in science! She also alludes to mathematics in the language of someone admitting its power is beyond their grasp (“protective thicket of equations”). People who are conversant with mathematics and the physical sciences know that relativity does give us a sense of understanding nature.
Midgley and Appleyard
Midgley admits much of her case overlaps with the Bryan Appleyard’s thesis. She confesses that he says more on the destructive effects of scientism in belittling nonscientific ways of thinking, such as morality. Appleyard contends that humanity would be better equipped to deal with moral and spiritual questions if scientism could be halted in its tracks, and she agrees.
She disagrees with him over the link he forges between science and liberalism, and in particular his surprising idea that clearer moral judgments—of the kind that scientism has eroded—would damn liberalism by making intolerance appear preferable to tolerance. She also deplores some of his rhetoric which seems to indict science itself rather than scientism, such as that “the heartless truths of science” are the root of our trouble. The untruths bother her, but most of them seem to be incomprehesion.
Midgley wants scientism but supposedly not science halted in its tracks. If one really does have confidence in the primacy of the scientific approach to wresting understanding from Nature, then it is inevitable that one is led to scientism. Many critics have no arguments on this other than tradition. They say that science describes and explains things but philosophy is conceptional enquiry, and theology concerns what should be. The thought experiments of Einstein, and many other scientists throughout history, show that science is intimately involved with philosophizing. The essential distinction is that science is concerned with reality not just playing intellectual games.
What is quantum theory? People claim it for theology and philosophy. The mathematician, Roger Penrose, has written that “reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper”, but what bothered him was that a “theory should predict the results of measurements”, and quantum theory does. So, to “predict the results of measurements” is the litmus paper of reality. That is the scientific criterion. Quantum theory is scientific. It explains reality and successfully predicts what we can expect to happen in it, given initial conditions. Philosophy can be the same, if its results are checked in the same way. Theology cannot be checked. That is why it is nonsensical.
Science is not merely descriptive and explanatory. It predicts also, and so can concern itself with how things turn out, and that is a practical way of considering what ought to be. So, science can illuminate moral and spiritual questions. It will cleanse moral questions of their foundation in the lies of the clergy. That cannot be expected to please priests. It will also elevate “spirituality” from being a carefully nurtured human mystery to being understandable in the working of the human brain in relationship to Nature. That might not please poets either, but will bring joy to those who value knowledge and who delight in the power of the human intellect. Some poets will be in those categories.
The scientific method is harder work than “other ways of thinking” like drawing lots, religious faith or intuition, but the knowledge it supplies is of correspondingly greater utility. For this reason it offers the best hope we have of solving the problems we face as individuals, societies and species. Perhaps the most important problems at present are in politics and ethics—areas Midgley and Appleyard, and even the late Stephen J Gould, want to exclude science from.
Science will continue despite the cantankerous efforts of theologians and philosophers to thwart its progress. As it does so its critics will have to strike camp every few years and rush along to comment on what has been achieved by scientists working in the fray of discovery. Humanity in general, and scientists in particular, have every reason to be proud of their transnational and transcultural achievements and can stand aloof from the chattering bickerings of the underinforned and the fearful. They are busy with the work of explaining everything and bringing the Renaissance to its climax.
The real objects of the criticisms of these people ought to be those who own scientific discoveries once they have been made. They are mainly transnational corporations and government agencies. If scientists really are “humble operatives in an immense, impersonal falsification factory”, as Midgley wrote, then why is she carping at the operatives instead of the factory owners? It is easy to see that Appleyard knew full well what his target was. The owners employ him as a propagandist. What excuses do Holbrook and Midgley have?
