Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 20 November 2002

Science and Religion

Daniel Garber, in a University of Chicago Divinity School lecture, says for some, science and religion are incompatible and completely irreconcilable, but for others they are compatible. The literature on the relation between religion and reason has been expanding rapidly in the last decade or so because of the large cash prize offered by the Templeton Foundation for those who will pander to Templeton’s delusion that science and religion are compatible.

Honest scientists see science and religion as fundamentally opposed to one another. Evil, dogmatic, and anti-rational religion has generally stood against the scientific world view because many of the traditional beliefs of religion are demonstrably wrong. That this is so is shown by the way Christians have progressively dropped various bits of traditional scripture in the face of scientific evidence.

To judge by some recent writings of Christians, there is no contradiction between science and religion. Ian Barbour categorizes all the arguments on religion and science into four categories:

1. conflict—the two views are at war,
2. independence—the two views have their own domains of legitimacy that coexist but do not overlap or interact,
3. dialogue—the two views have similar presuppositions, methods, and concepts,
4. integration—the two views are just different ways of looking at the same scene and they can be merged into a natural theology, a synthesis of religion and science.

Barbour sympathises with dialogue and integration, believing that religion and science can have a dialogue with one another in domains like astronomy and creation, quantum physics, evolution, and the biological and neurological view of the human being. It is simply Christian self-delusion. It is their prayer that there is no conflict but the prayer has not made the conflict disappear.

Believers often see God everywhere in nature, and even experience God directly, chatting with Him and strolling with Him through the woods. They have no doubt about the existence of God, and see those who reject Him as rejecting common sense. They say God has moved them and they can see evidence for God that others cannot. That sounds impressive for those who flatter themselves as chosen by God in this way, but many people have similar non-Christian delusions. Many people see ghosts that others cannot see. Many people are convinced they are being abducted by aliens when others think they are just sleeping the night through, as anyone does. Many people are convinced that astrology successfully predicts the future, though is never seems to predict anything important.

What they have in common is a mental fixation—a state of mind that makes some facts and reasons more salient than others. It leads a person to accept some things and question others. It is not voluntary but seems to be inculcated at a young age, or even has a genetic component.

Science is not fixed but is evolving with time. So, what is the state of science as it is today? It was defined in a court of law!—in the case of McLean v Arkansas of January 5, 1982. The State of Arkansas, had passed a law that “public schools within the State shall give balanced treatment to creation-science and to evolution science”. Opponents said creation-science is not science but religion. The case became a test of what constituted science and could be taught as it in the schools. Judge William R Overton gave in his judgement a list of “the essential characteristics of science”.

1. It is guided by natural law,
2. it must explain things by reference to natural law,
3. it is testable against the empirical world,
4. its conclusions are tentative, not fixed,
5. it is falsifiable.

So, a scientific explanation is cast entirely in terms of natural law. It must exclude God. Any supernatural force intervening in a natural world cannot be scientific. Moreover:

The creationists’ methods do not take data, weigh it against the opposing scientific data, and thereafter reach conclusions… Instead, they take the literal wording of Genesis and attempt to find scientific support for it.

Judge Overton

The believer sees God at work in the world, accepting revelation as a way of knowing what God is and how He works. Yet, if revelation is prior to and even superior to observation, reason and experiment, creation scientists are not doing science. Furthermore, revelation is arbitrary because religions and even people within the same religion differ about what revealed knowledge is. No scientist can accept revelation and remain a scientist.

The arguments of the believer cannot address the rationality of the scientist’s position. What believers see as evidence for God, they cannot use as evidence of God because they require a previous belief in God for it to work. Indeed, the scientist sees the same evidence as demonstrating that the world is independent of God. It can be explained satisfactorily without God as a hypothesis.

The believer simply refuses to accept that the secular position can hold at all whatever evidence the scientist submits for consideration. Faith might not seem a blind faith to a believer, but the fact that they have to ignore a perfectly sound natural explanation to hang on to the supernatural one they prefer shows that their faith is unreasonable. The scientist cannot convince the believer because they will not accept reason. The believer cannot convince the scientist because the latter will not accept unreason. The believer simply cannot accept the world without God, or even with only a personal God—it has to be a so-called objectively real God, and any such God ought to have left some evidence.

Science and Pseudoscience

Edward O Wilson defines natural science as an organized, systematic enterprise using an ever changing variety of methods to gather knowledge about the world, to condense it into testable laws and principles. Science is distinguished from pseudoscience by:

1. repeatability—the same phenomenon is sought again, independently, and the interpretation given it confirmed or discarded by experimentation and analysis.
2. economy—scientists seek explanations that are simple, easily recalled, and aesthetically pleasing—called elegance—thus yielding information with minimum effort.
3. mensuration—helps testing of hypotheses because when something can be measured with universally accepted scales, generalizations about it are less ambiguous.
4. heuristic—good science stimulates further discovery, often in unpredictable new directions, confirming the initial hypothesis.

The Criterion of Falsification

Karl Popper set out to distinguish between science and pseudo-science. The widely accepted answer was that science is distinguished from pseudoscience, or from metaphysics, by its empirical method, which proceeded from observation or experiment, Popper thought by induction. What, though, of a method which, although it appeals to observation and experiment, nevertheless does not come up to scientific standards, like astrology, with its stupendous mass of empirical evidence based on observation? Popper was not concerned only with astrology, however, but with Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s individual psychology. He felt that these theories, though posing as science, had in fact more in common with primitive myths than with science—they resembled astrology rather than astronomy.

They seem to explain almost everything within the fields to which they referred. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Its truth appeared manifest, and unbelievers were people who did not want to see the truth and refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their un-analyzed repressions. Human actions could always be explained in Adlerian theory as the effects of a complex, but the complex was assumed and not verified scientifically. This apparent strength was their weakness. Einstein’s theory of relativity was different because it made explicit predictions that could be checked, not vague interpretations after the event. He concluded:

1. It is easy to obtain post hoc confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory. Confirmations must be from risky predictions
2. A prediction must involve the risk of failure. If observation shows that the predicted effect is absent, the theory is refuted. The theory is incompatible with the expected results of observation
3. Every good scientific hypothesis is a prohibition—it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory but its failing.

Every genuine test of a theory must include the possibility of falsifying it. Testability is falsifiability. Confirming or corroborating evidence of a hypothesis is only the result of a genuine test involving the serious risk of falsifying it.

Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are saved by introducing some auxiliary ad hoc factor or assumption. This is not unusual but few hypotheses will bear this sort of adjustment for long without stimulating a search for a better basic hypothesis. Thus deviations from the gas laws can be saved by adding additional terms in a series, but series expansions of mathematical expressions are approximations.

Astrology does not pass the test. Believers are greatly impressed, and misled, by post hoc confirming evidence, and are not impressed by any unfavorable evidence. Moreover, the astrologer’s interpretations and prophesies are so vague and general, they are too imprecise to be refuted.

The marxist theory of history made predictions of coming social revolutions that were testable, and were falsified. By forever pushing the revolutions forward in time, marxist theory is rendered unscientific. It does not mean it does not contain true things within it, but that it is not sufficently scientific to be relied upon in prediction.

The two psycho-analytic theories are non-testable—irrefutable. This also does not mean that Freud and Adler were not seeing certain things correctly. What they have done might be the first steps towards a psychological science which is testable. They contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form.

Such myths may be developed, and become testable. In early science, scientific theories often originate from myths, and myths may contain essentially pre-scientific theories. If a theory is found to be non-scientific, or metaphysical, it is not necessarily unimportant, or insignificant, or meaningless, or nonsensical. It might be hypothesised that all men are wise. This hypothesis will correctly predict that Karl Popper is wise, but it will make other predictions that refute it. The genralisation is false but it must contain some truth.

Popper says he was not trying to show what is meaningful, significant, true or acceptable, but to distinguish between statements of the empirical sciences, and pseudo-scientific statements or all other statements of a religious or a metaphysical character. The criterion of falsifiability is a solution to the problem of demarcation of scientific from non-scientific statements.

Popper was an indeterminist who saw history as a series of unforeseeable events. He distinguished three “worlds”—the external physical universe, the inner world of the mind, and the world of culture. Like Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle, he had no use for God or an afterlife, and his world of culture allowed God to be a real cultural construct, but not a real entity in the physical world.

Karl Popper

Martin Gardner in Skeptical Inquirer (2001) takes a skeptical look at Karl Popper. Rudolf Carnap and the Logical Positivists had advocated the principle of verifying statements. That seemed sensible and scientific but Popper thought that nothing could be verified. Verification was a continuous process of confirmation but no one could be sure when an exception might arise. Popper thought that statements could be falsified with certainty but never verified for all time. Any statement that could not be falsified was not a scientific statement, in Popper’s view. It was the fact that any statement could be falsified in principle that made it scientific. Martin Gardner seems to think that scientific statements have to be falsified to be scientific, a denial that we can know anything at all.

Gardner says that “astronomers look for signs of water on Mars. They do not think they are making efforts to falsify the conjecture that Mars never had water”. The point is that they are making such efforts despite themselves. If that is someone’s hypothesis then as soon as water is found it is falsified. He adds that the cosmological constant, introduced as a fudge to stop the universe from collapsing in Einstein’s first cosmological model, and described by him as “the greatest blunder of my life”, now explains why the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should. Astronomers are not trying to falsify it. They are looking for confirmations. And by doing so, they are also automatically seeking to falsify it because any valid confirmation must have a possibly negative outcome.

A falsification might be wrong because an observation was faulty, but in science repeatability is another criterion, and any such mistake ought not to happen without being detected. A mistaken falsification will therefore be exposed.

Gardner is arguing that induction is still used despite Popper’s own view that it is not, but most scientists accept that it is, though not in the way the Hume and Mill thought it was. Induction is unquestionably part of the experimental method. Initial observations are made without any idea, or without a clear idea of what might emerge. From the observations, inferences are made. The inferences are tentative hypotheses, and this process is induction. Hume and Mill thought that was it, but thereafter, the progress of the science is driven by a desire to gather data to test hypotheses. If Popper was wrong about induction, it does not mean he was wrong about his criterion of falsification.

Thus astronomers are finding small planets orbiting distant suns. Gardner gives this as inductive evidence that among them might be Earth-like planets. The astronomers are not trying to refute anything.

Gardner seems to think that scientists who accept Popper’s criterion of what is scientific must try to refute their own hypotheses. That is absurd, but the hypothesis must be capable of being refuted, since otherwise it cannot be tested. No one will put forward an explanation expecting it to be false, and particularly with a duty of proving it to be false. What then would be the point of putting forward explanations? Scientists normally want to verify their hypotheses, but when verification is the only outcome, the test is not valid and is not therefore scientific. The test must have a criterion of failure. By seeking to confirm their hypotheses, scientists are automatically seeking to falsify them because they are testing them.

Thomas Kuhn

Philosopher of science, Thomas S Kuhn, who died on 17 June 1996, aged 73, is best known for introducing the principles of “paradigms” and “incommensurability” into the study of science. With Karl Popper, who died in 1994, Thomas Kuhn was the most influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century. The Structure of Scientific Reolutions (1962) has been translated into 25 languages, and the English edition alone sold over a million copies.

Just as Popper is identified with the principle of falsifiability, the notion of a paradigm brings Kuhn to mind. Kuhn distinguished between normal and revolutionary science. In periods of normal science the basic outline of the world view (or paradigm) held by a group of scientists is well understood. Scientists know what they are supposed to do and how they are to do it. Later Mendelian geneticists did not have to be geniuses to make significant contributions to Mendelian genetics once the science had been established. All they had to do was follow the exemplar set out by their forerunners.

Revolutionary science is different because scientists are questioning the ground upon which they are standing. Those interested in science tend to emphasize revolutionary change—the radical changes stemming from the concepts of continental drift and plate tectonics, or the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics, and from there to the notions of relativity and quantum theories. One reason why many scientists liked Kuhn’s work was that normal science was their own experience. Most of the time, most scientists are engaged in normal science. Anyone attempting to explain science had better pay attention to the typical case, instead of concentrating totally on the rare, abnormal periods of revolutionary change.

Other historians have tried to apply Kuhn’s views in their own work. Can the history of science be interpreted as an alternation between normal and revolutionary science? Were the introduction of Copernican theory, cell theory or evolutionary theory instances of “revolutions” in Kuhn’s sense? The usual conclusion that historians have been forced to reach is that Kuhn did not articulate his views about scientific revolutions with sufficient precision to allow them to decide. On Popper’s view, Kuhn’s hypotheses were non-falsifiable, and so not scientific.

The slogan with which Kuhn is most closely identified is that paradigms are incommensurable. All terms, even the most observational, are theory laden. Even though two different theories include references to “mass”, it may he defined differently in the two theories. Some of these differences in meaning are incorporated even in straightforward descriptions of observations. Anton van Leeuwenhoek prided himself in describing what he saw through his lenses, not in theorizing about them. Yet he termed the little creatures that he saw “animalcules”, implying they were little animals, not little plants. Two theories cannot be compared with absolute precision by reference to data.

As a result, scientific paradigms are incommensurable—scientists cannot decide between alternative paradigms solely on the basis of reason, argument and evidence. Kuhn compares scientific revolutions to political revolutions, and the latter are not only a matter of reason, argument and evidence. If paradigms are incommensurable, then they cannot, strictly speaking, contradict each other. That is the whole point of incommensurability. Kuhn sometimes said that incommensurable meant incompatible.

Critics of science, having decided the transition from one paradigm to another cannot be explained entirely in terms of reason, argument and evidence, conclude they play no role at all in such transitions. For them, evidence is little more than putty to be moulded as one sees fit. Social relativism has become popularly fuelled by an increasing hostility to science:

• People on the religious right have raised emotional protests as they feel themselves being marginalized. Evolutionary theory is “only” a theory and should be taught alongside other theories, in particular Creationism. Bible stories should be taught in biology classes.
• People on the ecological left, rightly conclude that reason, argument and evidence are insufficient to judge science in society—its social implications must also be considered. Science simply seeks the truth. Protesters reject scientific truth as deriving from the social assumptions of people who have contrary interests. For them, “good” must take precedence over “true”. They have fallen for the right wing propaganda that science is the ogre, not the greed of the decision makers who used science as they use anything else they control.

The social study of knowledge speaks of reflexivity. If something is true of everyone, then it is true of any person making a claim. So, if all conclusions are drawn with evidence playing an incidental malleable role, then decisions made by those who pronounce about science are also not essentially made on the basis of objective evidence. Yet, social constructivists use evidence, and spend a lot of time gathering it, to show how irrelevant evidence is—including therefore the evidence they have just produced in pronouncing on science! Their own criticism destroys their own case.

As social relativists have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to what they take to be simplistic, positivist views of science, more traditional philosophers of science have come to conclude that their own early, highly critical reaction to Kuhn was too one-sided. If Kuhn is interpreted with only a modicum of charity, he tells us a lot about the nature of science.

Though the problems that Kuhn raises about testing general positions against evidence are real, Kuhn never meant them to be used nihilistically. He himself invested a lot of energy in studying science. What is that but gathering evidence? Evidence ultimately plays a deciding role both in science and in the study of science. This is why he called for a larger involvement of the history of science in the philosophy of science.

Scientific Revolutions?

Steven Weinberg, in an essay published in The New York Review of Books (8 October 1998), discussed the work of Thomas S Kuhn, whose ideas have been used repeatedly by Christian apologists in the conflict of science and religion.

The famous part of Kuhn’s work is his description of scientific revolutions and his view of scientific progress. And it is here that his work is so seriously misleading. For Kuhn, the history of science was a cyclic process. Periods of normal science characterized by what Kuhn called a paradigm—a theoretical and empirical consensus—were punctuated by periods of crisis. In normal science, scientists agree about what phenomena are relevant and what explains them, about what problems are worth solving and what is a solution of a problem.

Near the end of a period of normal science, experimental results no longer fit existing theories, or theoretical contradictions are found in them. The limits of applicability of some central hypothesis of the science are being reached. Competing ideas fill the scientific literature, but no one is sure which ones are worth spending several years testing. Alarm and confusion are in the air until a revolution happens. A new consensus is reached on what is the best of the hypotheses on offer, and scientists are converted to a new way of looking at nature. Out of it comes a new period of normal science. The paradigm has shifted.

After the acceptance of Newton’s physical theories—the Newtonian paradigm—in the eighteenth century, a period of normal science began in the study of motion and gravitation. Scientists used Newtonian theory to calculate accurate planetary orbits, leading to the prediction in 1846 of the existence and orbit of Neptune, showing astronomers where to look for it. By the end of the nineteenth century, a failure to understand the motion of light caused a crisis. Einstein in the decade between 1905 and 1915 resolved it by a paradigm shift, a revolutionary revision in the understanding of space and time. Motion affects the flow of time, matter and energy can be converted into each other, and gravitation is a curvature in space-time. Einstein’s theory of relativity became the new paradigm, and the study of motion and gravitation entered upon a new period of normal science.

While this is broadly a true description of what has happened in science, Kuhn’s radically skeptical conclusions in his later writings made him a hero to scientific detractors—the theologians, philosophers, historians, sociologists, and cultural critics who question the character of scientific knowledge. Kuhn made the shift from one paradigm to another seem more like a religious conversion than an exercise of reason.

He argued that our theories change so much in a paradigm shift that it is impossible for scientists after a scientific revolution to see things as they had been seen under the previous paradigm. Paradigms that govern successive periods of normal science are incommensurable because the very standards by which scientific theories are judged have also changed.

He went on to reason that since a paradigm shift means complete abandonment of an earlier paradigm, and there is no common standard to judge scientific theories developed under different paradigms, there can be no sense in which theories developed after a scientific revolution can be said to add cumulatively to what was known before the revolution. Only within the context of a paradigm can we speak of one theory being true or false. Kuhn concluded:

We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion explicit or implicit that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.

Kuhn did not deny that there is progress in science, but he denied that it is progress toward anything. He used the metaphor of biological evolution—scientific progress for him was like evolution as described by Darwin, a random process seeming like the flight of a butterfly, rather than the flight of an arrow to a target.

For Kuhn, the natural selection of scientific theories is driven by problem solving. When, during a period of normal science, some problems cannot be solved using existing theories, then new ideas proliferate, and the ideas that survive are those that do best at solving these problems. But nothing made it inevitable that science would evolve toward anything objectively better. Kuhn recognizes that Maxwell’s and Einstein’s theories are better than those that preceded them, in the same way that mammals turned out to be better than dinosaurs at surviving the effects of comet impacts, but when new problems arise they will be replaced by new theories that are better at solving those problems, with no overall improvement.

Weinberg declares this to be wormwood to scientists, for whom the task of science is to get closer and closer to objective truth. Weinberg sees scientific progress as more like evolution in reverse, science tracing backwards the lines of evolution from individuals to species and back to larger and more comprehensive units, and ultimately to the whole of life.

But Kuhn’s conclusions suit those who are skeptical of science. If the transition from one paradigm to another does not depend on any external standard, then nature does not dictate the content of scientific theories, and they are then not privileged over other ways of looking at the world, such as shamanism or astrology or creationism. In other words science is arbitrary. Kuhn himself did not think so, complaining in 1965 that to describe his arguments as a defense of irrationality in science seemed to him to be “not only absurd but vaguely obscene”. He meant the philosopher Paul Feyerabend.

Scientists can indeed switch back and forth between ways of seeing, and can understanding the science that went before a scientific revolution. Newtonian mechanics, the favourite example of Kuhn, were only replaced in certain applications. Newtonianism reached its mature form in the early nineteenth century through the work particularly of Laplace and Lagrange. Mature Newtonianism—which still predates special relativity by a century—is taught today. Physicists do not forget how to think in Newtonian terms, even after they learn about Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The electrodynamics of James Clerk Maxwell were developed while Maxwell still accepted the notion of the ether. In this respect, Maxwell is pre-Maxwellian. The theory of electricity, magnetism, and light that is based on Maxwell’s work reached its mature form, which does not require reference to an ether, by 1900, and that too is still taught and used. Later students learn quantum mechanics in which light is composed of particles called photons, and Maxwell’s equations are approximations, but it does not stop them using Maxwellian electrodynamics in the correct situations. Mature scientific theories, not embryonic ones must be compared to judge the nature of scientific progress.

Kuhn concluded that, in the revolutionary shifts from one paradigm to another, science does not move closer to the truth. He inexplicably argued that all past beliefs about nature have turned out to be false. Kuhn knew very well that physicists today go on using the Newtonian theory of gravitation and motion and the Maxwellian theory of electricity and magnetism, because they are valid in their circumstances, and can be deduced from more general later theories. Newtonian and Maxwellian theories are not false.

The words we use and the symbols in scientific equations do not mean such different things after a scientific revolution. Kuhn thought physicists meant something different by mass before and after the advent of relativity. Yet, mass is still understood much as it was before Einstein—an intrinsic property of a body, unchanged by motion—its rest mass. Meanings can change, but it is no great effort for a scientist to appreciate how they were understood in the past.

Nor do scientific revolutions necessarily make different paradigms incommensurable. Even when ideas change, scientists still assess theories in the same way. A theory is a success when it is based on simple general principles and accounts for experimental data in a natural way. No sudden changes in the way scientists assess theories make it impossible to compare the truth of theories before and after a revolution. This is the essential feature of science that its critics just do not get. They are theologians, philosophers and literary critics who are used to giving opinions which they think are as good as anyone else’s. Science is not a question only of opinion.

The present theory of elementary particles, the standard model, accounts well for the measured properties of the particles, but physicists today are not firmly committed to the view of nature on which it is based. They know that any theory based on quantum mechanics and relativity will look like a field theory when experiments are done at only low energies. The standard model is a low-energy approximation to some unknown fundamental theory that may not involve fields at all.

The standard model is the paradigm for normal-science in fundamental physics, but has several ad hoc features, including about eighteen numerical constants, such as the mass and charge of the electron, that have to be arbitrarily adjusted to make the theory fit experiments. Nor does it cover gravitation. Theorists are looking for a more satisfying theory, to which the standard model would be only an approximation, and experimentalists are working to find new data that would disagree with some prediction of the standard model and give them a clue to a better one. Such a clue is the experimental finding that neutrinos have masses, forbidden in the standard model. Whatever theory turns out to replace the standard model will have neutrinos with masses.

What drives scientists is the sense that there are truths to be discovered, truths that will form a permanent part of human knowledge. Weinberg says the laws of nature are as real to him in the same sense as the rocks on the ground. Kuhn’s view of scientific progress would leave us with a mystery. Why should anyone bother?

Kuhn was quite wrong in saying that it is no part of the work of normal science to find new sorts of phenomena. A period of normal science is not a time of stagnation, but an essential phase of scientific progress.

Until the late 1960s, cosmology had been confused. No hypothesis dominated and astronomers and astrophysicists were partisans of some preferred cosmology, mainly on shaky grounds. In 1965, the cosmic microwave background radiation—radiation that is left over from the time when the universe was about a million years old—was discovered. Measurements could now confirm or refute cosmological speculations.

Cosmologists could seriously think about the early universe. Soon the Big Bang theory emerged and was accepted. Only when scientists share a consensus can they focus on the experiments and the calculations that can tell them whether their theories are right or wrong, and can show the way to a new consensus when wrong. Kuhn quoted Francis Bacon’s dictum to good effect:

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Many different hypotheses might fit a set of data. Kuhn made the point that elegance, consistency and universality are criteria used to decide among them. Pierre Duhem had long ago made the same point.

Scientists agree that the standard model accounts for observed phenomena providing a period of normal science in which the implications of the standard model are being calculated by theorists and tested by experimentalists. As Kuhn recognized, it is precisely this sort of work during periods of normal science that can lead to the discovery of anomalies that will make it necessary to take the next step beyond our present paradigm.

The birth of Newtonian physics was a mega-paradigm shift, but nothing that has happened in our understanding of motion since then—not the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics, or from classical to quantum physics—fits Kuhn’s description of a paradigm shift. Kuhn was a scientist, so where did he get his radical skepticism, and his strange view of the progress of science? Certainly not ignorance—he understood many episodes in the history of physical science as well as anyone ever has.

Weinberg says it was because Kuhn’s emphasis was on the profound difference in view of Aristotle and Newton, two thinkers who were 2000 years apart. The archaic ideas of Aristotle were preserved by the Christian churches as their received scientific dogma, so it was a paradigm well past its sell-by date. This might be why a modern scientist finds it hard to get into the frame of mind of an Aristotelian. Kuhn’s statement that all previous views of reality have proved false, though not true of Newtonian mechanics or Maxwellian electrodynamics, does apply to Aristotelian physics. Kuhn made this into the model of a paradigm shift, though it was far from typical.

The next great step forward in physics will see the theory of gravitation and all of the different branches of elementary particle physics merge together into a single unified theory. And when we have discovered this theory, it will be part of a true description of reality.

Lakatos on Falsification

Imre Lakatos says intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to establish one’s position by proving it. It consists in specifying the conditions under which one will give up one’s position. Committed Marxists, Astrologers, Freudians and Christians refuse to specify such conditions. This shows their intellectual dishonesty. Belief is an unavoidable weakness which has to be controlled by criticism. Lakatos says, for Popper, science is a “permanent revolution”, and criticism the heart of the scientific enterprise. Commitment is an error.

According to Kuhn revolution is exceptional and outside of normal science. In normal science, criticism is anathema. The transition from criticism to commitment is where normal science begins. Criticism of the dominant theory and proposals of new theories are only allowed in the rare moments of “crisis”.

For Popper scientific change is rational and falls in the realm of the logic of discovery. For Kuhn, scientific change—from one paradigm to another—cannot be governed by rules of reason. Truth lies in power. It is social psychology. Scientific change is a kind of religious change.

Falsifying a hypothesis requires its own rules, or “demarcation criteria”. Mere falsifiability is not enough to make a hypothesis acceptable. It must also be the best of them. It must explain better and explain more. Lakatos however seems to think that a hypothesis is not rejected by simply being falsified. A better hypothesis must be available to replace it, and it must be better because it explains what the old one succeeded in explaining and more besides. There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory. Whatever falsifies the old theory must corroborate the new one.

The crucial element in falsificationism is whether the new theory offers any novel, excess information compared with its predecessor and whether some of this excess information is corroborated.

Fact, Theory or Hypothesis

Is evolution a fact, a theory, or a hypothesis? Douglas Futuyma explains that people often speak of a “mere” hypothesis as if it were an opinion unsupported by evidence. In science, a hypothesis is an informed statement of what might be true. It may be poorly supported, especially at first, but an abundance of supporting evidence can make it a fact. Some hypotheses, such as the hypothesis that the earth revolves around the sun, or that DNA is the genetic material, are considered facts because they are so well supported.

Even so, a fact should not be thought of as something certainly known to be true. A fact always remains a hypothesis, even when so firmly supported by evidence that for now it is regarded as true. Every hypothesis has some chance, perhaps apparently negligible, of someday being modified or rejected through unimagined theories or new data. The history of science is full of examples of conclusions that had to be modified or rejected because of new theory and information. Until the late 1950s, geologists believed in the fixed position of the continents. Now all believe in plate tectonics and continental drift, and geological phenomena have had to be reinterpreted.

So, research never attains proof, no matter how painstakingly conceived and executed. Nothing is certainly known. That is why scientific papers are cautious. Data may be exquisite, the experiment carefully designed, the statistical analyses exemplary, but few authors claim to have proof. They may have confidence in their conclusions, but not certainty. Doubt is essential to a good scientist.

The social dynamics of science ensure the scientists’ confidence in the statements they propound as facts is merited. A solitary scientist may be mistaken or could deliberately falsify data, but all scientific papers are reviewed by prominent scientists in the same field to maintain quality and standards. Work not up to standard is returned for more to be done, or rewriting. Readers of the published paper skeptically question it especially when the issue is important—when progress depends on it. Publishing the structure and function of DNA by Watson and Crick was like that, for the whole of molecular biology depended on it. Some scientists will try to replicate the experiment. Others will assume it is correct and pursue research based on it. If the hypothesis is false it will not be making the right predictions and the work will expose its failings. Thus, researchers in the field test it for error, because their own work and their own careers are at stake.

Scientific disciplines at their frontiers are full of controversies and intellectual battles between proponents of opposing hypotheses. Like many people, scientists are motivated by a desire for recognition or fame, not only by intellectual curiosity, and disproving a well known hypothesis will yield professional recognition. Anyone who could show that David Bohm’s quantum theory is better than the Copenhagen model would be a scientific celebrity. There is competition—a kind of natural selection—among ideas, with the outcome decided by more evidence and ever-more rigorous analysis, until even the most intransigent skeptics are won over to a consensus view, or they die off.

For a scientist to arrive at a confident conclusion takes a lot of research work. Every sentence in a textbook stating a fact is from research that took immense effort, perhaps a few years of a scientist’s lifetime, maybe more. So, scientists defend their conclusions with vigour. Those who originally propounded the hypothesis have a lot at stake—a great investment of effort, and even their reputations—so they typically defend their view passionately, even sometimes when the cause is lost. They do not just roll over.

A theory in science is not an unsupported speculation. Rather, it is a mature, coherent body of interconnected statements, based on reasoning and evidence, that explains a variety of observations. Some definitions are:

1. A scheme or system of ideas and statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena.
2. A hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is accepted and expounded as accounting for the known facts.
3. A statement of what are known to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Thus atomic theory, quantum theory, and the theory of plate tectonics are not mere speculations or opinions, nor are they even well-supported hypotheses. Each is an elaborate scheme of interconnected ideas, strongly supported by evidence, that accounts for a variety of phenomena.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin propounded two main hypotheses. One was descent, with modification, from common ancestors—the hypothesis of descent with modification—and he published abundant evidence for it. The other was Darwin’s proposed cause for descent with modification—natural selection acting on hereditary variation. His argument was based on logic and on interpretation of many kinds of circumstantial evidence, but he had no direct evidence. More than 70 years passed before an understanding of heredity and the evidence for natural selection vindicated his hypothesis.

The theory of heredity, consisted at first of Mendel’s laws of particulate inheritance, dominance, and independent segregation of the genes that affect different characteristics. Exceptions to dominance and independent segregation were soon found, but the core principle of particulate inheritance remained. Building on and adding to this core throughout the twentieth century, geneticists have developed a theory of heredity far more complex and detailed than Mendel could have conceived. Parts of the theory are well established, other parts are still tentative, and may be altered as the mechanisms of heredity and development are explored.

Evolution is caused in more ways than Darwin realized, and natural selection and hereditary variation are more complex than he thought. Mutation, recombination, gene flow, isolation, random genetic drift, the many forms of natural selection, and other factors together constitute our current understanding of the causes of evolution.

This complex of interrelated ideas about the causes of evolution is the theory of evolution. Like all theories in science, it is incomplete, for the causes of all of evolution are not known, and some details may turn out to be wrong. Because a theory is a complex of statements, it usually does not stand or fall on the basis of a single critical test, as simple hypotheses often do. Rather, theories evolve as they are confronted with new phenomena or observations. Parts of the theory are discarded, modified, added.

Like the heliocentric hypothesis of Copernicus, the hypothesis of descent with modification has long held the status of a scientific fact. Evolution is not mere speculation and not a mere hypothesis, but a body of well supported hypotheses. The main tenets of evolutionary theory are so well supported that most biologists accept them confidently. Within about 15 years of 1859, all biological scientists except for a few diehards had accepted this hypothesis. Since then, hundreds of thousands of observations, from paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology, have confirmed it. Evolution is a scientific fact, explained by evolutionary theory. No biologist today would think of publishing “new evidence for evolution”, any more than a chemist would want to show that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. Evolution has not been an issue in science for over a century.

Science or Pseudoscience?

High levels of interleukin-6 are linked to many diseases of the immune system, including multiple myeloma, B-cell Lymphoma and such autoimmune diseases as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. In Forbes Magazine (March 23, 1998), Dr Harold Koenig of the Duke University Medical Center reported that old people who regularly attend religious services have lower blood levels of interleukin-6 than old people who watch TV Sunday mornings.

This is one of the bits of evidence being propagated by the Templeton Foundation in support of religion. Is it, though?

Honest scientists would be naturally skeptical. A great deal of checking would be needed before any such cause and effect relationship could be established. No figures are given on numbers or proportions of each group protected or not. Were the groups matched for sex and age, and habits? What consideration has been given to other factors like habits, place of residence, and lifestyle. The obvious one with a religious group is that they tend to eschew for religious reasons unhealthy things like smoking and drinking that other people indulge in, and might dispose them to the higher interleukin-6 level. Or is cause and effect being distinguished? Could the old people in better health have the energy to get out more, including to religious services? What explanation is there for the TV watchers who had low levels of the protein, and the churchgoers with high levels of it?

Were, for example, any statistical tests done? Suppose (with apologies to Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 1998) the samples were of 50 churchgoers and 50 TV watchers. The interleukin-6 is found to be high in 20 of the TV watchers, but only 10 of the churchgoers. Is this difference enough to reject the null hypothesis that the two groups of people do not really differ in the incidence of high interleukin-6? The chi-square statistic needs to be found to test this. In this example it is 4.76, showing the probability is at least 20 to one against the difference being due to chance alone, and that there is no real difference between the groups, assuming that the two groups are otherwise random samples. Did Koenig do a statistical test to see whether the difference between these numbers is too great to have arisen merely by chance?

So the study of 100 people supports the hypothesis that TV watchers are more likely to have high interleukin-6—but only weakly. The interleukin-6 might be significant, but the correlation is imperfect. The sample needs to be expanded to say 1000 people, other measures of health like blood pressure taken, and the absolute levels of the protein in the blood taken into account. The people that fell ill or died in the following year could be collected. If only 5 percent of the churchgoers died while 95 percent of the TV watchers died, the Templeton Foundation might have a story.

There are still other hypotheses to eliminate. Maybe the couch potato habits of TV watchers are the real factor in their high interleukin-6 level. Maybe TV watchers are genetically predisposed to a sluggish lifestyle, and the churchgoers are the opposite. You could do an experiment by paying the TV watchers to attend church, and the churchgoers to watch a service on TV, for a sufficient length of time, and see whether the protein levels change. Better still split each group into two and make one lot of TV watchers go to church and another lot watch a church service, while the churchgoers watch a church service or CNN. If all of them show a raised interleukin-6 level then you might begin to revise the spirituality thesis. But if all of the churchgoers have fallen sick while the original TV watchers have much lowered interleukin-6 levels, then the Templeton Foundation has a story.

At this point, Christians might have confidence that the interleukin-6 causes disease and death, and attending church saves peoples lives as well as their souls, but have they absolutely proved it? No! Data in themselves say nothing—they have to be interpreted in the light of theory and prior knowledge, not vague wishes, in this example, probability theory, the theory of experimental design, and the knowledge that extraneous factors exist besides the ones the Christians are interested in, and might confound their conclusions. In other words, there is a great deal more to proper science than most Christians even consider.

Like most of these supposed Christian correlations, this is propaganda, worthless as it is reported, and one suspects that the work is worthless. Koenig says that his study statistically controlled for chronic illness and physical functioning, but even that does not tell us much or cover the possibilities for error.

Dr Albert Ellis, a cognitive psychologist in New York City, questions whether surveys that collect data on churchgoing habits are trustworthy.

If you ask deeply religious people if they are happier, have better marriages and so forth, of course they’re going to say they do. They just lie.

Moreover there is always the assumption that these supposed effects are “spiritual” but no one says what it means. Health is affected by state of mind, and state of mind may be affected by religious beliefs, but then so is lifestyle, and that is what is more important. To pretend that there is a supernatural element in this is typical of Christian dishonesty. More research needs to be done on the effect of mind on health, but not by Christians who just cannot do science properly.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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