CHAPTER 9
SCIENTIFIC FUNDAMENTALISM
The term ‘fundamentalism’ has a decidedly negative ring. It is an attitude of which one is said to be ‘guilty’ and it triggers in most people's minds thoughts of extreme views, especially in the religious sphere. These views may range very widely. For instance, militant Islamic terrorists are called fundamentalists as are the peace-loving Amish. Indeed, because of the wide spectrum it covers some regard the word ‘fundamentalism’ as unhelpfully imprecise and misleading. However, we are stuck with its constant use and my purpose in this essay is to examine whether the ideas connected with fundamentalism extend beyond religion to science.
Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci certainly thinks that fundamentalism has a wider remit than religion. He defines it as a ‘form of ideological intransigence which is not limited to religion […]’.1 And in his book Darwin's Angel, John Cornwell suggests that scientists, also, may be guilty of fundamentalism: ‘Fundamentalists are determined aggressive dogmatists, insisting that they, and they alone, are right.’ Cornwell then addresses Richard Dawkins with the rhetorical question: ‘Do you think it is just as possible to be a scientific fundamentalist as [to be] a religious one?’2 Cornwell evidently expects a positive answer.
The celebrated physicist Peter Higgs (Nobel Prize 2013) agrees. In an interview in December 2011 he said: ‘What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists […]’ Higgs went on to say that Dawkins in a way is ‘almost a fundamentalist himself of another kind’ whose approach he found embarrassing.3
Striking examples of ‘determined aggressive dogmatism’ in science are not hard to come by. For instance, at a conference at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California in 2006 on the theme: ‘Beyond belief: science, religion, reason and survival', physics Nobel prizewinner Steven Weinberg addressed the question whether science should do away with religion. Weinberg said: ‘The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion […] Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.’4
This attitude is scarcely new as Weinberg here vividly echoes the nineteenth century attempt by T. H. Huxley to loosen the grip of Christianity and achieve the secularisation of society through the domination of science. This theme was very evident in 1874 at a famous meeting of the British Association in Belfast at which Huxley, Hooker (botanist) and John Tyndall (President of the British Association for Science and Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution) were main speakers. In his presidential address Tyndall said: ‘All religious theories must submit to the control of science and relinquish all thought of controlling it.’5
Weinberg's contemporary appeal goes even further: ‘anything we can do to weaken the hold of religion’ arguably demonstrates another common aspect of fundamentalism – totalitarianism. And all in the name of science.
Even more sinister is the following fundamentalist sounding statement by neuroscientist Sam Harris: ‘Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.’6 We might well ask if it will be such scientific fundamentalists who in the end have the authority to decide what those deadly propositions are and who will execute the sentence?
It is, of course, important to emphasise that scientific fundamentalism is by definition an extreme position and is far from representative of the main body of scientists who recognise that nature is open to many different interpretations and that one can be a serious scientist whether or not one believes in God.
Peter Higgs again:
The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined. But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.7
Higgs pointed out that a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. ‘I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.’8
The late Harvard palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, took a similar stance: ‘Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism […] science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible existence.’9 Gould regarded science and religion as non-overlapping ‘magisteria’ each dealing with a different set of questions.
The attitude of Higgs and Gould is evidently very different from that of Weinberg and Harris. Indeed, at the La Jolla forum addressed by Weinberg, the tone of intolerance reached such a peak that anthropologist Melvin J. Konner commented: ‘The viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?’10 Militant scientific fundamentalism?
The tragedy is that, although these extreme views are those of a minority, they are widely influential and bring science itself into dispute.
Scientism
Fundamentalist aggression of any kind goes hand in hand with exaggerated truth claims. We already have a name for this definitive aspect of scientific fundamentalism – scientism, the epistemological belief that science alone can deliver truth, that all valid knowledge is science so that, in the end, science is to be equated with rationality.
In the Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, philosopher Mikael Stenmark writes,
while the doctrines that are described as scientism have many possible forms and varying degrees of ambition, they share the idea that the boundaries of science (that is, typically the natural sciences) could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science (usually with science becoming the sole or the main arbiter regarding this area or dimension).11
According to Stenmark, the strongest form of scientism states that science has no boundaries and that all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour, with due time, will be dealt with and solved by science alone. Stenmark calls this scientific expansionism. It is a form of intellectual imperialism. Bertrand Russell gave what is a very effective definition of scientism though he did not himself fully subscribe to the view: ‘Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’12 This statement, however, is self-contradictory. It is not a statement of science and so according to its own logic it must be unknowable.
Undeterred by such elementary logic, physical chemist Peter Atkins, defends scientism with characteristic fundamentalist vigour:
There is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the religious – among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the under-informed – hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate. But science has never encountered a barrier and the only grounds for supposing that reductionism will fail are pessimism on the part of scientists and fear in the minds of the religious.13
One cannot help notice another characteristic of fundamentalism here – only the ignorant will reject our view.
Physicist Stephen Hawking opens his book The Grand Design (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow) with a list of ‘big questions’ like ‘What is the nature of reality?’ He then says:
Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.14
Scientism with a vengeance once more.
The irony is that, having declared philosophy to be dead, Hawking and Mlodinow nevertheless proceed, clearly unawares, to write a book on (the) philosophy (of science).
Astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss also appears to have little time for philosophy: ‘Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.’15 However, as philosopher Massimo Pugliucci points out: ‘This clearly shows two things: first, that Krauss does not understand what the business of philosophy is […] second, that Krauss doesn't mind playing armchair psychologist, despite the dearth of evidence for his pop psychological “explanation”.’16 Indeed, under pressure, Krauss has had to soften his attack on philosophy.
The claim that science is the only way to truth is a claim unworthy of science itself. Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar points this out in his excellent book Advice to a Young Scientist:
There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and upon his profession than roundly to declare […] that science knows, or soon will know, the answers to all questions worth asking, and that questions which do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions.17
Science has been phenomenally successful but it would be a pity if hubris and a fundamentalist attitude to it were to rob young people of the importance of the arts in all their richness to deal with questions of meaning. Religious fundamentalism (especially in the United States) is often held to be the sole culprit responsible for a widespread suspicion of science. Following Medawar, I would suggest, in addition, that the confusion of scientism with science is plausibly one of the main reasons why science is regarded with suspicion and even rejected, by sections of the general public.
Medawar presses on with his case:
The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’; ‘What are we all here for?’; ‘What is the point of living?’18
He adds: ‘Doctrinaire positivism – now something of a period piece – dismissed all such non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer’.19 Medawar does not of course mean that science does the main work and there is a little bit left over for the other disciplines. Indeed, questions of meaning and value are arguably much more important than questions of function. Teleological thinking is not to be dismissed in a cavalier way.
I wonder how Medawar would have responded to Dawkins’ doctrinaire positivist statement that since we now have modern biology ‘we no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems; is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?’20 As if the only alternative to biology is superstition. Ian Hutchinson, an MIT physicist, warns in this connection of the ‘knowledge domination of scientism’ – the view that science is the only game in town.21 After all, it is surely obvious that if scientism were true, half the departments in each university would have to close and the British Academy would cease to exist. It might be worth replacing the term ‘scientism’ by ‘scientific fundamentalism’ in order to alert a wider public to its existence and dangers.
Cosmologist George Ellis says that the essential nature of scientific fundamentalism (and of all other fundamentalisms) is that
a partial truth is proclaimed as the whole truth. Only one viewpoint is allowed on any issue, all others are false. This dogmatism is combined with an inability to relate understanding to context. Admitting that what is important varies with the context would undermine the fundamentalist's need to see the same single issue as dominant in every situation, come what may.22
Ellis regards such fundamentalism as ‘a major problem’.
He is right about this ‘one size fits all’ attitude – especially when it comes to the way in which scientific fundamentalism handles the nature of explanation.
Scientific Fundamentalism and the Nature of Explanation
Philosophers of science are well aware of the difficulty inherent in defining science – and scientism compounds that difficulty in some very unhelpful ways. Take for instance the matter of explanation. We are all familiar with the claim that science explains, and indeed with the fundamentalist claim that science explains everything. That raises the question as to what constitutes a scientific explanation. This is not the easy question it was once thought to be – witness the prolific literature on the nature of science. One response is to say that science explains in terms of laws and mechanisms – witness the brilliant success of Newton. So, for instance, Newton's law of gravity ‘explains’. But what does it explain? It certainly explains how to do mathematical calculations to determine the orbits of the planets that move under gravity. But it does not explain what gravity is – as Newton himself realised. In fact no-one knows what gravity is – nor, for good measure, do they know what energy is. We can do impressive and useful calculations using the laws that govern gravity and energy but we cannot give a definitive explanation of what they are.
However, such is the hubris of scientism that many people are deceived into thinking that once scientists have found a law they have found a complete explanation. This is not so as the distinguished German philosopher Robert Spaemann points out:
Science does not try to find out, as Aristotle did, why the stone falls downwards. It rather tries to discover the laws according to which it falls. And that constitutes scientific ‘explanation’. But Wittgenstein writes: The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.23
Furthermore, scientific fundamentalism obscures the fact that there may be several levels of explanation of the same phenomenon, not all of which are necessarily scientific. For instance, a Ford car engine can be ‘explained’ in terms of automobile engineering and the law of internal combustion – a scientific explanation; it can also be ‘explained’ in terms of Henry Ford – explanation in terms of an intelligent agent. These explanations are both rational that neither compete nor conflict but complement one another. It should also be observed that neither explanation is complete on its own – both are necessary.
Our illustration also shows that different kinds of questions are involved in the two levels of explanation. The scientific side involves ‘how’ questions related to the car engine, and ‘why’ questions of function – ‘why is that gearwheel in that place’ etc. The agent-explanation answers ‘why’ questions of purpose and intentionality that ‘how’ questions do not address.
Scientific fundamentalism, true to its name, often counters by outright denial of the validity of the ‘why’ question in the second level of explanation especially (but not only) when we scale the illustration up from a car engine to the universe. Such denial has no apparent justification and is certainly not a valid scientific response. This provides us with another example to substantiate Ellis' point above that all fundamentalisms involve a partial truth being proclaimed as the whole truth.
The rejection of multi-level explanation leads scientism into a head-on clash with theology, a clash that, sadly, has had the inevitable effect of perpetuating the conflict myth that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Historians and philosophers of science have long since dismissed as evidence for that conflict the iconic disputes of Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church and of Huxley and Wilberforce. For instance, historian of science Colin Russell concludes:
The common belief that […] the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility […] is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.24
Indeed, it ought to be evident that the conflict is not between science and religion. William Phillips and Peter Higgs have both won the Nobel Prize for physics. Phillips is a Christian and Higgs an atheist. What divides them is obviously not their science. It is their worldview. And at the level of worldview there is, of course, a real conflict. Naturalism and theism are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. Once we understand that this is where the conflict lies, we are in a better position to understand the nature of scientific fundamentalism.
Scientific Fundamentalism and Worldview
Science is (at least) a set of intellectual disciplines that have as a prime objective the study of the natural world. Scientific fundamentalism, or scientism is a worldview that claims that science is able to answer all the big questions. As a worldview it is closely related to and by some even regarded as synonymous with naturalism or even materialism.
Scientism is essentially atheistic since it rejects a priori the concept of God the supernatural creator and upholder of the cosmos, who is the answer to the question as to why there is a universe at all in which science can be done, and who is the explanation as to why scientific explanations are possible. Scientism appears totally incapable of seeing that God does not compete with science as an explanation. It insists that he does and therefore God must go. The reason for this is not far to seek. Since scientism's tunnel vision cannot conceive that any (intelligent) person could believe in a supernatural Creator God – even though many do – it erroneously concludes that the only kind of God people could possibly believe in is the so-called God of the Gaps of the ‘I can't understand it, therefore God did it’ variety.
Now, such a god is by definition simply a mythical and temporary place-holder for present human ignorance, an unknown X that disappears when a scientific explanation is forthcoming, just as the ancient gods of thunder and lightning are dispatched by elementary considerations from atmospheric physics.
However, it would be hard to find a serious-minded Jew, Christian or Moslem who believed in such a god. They all believe in a God who is God of the whole show – the bits we do not understand and the bits we do.
It is the widespread misconception of God as a God of the gaps that helps us understand why scientific fundamentalism insists that we must choose between science and God. For it is obvious that if you regard God as a God of the gaps then of course you must choose between science and God since that is the way you have defined God.
Scientific fundamentalism is therefore potentially educationally damaging since in erroneously pitting science against God it could be seriously off-putting to believers in God who wished to study science – of which there are many.
Before we leave the concept of a ‘god of the gaps’ it is worth pointing out that there is a parallel phenomenon, ‘evolution of the gaps’, in scientism's one-track insistence on invoking evolution at every possible juncture. Nobel Laureate physicist Robert Laughlin, whose research is on the properties of matter that make life possible, warns scientists about the dangers of this kind of thinking:
Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that it has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great theory has lately come to function as an anti-theory called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action – evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken – evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!25
I am tempted to think that belief in an ‘evolution of the gaps’ is probably more widespread than belief in a ‘God of the gaps’, since concentration on the latter allows the former to thrive undetected.
A survey of the literature tempts me to ask whether the close link between scientism and atheism could have to do with a conflation of science and scientism that is sometimes subsumed in definitions of science itself. For instance, Massimo Pigliucci holds that: ‘The basic assumption of science is that the world can be explained entirely in physical terms, without recourse to godlike entities.’26 The word ‘entirely’ is again an indicator of scientific fundamentalism and this, coupled with the last phrase banishes God from the world at all levels of explanation. So for Pigliucci science itself is inextricably coupled to atheism.
Similarly, Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve says:
Scientific enquiry rests on the notion that all manifestations in the universe are explainable in natural terms, without supernatural intervention. Strictly speaking, this notion is not an a priori philosophical stand or profession of belief. It is a postulate, a working hypothesis that we should be prepared to abandon if faced with facts that defy every attempt at rational explanation. Many scientists, however, do not bother to make this distinction, tacitly extrapolating from hypothesis to affirmation. They are perfectly happy with the explanations provided by science. Like Laplace, they have no need for the ‘God hypothesis’ and equate the scientific attitude with agnosticism, if not with outright atheism.27
Again we have the fundamentalist claim that scientific enquiry means total explanation of the universe without recourse to the supernatural. However, there is something even more striking here. De Duve is honest enough to admit that this concept of scientific enquiry is not an a priori position but one that scientists should be prepared to abandon. Yet he thinks that this should be done only if they are ‘faced with facts that defy every attempt at rational explanation’. Here is a clear admission that, for many, science is practically inseparable from a metaphysical commitment to an agnostic or atheistic viewpoint.
Indeed, philosopher Paul Kurtz thinks that the naturalism flows from science rather than being a priori: ‘What is common to naturalistic philosophy is its commitment to science. Indeed, naturalism might be defined in its more general sense as the philosophical generalizations of the methods and conclusions of the sciences.’28
But back to de Duve. If ‘supernatural intervention’ is to be equated with ‘defying every attempt at rational explanation’ then ‘supernatural’ implies ‘non-rational’. Secondly, it implies that science is co-extensive with rationality. To anyone who works in the humanities, and, in particular to anyone who has engaged in serious theological reflection, this will seem quite absurd – a stunning example of scientistic hubris.
De Duve then honestly admits that many scientists ‘equate the scientific attitude with agnosticism, if not with outright atheism’. In order to make this move de Duve suggests they are following Laplace. This is once more a failure to see that explanation comes in different forms. Laplace was correctly responding to Napoleon in saying that his mathematical calculations did not need God. He was not responding to the question whether the universe was itself the result of intelligent agency.
Other scientists go even further than de Duve and admit that their worldview is a priori. Immunologist George Klein says that his atheism is not based on science, but is an a priori faith commitment. Commenting on a letter in which one of his friends described him as an agnostic, he writes: ‘I am not an agnostic. I am an atheist. My attitude is not based on science, but rather on faith […] The absence of a Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith, my adult belief, unshakable and holy.’29
Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin agrees:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs […] in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment […] to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.30
This is perhaps the most remarkable and simultaneously the most honest example of a fundamentalist attitude to science to be found anywhere in the literature. Lewontin admits that his materialism does not derive from science but rather shapes his definition of science. Lewontin also buys into the ‘conflict thesis’ that there is a struggle between ‘science and the supernatural’. He then immediately contradicts himself by admitting that science carries no compulsion within itself to force materialism upon us. This supports the contention that the real battle is not so much between science and faith in God, but rather between a materialistic, or more broadly, a naturalistic worldview and a supernaturalistic, or theistic, worldview.
That it is Lewontin's dogmatic antipathy to a Creator and not his science that lies behind his worldview is revealed in his next statement: ‘Moreover that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.’
Lewontin's materialistic-science net is deliberately designed not to catch God. But that means, of course, that its use leaves the question of God's existence completely open. And yet materialistic science often claims to have proved that God does not exist!
We may illustrate this in the following way: if we deliberately design an apparatus only to be able to detect light in the visible part of the spectrum, it would be foolish to argue on the basis of experiments using our machine that infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays or Gamma-rays did not exist. It would be a foregone conclusion that we did not detect them, since our machine was deliberately designed not to be able to. Analogously, if we deliberately craft our science to exclude God a priori, it is then foolish to argue that our science has led us to be atheists.
We would emphasise at this juncture that we are not suggesting that Lewontin and others who share an a priori commitment to materialism do not do good science. That would be incorrect. Excellent science can be and is certainly done both by materialists and theists and others, irrespective of their worldview.
Indeed, it is important to realise that when it comes to the scientific study of the way things operate (which is the main body of science), as distinct from the way they originate, worldview assumptions play very little role whatsoever. What we are arguing is the importance of recognising the limitations that worldview presuppositions put on what can be logically deduced from investigations based on them.
All of this has the effect of blurring the distinction between science and worldview leading to a conflation of scientism and science which provides fertile ground for scientific fundamentalism. In particular one casualty of the scientistic view is the widespread conviction that, whatever our precise definition of science, it is or should be principally concerned with the Socratic principle of following evidence no matter where it leads. How different that attitude is from feeling ‘forced by our a priori adherence to material causes’ to accept ‘patent absurdity’ and ‘insubstantiated just-so stories’. Indeed, I have heard many a scientist complain of the absurdities and just-so stories associated with religious fundamentalism. The pot calling the kettle black?
Scientism and Ethics
Albert Einstein, like Medawar, held that science was not applicable to every domain – ethics for instance. In a discussion on science and religion in Berlin in 1930, he said that our sense of beauty and our religious instinct are: ‘tributary forms in helping the reasoning faculty towards its highest achievements. You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality […] Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail.’31
Richard Feynman, a physics Nobel laureate, shared Einstein's view:
Even the greatest forces and abilities don't seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behaviour has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences do not directly teach good or bad.32
Elsewhere he states: ‘ethical values lie outside the scientific realm’.33
Even Richard Dawkins has, up until recently, espoused a similar view: ‘It is pretty hard to defend absolute morals on anything other than religious grounds.’ He also admits that you cannot get ethics from science: ‘Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical.’34
Nonetheless, scientific fundamentalism must disagree by definition and attempt to extend its sphere of influence into ethics. Sam Harris makes the attempt, as indicated by the subtitle of his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.35 Dawkins endorses this book and says that it has persuaded him to change his mind. Harris claims to have found a way around Hume's celebrated claim that it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
I am not suggesting that science cannot help us to make ethical judgements. For instance, knowing about how much pain animals feel can help shape judgements on animal testing. But the judgement is made on the basis of a prior moral conviction, that pain and misery is bad. Science can tell us that if you put strychnine in your grandmother's tea it will kill her. Science cannot tell you whether you ought or ought not to do so in order to get your hands on her property. As cosmologist George Ellis points out, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics and meaning are outside the competence of science – ‘there is no experiment that says an act is good or bad’.36
Harris' attempt to get ethics from science is not convincing. He writes: ‘We simply must stand somewhere. I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for every one.’37 Thus Harris begins with a moral conviction (in fact, as a basis for his own restatement of utilitarianism), and then brings his science to bear on deciding on whether a given situation conforms to it. That is a very different matter from his claim that science can determine human values.38
Biologist P. Z. Myers comments:
I don't think Harris's criterion – that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals – is valid. We can't. We can certainly use science to say how we can maximize well-being, once we define well-being […] although even that might be a bit more slippery than he portrays it. Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.39
Harris's response to this is illuminating:
To use Myer's formulation, we must smuggle in an ‘unscientific prior’ to justify any branch of science. If this isn't a problem for physics, why should it be a problem for a science of morality? Can we prove, without recourse to any prior assumptions, that our definition of “physics” is the right one? No, because our standards of proof will be built into any definition we provide.40
Quite so; but if the unscientific prior involves a moral assumption, then Harris cannot claim to deduce morality from science.
Harris is still trying to get, as C. S. Lewis put it: ‘a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible’.41
It is well to bear in mind that other attempts have been made to allow science to invade the field of ethics that have resulted, for instance, in the unspeakable horrors of Social Darwinism. In this connection, it is worth quoting John Horgan's Globe and Mail review of Sam Harris's attempt to derive ethics from science. Horgan, it should be noted, regards Harris as one of his ‘favourite religion-bashers’ and yet he writes:
My second, more serious objection to Harris's thesis42 stems from my knowledge of past attempts to create what he calls a ‘science of human flourishing’. Just 100 years ago, Marxism and eugenics struck many reasonable people as brilliant, fact-based schemes for improving human well-being. These pseudo-scientific ideologies culminated in two of the most lethal regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Harris repeatedly insists that we shouldn't rule out the scientific revelation of an objectively true, universal morality, just because it isn't possible yet. As long as this achievement is possible in principle, he says, we shouldn't worry that it still isn't possible in practice. But we live in the world of practice, where even the smartest, best-informed, best-intentioned people make terrible mistakes. I therefore fear the practical consequences of a scientific movement to derive a universal morality.43
Cosmologist George Ellis' comment on Social Darwinism is apt:
[It] has been one of the most evil movements in the history of humanity, causing far more deaths than any other ideology has done.44 And the fact that one is able to say that it is evil shows that there are standards of ethics outside those provided by evolutionary biology. There is, of course, a substantial literature on the evolutionary rise of altruism, but as a historical fact the influence of evolutionary theory on ethics in practice has been to provide theoretical support for eugenics and Social Darwinism, not for any movement of caring for others. The theoretical ideas in support of the evolutionary rise of altruism have had no discernible effect on public behaviour; and ultimately this is because they explain ethics away, rather than providing a foundation for ethics.45
Scientism's Fatal Flaws
There are lessons to be learned from this. For today, not only the academy, but also western culture is threatened with domination by an all-pervading scientism that holds naturalism to be the default philosophy. Dissenters from this view are all too readily written off as religious fundamentalists. The irony is however that scientism suffers from two fundamental defects – firstly, it is logically self-contradictory and, secondly, it threatens the validity of science itself.
The self-contradictory nature of the fundamentalist dictum that ‘science is the only way to truth’ is a matter of elementary logic. For the statement ‘science is the only way to truth’ is not a statement or result of science. It is a statement about science. If, however, science is the only way to truth, then this statement must be false. It is therefore logically incoherent.
The second flaw is related to the first. Naturalism's story is that the human mind on which we rely to do science is the product of an unguided, mindless natural process. The problem then is, if that is really the case, why should we then trust the mind? After all, if we knew that the computer we are about to use was the end product of a mindless unguided process we would not trust it for a moment. Charles Darwin thought of this difficulty which is frequently referred to as ‘Darwin's Doubt’: ‘With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy’.46
John Gray, Professor Emeritus of the History of European Thought at London University, has this in mind when he writes: ‘Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.’47
The tension that appears here is not, it should be noted, between science and religion. It is a tension between the desire to have science based on reliable human cognitive faculties and the undercutting of that reliability by a naturalistic belief that insists that human cognition is an unforeseen consequence of mindless unguided processes.
Alvin Plantinga sums up the argument as follows:
If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce – including Dawkins' own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.48
A further exploration of this argument is due to Thomas Nagel. His book Mind and Cosmos has the explosive subtitle: ‘Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false’. He explains the grounds for his scepticism:
My skepticism is not based on religious belief,49 or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is particularly true of the origin of life.50
Later he writes:
If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science […] Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.51
That is, naturalism undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever – let alone a scientific one. Scientific fundamentalism espousing a ‘one size fits all’ naturalism would therefore appear not merely to shoot itself in the foot but in the brain.
Notes
1. EMBO Rep. 2005 December; 6(12): 1106–9. doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400589
2. J. Cornwell, Darwin's Angel (London: Profile Books, 2007), p. 95.
3. A. Jha, ‘Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious “fundamentalism”’, Guardian (26 December 2012).
4. This conference was extensively covered in a special 50th year edition of New Scientist (18 November 2006).
5. http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html (accessed 11 March 2015).
6. Harris, S., The End of Faith (London: The Free Press, 2005), pp. 52–3.
7. Jha, A., ‘Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious “fundamentalism”’, Guardian (26 December 2012).
8. Ibid.
9. M. Stenmark, 'Scientism', in J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen (ed.) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion (Detroit: Thomson Gale. 2003) p. 783.
10. S. J. Gould, ‘Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge’, Scientific American 267/1: 118–21 (July 1992); reprinted in L. R. Hughes (ed.), Reviews of Creationist Books (Berkeley, CA: The National Center for Science Education, Inc., 1992), pp. 79–84.
11. See n.4.
12. B. Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
13. J. Cornwell (ed.), Nature's Imagination – The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 125.
14. S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantam Press, 2010), p. 5.
15. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/ (accessed 11 March 2015).
16. P. Medewar, Advice to a Young Scientist (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
17. Ibid.
18. rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html (accessed 11 March 2015).
19. P. Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist (London: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 31; see also his book The Limits of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 66.
20. R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
21. I. Hutchinson, Monopolising Knowledge (Belmont, Mass.: Fias Publishing, 2011).
22. P. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 762.
23. Spaemann interviewed by Wirtschaftswoche (August 2007). My translation.
24. C. A. Russell, ‘The conflict metaphor and its social origins’, Science and Christian Belief 1: 3–26 (1989).
25. R. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 168–9.
26. J. A. Campbell and S. C. Meyer, Darwinism, Design and Public Education (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003), p. 195.
27. C. R. de Duve, Life Evolving (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 284.
28. P. Kurtz, Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990), p. 12.
29. G. Klein, The Atheist in the Holy City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) p. 203.
30. Review of C. Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York Review of Books (9 January 1997).
31. For this and Einstein's stance on religion and science see the definitive work of M. Jammer, Einstein and Religion (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999). The citation here is from p. 69.
32. R. P. Feynman, The Meaning of it All (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 32.
33. R. Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain (London: Phoenix, 2004), p. 39.
34. S. Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010).
35. Clarke, Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, p. 760.
36. Ibid., p. 43.
37. S. Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (London: Black Swan, 2012), p. 39.
38. Ibid., p. 189. Perhaps Harris is vaguely aware of this himself since, towards the end of his book, he attenuates the claim of his cover sub-title to the lesser and very different ‘claim that science could have something important to say about values’.
39. scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/sam_harris_v_sean_carroll.php? (accessed 11 March 2015).
40. www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html (accessed 11 March 2015).
41. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940).
42. Horgan's first objection is that he disagrees with Harris about Hume: ‘Hume was right: The realm of ought is qualitatively different from the realm of is.’ J. Horgan, ‘Book review: The Acid Test for Doing the Right Thing’, The Globe and Mail (8 October 2010).
43. Ibid., www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/book-review-the-moral-landscape-how-science-can-determine-human-values-by-sam-harris/article1749446/page2/ (accessed 11 March 2015).
44. Ellis here cites R. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
45. Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, p. 761.
46. Letter from Charles Darwin to William Graham, 1881, Darwin Correspondence Project Letter 13230.
47. J. Gray, Straw Dogs (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 26.
48. For the detail of this argument see plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/ (accessed 11 March 2015).
49. Nagel is an atheist.
50. T. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 6.
51. Ibid., p. 27.
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