‘Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens’, wrote the poet and dramatist Friedrich von Schiller in his play Maid of Orleans: against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain. I first came across this quote in the title to one of Isaac Asimov’s finest novels, The Gods Themselves, but had to wait until the internet age before I could discover more. The context of the quote – a speech by a character, Talbot (here in translation), is interesting:

‘Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.’

This could be the rallying call of any modern scientist faced with what he or she sees as a tide of unreason – unless they are very careful, ‘Exalted reason’ will become tied to the tail of ‘folly’s uncurbed steed’ and be pulled, ‘vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd’, into the abyss—eyes wide open. What is to be done? Can one sever one’s connection with the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed and rise above it, or are all those who ‘striveth for noble ends’ invariably to be dragged down into the pit? And if one cuts the link to folly, what then? Does folly continue on, heedless, with ‘exalted reason’ powerless either to stop it or to shape the course of events?

I’ve been an editor at Nature for more than twenty years, and have seen, in that time, an increase in what I’d characterize as a siege mentality among scientists, particularly the more vocal adherents of what used to be called the ‘Public Understanding of Science’ (PUS) enterprise. This has been manifested as increasingly strident positions taken against anything that the proponent sees as unscientific, everything from established religion to homeopathy, from astrology to dowsing. In recent years, the whole business of creationism, intelligent design, the teaching of evolution and faith schools has gotten drawn into the mix, and the result, I contend, is that in battling these forces of unreason, the scientific enterprise has itself stooped to folly, deserting the code of rationality that makes it unique and whence derives its power. The cost will be science’s own existence.

It used to be that scientists did what they did, and would attempt to explain this to the uncaring multitudes, in as reasonable a way as possible, cognizant of the fact that whereas the multitudes might understand little of what the scientists were on about, the scientists had a duty to try to explain their activities nonetheless, gently, given that the multitudes, untimately, paid their wages.

The key to understanding was the power of the scientific method. Scientists would create hypotheses about the Universe, and, through creating a ‘toy’ version of part of it, try to test these hypotheses. Hypotheses that were substantiated by greater bodies of experiment became elevated to the status of ‘theory’. Whatever it did, science would never seek to promote any theory as truth in an absolute sense, for that was not what science was about – science is a system of provisional solutions, always subject to revision and elaboration. Key to the uniqueness of science – and, I maintain, its flexibility and power – is this sense of uncertainty, this precious provisional.

Scientists would never pretend that their findings shed light on any absolute truths. This is the important theme that lies behind the cliché ‘this research raises more questions than it answers’. Scientists know that whatever they discover, the sum of their knowledge will always appear as a small islet of knowledge, shrinking in relative terms before the ever-widening ocean of ignorance. The Copernican revolution moved the Earth from the center of the Universe, but the Universe has increased vastly more since the Copernican clockwork than this statement implies. Key to the scientific enterprise is a certain humility before the evidence.

Associated with this humility is science’s inherent democracy. Although regulated by tiers of experience and qualification, science should be open to anybody, irrespective of origin, gender, political or religious orientation, or even experience. Nobody should be afraid to ask a silly question – and, very often, it is the silly questions asked by amateurs on which rest the greatest scientific achievements. One thinks of the patent clerk who, when traveling by tram to work, came up with the idea of relativity; and the naturalist, allowed aboard the Beagle more for reasons of social snobbery than scientific acumen, who formulated the idea of descent with modification by means of natural selection – probably the most powerful scientific theory ever devised; powerful through its sheer simplicity and, therefore, its broad applicability. Science should welcome all comers, no matter how green they seem, and established scientists should accord their lisping attempts at science with the same respect as the more polished efforts of seasoned professionals.

So what went wrong?

In my view, scientists have become ever more impatient with the inability of the mass of the public to understand what they do, still less sympathize with it. This impatience is manifested in a most unlovely way: rather than remaining willing, with open ears, to listen to anything and everything the public might offer, no matter how bizarre, and quietly explaining the circumstances in which these ideas accord (or not) with the scientific method, scientists have either turned away from the public entirely, refusing to make their research in any way accessible; or they have become uncomfortably preachy, compiling lists of gradgrindian ‘facts’ which we, the public, really ought to know – not because of any inherent worth that can be discerned in any way by a member of the public, but simply because we, the self-selected scientists, have taken it upon ourselves to tell you that such-and-such is The Truth, a contention supported by nothing more than our own authority. This rather unattractive, hieratic trait of some scientists was sent up a long time ago by Hilaire Belloc in The Microbe:

‘The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen—
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so….
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!’

Given that people really don’t like being patronized, it is no wonder that the public, especially the young, is staying away from science in droves. If the self-selected scientists tell you that these are the facts that you should know, and never mind that you’re too dim to understand them, it’s no wonder that people desert science as being too inherently ‘hard’. This is proven in the breach by the success of more participatory events, such as the Cambridge Science Festival (of which I’ve been honored to have been a patron) in which visitors are encouraged to make their own discoveries – and which are absolutely mobbed. But when self-selected scientists set themselves up as a kind of secular priesthood, preaching to the multitudes, they are curiously reluctant to step down from the temples they have themselves created.

The saddest casualty of this increasingly authoritarian voice among scientists is the precious provisionality on which the whole scientific enterprise rests. Scientists are now inclined to tell you what you should know, which you must accept without demur (Oh! Let us never, never doubt, what nobody is sure about!).

With provisionality a thing of the past, scientists now feel themselves qualified to pronounce on things that they had avoided, quite rightly, as outside their remit – the business of absolute and revealed truth, properly the domain of religion. And because of that, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of scientists who equate the scientific method with atheism, the converse (as yet unstated) being that anyone who pretends to religious belief is by definition irrational and therefore is not fit to be a scientist.

The main culmination of this trend has been Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. For some years, Dawkins had been promoting the idea of evolution by natural selection not as a powerful theory in its own right, but as a force which should replace religion. This idea is elaborated in The God Delusion. What is most worrying is that this thesis falls foul of serious logical inconsistency, as well as traducing the whole basis and purpose of science.

The logical inconsistency lies in Dawkins’ assumption, which he regards as axiomatic, that articles of faith, such as God, ought to be subject to scientific testing. That this is plainly ridiculous is often muddied, especially in debates with creationists, about the status of the word ‘belief’. Because Dawkins and his acolytes tend to regard science and faith as equivalent competitors, when they are in fact nothing of the kind, the word ‘belief’ has become attached – wrongly—to scientific theories, such as “I believe in evolution”. Belief is a state in which one holds something to be true irrespective of the physical evidence, and as such applies to faith. Such notions have no place in science, and yet scientists would have us make it so.

And so we come to the increasing equation of science with atheism. This is not only illogical, but pernicious. Atheism cannot be a scientifically held position, because it relies on the certain knowledge that God does not exist. There is no way that such certainties can be established – for a start, science does not deal in certainties, and adherents of religion believe in the existence of God in a proper sense, that is, irrespective of physical evidence, without asking that such existence should be revealed (that creation scientists do this very thing is, of course, pathological, and traduces religion in the same but obverse sense that Dawkinsian atheism traduces science).

The only possible way to approach faith as a scientist, I think, is that of Thomas Henry Huxley, who in his coinage of the term ‘agnostic’ admitted, honestly, that there were parts of human knowledge and experience concerning which he, as a scientist, had no business to be pronouncing:

‘When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain “gnosis”—had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.’

Dawkins (and Dennett, and Hitchens, and others) have gone beyond this, crossing an important line, and, if they pretend to scientific reason, must—by logical necessity—have deserted it.

This leads me from the discussion of scientific atheism as illogical (which is bad enough) to its being pernicious (which is worse). This is quite a strong accusation, so I should justify it.

Atheism, in its explicit statement of a belief in a scenario that cannot be tested (the non-existence of God) is a faith like any other, so it is not only illogical but deeply wrong for atheists to claim science as speaking in its especial favor. That this is at the very least is a tactical error should be evident – creationists do much the same thing. But there is more to it than that. Given that there is, logically, no reason to connect atheism than any other religion with science, scientists have, in effect, changed their entire attitude to those who contemplate science from the outside. Rather than welcoming all comers and encouraging them to test their own ideas about the world, they impose an entry criterion. Science has become a religion, and proselytes must set their face against all false gods before even joining.

I foresee a bleak future for science, and it goes like this. Within science itself, people who profess religion will become increasingly marginalized and ridiculed, and their scientific achievements, irrespective of their intrinsic value, will be diminished simply because of their separate religious beliefs. Such scientists will find it increasingly hard to get tenure or grants. Such discrimination would be illegal, of course, but very hard to police.

To the outside, science will appear (if it does not already) increasingly exclusivist, strident and hieratic, and demand that anyone who wishes to contemplate a life in science must forswear any existing religious beliefs or face denigration and ridicule.

That such an attitude will worsen recruitment to science, especially from ethnic minorities, would be something scarcely to be wondered at. A couple of years ago I was lecturing about science to a large group of 14-year-olds in an inner-city school in London. Most of the pupils were Muslims, from strictly religious households. Some of the children were thrown into agonies – whom should they believe – me, the evolutionary biologist, or their respected elders? Such conundrums cause very real pain and distress, and will not be resolved by a strident attitude taken by scientists that all religions but their own atheism are inherently unworthy of discussion.

Atheism is the folly to which science now stoops, and the only possible result is its death. As Oliver Goldsmith wrote, in a different context (albeit just as brutal):

‘When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom, is — to die.’