Cosmology is bringing us closer to the mind of God, wrote Stephen Hawking in his celebrated book A Brief History of Time. But in recent months the pressing issue has been what such statements reveal about the mind of science - as is evident from the rash of books and newspaper articles questioning the cultural ascendancy and function of science.
Why this sudden excitement? The immediate debate has been triggered by
the increasingly strident claims of cosmologists that they are close to
understanding creation and providing a 'theory of everything'. These claims
have put the cat among the pigeons in sacred quarters. From the recent
exchanges in the British press between Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist
and avowed atheist, and John Habgood, the Archbishop of York, it seems
that some commentators want to go back a century for one more game of Evolutionists
versus Creationists.
But many debaters are already complaining that their regular opponents
aren't available. The reason is simple: what we now have is a new set of
problems, problems that belong primarily to science and would still arise
even if religion was magically removed from the scene. Indeed, that removal
might make things still harder, for it would create a vacuum which science
would instinctively, but inappropriately, attempt to fill.
At issue is not merely what cosmology can - or cannot - say about creation
(or the mind of God), but the excessive claims that scientists and others
have made about the scope and capacity of science as a whole. The doctrine
of 'scientism' - with its implied belief in the omnicompetence of science
- has been steadily gaining ground in our culture throughout this century.
The philosopher Karl Popper, for example, is better known for playing down
the powers of science. But in 1972 he made the startling claim that science
is 'perhaps the most powerful tool for biological adaptation which has
ever emerged'. Even more strident is the philosopher Rudolf Carnap's pronouncement
of the 1930s: 'When we say that scientific knowledge is unlimited, we mean
'there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science'.'
No question. Not for instance 'Who killed President Kennedy?', or 'Is life
still worth living?', or 'If so, why?', or 'What should we do about prisons?',
or 'Is this will legally binding?' or 'Do your feet hurt?'. Not anything.
The territory claimed here is not just that of the religions. It is the
whole area of organised and everyday thought. And science, as a claimant
for that territory, means essentially just physical science. Though the
doctrine is sometimes expanded to include technology and social science,
these extensions are foreign to it.
This seductive promise of universal explanation is something new. It outbids
the explanatory offers of any religion, both in scope and certainty. The
religions habitually admit, indeed claim, that they deal in matters not
fully knowable by human beings, whereas science now seems able to offer
fully reasoned proof for all answers to all possible questions. People
today are far more vulnerable to such offers than they were a century ago,
because the world has become so confusing. In today's desperate muddles,
people long for a map, a clear world picture.
The religions have been attempts to provide such a background map. But
today they no longer look universal; we know that there is not just one
of them. Science, by contrast, does look universal; it is the same everywhere.
Its universality is of a rather special kind. Few people anywhere actually
understand science, and outside Western countries it is always somewhat
detached from the surrounding culture.
Science belongs, therefore, to a certain highly sophisticated subspecies
of Airport Man rather than to Homo sapiens generally, and even for Airport
Man it does not cover the whole of life. Still, in an important sense it
does indeed carry its benefits across cultural barriers. And in so doing
it offers a new, unparalleled hope of inclusiveness, an ultimate background
against which all human problems can finally be resolved.
Jawaharlal Nehru spoke for many when he declared in the 1950s: 'It is science
alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation
and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of
vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving
people.'
Alone? Do we no longer need, for instance, better political and economic
systems, less corrupt administrators, a more just distribution of privilege,
a wider general education, a more practical approach or more generous sympathies?
The exclusiveness of such grandiose claims for science is seldom intended;
other resources are taken for granted. Yet the emphasis, the insistence
on primacy, is unmistakable.
Scientists today are often surprised by wild claims such as Carnap's and
Nehru's, and suggest that they are a thing of the past. Even if these claims
actually had ceased to be made, their legacy would still need to be dealt
with. But they have not ceased: we are simply so used to them that we no
longer notice them. In his book The Selfish Gene, for instance, Richard
Dawkins writes that since we now have modern biology, 'we no longer have
to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems; is there a
meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?.'
And in April, at a public debate about the impact of science on faith and
spirituality - an occasion on which he surely weighed his words - the developmental
biologist Lewis Wolpert ended his speech with a remark quite close to Nehru's:
'When we come to face the problems before us - poverty, pollution, overpopulation,
illness - it is to science we must turn, not to gurus. The arrogance of
scientists is not nearly so dangerous as the arrogance that comes from
ignorance.'
The only alternative to scientists is, then, utterly ignorant 'gurus'.
No other kind of expert exists. Though Wolpert does not use the word 'alone',
his wording can bear no other meaning. British scientific education is
now so narrowly scientistic that many scientists simply do not know that
there is any organised, systematic way of thinking besides their own.
Einstein used advanced philosophy in his discussions with similarly trained
contemporaries, because it gave him the right tools for his scientific
problems. So indeed did T. H. Huxley, the 19th-century evolutionist. But
in Britain today, this essential tool kit is forgotten, or, worse still,
denigrated. Defending the business of science in a recent newspaper article,
for example, Steve Jones, a geneticist and former Reith lecturer, claimed
that 'philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex'.
The exalted claims that scientism makes for science are not just excessive,
they are of quite the wrong kind. The astonishing successes of Western
science have not been gained by answering every kind of question, but precisely
by refusing to. Science has deliberately set narrow limits to the kinds
of questions that belong to it, and further limits to the questions peculiar
to each branch. It has practised an austere modesty, a rejection of claims
to universal authority.
Ironically, it is this modesty which has earned science its un-paralleled
reputation for effectiveness. The most famous example is Galileo's exclusion
of 'purpose' questions from physics - a well-conceived veto which some
cosmologists seem now happy to forget. The strange fantasies that these
people then produce are a main theme of my book Science as Salvation.
Of course, scientists have every right to explore questions outside scientific
territory. But they cannot do it effectively without changing their methods.
If they do not take the trouble to acquire new ways of thinking about their
new subject matter, they are liable to get conceptually lost (of which
more later).
The general over-confidence of scientism combines particularly badly with
the rather superficial ideas many scientists have about the impact of recent
theories on the nature of science. The prevailing assumption is that the
coming together of such powerful theories as relativity, quantum mechanics
and chaos theory easily frees science from the restrictions imposed by
Galileo; and that physics really has evolved to the point where it can
answer every sort of question without losing the special authority which
arose from sternly limiting its scope. In the fairy tale, the peasant induced
the king to marry his daughter by boasting she could spin straw into gold.
Having married her, the king promptly locked her up with a pile of straw
and told her to get started. Science ought not to be put in this position.
TRIBAL DISPUTES
The question for scientists now is, how much of the vast responsibility
that scientism loads on them do they actually want to shoulder? Put like
this, it usually gets a modest answer. So vast and complex are the world's
problems, especially those of the environment, that what anyone does in
helping to understand them can surely only be a contribution to a team
project. Yet the sweeping claims of scientism arose in very different circumstances,
out of tribal disputes over intellectual territory, either between academic
disciplines or against the churches.
To fight this battle, champions of scientism drew a hierarchical picture
showing all other ways of thinking as only rough approximations, all reducible
to the sciences and ultimately to physics. They gave short shrift to the
distinctive uses of history, law, linguistics or logic, theology, ethics,
geography, political theory or the psychology of motive. And they certainly
never considered what they should do if, so to speak, they were suddenly
victorious and inherited the treasure of their supposed rivals - that is,
the responsibility for answering all possible questions. But that day may
now have come.
Should all the large claims, then, simply be withdrawn? Many of them surely
can and should. Theorists such as Popper have already proposed various
forms of scientific minimalism, techniques for abandoning large claims.
They have suggested that science is really just a store of facts, a record
of hypotheses that have been experimentally verified, or at least not falsified
- which turns scientists into humble operatives in an immense, impersonal
falsification factory. Or perhaps talk of truth and falsity is itself too
bold. Perhaps, as the philosopher Larry Laudan puts it, 'the aim of science
is merely to secure theories with a high problem-solving effectiveness'.
If so, and since different theories help for different problems, the various
sciences are entitled to use very varying methods, as in fact they do.
The myth of a single scientific method can then be abandoned. The obsession
with reducing everything to the pattern of physics can be dropped, taking
with it the primacy of physics itself. Indeed, the stark separation between
science and nonscientific ways of thinking begins to look mistaken. Perhaps
the whole tribal battle has become unnecessary.
How should the retreat be carried out? By far the most popular idea is
the positivist one that we should keep only the facts; everything nonfactual
is nonrational, subjective, intuitive, somehow 'soft'. Yet this notion
cannot really be applied because the line separating fact from non-fact
is far too loose and variable.
Facts cannot really be confined to particular experimental results, because
these depend on the concepts and theories from which they spring. Theories
are not handy, neutral shelves for facts; they are ways of thinking which
determine the choice of experiments. They involve imaginative patterns
arising out of the wider paradigms of a given age and culture. One has
only to think of the machine model furnished by the early Industrial Revolution,
or of Darwin's rich, prophetic vision of evolution, to see how much science
owes to its imaginative element.
The positivist approach excludes from science this whole range of vital,
pre-experimental thinking. Though this thinking goes on, it is not regarded
as official and it therefore doesn't get the disciplined criticism that
it needs, even though it can perfectly well be judged by standards of rationality.
Once all pre-experimental thought is classed as nonrational, subjective
and somehow a private matter, it becomes hard to come down like a tonne
of bricks on specimens of it that are distinctively and dangerously irrational.
I have been reproved for my indelicacy in discussing these excesses in
my book, much as if I had been attacking the authors concerned for their
private lives.
The instruction to confine science to the bare facts is, however, so unrealistic
that it almost inevitably produces hypocrisy and doublethink. Instead of
gradually forging the discriminating kind of modesty outlined above, scientists
are left oscillating between the only two options now laid before them
- between making vast scientistic claims and unconvincing protestations
of total modesty. Intellectual overeating alternates with anorexia.
This attempt to combine the prestige of omnicompetence with the minimalist's
freedom from responsibility won't do. What scientists need is to develop
their general ideas and express their imaginative vision openly - not overconfidently,
as part of a wider campaign, and not just in the last chapters of scientific
books (a showcase currently considered quite immune to comment), but realistically
against a background of rational criticism.
What, then, is the proper boundary of science? In my recent book, I do
not directly attack the physical theories which have been the intellectual
weapons used to extend the scientific realm so unrealistically. I think
they are too academic to lie at the heart of the current over-confidence
in science. Rather, the main roots of the problem lie in the success of
technology - the most conspicuous sign of the effectiveness of science.
Instead, I concentrated simply on displaying the enormity of that overconfidence
by examining some fantastic prophecies recently put forward by eminent
cosmologists, not as a hobby or a sideline, but explicitly as part of physics.
Though these fantasies are only a small part of the scientific output,
they seem to me a highly significant one. They attract much attention and
indicate a euphoric faith shared by many who would not themselves put it
in print.
What they offer is cosmological pie in the sky. I can here only summarize
brutally its various ingredients as they are brought together by the physicists
John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
The Anthropic Principle is founded on the notion that the physical universe
can in some ways be explained by assuming that it must be such as to contain
people. Partly it is an attempt to explain why there are so many striking
numerical coincidences in physics - the fact, for example, that the age
of the Universe (in nuclear units) and the ratio between the gravitational
attraction between two protons and the electrical force between two charged
particles are both 1040. Such coincidences, the argument goes, arise because
all physical quantities are inherently restricted: they can only take on
values appropriate for a universe that is old enough, and of the right
kind, to have evolved the human life needed to measure them.
But in their book, Barrow and Tippler go much further: they add the fatal
ingredient of purpose. Here, among a thick forest of equations, it is explained
that the Universe probably exists in order to produce us - not for any
of the reasons that might occur to most people as providing the point of
human life, but solely in order that we shall do physics and observe things
through appropriate instruments. After doing this, our next business is
to 'download' ourselves (or at least our descendants) to machines which
will then occupy outer space, not just grabbing part of it, not just a
few neighbouring galaxies, but the whole concern. From this pleasing eminence,
the human intellect will complete the destined cosmic process.
They write: 'At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have
gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe but
in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have
spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically
exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including
all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this
is the end.'
This story, which radically diverges from Darwinian notions by positing
evolution as an immense escalator designed to culminate in humanity, converges
with another bizarre claim propounded by Freeman Dyson, the founder of
quantum electrodynamics, that the human race can and should be made literally
immortal by colonising the Universe - a process which he considers necessary
if our life is to have any meaning.
These predictions scarcely fit the traditional pattern in which sternly
reductive scientists denounce self-deceiving gurus for promising pie in
the sky as consolation for the harshness of human life. Moreover, the arguments
are rarely scrutinised because they peep out only briefly from their protective
thicket of equations. Many who have taken the trouble to examine the Anthropic
Principle dismiss it pretty sharply. The physicist Heinz Pagels, for instance,
drops it as 'not subject to experimental falsification' and so not a true
scientific theory.
LIFE AMONG THE COMPUTER PROGRAMS
There is also, however, (as in the recent chatter about the creation) an
extraordinary confusion between literal and symbolic meaning. The authors
write as though merely going up to the sky and living there for ever must
infinitely improve human life. But 'up' does not necessarily mean 'better'.
And in any case, only people who had been 'downloaded' to computer programs
could possibly complete the journey. Life among disembodied computer programs
in outer space might well be horrible and degraded. Death is indeed frightening,
but it is not the only evil we face. What if unhappy disembodied programs
cannot even die? In spite of its triumphant tone, this vision is morally
bankrupt, which leaves it no better as a religion than it is as science.
I discuss in my book what makes some of these imaginative dramas so disastrous
while others are legitimate and useful. This is part of a wider effort
to put science back in context - to show its borders not as sharp, defended
frontiers, but as complex interactions with other ways of thinking. Much
of my case overlaps with the controversial thesis propounded recently by
Bryan Appleyard in his book Understanding the Present. What I have not
pursued here, as he has, is the destructive effects of scientism in other
areas, notably its belittling of nonscientific ways of thinking, such as
morality. (I have dicussed this earlier in Wickedness and in Can't We Make
Moral Judgments?). Appleyard contends that humanity would be better equipped
to deal with moral and spiritual questions if scientism could be halted
in its tracks, and I agree. Where I part company with him, however, is
over the link he forges between science and liberalism, and in particular
his surprising idea that clearer moral judgments - of the kind that scientism
has eroded - would damn liberalism by making intolerance appear preferable
to tolerance. I also deplore some of his rhetoric which seems to indict
science itself rather than scientism, such as the formula that 'the heartless
truths of science' are the root of our trouble. Actually, it's the untruths
that bother me.
Mary Midgley was formerly senior lecturer in philosophy at the University
of Newcastle upon Tyne. Her latest book, Science as Salvation, is published
by Routledge. Next week New Scientist will carry a reply from a scientist.
MARY MIDGLEY