Science, Religion and Evolution
Table of Contents:
Is Science really just another religion?
Science and Religion or Science as Religion?
How does Dogma Fit into Religion?
So how is Science not Religion?
Science, evidence, and near-proof
Why dogma as the diagnostic criterion?
Dogmatism or fundamentalism as blasphemy
Is Science really just another religion?
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
Thomas Huxley
One spoiling tactic that many apologists for various anti-scientific themes
resort to is the claim that science is neither more nor better than a religion,
and as such has no more persuasive merit than any other superstition.
This quibble is scientifically, philosophically, religiously, and ethically
bankrupt, but even to begin to refute it we must establish a clear criterion by
which to distinguish science from religion.
This essay describes and illustrates a simple criterion that will not please
everybody, but that is sufficient, necessary, and cogent. It includes a
brief discussion of some claims that evolution itself is nothing more than a religious
faith or dogma.
Science and Religion or Science as Religion?
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.
Thomas Huxley
In some circles it has become a cliché that science is merely an instance of a
religion. For such an assertion to be meaningful, much less correct, it
must be possible to demonstrate some attribute that defines any particular
thing as a religion, and to show that science has that attribute. If on
the other hand we are to demonstrate that it is unreasonable to class science
as a religion, we need to establish diagnostic criteria that distinguish between science and
religion: "X is (or is not) science (or religion) insofar as it meets (or
fails to meet) criterion Y."
Note that this would not necessarily imply that everything must be either
science or religion.
Given such a criterion, any particular thing or class of things might be one,
the other, or neither, but not both. An elementary NAND
relationship in formal logic, if you like. As we shall see, this is a bit
optimistically simplistic, but we can achieve a good first approximation for
practical purposes.
Whatever else they might be, science and religion both are activities based on
conceptions or bodies of theory, and for the most part both depend in practice
on their adherents being able to persuade others of their ideas. (“Go
ye therefore, and teach all nations. . . ”) Nothing forbids a hermit
to worship without preaching, or a scientist such as Cavendish to do
ground-breaking research without publishing, but for the purposes of this
discussion, we may ignore introversion as irrelevant, however devout or
profound it may be. At the least such practitioners work to convince themselves
of the validity of their own ideas, so we may regard the hermits as
degenerate cases, rather than counter-examples.
Such distractions notwithstanding, is it possible to formulate and demonstrate
criteria for distinguishing science from religion?
One argument in favour of regarding science as religion is the claim that, in
spite of the belief common among scientists and the public, science has
all the answers. Now, science in fact is fallible, and in particular, conclusions that have been derived validly, or arguably validly, by scientific procedures are fallible.
Now, to begin with, I
cannot answer for all members of the public, but I don’t know any scientist who
believes in the infallibility of science. For example M. Cartmill, an
anthropologist, put it vividly as follows: "As an adolescent I aspired
to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful
vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an
archbishop so you can meet girls."
Wry, but realistic — and penetrating...
Indeed, many people claim that in contrast to science, religion has
all the answers, including in particular all those answers that science
lacks. This is ironic, because one of its cardinal strengths is that
religion does not always need answers, particularly not morally or logically
cogent answers. For reasons that I mention later, religious answers do
not as a rule need to stand up to ethical, logical or even factual criticism.
They do not even need to be consistent, let alone sensible or compassionate. In
a similar connection, Daniel Dennett quoted without attribution:
"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
In either science or religion, arguments may or may not involve material
evidence and the search for new insights, therefore such argument is not
helpful in distinguishing science from religion. Where science and
religion tend to differ from each other in ways that matter in practice, is
largely in how they establish and defend or extend opinions. Science in
particular demands the construction of arguments with which, if he pleases, a
sceptic may convince himself, perhaps using his own methods and data, rather
than accepting assertions unquestioned. In practice such a stage of persuasion
and scepticism may be protracted, heated, sometimes embittered. In the long
run it even may turn out to have been mistaken and pointless, when the
disagreement is based on common views that later are found to be mistaken, or
on shared terminology that turns out to be based on mutually conflicting semantics.
However, even if all the sceptic achieves is the conviction that he has as yet
no conclusive counter-argument, even that is progress of a sort.
Instead of course, the sceptic might convince you that his argument or
evidence rests on stronger ground than yours. That also happens. If
your change of mind is rational, that too is progress.
Science is based on the opinion and insight of the scientist. Its
recourse to, and reliance on, observation, prediction, disciplines, logic, and
cogent theory, does not alter this fact; the scientist has nothing but his own
opinion to justify his certainty of the reality or accuracy of his observations
and theories; he has no more ultimate justification for these views than any
believer. Scientific research produces wrong or incomplete answers and trivialities
more often than it produces durable scientific "laws". It
progresses by its heuristic nature, not by its infallibility. "Further research is necessary..." is almost a reflex cliché in articles reporting on research — and with good reason.
Scientific "proof" is based on material "induction" from
"abduction", which unlike formal induction, is not logically
compelling, not logical proof at all. Many a scientist and philosopher
would happily crucify me for that assertion, those who did not assume that I
had typed the statement inadvertently. But no, I did nothing of the type. I
also am well aware that nowadays in many circles there have been attempts to
eliminate induction. Popper in particular tried to substitute the idea of
basing scientific work on hypotheses to be falsified, but in my opinion he
achieved nothing more substantial than a change in terminology. In the
views that he presented through the decades the old difficulties with
"induction" remain, and so do most of the pre-Popperian merits;
hypotheses do not emerge from a vacuum. His views might have startled and
impressed many people whose views were superficial, but really, his major
assault on induction had been invalidated even before he published or developed
it. For an introduction to major examples, see the articles on underdetermination
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdetermination
) and on the Duhem-Quine thesis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis
)
Even the so-called analytic sciences — logic, mathematics and the like — are
founded on belief; not necessarily belief in any particular assertions they
might make, but in the validity of logical operations such as valid deduction,
implication and so on — and belief in any particular formal proof of
anything may be an error; for example, the constructor of the proof might have
made an unnoticed slip, or the premises might include an invalid assumption or
false data.
Please note however, that in saying so I am not guilty of the solecism of asserting that formal axioms are in any way essentially true, false or even meaningful; the possible errors I refer to are in the derivation and application of the formal procedures. It is perfectly possible for me to accept standard axioms of arithmetic, and yet to blunder in accidentally and erroneously deriving say, the conclusion that that two cubed equals six. Errors occur in the formal disciplines as well as in laboratory or field research, and in the work of some of the greatest intellects.
A major example — I am
uncertain whether it was humorously intended or not — was Gödel's
ontological proof of the "existence of God". It appears under
that name in Wikipedia, and if you are interested, that is as good a discussion
as I have seen anywhere.
Some scientists might argue that this class of procedure, of deriving
inferences from theory, hypothesis, and observation is not really belief,
but something more like conditionally and transiently entertaining a given
hypothetical structure, but that is doubtful pleading. A scientist rarely
does much work on hypotheses that he thinks are wrong; he looks for, and tests,
the ones that he thinks are most probably right, or at least viable and
defensible, in terms of his ideas or initial observations, as they survive
these processes. Roughly speaking, deriving such bases from which induction and
deduction may proceed, is a process of abduction. In case
the concept is unfamiliar, there is a good discussion at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abductive_reasoning
As everyday opinions
go, although the evidence for the idea is strictly abductive and inductive, and
accordingly tentative, it would be a highly atypical scientist who does not
believe firmly that on Earth stones fall (i.e. that their trajectories end in
the position of lowest potential energy accessible on the surface of solid earth unless
they are propelled into space with sufficient velocity.)
As Kipling put it in "The Gods of the Copybook Headings":
We were living in
trees when they met us.
They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us,
as Fire would certainly burn...
Patently then, belief as such also is not useful as a criterion for distinguishing religion from science.
Science is a term applied to a broad range of concepts and contexts, but some of them apply broadly too. One is "nullius in verba" it is a topic in its own right, and rather than discus it deeply here, I refer readers to that entry in Wikipedia, and also the entry on "Social Epistemology".
I also would lightly paraphrase an item I found in Steven Pinker's book on Rationality, in which he quoted a typically trenchant quip of Fran Lebowitz, which seems to me to encapsulate much of the essence of nullius in verba: "I feel no need to believe in anything that needs to be believed in".
What is Religion then?
The opposite of the religious
fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but
the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Eric Hoffer
Methinks there be not
impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith:
the deepest mysteries
ours contains have not only been illustrated,
but maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason.
I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas
and riddles of the Trinity — with incarnation and resurrection.
I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with
that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, "Certum est quia
impossibile est".
I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point;
for, to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith, but persuasion.
Religio Medici. Sir Thomas Browne
Then how do we show that science is distinct from religion? First
let us see what religion is; if we cannot find any criterion
defining religion, then it is hard to see how we can be sure of defining
non-religion.
Immediately we encounter a difficulty. Religion is enormously miscellaneous.
What unites say, Nama/Kung Mantis veneration, Buddhism, Hinduism,
Judeo-Christian-Muslim beliefs, Mormonism, Marxism, Norse, Classical, aboriginal American,
and Australian religions? Far from being no more than mutually
contradictory, even mutually hostile, many religions, and even sects in nominally the same religion, are, in effect,
mutually incomprehensible. In fact the closest approach to unanimity
among religions, be they never so in favour of ecumenism, is almost of
necessity that each asserts or implies that the others are in error. To me this
recalls Piet Hein's
Commutative Law of Similarity:
No
cow's like a horse,
and no horse like a cow.
That's one similarity
anyhow.
After all, if two religions did not disagree in any respect, it should
follow that they were the same single religion. What else could they be? For two religions to
concede that there were no differences between their beliefs, at least one
would have to die, or subsume itself in the other, possibly both.
And yet. . .
Apart from sharing their mutual dissimilarity, all religions do have at least
one thing in common: they all have dogma.
Here the term "dogma" raises hackles and prompts denial, often furious and abusive. And yet, in the technical sense, it is not specifically pejorative; it does not refer to closed-minded assertion as such. In this sense it is the technical term for that part of a body of belief that is given as non-negotiable. If you like, it is the statement of that part of a religion that adherents unconditionally believe. Call it the doctrine or tenets if you prefer (some persons go ballistic, even hysterical, if you characterise their tenets as (horrors!) dogma instead of say, faith!)
Perhaps you wish to draw fine distinctions between such terms as doctrine and dogma, but for present purposes they are not likely to be very relevant. For the rest of the discussion I mainly shall use the term “dogma”.
Don't assume that the
distinction is a semantic irrelevance; I have had online shouting matches with
people who insist that dogma is completely different from "doctrine"
and "tenet", and they have kindly undertaken to instruct me on
the point, even by reference to dictionaries — dictionaries that they are prone to quoting
inaccurately or inappropriately.
Sadly, such quotes are insufficient in such matters, even accurate quotes from up-to-date dictionaries. Apart from the fact that the current fashion in lexicography leans towards recording usage, rather than prescribing it (often to my personal disgust) there is the fact that I too own and use dictionaries in several functions, so I am less embarrassed in dismissing dictionary-derived objections, than dictionary purists had no doubt intended, much less expected. The reality is that many words have more than one clear meaning, and even those that have multiple, closely related, meanings often have different senses and sub-texts. And, as similes for "dogma", every one of several English or American dictionaries that I have consulted, gives one or more of: "doctrine", "teaching", or "tenet".
However, that fails to pacify, or even give pause to, those with the most rabid recourse to authorities such as dictionaries.
So, I do not for an
instant apologise for use of the term dogma in its general sense, and if anyone
reads the term as pejorative, then I refuse to accept any blame for readers' blood
pressure: that is for them to take up with their English and their religious hierarchies and the sensitivity of their physiology to their own prejudices.
Also, as I point out later on, believers, comparative theologists, and the
like, might find the criterion too inclusive. They might wish to
distinguish religions from heresies, sects, cults, superstitions, and so on.
They might insist that if it is not based on virtuous assertion of god, then it
is not religion, even though various religions differ in their concepts of god
or gods or their significance, let alone their commandments. I also explain why
such distinctions, however valid in other contexts, are irrelevant to this
essay and why I lump them all together into the same category, without
prejudice to whether they have anything else in common, or even whether or not
they are diametrical opposites in every other respect (as is logically
possible).
It is after all
likely that the origin of the very word "religion" ultimately stems from the
Latin word religare: "to bind". And such an interpretation certainly would fit the concept of
commitment to the dogma.
Some religions prudently forbid that their dogma be questioned or even so much as
discussed; some might not even permit their lay members to know the detail of
the dogma, let alone study the high secrets reserved for the priests.
Other religions do permit some questioning, as long as the answers
unthreateningly leave the dogma intact, on pain of charges of heresy, vanity,
and even more heinous transgressions. Historically it sometimes has
turned out to be dangerous even to be too helpful in suggesting rational support for their dogma — simply to suggest that the fundamental beliefs or sacred scriptures might be in
need of such support would in itself be heretical!
If your stomach is strong enough, you might like to do some background reading on the history of religious conflict on say, infra- versus supralapsarianism, or on transsubstantiation.
Such persons commonly would hate to permit even the publication of rival views. Caliph Omar allegedly said of the books in the library of Alexandria: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." The story is disputed by some scholars, and I do not stand bail for it, but it certainly is consistent with many other events before and since. I accept it here for the present as an illustration of a persistent attitude. What certainly is true is that book burning on the grounds of religious prejudice occurred at intervals throughout history.
This was not limited to religion of course — burning or other modes of destruction of books and other objects of bigotry or political rivalries, have been popular modes of entertainment and rabble-rousing since prehistoric times, and still persists, at the behest of dictators, fascists, authors such as Marxists and their followers.
It is directly opposed to scientific behaviour by the very essence of the nature of science however, as I expect should become obvious if you read on.
A related obsession of many religious bodies is hatred of the apostate, and one
can easily imagine how damaging it might be to the minds of the faithful, to
see how someone who had at one time been blessed with faith in the dogma, could
come to believe that after all it was worthless, untrue, or at the least, that
there were better and higher things in this world or the next, if any. Throughout
the history of humanity the rage of the faithful in such religions has led them
to revile, persecute or murder anyone who came to believe that their initial faith had been
misplaced.
Don't take my word for it — read your headlines, look about you, think of the threats and attempts on the lives and rights of persons who have suffered, say because they:
- have had the courage to voice their own views, or
- have claimed their rights to independence of views foisted on them
- have been gulled into accepting dogma, and afterwards rejected it
- have been born in such a community and willy-nilly dragooned into the faith
- have had roles forced on them as slaves or sexual chattels
- have forced roles or status based on social, historical or ethnic criteria
There are plenty where those came from!
In many religions lately, secular restlessness has led to increased flexibility
of interpretation of dogma, but that is a detail of circumstance, not a
refutation of the principle of founding a religion on a body of prescribed
belief. Conversely, many a faith has increased its dogma and discipline to hysterical levels of intensity in the face of public debate or disagreement.
Historically, dogma originally has been formulated arbitrarily and ad hoc by
ignorant persons, and for ignorant persons; it accordingly tends to be rife with
absurdity, fossil topicality, and wishful thinking. It therefore is a
frequent rationalisation in religions, to represent unquestioning faith as a positive
virtue.
Faith — which I define as unquestioning belief in the dogma,
or at least acceptance, irrespective of logical or factual justification or
absurdity — faith is what such religion commonly demands and exalts. In such faith the
worshipper deliberately or implicitly renounces his reason in embracing absurdity
or even meaninglessness, and represents the renunciation as a virtue, and represents any
reservations on the creed as sinful at best, heathen typically, and evil always.
The claims I make here might seem unlikely, as though I were inventing damaging
evidence as a polemical trick, but no, there actually are extant religious
writings by Christian believers mourning the fact that the dogma did not demand
the belief in more impossibilities. For all I know, similar statements
may have been made by fundamentalists in other religions as well.
According to such persons, faith is a poor thing if it is based on whatever
anyone could see is true; real faith, worthwhile faith, is belief
in the face of whatever anyone could throw at the believer, even facts or
logic. The seventeenth century genius, Sir Thomas Browne, satirised such
views in his Religio Medici, as quoted in the epigraph on this section. His
work is available online, and well worth a read even today. How truly religious
he was in private, I cannot say, but he certainly asserted that he was.
For all I know, some religions might have a dogma denying that they have dogma,
but this essay is not based on whether they accept or reject the idea that they
might have dogma or not, or whether the tenets that define their beliefs should
be called dogma or not, only whether they have certain items of belief that
they assert unconditionally, without which they refuse to accept that a person
is in good faith a member of their belief.
So don't think it was my idea or that I am misrepresenting anyone. Mind
you, I must emphasise that I do not claim that this attitude is in the
majority. I have no idea how frequent it is, nor how strongly it affects
the typical day-to-day thinking of such people — or anyone else.
Note that I state that dogma is the essential component of religion; I do not insist as a logical requirement that everything that asserts dogma must be a formal, ecclesiastical religion. Whether to do so would be a defensible position, but not essential. Dogma certainly is frequent in dictatorships of all kinds, and there is no clear distinction between what we might call the ecclesiastical and the temporal attitudes. If you wish to distinguish them taxonomically, go ahead: taxonomy always has elements of arbitrariness, and one learns to live with them as appropriate.
As an example of secular dogmatism in despite of available facts, Hitler's rule was more vivid than most, though a study of such pathologies in various oppressive regimes throughout history, ranging in modern times from soccer hooligans to national dictatorships, could fill an entire category of historical studies. Consider one small extract from the 1949—1950 book by Franz Halder: "Hitler as War Lord".
...Hitler stiffened in his opinion that the Russians were ‘dead’. In angry words he daily accused the General Staff of lacking ‘guts’, even of cowardice masquerading as prudence. He ridiculed the reports, now coming in almost every day from reconnaissance and wireless interception, of the continual appearance of new Russian divisions, saying that only completely naive and simple-minded theoreticians would let themselves be taken in by this clumsy swindle of Stalin.
When he was read a statement compiled from unimpeachable sources which showed that in 1942 Stalin would still be able to muster another one to one-and-a-quarter million men in the region north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga and at least half a million more in the eastern Caucasus and the region to its north, and which proved moreover that the Russian output of first line tanks amounted to at least 1,200 a month, Hitler flew with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth, at the one who was reading this statement, and forbade such idiotic twaddle.
That is just a sample: it is so consistent with many other reports, both of Hitler and of other dictators deluded by their own preconceptions throughout ancient and modern history, as not to be worth following up: too commonplace to justify the trouble.
The reason that I presented the text at all, is because the behaviour that it described is eloquent of the arbitrariness and wishful thinking that underlies authoritarian dogma in general: the violence of the rage against reality or logic, seems almost to be an index of how unanswerable the objections may be. This is characteristic of prescriptive authorities, whether ecclesiastic or secular.
Accordingly, though I do not insist on calling all such things religion, I feel comfortable in regarding any such thoughts and deeds as at least being decidedly the opposite of scientific, no matter who harbours or perpetrates them.
What is Dogma then?
It is a good morning exercise
for a research scientist to discard
a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.
It keeps him young.
Konrad Lorenz
That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
P. C. Hodgell
At some time people thought that the
potential that people had was not developed
because everyone was ignorant and
that education was the solution to the problem,
that if all people were
educated, we could perhaps all be Voltaires.
But it turns out that falsehood
and evil can be taught as easily as good.
Richard Feynman
Dogma may take stronger or weaker forms:
Strong forms of dogma say, more or less: This creed is what you believe, no
matter what any fancied reason or evidence might show to the contrary, and no
matter whether you understand its details or not (The less secure the religion,
the stronger the dogma, and the more probably it will add codicils to the
effect that even your questioning is evil, and prescribe in its compassion, a
therapeutic grilling at stake or stoning, plus eternal damnation for the good
of your soul.)
Weaker forms of dogma will typically say (also more or less): Here is the body
of what we believe. Such and such an absurd detail of our creed is
patently mythical. It either is included to test our faith, or is a
parable that remains true in spirit, when subjected to appropriate
hermeneutics. As long you still don’t understand, you need instruction, till you admit that you do, or at least till you do not doubt the dogma, whether you understand it or not, and you accept that you are the one in error.
Weaker forms of dogmatism used to be much rarer than they are nowadays, simply
because weak dogmatism simply was unnecessary in the old days. Their modern incursion has arisen largely from the increasing need for once impregnable
theocracies to incorporate sufficient flexibility to weather the prevailing
climate of rationalism and functional literacy. Compromises, such as those intrinsic to the weaker forms of dogmatism, remain commoner and
more troublesome than theocracies wish; anything less than absolute abjection of the faithful worries the authorities, and aggravates the murderous rage of the least secure among them
A more sophisticated version of the weaker forms of dogmatism is: This
non-parsimonious, non-Occamist doctrinal material is presumably
unfalsifiable. It is the substance in which you must believe if you wish
to count yourself as one of our belief, but if, against all reasonable
expectation, you find really compelling evidence against it, then very well, we
shall adjust our view accordingly. (An example, I understand, is the
Buddhist belief in any doctrine, even reincarnation.)
How does Dogma Fit into Religion?
In all science, error precedes
the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.
(Variously
attributed to Horace or Hugh Walpole, without source, but too good to omit)
On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the
machine
wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend
the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
If a body of belief
has nothing corresponding to dogma in any such form, it is hard to know how to
call it a religion, except that many religions, or at least schisms, are too
incoherent to define any clear body of dogma at all. Such religions may
amount in effect to politics or con games, but their sincere members do insist
that great truths underlie their belief, and that rivals are mistaken or evil.
The more pernicious examples include a few of the grosser evangelical scams and
movements like the People's Temple of Jim Jones or Scientology, not to mention
the bible-waving of biblical illiterates like Donald Trump. Others are
blander, tailing off into tea parties for the rich and inept.
Religions typically are not abstract but have specific imperatives, such as
worship. They may be more or less good, or evil, or simply incoherent, but
their goodness or otherwise is not what defines them as religions: by the
criterion of dogma, Satanism and dogmatic atheism intrinsically are classes of
religion as definite as Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Hindu-etc faiths. (Any
particular version of agnosticism may be a religion, or may not, specifically
insofar as it entails dogma.)
As formal ideals, dogmata defining any religion as a body have little to do
with the private beliefs of individual members (which, to the extent that they
conflict with the established formal dogma are by definition heresies) or with
their personal behaviour (sins) or their sociology and politics outside the
commandments or routine practice of the religion. In most religions only
a small minority of the members have the slightest grasp of the dogma that they
theoretically espouse, or even realise that there is such a dogma, or even know
what a dogma is or what its significance might be. Many do not even
explicitly realise that there is such a thing as a body of belief, such as one
might learn in a catechism.
In fairness, not to present the position of science too smugly, only a minority
of practising scientists could coherently discuss philosophy of science, and
only a minority of those can do so cogently, much less state any items of basic behavioural principles. Many of the rest simply
consider philosophy of science to be so much hot air, fit only for obsessive
academics and for superannuated scientists who are past their best, and no
longer fit for research. The abjurers speak of the
"philosopause". How much this actually is of practical
importance in either case is debatable.
Even Richard Feynman, whom I admire greatly, and whose death I lament, notoriously said something like: "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds", and yet, his own writings were full of aphorisms, which implicitly amounted to philosophy of science, some of them valuably, such as:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool;
and:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
and:
It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.
But however we look at it, the fact is that neither deviant belief nor deviant
behaviour in individual adherents is a general criterion for distinguishing
science from religion.
Notice that it does not follow that every opinion in a given religion need be
dogma. In fact, in most religions it is likely that most statements are
not dogma, no matter how dogmatically they might be presented; they may deal
with everyday concerns and be open to debate, interpretation, and
adjustment. For instance, one might, but need not, include in one's dogma
or its immediate implications, the rules for how and when to clean one's teeth,
or on what parts of the body to shave one's hair, or what to wear on one’s
head, or the question of whether penguins or bats are birds, or whether
elephants can jump, or whether mountains might come when called. (All of these are actual examples, and not of my own invention; there are limits to my morbid creativity!) It is in
fact well known for religious people, often actual religious functionaries such
as priests, to do good scientific work — one even might debate whether most of
material scientific progress historically has been made by believers.
So not even one's opinions in secular matters need be of much use in
distinguishing religion from science.
None of this affects the main point: that there is in each religion a core of
dogma, and that anything conflicting with that dogma may (must?) be defined as
heresy. In principle that means that insofar as it is heresy, it is
unacceptable unless apologists can rationalise it by arguing that there was not
in essence any conflict. For instance, during a reformation religious
authorities might decide, commonly have decided, that the traditional view actually had been a
misinterpretation of the dogma. Such things have happened repeatedly in
the history of the major religions, either locally or at the highest levels of
authority.
Commonly, tolerant religion clashes as little with science as with any other
day-to-day matters of reality. In fact many scientists, including some
evolutionists, are religious. Some reconcile their beliefs with
their science, but others live double mental lives, believing their science
with one part of their minds and their religion with the other. They
rationalise or even radically divorce their conception of their work from their
faith. Presumably most do it largely unconsciously, but I have met
research workers (usually biologists, but by no means always) who unapologetically believed one thing
in their laboratories and another thing in church.
Mind you, some so-called scientists who would be deeply offended at my saying so, although they do acceptable work in research on scientific questions, have only the vaguest concepts of anything like a defensible philosophy of science.
Too bad. No apologies!
For my part I do not understand any such intellectual process, but it is not
for me to tell anyone to change the beliefs on which he builds his mental or
social peace. A religious attitude seldom makes much difference to how
one practices one’s science; most scientists worry as much about the philosophy
of science as most carpenters worry about the atoms that make up their
wood. Still, the history of science is rife with examples of workers who
insisted that the result of every scientific investigation must support their
personal religious or political dogma.
One way or another, that core of dogma is what lies at the heart of anything we
can reasonably call a religion.
So how is Science not Religion?
Nullius in verba
Knowledge is growing and changing, the world is large and Man is small,
and except in matters of faith, there is no pope.
Anon Scientific American 1964
So much for religion.
And science? Is science dogma free? Really? Could anyone
cogently support such a claim? How?
Dogma may seem to you like a very strange, small difference to pick on; in
fact, the proponents of what they call “creation science” have claimed that
science is itself a religion. They say that science places its faith in
observation, in Occam’s Razor (the principle of parsimony and elegance) and in
scientific method; it has its own wars and splits and dogma and accordingly has
no special merit compared to religions.
And yet these are not points of dogma in science, not at all. . .
Science in the sense that we are discussing, differs from religion in that, far
from relying on dogma, or even recognising it as a basis for justification of
action, science intrinsically has no conceptual scope at all for ideological
dogma. Science does not even deny dogma, any more than religion
denies noise. (Nor of course does science deny "noise"; in fact, unlike most religious adherents, practically anyone practising in a scientific discipline needs to understand noise very well!)
Science in essence is a range of processes for finding and using information for constructing, identifying, urging, or selecting, the strongest candidate hypotheses to answer any manageably meaningful question.
No
appeal to dogma, in fact, no appeal to any assertion at all, whether empirical
or philosophical, transient or eternal, has cogency in science, because the
only means available for convincing persons who refuse to accept your
arguments, is by letting them convince themselves in the light of available
evidence, including any evidence that they unearth for themselves. And
conversely, your adversaries' options for convincing you of their views, are
equally constrained in turn.
It follows that no statement is sacred in this essay for example. Anyone
might take issue with any point. By replacing enough of the principles I
assert, the concept of science could indeed be modified or even destroyed
outright.
Certainly you would have to convince the scientific community first.
Convincing them is the essence of scientific progress.
In science there is no pope.
That assertion is not dogma, it simply is failure to imagine a role, let alone a function, for any such a papal entity. What form would a pope take in science, and what could anything like a pope be expected to do? What form would dogma take in science, and what would any rational practitioner in science do with such a dogma?
Paradoxically, if you think you can make out a strong enough case to support your denial that science is popeless rather than hopeless, then feel free to do so; just do not demand that anyone in particular should take you seriously. And if anyone did, that need not yet mean that anyone else must take either of you seriously.
That is not how science works.
And science works very well compared to absolutely any other discipline in human history — certainly compared to any religion. Ask any doctor, engineer, soldier, or technologist. For that matter, ask yourself, or any religious apologist, as you fly in a jet airliner less than two centuries after sailing ships still were as much the dominant means of crossing the waters, as they had been for millennia.
It is magic, you know. The divine winged sandals that Hermes lent Perseus, bore him each day a seven days journey. At that rate Perseus couldn't even have kept up with a modern cheap car driven by the proverbial little old lady on the way to church, let alone a pre-World-War-II airliner.
And you know what the Abrahamic faiths said about magic:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Comforting thought. . .
Meanwhile of course,
if your arguments are not in themselves convincing, let alone correct, that is a separate
problem. Nothing in science promises that your beliefs are meaningful or
correct, and whether they are or not, there is no guarantee that they will
convince anyone soon or at all, and nothing in science demands that anyone be
interested in listening to you, or having once believed you, should continue to
believe.
It is not that scientists loathe or love dogma, that dogma is evil or stupid,
or even that particular dogmatic or scientific propositions are true or false,
but that in the process of convincing someone who will only accept arguments
that he can understand and confirm for himself, dogma as such has no
meaningful role.
Granted, in scientific controversy, appeal to authority often may be tempting (Thus spake Maxwell! Ipse dixit Al Kwarizmi. Also sprach Einstein. My professor said. . .) but such appeal constitutes no more than an argument of convenience, a substitute for time-consuming exploration of probably unrewarding avenues.
After all, we cannot
delay Biology 101 while each student personally verifies every individual
assertion presented in class. Just as we cannot delay Biblical Hermeneutics 101
while each student personally decides whether to accept the book of Job as
literally true or as allegorical, or downright poetical, as required by the
associated curriculum.
Then again, the appeal to authority might be used in bad faith to intimidate
those whose critical faculties are not up to scratch. Right?
True.
Science can no more
guarantee universal good faith or understanding or knowledge than religion can guarantee universal good faith; and that is saying a great deal: it is well known that many a sworn witness, irrespective of faith, will perjure himself in court. Bertrand Russell put it succinctly thus:
One
is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because
religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
In religion, to reject the revelations of the charismatic or the authority of
the ancients may be criticised as a sin of pride. Historically the
punishment has ranged from grilling by your spiritual counsellor, to grilling
at stake.
In science the sin of pride (and futility) is to demand that others
shall not differ with your pronouncements and wisdom. In science there
also is a matching sin of humility: forbearing to differ when your
insights or evidence suggest a flaw in the received wisdom of authority.
The punishment in either case is likely to include painful levels of cognitive
dissonance.
In particular, although hardly anyone routinely devotes all his time and
resources to systematically opposing received wisdom and established opinion,
there is no prescribed penalty for doing so. No unexpected anti-dogma
police drag heretics off to the COMFY CHAIR. Anyone at any
time is in a position to ask in effect: "How does the establishment
position make more sense than alternatives proposed in the light of new
findings or new arguments, or for that matter, old work that has gone unnoticed,
or temporarily been forgotten or overlooked or now has been
re-interpreted?"
Granted, withholding of grades, degrees, tenure, cooperation, honour, and lucre,
or even attention, are sometimes represented as being almost as effective,
almost as barbarous even, as religious persecution. There certainly have
been many ugly examples of such, and there have been even uglier examples of
so-called scientists who have tried to stifle views that conflicted with their
political dogma, stifling them by authority, or even by inciting public riots
against speakers, but actual religious martyrs faced with physical torment and
death, would be unimpressed by the fate of our contemporary dissidents among
scientists. Even Galileo and Urban VIII would probably have snorted
dismissively.
So: in science the fact that a hypothesis is accepted wisdom, is no reason for
pioneers or dissidents to refrain from criticising it and from refuting or even
replacing it if they can. (Have you had any recent debates with supporters
of phlogiston theory for example?) Conversely, the newness of a proposal
is no argument for establishment supporters to adopt it. Cold fusion and
quantum theory, jumping genes and polywater, introns and N-rays — each
encountered scepticism in its turn. From the point of view of the
fundamental principles of science their respective rejection or acclaim had
nothing to do with newness or authority.
The point of view of
individual scientists might be another matter, but the question of whether the temperaments
of particular workers happen to cause them to prefer new ideas or old, has
little significance in the long run. It is true that it may take time for
people to get used to an idea, mentally to integrate its attractions, its
non-cogencies and its potential, but that is a reasonable consequence of the
difficulties of dealing with imperfect information on unfamiliar
material. In itself, the novelty or originality of an idea is neither a
merit nor a demerit, however well or poorly it might reflect on the originator.
Political persecutions such as of Vavilov by Lysenko have nothing to do with
science, only with politics, and in particular with a religious version of
politics: the Stalinist version or sect of Marxism, which is as pernicious a religion as any. Nor does the
incitement of mobs to shout down unwelcome opinions or evidence that
contradicts one’s dogma, have any scientific merit. It is said that fifty
Nazi physicists once collaborated on a book refuting the "Jewish
science" of relativity. Einstein reputedly remarked that this was
totally needless; if his theory was wrong, a single scientist would have been
sufficient.
In saying so, he vividly demonstrated a keen understanding of an essential aspect of science.
Whether to class the
behaviour of the anti-scientists as religious in any particular case, is
moot. This discussion is not much concerned with discriminating between
politics and religion, much less discriminating between religions.
Science (as incarnate in the body of scientists and scientific record) does not
deny spiritual planes or intelligence in the universe; it largely ignores them
until someone can show which phenomena to observe, in order to obtain material
upon which one could found hypotheses or rationales in terms of relevant
conceptual structures. If you like, you could say that until we have some
idea of how to talk about what we think we are talking about, we are not
talking science.
This frequently is a difficulty with questions of the form: “Why. . . ”
Such questions are very treacherous for the naïve to deal with because they
sound simple, but the word is so deeply ambiguous that discussions of such
questions often are meaningless, and even more often are at cross
purposes. Some “why” questions are outside the province of science
because they have no demonstrable empirical consequences. According to
some points of view they therefore are metaphysical. Certainly one needs to
distinguish between different meanings of the word, meanings that might include
say, causation or history, deduction or implication, justification of values or
opinions, rationale, or motivation. Often it is simple temporisation
("Why, so can I, or so can any man, but...")
Possibly the main nontrivial example of such a question is “Why is there
something rather than nothing?” Some people think it is the supreme
question in science and philosophy. Some think it is simply stupid.
For what my opinion is worth, I think it simply has not yet been defined
clearly enough to count as a meaningful question, and until it does, it is not
a question that can be taken any further in any constructive formal or
scientific investigation.
Still, I begin to
think that some questions in philosophy, quantum theory, and cosmology are
beginning to tickle the tail of that sleeping dragon, and in case any reader is feverishly interested, I do discuss it in greater detail elsewhere:
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html
Science is not
static, and accordingly some meaningless questions of yesterday might be
meaningful today.
None of this has any more to do with Kuhnian paradigms and scientific
sociology, than the sins, heresies, and sociology of the faithful have to do
with a religion's fundamental dogma or philosophy. Classes of techniques,
procedures, disciplines, and conventions have been developed for choosing
between rival hypotheses in science, but again, these do not define science
any more than prayer in general defines religion in general; they simply are
the tools currently established locally.
Some people might find it amusing to reflect that, while there is nothing
stopping anyone in a particular religion from formulating an immutable dogma
concerning science, at the same time, in contrast, any scientific hypothesis
concerning any aspect of any religion would be subject to the same forms of
attack as any other scientific question.
In case anyone wonders what one's attitude could be called, who rejects religious dogma and also rejects atheism and agnosticism in most of their senses as discussed in this section, I have coined the term "irreligism", and I call myself, not an atheist, but an "irreligist'. The meaning is neither particularly one of belief or unbelief, but of rejection of any form of dogma, not necessarily as true, false, or meaningless, but as any valid kind of argument, or as being otherwise binding.
This excludes any acceptance of any concept of religion as cogent, or even as being of intellectual interest, whether it comes in the form of conventional or overt religion, or less conventional variants such as satanism on the one hand, or unscientific behaviour such as prescriptive atheism or agnosticism on the other.
It is however
compatible with most forms of scientific endeavour and rational humanism, and
with ethical or moral principles.
Science, evidence, and near-proof
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
Das is nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!
(That isn't right; it isn't even wrong!)
Wolfgang Pauli
Roughly speaking
there are two classes of science: formal and empiric (or if you
prefer: analytic and synthetic; no terminology satisfies
everyone, but then, the terminology is not the core of the question).
Formal activities are those based on defined sets of axioms and
operations. Examples are mathematics, logic and, at least in some of its
forms and applications, philosophy. Formal assertions only can be
criticised meaningfully in terms of their consistency with the axioms and
operations that they are based on, which in turn can only be criticised in terms
of internal consistency (or para-consistency), completeness, parsimony,
elegance, relevance, interest, and the like.
In contrast, empirical science deals with the world we seem to
see ourselves in, and so the axiomatic structure of such science must be
compatible with empirical evidence. In empirical science we therefore
have no unconditional axioms about our world — we can do no more than
propose theories based on assumptions about our observations and
the perceived behaviour of the world.
For instance for practical purposes we generally assume such things as:
- the world operates on principles consistent enough to
permit us to generalise meaningfully, in particular to generalise according to
axioms in logic and mathematics, chosen according to their being suitably
isomorphic to the apparent behaviour of the objects under study.
- such information as we can derive about the world from our
sensory perceptions and instrumentation, forms a practical basis for a mental
image, a model that has relevant and practical isomorphisms to some sort of
presumed underlying reality that has a meaningful relationship to that which is
apparent to us; there will be aspects of the nature of the universe that will
be common to moles, bats, birds, whales, and humans. They might not agree on
many things, each being unable even to imagine some things that seem obvious to
the others, but they will agree with the concepts of physical obstacles,
aspects of gravity, and so on.
- for practical purposes the theory of probability may be
assumed to be isomorphic with relevant behaviour of entities in the perceived
universe, particularly according to the limits on the availability and reality
of information. This is the basis of the concepts of
randomness, and the ubiquitous applicability of statistics as a practical and
philosophical tool in science, for example.
Since I originally wrote the foregoing, I have been increasingly dissatisfied with one aspect: the nature of isomorphism in science. In the formal or mathematical sense it is possible to speak of a definitive and precise isomorphism, because the items being matched are finite in the terms of their matching — say, the terms of an algebraic mapping. But in the matching between physical items (say, between a photo and a landscape, or between a waxwork and a subject, or between a bird and a bat) there always are indefinite numbers and degrees of discrepancies.
It does not follow that the correspondence of form in an imperfect isomorphism is necessarily wrong or futile, but sometimes one needs to to distinguish between perfect formal isomorphism between abstractions, and "good-enough" physical isomorphism, "empirical isomorphism", which in my opinion generally cannot possibly be perfect. For that kind of mapping, I propose the term "plesiomorphism". The term is used in some other fields, such as cladistics and crystallography , but those are independent of this sense, so I retain my usage here. It might be objected that it would be adequate to speak instead of "approximate isomorphism", but not only is that cumbersome, it is a questionable usage of the concept of "approximation".
"Plesiomorphism"
in this sense means something like: "matching form nearly enough in
context, to be useful in empirical or physical applications". I find the
concept useful in almost all concepts where characterisation or quantification
must be applied when infinite precision is not practically attainable, but a
rough matching is adequate for conceptual purposes. For example, there is a
plesiomorphism between a pixel on a screen, a dot on paper, and a mathematical
point, or a screen as opposed to a sheet of paper or a clay tablet.
The foregoing plesiomorphisms are just a few examples, but the principles are
important. If we cannot rely on something of that kind, it is hard to
know how we are even to attempt to discover anything about the world with any
confidence of anything like success. At the same time, such assumptions
still amount to no more than working hypotheses. Anyone is free at any
time to present arguments for thinking we are wrong, or at least that the
assumptions are not logically justified. Conversely no one is constrained
to be interested in those arguments.
In fact, in any sizeable community of philosophers of science, you can be sure
of a lot of heated dissent even on such basic points, let alone the question of
which points should be included in such a list, their relative importance, how
they should be worded, and what they imply for the meaningfulness of science or
what form meaning in science might take at all.
In short, those assumptions are about as far from dogma as one can get; assumptions
are not even axioms except to particular workers who choose to define them
as such. And such a worker is getting pretty close to religion, please
note!
And notice that Occam’s Razor is not one of the basic practical assumptions.
It certainly is enormously useful as a rule of thumb and only a fool would fail
to test his ideas against Occam, but it is no more than a convenient tool, a
basis for principles of elegance of theory and parsimony of things assumed, not
a proof of validity.
The current discussion is mainly about empirical science — formal disciplines
have little to do with belief, since one can construct as many independent
formal axiomatic structures as one likes, to be compatible with practically any
coherent belief one likes, or none at all. These structures would not
differ in "correctness" but only in their interest or usefulness and
applicability.
A whole field of
practical and conceptual relevance opens out in some modern fields of study and
application. Readers might consider starting their study of one aspect with the
following link to the article "Why black box machine learning should be
avoided for high-stakes decisions": https://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-022-00172-0
In spite of the popularity of the phrase: "scientific proof",
empirical science has little to do with formal proof. Because of their
inherent uncertainties and assumptions, as Duhem and Quine variously pointed
out in terms of underdetermination, observations cannot formally prove
anything, but they do permit us to compare the defensibility of rival
hypotheses that plesiomorphically imply observable phenomena.
Observations that constitute confirming instances of predictions, can be used
as a basis for establishing working hypotheses: a weak form of support that can
be assessed in terms of statistical theory. The currently most popular
example of such a confirming instance is called falsification.
When the prediction of a hypothesis X fails, then this is taken
as confirmation of the hypothesis not-X.
Naïve practitioners have been known to regard such falsification as
“disproving” X, i.e. “proving” not-X, but such fatuity has nothing to do with
science as such. Having "falsified" hypothesis X, we have no more
than established that in terms of our (well-designed, well-executed) experiment
some version of not-X becomes a stronger hypothesis than X, and also given that
more persuasive evidence is not forthcoming from other, independent research or
explanation. For example, both X and not-X might turn out to be meaningless — being based on complete misconceptions.
This is all on the assumption that the hypothesis has been suitably expressed
for the procedure to be meaningful, and that assumption is large, because the
design of experiments is a treacherous field — it is subject to the venerable
principle of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.
An important problem in testing any new hypothesis is that it can only be
tested on the basis of a lot of other assumptions. You cannot generally test a
combination of more than one hypothesis at a time, so we go to great lengths to
test just one variable, making the assumption that all other circumstances are
held constant according to already established facts: known truths or givens.
That is what we call a controlled experiment. The problem remains
however, that the assumptions about already established facts amount to extra
hypotheses. If we were wrong about any of them and our experiment yields
results that contradict our predictions as dictated by our new hypothesis, then
our conclusion that the new hypothesis is incorrect is unsound, even
meaningless, and if our predictions were in fact borne out, then our acceptance
of the new hypothesis as a working hypothesis in turn would be unsound.
We would have fallen victim to our trust in our black box.
If we concluded that
we had in fact been victim to such errors, then we would say that our
experimental setup is underdetermined, meaning that there could
reasonably be more than one interpretation of the results, including that our
proposed interpretation could be meaningless rather than wrong, as Pauli
remarked on another occasion.
This class of limitation on our ability to determine our experimental controls
and the hypotheses that we test in any experimental programme is in line with
what I have mentioned as the Duhem–Quine thesis. Readers unfamiliar with
the field might find it helpful to read about underdetermination in
Wikipedia, or in the Stanford article on Underdetermination
of Scientific Theory.
But, you might object, how is it possible that one could be mistaken in one's
known truths, one's predetermined facts?
It happens. In the past predetermined facts included flat Earth, planetary
epicycles, phlogiston, relative speed of light being affected by its path
through the ether, the impossibility of interconverting matter and energy...
All such and many, many more were predetermined facts, givens in their own
places and times, natural assumptions on which we based our controls in our
scientific research, often unconsciously.
For such reasons even modern scientific practice produces a great deal of
wasted research and outright delusion. For much of such work, the
fundamental reason that it is a waste, is that it is based on misconceptions or
misformulations, and yet even peer-reviewed publications may report favourably
on just such research. Having missed the hidden conceptual flaw or error,
the researcher may perform the rest of the work coherently and competently, but
of course futilely. If that research work is indeed coherent and competent,
it may be very difficult for a reviewer to spot the flaw, or if he does, to
justify his view that the paper none the less is ill-founded. A major
source of such disasters is not poor work, so much as experiments based on
preconceptions or poorly constructed or inapplicable questions. Even
flawless work on meaningless questions produces meaningless answers, and
preconceptions often mask or rationalise that meaninglessness.
GIGO...
Whether the experiments have been well designed or not, if the observations are
too poorly consistent with the predictions, we discard the hypothesis, modify
it, or try again with a totally new hypothesis. We never prove
it. We never forbid anyone to doubt our work or to re-test the
hypothesis or propose alternatives or extensions. We never demand that
anyone accept a hypothesis. In empirical science the closest we come to
proving a hypothesis is by presenting evidence so strong that to deny it one
would have to be perversely unreasonable.
Of course, we do not generally stop our work and wait until everyone agrees
that we have shown that which we set out to do. After all, by that time
we have convinced ourselves, at least conditionally, and there will be more
work to do while discussion proceeds.
The other side of the coin is that, when anyone else proposes a hypothesis, we
in turn reserve our acceptance until we have convinced ourselves of its
merits. And of course if we do accept it our commitment to the new
hypothesis (whether our own or anyone else’s) is fundamentally temporary.
It lasts only until we are sufficiently convinced that yet another hypothesis
is superior. In most religions such behaviour would be apostasy, and as
such, traitorous. In some quite major religions or sects, apostasy still
is punishable by death. In science it is no more than common sense, and
to stick to a hypothesis in the face of the balance of the evidence is regarded
as mental ossification, the weakness of an old fogy (or worse still, a young
fogy).
Nor is our acceptance any guarantee of correctness, not even temporarily and certainly
not permanently.
It does not matter whether this is necessarily because "we" as
"scientists" are so virtuous, so liberal minded, that we would never dream
of imposing our diffident opinions, or because we just have too much good
sense. The reality is that if we did try to impose our views it
would have little effect. That simply is how the process works. It
depends on conviction, not imposition. Conviction by fashion, compulsion, peer
pressure, authority or even riot, certainly has worked very frequently and
widely in history and in contemporary education, religion, business, and
politics. Science and scientists are not immune to such influences.
Anyone who has never seen a senior who refuses to let a junior publish
embarrassing or unwelcome evidence, cannot have been in the field for very
long. And in the history of science and technology there are major examples of
discoveries and developments that were withheld for long periods, sometimes till
rivals scooped them, or serious consequences resulted.
But as conviction goes, the influence of compulsion or crookery in scientific
work or the associated politics is exceptional and transient. Within a
century, or a professional lifetime, or perhaps months, future generations will
hold it to scorn. Brash young students will sniff at the very idea that
anyone could have been stupid enough to fall for such rubbish.
Simplistically retailed history generates either simplistic adulation or
simplistic disdain. One is tempted to despair. . .
Unfortunately, work presented in bad faith, though it has no long term effect
on the body of science, has led to the ruin of many a promising career, often
the career of the whistle blower. We have seen several tragic and immoral
examples in the past few decades.
Interestingly, there have been far more cases of good faith retractions of
work, sometimes very prominent work, that turned out to be in error or at least
unrepeatable, and the reaction of the scientific community has generally been
muted, even sympathetic. It is a sad reflection on the effects of
ambition, greed, malice or vanity, that bad-faith parasites can corrupt such a
beneficial system.
Be that as it may. . .
It does not follow that because a hypothesis is untestable by any observation
accessible to me, it is not investigable and falsifiable by some other subset
of the scientific community, perhaps even by just a single member.
Members of such a subset may be perfectly scientific in their work.
Nothing in the nature of science guarantees that every proposition that is
meaningful to one worker, in terms of falsifiability or induction, must be
equally meaningful to every other worker. There might be differences in
skills, in equipment, in resources, in chance observations. There might
be differences even in personal senses or aptitudes, such as perception of
harmony, taste or colour. How is one to react to a scientific claim that
one is not in a position to test personally? Is every such claim
meaningless by definition to everyone but the observer in person?
Not necessarily. It depends on our personal world view and intellectual
taste, how high a level of confidence we demand before we are willing accept a
given assertion as a working hypothesis. The principles of science
neither demand that we believe, nor that we disbelieve. The world is too
large for everyone to investigate all of it personally in detail, or even to
acquire the necessary skills to do so. In discriminating between rival
hypotheses, we need not consider only formal falsifiability by personal
experiment; it is reasonable and in practice it also is necessary, to give
appropriate weight to weaker evidence, such as:
- a claim's consistency with our experience and opinions
- the word of other observers
- the opinions of persons whose skills we respect
- its consistency with coherent and logical bodies of theory
- other criteria than direct evidence, such as parsimony and
explanatory richness.
None of these is proof either, but they are useful in practice and historically
they have been of enormous power and value.
Weak or indirect evidence still is evidence — evidence is everything that has
weight in rationally influencing one's choice of particular hypotheses as being
the most persuasive. Strong evidence carries the most weight; weaker
evidence carries correspondingly less. There is no general, cogent basis
for assessing the weight to assign to any item of evidence; its strength
keeps changing according to context, and in any case one's appraisal of context
and weight necessarily are largely arbitrary. Except in religion there is
theoretically no such thing as absolute evidence, only a range of cogency that
extends from an interesting speculation at one extreme, to repeated,
independent observation, precise, practical, predictable, quantitative, and
explicable, at the other.
Similarly, I reject with contempt the cliché that "the plural of anecdote is not data". That is good grammar, but bad science. Sometimes anecdote is all we have. Certainly it is not proof, but neither is repeatable, respectable research with high levels of significance. Science is not about absolute proof, but about probabilities. And when anecdote is all you have, you make of it whatever abductive use that you may.
If you are a real
scientist.
Well asked is half answered
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Thomas Carlyle
There is yet another problem with the concept of formal proof in empirical science:
one never can show formally that one has listed all possible meaningful
hypotheses about something that in principle is observable and
falsifiable. One cannot so much as show that one has included the correct
hypothesis (the "god's-eye-view", or some simplification or
representation thereof) in the list, let alone that the truly correct and
meaningful possibility is the one that the observations support best. One
cannot even be sure in principle that one's conception of the phenomenon is
framed in terms that can meaningfully and non-trivially be related to the
"god's-eye-view".
Consider the technological sophistication of the typical hunter-gatherer, no
matter how intelligent, in particular, one who has no conception of electricity
or magnetism, and no knowledge of metals or chemistry. Such a one would have
great difficulty formulating a meaningful theory about how a battery operated
fan works. We in turn at present, have no idea of how many levels of
sophistication we stand below the TOE (“Theory Of Everything”) of the
god's-eye-view.
These difficulties make sense in view of the well-established and repeated
observation in the practice of science, that the greatest scientist is not
necessarily the one who finds the best answers, but very likely may be the one
who frames the best questions.
Now, framing relevant questions in meaningful terms is a major challenge in the
design of meaningful experiments. Our hunter-gatherer might well ask
whether that fan works because it has trapped the spirit of a dragonfly or
rather because it has trapped the spirit of a hummingbird.
As a good scientist the hunter-gatherer might proceed to carry out experiments
to resolve the question. Statistical analysis of his results might well
yield high significance, but an industrial engineer who designs electromagnetic
fans might have a harrowing time explaining why, in spite of significance at a
level better than p = 0.00001, those experiments do not constitute strict proof
that the fan works because what it has in fact captured is indeed the spirit of
a hummingbird. One of the engineer’s difficulties in convincing the
investigator might be the fact that both the experiments and the analyses were
impeccable. Trying to point out flaws in basic assumptions tends to be dismissed
impatiently as airy-fairy academic quibbling beyond the rational concerns of
practical, down-to-earth experimentalists who know all about dragonflies and
hummingbirds, and can see that they have nothing to do with the nature of amber
and the fur of cats, neither of which in turn could have any conceivable relevance to
whirring fan blades.
Note that this is a classic example of underdetermination, with the added observation that it does not follow that because you know that there is underdetermination, you know nature of all the possible operative antecedents; you may not be in a position to include the operative antecedent in your list of conceivable determinative hypotheses.
In fact, you might not be equipped to guess at or understand the operative antecedent at all, any more than the hunter-gatherer could imagine such a thing as a magnetic field or an electric motor.
In our case, say in our conception of modern cosmology, we do not know whether
we are any nearer understanding the universe in terms more meaningful than the
hunter-gatherers' conception of the principle of the operation of the
fan. Would the Olympians with their god's-eye-view laugh at the idea of
the multiverse? Of superstrings? Of the Big Bang? Of
red-shift? Of gravity? Of dark mass or energy? Of quantum theory,
and in particular of quantum entanglement? Of information? Of
evolution? Of matter? Of mind? Of spirit? Of
ideas? We don't know. And if those Olympians do laugh, we certainly
do not know what they would replace such things with, or in what contexts.
Much less can we
guess whether there are still higher meta-Olympians who laugh at our Olympians.
But we can go on with our asking, doubting, thinking, measuring, induction,
synthesis, and falsification. All abject activities no doubt, but,
offensive though they seem to some people, they have yielded proud results time
and again.
Certainly more
impressive results in the past few centuries, materially, philosophically, and
ethically, than religion has done in the past twenty or so millennia.
Scientists as a group do not tend towards conscious modesty, and yet the
philosophy of science implies an implicit humility so deep as to transcend the
mental horizons of the arrogance of dogma. Subjection of oneself and
one's Weltanschauung to a concept, be it never so small, or so
counter-intuitive, or transcending the scale of every vision of humanity or the
universe, and dropping it or accommodating it according to what one can show
about it; there is humility to vaunt, if you like!
My humility does not extend to omitting another quote of a Piet Hein aphorism:
The road to wisdom? -- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
Note yet again that these principles we observe in today's science still are not dogma. They certainly are resilient, because they are based on views that have developed through the centuries and have taken coherent form, most spectacularly since the mid nineteenth century, though the pace still shows no sign of moderating its rate of acceleration.
In that process the bodies of theory and of empirical evidence have undergone generations of criticism and have been adapted accordingly. Whether formal or empirical, they are subject to review, dissent, and replacement at all times. Each adjustment to the underlying view may have been disconcerting, but always has been assimilated once it has outlived the fogies, young or old.
Note that such assimilation need not imply compulsory acceptance of new conjectures or theses as truth to be read and revered by all, on tablets from the mountain. Every adjustment, however useful or impressive, remains open to doubt indefinitely, and open to question and revision in its context, in its turn.
The problem for the innovative scientist is to
persuade the community (or let it persuade itself) that some particular new or dissenting view is
preferable (for now, in some particular context at least). In fact, if you discuss
the philosophy of science in different circles you will find a great deal of
variety in the details of all the opinions, but one thing that no one but a
crackpot would tell you, is that in science the way to persuade a sceptic is by
exercise of violence, majority, authority, threat, or even reproach. It is no part
of science to prove the formally unprovable formally, or force anyone to
believe anything by moral or physical pressures.
This no more suggests that any particular person who does work in scientific
fields is ethically sound, dogma-free, or religion-free, than that any religious
person must be without sin, heresy or doctrinal error. In effect many a professor
in a field of scientific study does accept something as dogma and
does force it on his students, and most of his students will swallow it as
dogma, often without even token inquiry, and without even being aware of the nature of
dogma.
Many of the top scoring students actually will object bitterly if asked to accept views as conditional; what they want is hard fact that they can master for the examinations. Some of them never outgrow such childhood diseases, even if they in their turn succeed dogmatic professors in their role of the next generation of dogmatic professors. Sad of course, but better than some other instances and forms of dogmatism. No auto da fe is required in eventually mending matters.
Mind you, commonly such students and professors would be bitterly offended if
anyone pointed out the unscientific nature of their behaviour. Very
likely the class notes contain a solemn passage on the intellectual
independence and dignity of science, and the students can get marks for
mentioning it in the exams.
So?
So that dogma is the creation of that professor, not a component of the field
of science. That fact makes no difference to the demands placed on the
professor's rivals or associates. The proposition that his dogma asserts
might be robust or it might be transparent delusion. All that the scientific
community requires is that the work that a dogmatist presents is subject to the
same scrutiny as the work of anyone else. If the dogmatist takes such
scepticism as a personal affront, then so be it; the responsibility of the innovator is to present theories, logic, or evidence, not to convince every audience, let alone convince everyone forever.
Interestingly, I have
read a lot of Feynman's informal writings, and his stated opinions have so
uniformly clashed with his quip that: "philosophy of science is as
useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds", that I would give good
odds that he was making fun of the staid philosophers of science, and those who
philosophised without personal competence in the fields about which they
sounded forth. Such most certainly are in goodly supply. I have encountered
several myself.
In science the word "scientist" as applied to a person, is far less
meaningful than the word "scientific" as applied to his
behaviour or his work. Furthermore, on many occasions in history, unscientific work performed by people under
total misapprehension as to its meaning, has produced material of
value. One even could argue that, until perhaps two centuries ago, material progress
based on such misconception was rather the rule than the exception. Sometimes it still happens. What
the scientists of two centuries in the future will say of formal and professional science in our time,
we can only guess, or if we prefer, wait and see.
Why dogma as the diagnostic criterion?
There is one thing even more
vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is,
the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.
Charles Pierce
Science necessarily
and sufficiently can be distinguished from religion by the absence of dogma.
This is sufficient as a basis for saying whether something that must be
classified as either religion or science, is one or the other. It is not
to say that everything must be one or the other, just that it cannot be
both. Nor does it guarantee that there is some mystical justification by
which our spiritual eye can see that if something is based on dogma, it is
religion, otherwise it is science.
Rather, our distinction is a basic operation in the formal discipline of
systematics:
- identify the (super)set you are dealing with
- find by inspection of some subset of its elements, one or
more attributes that are not attributes of the rest of the elements of its
superset
- by definition you thereby have established two subsets
whose membership can be diagnosed, using those attributes as criteria, and as a
defining context..
How useful these diagnostic criteria are, is another matter. It depends
on such things as:
- how practical the diagnosis is (can one rely on identifying
elements and telling which elements have which attributes?) and
- how relevant it is (Is it evidence, i.e. is it
reasonable to expect it to affect anyone's opinion?)
Given n objective, mutually independent attributes of elements in a set, there
could be a large number of ways of partitioning it into up to n subsets.
We simply choose the one that seems most useful in context. If anyone can
demonstrate a more coherent and relevant (i.e. more useful) partitioning, we
are free to reconsider.
Let's consider a simplistic example. We have a set: (pigs, pigeons, penguins, balloons, emus, aeroplanes, albatrosses, and bats). How should we partition them into subsets according to their respective attributes? Obviously pigs are closer to emus and penguins. And pigeons closer to bats, aeroplanes, and albatrosses, right? You see where this is going? One classification would give the biologists strokes, while another would horrify flight engineers.
The problem is not novel; if you have never read "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, have a crack at it and find the passage in which he concludes that whales are fishes.
Well, the point is
that if you wish to classify categories, you need to be very careful in your
choice of diagnostic criteria. Bear that in mind and read on.
In our current exercise of separation of the sheep from the scientists, the
diagnosis is pretty comfortable and the distinction that emerges is in fact the
point at issue. It distinguishes what most of us associate with religion, from
what most of us perceive as science, so yes, I think we quite easily can
justify the choice of dogma as a practical criterion. By all means supply
clearer criteria if you can think of any that would be relevant to the
distinction and definition.
I re-emphasise that this assumption does not deny that there are other ways of
splitting the set. It does not even imply that we have inspected the set
of belief structures comprehensively. We have performed a notional
exercise and it seems to meet the needs of our discussion. It also seems
sufficiently persuasive that if anyone rejects the view that our superset is
indeed usefully to be partitioned in that way, we can invite them to produce
counter-examples that destroy or at the least demand adjustments to the thesis.
Or possibly demonstrate a different partitioning that is still more persuasive
and accordingly more useful.
In particular note that comparative theologists may regard some dogmatic belief
structures as religions and others as sects or cults or superstitions or moral
aberrations or the like. Also adherents to some beliefs are likely to
class their own beliefs as religion and other beliefs as anything from paganism
to heresy. None of this affects the validity of the terminology in this
essay within its own context. Granted, in other contexts the terminology
could be inappropriate, but that does not affect the current theme.
Scientific behaviour can be distinguished from non-scientific behaviour
primarily by the attitude to falsification or functionally related principles.
Science can indeed be applied to the study of religion, personal experience,
emotional views, and the like, to the extent that the statements concerning such
can be expressed in falsifiable terms. The only secure faiths are those
that avoid falsifiable statements.
But such security need not imply persuasiveness.
Science, religion and. . .
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a
nail.
Abraham Maslow
As long as people believe in absurdities
they will continue to commit atrocities.
Voltaire
Notice that not everything is either science or religion. Some things are
nonsense without being either. Is sport a religion? Some people
might argue that for some people it is, but even if it turns out that in some
cases this literally is true, certainly it is not generally a reasonable thing
to assert. Is sport science? Certainly science or scientific method
can be applied to the study of sport, or used to improve performance or
technology in sport, but again, simply and sensibly, sport as such cannot be
regarded as being science.
To say such a thing is neither praise nor criticism; it just reflects
differences between sport and science, or indeed religion.
On the other hand, whether science or religion is sport depends on the attitude
of the particular practitioners or spectators. It does not affect the
science or religion as such.
There are dogmata in fields other than those we normally call religions.
Some are milder, some about as fervid. Think about traditions, superstitions,
racism, patriotism and party politics. There are many such.
Humanity seems to hunger for certainty, including certainty of prejudice,
rather than for truth or cogency.
Dogma is the most convenient substitute for cogency, though one liberal minded
dogma of the last century or two is that what the human mind yearns for is
creativity, dignity, and freedom to think for itself, and that it hates
dogma. But dogma saves the pain and trouble of thinking and suitable
dogma can be memorised and recited to give a comfortable sense of authority,
superiority, and righteousness; in that form it can justify any kind of cruelty
and greed and if there is danger of argument, then, as long as they are loud
enough, rage and repetition will always work more conveniently than sense and
honesty, preferably in a crowd that is large enough and supportive enough and enjoys
howling slogans.
"Use not vain
repetitions as the heathen do"? But the heathen know that repetition is
fun, and is easier than thought, that it trumps sense, and is good for shouting
down the opposition, and that there is nothing better than dogma for shouted
slogans.
The same sort of reasoning could be applied to deciding whether art, law or
business should be regarded as science or religion (or perhaps sport. . .
?) When we develop a scheme of classification, we should not forget that
if some objects do not fit into any of the classes, it does not necessarily
make sense to force them into one or the other, rather than allocating them to
separate classes of their own.
Science and religion are largely classes of attitudes and activities. In
the role they play in anyone’s life, they also are largely matters of context
and degree. Not everyone is necessarily and categorically, nor at all
times, purely a scientist or a religious adherent. One might take a
scientific view of one matter, and an essentially religious view of
another. Notice again that according to the criterion of dogma, such a
religious view need not imply worship or virtue.
Even apart from such questions, it does not follow that every body of theory
must be all science or all dogmatically based religion. A believer in a
flat Earth at the centre of the universe with the sun circling it daily in
accordance with his holy scripture, could make perfectly valid astronomical
observations and perhaps make valid scientific deductions from some of
them. Some points of his belief would be scientific and some would be
religious.
What is more difficult is to imagine how any one point could be both.
Dogma is not all bad. For one thing, for the bulk of humanity the best
weapon against bad dogma is not something as confusing as science, but
something simple and clear, like good dogma. The human mind seems to have
a level of dogma which is healthy; traditionally religious people sometimes
tend to have a resistance to superstitions that run riot through the ranks of
say, New Agers.
Evolution as a religion
Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, in "De Genese ad litteram" said:
It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world — respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation, and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever perceiving him to be as wide of the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.
And the real evil is not that a man is subjected to derision because of his error, but it is that to profane eyes, our authors (that is to say, the sacred authors) are regarded as having had such thoughts; and are also exposed to blame and scorn upon the score of ignorance, to the greatest possible misfortune of people whom we wish to save. For, in fine, these profane people happen upon a Christian busy in making mistakes on a subject which they know perfectly well; how, then, will they believe these holy books? How will they believe in the resurrection of the dead and in the hope of life eternal, and in the kingdom of heaven, when, according to an erroneous assumption, these books seem to them to have as their object those very things which they, the profane, by their direct experience or by calculation which admits of no doubt? It is impossible to say what vexation and sorrow prudent Christians meet with through these presumptuous and bold spirits who, taken to task one day for their silly and false opinion, and realizing themselves on the point of being convicted by men who are not obedient to the authority of our holy books, wish to defend their assertions so thoughtless, so bold, and so manifestly false. For they then commence to bring forward as a proof precisely our holy books, or again they attribute to them from memory that which seems to support their opinion, and they quote numerous passages, understanding neither the texts they quote, nor the subject about which they are making statement.
He
was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much
disbelieve
in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure
in thinking that human
affairs would never improve.
George
Orwell
Evolution? What is special about evolution in this connection? Not
much really; it is just that at present no branch of science is more rabidly
attacked by religious fundamentalists and zealots. At the same time such
parties claim that evolution is no more than another religion – this is a rearguard
debating tactic intended to nonplus those who claim that the study of evolution
is a scientific discipline. It certainly is the most intelligent tactic
that creationists have conceived so far. Creationists are not much into
intelligence, as any reading of "Intelligent Design" demonstrates.
Of course, to speak of evolution as either a religion or a science is careless
terminology. Evolution is a process, a range, a structure of
phenomena. You may believe in it or not, study it or not, theorise about
it or not, revere it or not, but it could no more be a religion or a science
than say, a glacier or the colour red could be such a thing. No, what
people usually mean is something like that the religion is the study of
evolution, the attitude towards evolution, a body of theory on evolutionary
themes.
Such loose terminology is understandable, if a little sloppy, so I make no fuss about it. In fact, I might be as sloppy myself at times, as I forgive those who trespass. It is not at all unusual even for scientists to speak of “evolution” when they mean “evolutionary theory”, "evolutionary adaptation", or the like.
And to conflate "evolution" with "natural selection", is a very frequent blunder, even within the disciplines.
Certainly there are evolutionists whose behaviour would be appropriate to
religious zealots. We see them all the time. Some of them are
actual professional biologists, and many others are militant self-styled
sceptics who have read the latest popular book and are ready to go out and
shout down anyone who has not seen the light. Sometimes they currently
are students who have studied one or more modules dealing with evolution.
They often are impressively informed, articulate, and partisan. Beware the
zealotry of the proselyte; it makes an uncomfortable ally of him!
Of course, evolution as a field of study has nothing much to do with such
things. The fuss and bother are the product of human vanity, sloth,
wrath, avarice, and envy. I am not so sure about lust and gluttony, but I
cannot exclude them outright.
But then how seriously are we to take the claim that evolutionary theory as she
is spoke could be religion? Let us apply the acid test, or perhaps the touchstone: if it is religion,
then where is the dogma?
Famously, Darwin
based his theory on a few observations concerning the exponential propagation
of populations, the inevitable resultant mortality, its favourable effect on
those sub-populations that bore suitable attributes and so on. None of
these is dogma. All of them have been observed or deduced, and exposed to
falsification in the field or the laboratory in context after context,
experimental and observational. And they continually get re-exposed,
re-thought, and re-qualified. Successive generations of geneticists,
zoologists, botanists, ecologists, evolutionary psychologists,
palaeontologists, and microbiologists publish, observe, and experiment.
And for all we know, some of them may worship, and sanctify, and proselytise. .
.
Certainly many of them speak outright nonsense on one point or another.
And then there is the Great Darwinian Tautology:
How-Do-We-Define-Fitness? After all, fitness is that which permits an organism
to reproduce effectively. How do we know the organism is fit? Why,
simple: see how effectively it reproduces! Surely this is about as cogent
as any typical Jesuitical exercise in apologetics? (Please bear in mind
that I use the term “Jesuitical” in the traditional metaphorical sense. I
am sure that any self-respecting modern actual Jesuit would scorn such a transparent
fallacy.) So, with dogmatic baggage like that, how is Darwinism any
better than religion?
For what it is worth, relative fitness is measurable by actual correlation of
genetic attributes with reproductive success. One might as well call
magnetism a tautology because it is something that acts on a magnet, while a
magnet is something acted on by magnetism. Over a century ago Ambrose Bierce
was wittily acrid on that very point, but since his time we have generated a
great deal more substance to discuss when we argue about magnetism.
Mind you, even in Bierce's day geniuses like Maxwell and Faraday had
established some really sound theory describing the nature of magnetism, but we
cannot demand that scientifically illiterate literati like Bierce should let things
beyond their ken inhibit their wit.
In discussing circular arguments in evolutionary theory, we are even better
off. Even Darwin
would not have found it a challenge to refute the charge of tautology, and
since his day huge volumes of work have addressed the measurement, prediction,
and effect of fitness in hundreds or thousands of contexts in nature. In
fact I cannot think offhand of much contemporary work on evolution, that does not
focus on identification of the components and mechanisms of fitness and
their measurement. As a concept fitness is quite simple; it comes down to
the effect that a genetic variable has on the reproductive success of a
population.
Among popular books describing the subject, “The Beak of the Finch” by Jonathan
Weiner is a particularly convenient example. At a more professional
level, every modern textbook of evolution defines the concept and measure of fitness
both verbally and mathematically. Measuring the concept is neither
arbitrary nor as simple as it sounds. Even in non-sexually reproducing
populations measuring fitness certainly is hard work. In sexually
reproducing populations with overlapping generations it becomes downright
tricky.
But no one said that just because it is science it has to be simple. At
least the idea is simple.
Given such a vast background of support in practice, and theory, and simple
common sense, it is hard to imagine any realistic prospect of the idea of
fitness being shaken in future. But there is nothing, not a solitary
thing, in science that forbids anyone to present evidence to modify or even
annihilate the theory. You might argue that such work would never get
published, and you might have a point. It certainly would not be easy to
find anyone to take you seriously, any more than you could easily find anyone
to take seriously the theory that the sun really is hollow. But it still
would not be forbidden, and if the work really were cogent you could be pretty
confident that eventually the new insights would prevail.
And they would not take four hundred years to do so.
The resistance would come, not from any doctrinal conspiracy of suppression,
but from people's refusal to believe – which after all no one will force them
to do.
So much for tautology and Jesuitry in science!
Still no dogma.
The closest I can come to anything of the type is the playfully named “central
dogma of molecular genetics” of Crick and Watson. This stated that DNA in
nature would be transcribed into either DNA or RNA, and RNA into RNA or
protein, but not into DNA.
Like most real dogma it did not last long in the face of the progress of
science, but in any case it never was a real dogma, either in practice or in
intention, just a conveniently challenging hypothesis with a provoking title.
Crick and Watson had never seen anything of the type, nor any strong reason to
propose it, so instead they proposed their "dogma".
It turns out in fact that Crick had proposed the term "dogma"
in ignorance; he had misunderstood what the word "dogma" meant,
thinking that it just meant something like a concept. And like an honest scientist, he advertised his own error.
Big Deal!!!
But that is by the way.
In due course virologists did discover reverse transcription in cells infected
with RNA viruses. Scientifically it was enormously important, enormously
exciting, and enormously interesting. Possibly surprisingly to the layman
though, it was not particularly startling. And as the overthrow of
dogma goes, it was about as earth-shaking as a typical report on a minor
intra-denominational ecumenical congress.
Still I find nothing in the study of evolution that as a biologist I am
compelled by authority to believe, nothing that I must not criticise, any more
than if I were studying physics.
And is physics dogmatic? If you like, I suppose some people could argue
the point. And yet, no one got burned at stake for proposing the existence of
N-rays, electrons, polywater, relativity, cold fusion or quantum
mechanics. A lot of people got hot under the collar at various times, but
that was about as hot as they got. It is not for you and me to claim that
therefore they were dogmatists.
Similarly those evolutionists who functionally amount to religious zealots make
no practical difference to the status of evolutionary study as a branch of
science rather than religion. However devout their professions might have
been, however influential their work may have been, it all got exposed to the
same erosive or supportive criticism and discussion, helpful, scornful,
enthusiastic or simply dismissive. If it got sifted out it got discarded,
or at least archived, no matter how slowly, justly or unjustly, and no matter
how passionate the originator might have been.
Of course, as a matter of practical fact the nut cases are the exception — the
rare exception — rather than the rule. Your run of the mill evolutionist
is an enthusiast, as well he might be, given such a beautiful, varied,
surprising and absorbing field, but that does not mean that he demands, foists,
or accepts dogma, or that he is shocked to have to defend his ideas and
evidence without any support other than verifiable observation and falsifiable
theory.
If anyone insists that such a situation also is characteristic of religion,
good luck to him. As long as the universe behaves consistently, it
certainly remains characteristic of science that it can outlive its opponents
and obstructionists.
After all, science is not chained to any practically immovable body of dogma; it
can adjust to new findings almost as fast as they emerge.
Religion versus science
“Mr Fuller,
correct me if I am wrong: you have already incorrectly forecast the end of the
world
on four separate occasions. According to you we were supposed to have had
doomsday
in 1923, 1931, 1937, and as recently as 1950.”
“What are a few years here and
there sir,
when measured against the limitless backcloth of eternity?
What are they but as grains of sand. . . ?”
Fuller’s Earth
Having distinguished religion from science, we might take the view that they
really have nothing to do with each other. After all, if science has no
dogma, then on what basis is the scientist to criticise religious
beliefs? When a scientist has religious views of one kind or another, why
should there be a problem? Religious dogma that deals with metaphysical,
unobservable, unverifiable, and unfalsifiable concepts should be outside the
field of scientific research, surely.
Philosophers of various schools have glibly referred to such dogmatic and
empiric fields as being of separate magisteria, and accordingly claimed that to
discuss them in common terms is invalid.
Well, maybe. But there are difficulties even so. Consider the tooth
fairy and Santa Claus. It is not really possible to prove that they do
not exist, any more than one can prove that paranoid conspiracy theories are
groundless. It is always a tricky matter to prove a negative in the
empirical world, unless we fall back on weaker forms of “proof” such as
presenting evidence so strong that to deny it one would have to be
unreasonable.
In science we think very little of any theory that has little relevance to
anything else. The most valued theories fit in with others and enable us
to make predictions that we can test. They also have a great deal of
power to explain large classes of things. For instance modern atomic
theory explained all sorts of things about the way matter behaves, whether
gases, solids and liquids, or the way energy affects matter. This did not
happen all at once, but within a few decades of Dalton’s proposals, there was hardly anything
in physics or chemistry that did not refer to the atoms that made up matter.
And that happened before our understanding was more than speculation. It was
well into the twentieth century before we had anything like a direct view of
actual atoms or molecules, and yet most of our current knowledge had progressed
very nicely thank you, with the predictions of vital classes of objects and
effects beyond the imaginations of non-scientists or earlier centuries.
The seventeenth-to-nineteenth century theory of ether was another good theory,
or perhaps I should say collection of theories. In contrast to atomic
theory, it was discarded near the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps
permanently, but in its time it supported a lot of ideas that led to work that
in turn led to much of modern physics. Such ideas that at first look
reasonable, but later are rejected as wrong are rather like scaffolding that
supports the construction of later theories, and then gets broken down and
discarded once the building can stand on its own.
Even today residues
of ether theory are making small waves.
Only a fool fails to respect the scaffolding that is necessary for new and
great constructions.
Now, suppose a theory cannot be criticised because it can answer all objections
of people who cannot see any evidence for it (“You cannot see the Tooth Fairy
because she can make herself invisible; you cannot detect her gravitationally
because she is too light” and so on).
Such immunity to criticism may sound marvellous to anyone who does not
understand science. The problem is that as you go down that road you soon
find yourself at the point where every prediction the theory makes is just the
same as if the theory were left out. The world of the Tooth Fairy looks
just the same as if there were no Tooth Fairy. This follows because if
things were not so, then we could find evidence for or against the Tooth Fairy.
All we need do is to see what difference the Tooth Fairy would make, and then
look for that difference. If we do not find that difference after looking
long and hard enough, then we assume that there is no Tooth Fairy.
Have we thereby proved that there is no tooth fairy?
Of course not, but there is no limit to the number of things we could imagine
that we never could detect. How about a separate Tooth Fairy for every
tooth in the world? Can you prove that to be false if you accept even one
Tooth Fairy?
When we refuse to accept the existence of something as long as the only
evidence for its existence is that you cannot prove that it does not exist,
then we are following an important principle in science and simple common
sense. This is the principle of parsimony or of theoretical elegance. I
have already mentioned it; it sometimes is called Occam’s razor. Cut out
every assumption one can do without. The fact that you can do without
those assumptions does not prove that they are wrong, but it does mean that a
sceptic is on strong ground if he refuses to believe when belief demands extra
assumptions that violate that principle.
Historically in fact, the effectiveness of Occam’s razor has been so great that
it seems almost suspicious. Why should the simplest possible assumption
nearly consistently turn out to be the best in practice?
I say again: Occam’s Razor is not a scientific axiom, just a useful tool, a
rule of thumb. Still, it is an uncomfortably sharp tool. Failing the
razor test is a bad, bad thing for dogma. It is so bad, that for most
purposes it disqualifies a hypothesis if there is insufficient good evidence to
rescue it.
Then there are various rules that depend on the consistency of theories with
predictions based on those theories. For instance, Darwin proposed that there should exist
undiscovered species of insects with particular types of mouthparts, because on
the basis of his theory and the structures of particular orchids, no known
species could have pollinated them. Sure enough, decades later, in fact
after Darwin's
death, a hawk moth was discovered that did pollinate those orchids. If
the moth had never been found, then some other theory would have had to be
tested, say that some undiscovered tribe had bred the orchid artificially.
And of course, if the moth had died out before anyone had discovered it, then
perhaps we never would have discovered the answer to that question.Such things
happen.
As you can see for yourself, nothing in science promises that we shall find the
answer to every question, nor that all the answers we find are correct
answers.
Such principles are basic to science and if you think about them carefully,
they are basic to common sense as well. So much so that some people
characterise "science" as "glorified common sense".
Now, according to the principle of parsimony, the less a religious belief has
to say about anything we can test, the less seriously a sceptic need take that
belief. If it offers us nothing to test, then it might as well go straight
into the Santa Claus bin; it makes no practical difference in life. If we
want Christmas presents, someone must buy them or make them or otherwise obtain
them; it is not enough just to send letters to the North Pole. But given
that that is the case, we might as well ignore Santa, leave out the assumption
that there is a Santa. We pay just as much to just the same people as if
there were no Santa, whether we have been good children or not.
But if there is something to test, such as the tears of a statue turning to
blood for one day every year, then the sceptic may argue that he has grounds
for disbelief if he is not permitted to perform or witness the test to his
reasonable satisfaction, or if the statue fails the test. This is not a
special attack intended for the destruction of religious claims; it applies to
everything in science as well. Some of the earlier scepticism about the
Piltdown skull began when the parties in possession of the skull, and who
passionately believed that it was genuine, refused to let sceptics examine it.
Not that every such refusal immediately amounts to grounds for absolute
disbelief of course. There may be many reasons for not letting
self-confident amateurs play around with irreplaceable specimens. For
instance, the custodians of the Archaeopteryx fossils refused to let the late,
brilliant, but biologically naïve, Fred Hoyle experiment on the material to
prove it to be faked.
And if he and some others elected to believe it to be faked, too bad! We
do not let a religious zealot who claims that an aircraft is a delusion and a
fake, fly an airliner to demonstrate the truth of his dogma. We care far less
about his belief or disbelief than about the costs and risks that his attempt
would entail.
In such connections we begin to see where the spheres of science and religion
overlap. Science cannot disprove assertions whose implications are not in
principle observable, but commonly it certainly can give strong reason either
to accept, interpret, or reject observables that have been
predicted. If items of dogma entail the predictions, then testing the
predictions can make or break those items except for the perversely faithful.
See whether this sounds familiar: “. . . they are like the deaf adder
that stoppeth her ear; Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers,
charming never so wisely. . . ”
In case it does not, you may find it in Psalms 58, verses four and
five. You also may find a difference between the attitudes of scientist
and Psalmist. Scientists say in effect: “Suit yourself whether you
believe my argument or not; now, unless you have some new and relevant
material, excuse me while I carry on with the next interesting question.”
The psalmist on the other hand goes on about breaking the teeth of the naughty,
naughty adders and the young lions.
Ah well, each to his own! But it was the scientists, not the tooth
breakers, who revealed the creation to be vaster and more wonderful than anyone
had imagined. There is a smug pride, not just a cruelty, but a smallness
of mind, in prescriptive and proscriptive formulators of dogma, that I see as
being destructive in the highest degree. Nothing shows up the sin of
pride more mercilessly, more accusingly.
To religion of that flavour, science very rightly is the arch fiend, the
destroyer of faiths.
What science does conflict with is what, speaking loosely, I will call religious
fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are believers who deny, and may
forbid, anything they see as clashing with what they take to be their given
“truth” or dogma. If they believe that their dogma demands that the world
be flat or just a few thousand years old, then everything that suggests say,
roundness or billions of years, is a delusion and probably a deliberate Snare
of Evil. And so is anything that suggests that in their fundamentalism
they might have mistranslated or misunderstand their own dogma or anything it
might entail. Logic need not come into it. Even innocent
questioning or discussion of the matter may be evil.
What really is wryly amusing, is that fundamentalists as a rule,
vigorously object to logic and evidence as criticism of their dogma.
"Logic isn't everything" they shout, when challenged with logic. Then
they argue back with… (wait for it!) logic and evidence — of sorts.
Ask such a person why they reject logic, and the answer is likely to
begin:
“Because. . .”
Now, anyone who starts a statement with “Because” is implicitly trying to state
an implication. That is to say that he is trying to use logic. Otherwise
there is no implication.
I admit that the fundamentalists do not go out of their way to be
consistent. Their logic and evidence often are flawed, and they abandon
both logic and evidence and common decency and courtesy when caught
contradicting their own dogma. Afterwards they feel free to come aboard
again at another point.
This is a convenient practice for point scoring in bad-faith debating,
discrediting their god with their abject and polluted ethics, but it would
cause sleepless nights for anyone who tries to be honest with himself.
What other kind of religion does one get? Are there religions of honesty,
of humility in recognising that perhaps neither the author of the dogma, nor
the faithful, might have known everything, might have been right about
everything? Or indeed, right about anything non-trivial?
Think about it. And then think about what one might do about substituting
for religions of the more ludicrously, demonstrably nonsensical dogmata.
Notice how many of them include the cruelest, most destructive dogmata, most
valuable to demagogues, parasites, and politicians, and most harmful to the
advance of knowledge and civilisation. Some of these beliefs class
themselves as religions, some as manifestos, but none of them is willing to
trust its followers to think for themselves without telling them what to
think. Don’t bother to read my lips; just look about you.
For such, science is an abomination, of no use except in helping to produce new
and more effective instruments of destruction.
That some of them have used without conscience or responsibility or reserve.
And yet, surely a civilisation that relies on hiding the flaws in its
unjustified beliefs cannot command much respect, or expect much progress.
Anyway, that sums up most of it. In science your final arbiter is what
you see in the world about you; in religion your final arbiter is your dogma;
in fundamentalism it is the literal view of your dogma as you see it.
Dogmatism or fundamentalism as blasphemy
When you cannot prove that
people are wrong,
but only that they are absurd,
the best course is to let them alone.
T.H.Huxley
The fellow that agrees with
everything you say
is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.
Kin Hubbard
Notice that this section does not deal so much with dogma as with dogmatism.
What is the difference, you ask? After all, dogma is that which you must
not deny, and as a rule, that which you must assert. If assertion of
dogma is not dogmatism, then what is?
That sounds reasonable, but it overlooks some important differences in the way
people deal with their dogmata. It also shows a weakness in the concept
of rigid doctrine as a basis for a belief. Given a structure of dogma
built on a number of basic statements of religious tenets, it might in theory
be correct that every one of those is literally true. It certainly is
true that some people do believe this of their own dogma. There are two
points of difficulty, one internal and one external.
The external difficulty is that there are many groups of such people, each as
passionate as the next, but no two agree on each point, each vital point;
sometimes they differ on practically every vital point. And sometimes
they are willing to kill to assert a single minor point. This is not too
serious from the point of view of any particular fundamentalist, because
although it certainly is impossible for two such groups to be correct simultaneously, it is
theoretically possible for just one to be correct.
And of course each of them is willing to die for his belief that his is that
correct one. The alternative possibility, that every single one of all the rival
beliefs is built on hot air and social parasitism, is not to be entertained.
So we shall not entertain it. Not here and now.
The other difficulty is more serious and is harder to fix. Fortunately
for their own peace of mind, fundamentalists are not generally inclined to be
analytical; after all, if they were, then they would not be fundamentalists in
the first place. The only reason that many of these sects have more than
one member is that practically none of the members seriously get together to
work out what each really sees as the true implications of the tenets of his
faith.
Now, by the time you have enough material to base any impressive religion on,
you have enough to guarantee that no two people will see all of it the same
way. However, there are a few things that practically all religions agree
on; for instance:
- Each claims to be true, to be the fount of wisdom.
- And to be good.
- And all the others are bad, or at best mistaken, a wrong assertion on matters of fact, of Truth.
- Or, in ecumenical charity, they at least have a poorer conception of crucial matters.
Let a zealot have his head in an environment like that, and you have a recipe for disaster. For one thing he is working with a mass of material that it is not possible for any person to make full sense of — don't take my word for it, just see how often you find two persons reading the holy scriptures of any religion and giving the same independent answers to penetrating questions without having colluded with each other. It only happens when the questions are among those their catechisms provide boiler-plate answers for; answers that might or might not be meaningful or substantial. And such questions accordingly are not very penetrating.
In fact, doing something of that kind to demonstrate to members of such a sect
that they differ in their views and faiths, is a good way of starting up new schismatic
sects! And there is no bitterness greater than one finds between rival
schismatic sects that regard each other as traitors.
Another thing to try is to get a lot of predictions about the world around us,
predictions that follow from the sacred texts. Even though our tame
fundamentalist theologians take their scriptures as the literal truth, they
don't often agree with each other in detail, though they don't let that put them
off pontificating about it. And insofar as their statements are
about the empirical world, they are either falsifiable or nonsensical. And
practically every non-negligible prediction ignominiously fails the test of
falsification.
It follows that practically all the nontrivial statements of the dogmatists
cannot be the word of any honest and omniscient godhead, which is just what
they claim it to be. And to claim that incoherent untruth, in fact, commonly
incoherent nonsense, is the word of that transcendent god, when it can at best
be the frothings of fallible humans, as a rule fools or parasites,
automatically amounts to blasphemy.
Just as well for them that they are talking nonsense, or by now the whole lot
would have been blasted as horrible examples by their respective gods.
They remain a nuisance to the rest of us though...
In a word: OUTSTANDING!!
ReplyDeleteThank you Frank.
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