What do we mean by science, and how does the scientific outlook translate to other spheres of human activity?
“Science,” says Alan Sokal, “is a worldview giving primacy to reason and the critical spirit”.
Lively and outspoken, the UCL and New York University physicist delivered the annual Sense about Science lecture on 27 February.
Homeopathy and religion came under humorous but scathing attack. Sokal expressed wry amusement at the UK government’s decision to assess the ‘competence’ of practitioners of a scientifically unfounded treatment.
Chairman Matt Ridley supported Sokal by swallowing a whole bottle of homeopathic sleeping tablets on stage. Needless to say, Ridley was still standing by the vote of thanks, given by Lord Taverne, trustee of Sense about Science.
“The epistemological bottom line of religion,” quipped Sokal, moving on to religious scriptures, “is, ‘because it says so’. Faith is not a rejection of reason but a lazy acceptance of bad reason.”
Sokal’s opposition to the ‘fog of verbiage’ that is unscientific reasoning was demonstrated in his 1996 parody of the postmodern, deconstructionalist, ultra-relativist view of science, in which he spun gravity as a ‘social construct’.
Scientific reasoning cannot be equated with myth, nor fact with assertion of fact, continued Sokal. We must be prepared to “modestly insist that empirical claims are substantiated with empirical evidence,” in Sokal’s words.
Sense about Science aims to inform the public of that evidence, in the face of often poor reporting, and to debunk an abundance of myth and pseudoscience.
However, science is not restricted to “a bag of tricks applied to arcane problems,” but is part of the “application of a rationalist worldview,” according to Sokal.
The principles of scientific thought are “not internal to science”, concluded Sokal, but can be adopted in all spheres of life. Science may be practiced by “historians, detectives and plumbers”.
“Scientific scepticism acts like intellectual acid, dissolving dogma and superstition. But this process is far from complete.”
If your reporting is correct and Sokal’s attitude to science colors what appears to be an alarming disdain about the rest of the world, then I no longer care very much about science. Religion may be bunk to a lot of (dare I say it) holier-than-thou atheists, who make pronouncements about religion without bothering to discover much about it, but it matters an awful lot to enormous numbers of people, including me, and the feelings of such people cannot and should not be dismissed with such sneering arrogance, especially if scientists want to reach out to a wider community rather than (as at present) chat amongst themselves. You may not approve of religion. You may think it illogical. But it matters, and it affects how scientists conduct their lives and livelihoods in the wider society. To dismiss religion in such a casual manner will only isolate scientists yet further in a bubble of increasing irrelevance to most people, who will see science only, at best, as “a bag of tricks applied to arcane problems”. The “application of a rationalist worldview” may be what Sokal is striving for, but to most people it comes across as a load of eggheads telling peopl,e, from on high, what’s best for them. And nobody likes being patronized.
Henry writes a very good argument about religion- who could disagree? Not me. However, religion is not homeopathy, and I like what Sokal, Ridley and co did and said about that.
Yes, but Sokal et al put homeopathy and religion very much in the same boat. This gives the impression of scientists forming a ring and shooting outwards, indiscriminately. If scientists want to win friends and influence people, this playing-to-the-gallery appreoach really isn’t the way to go about it.
I was reporting more or less verbatim. I agree with Henry that an extremely aggressive, disdainful attitude to religion is unhelpful to scientists arguing contra religion, not least because people will hold on harder to that which is attacked. It is a shame that we do not make more of the paralells – the need to feel a sense of beauty and of belonging is a uniquely human one, and cannot be discounted as ‘irrational’ – research studies year on year are giving us evolutionary/genetic bases for such things, after all. But science can and does for me fulfil that sense of awe and connection, I have no need for ‘God’ in the traditional sense. (I do appreciate the valid moral and philosophical points of serious religious thought on their own merits, again without need of reference to a supreme being.) The scientific mind is not amoral, cold or ugly, and should not be made so, albeit unintentionally, by its proponents.
I thought the gist of the talk was based around the irrelevance of pseudoscience and religion to science.
Science is about finding answers and is not about belief. Religion and homeopathy are.
Science is about finding answers and is not about belief. Religion and homeopathy are.
Quite. So why do scientists get so hung up about it?
I think scientists get hung up about religion when it seeks to challenge science – from Galileo to stem cells – or when religious advice runs counter to scientific advice (e.g. condoms & HIV prevention).
It is all about demarcation, the demarcation of science from ‘the other’. While we can disagree about the nature of the line which is drawn between science and other domains in society (is it ‘the scientific method’, is it ‘scientific reasoning’, and if so, what do these mean), we generally accept that the line exists.
However, the stamp ‘scientific’ provides claims with a certain authority (the origins of which are subject to a long philosophical debate) and many practitioners in many domains crave this authority by positioning themselves as ‘scientific’.
This wasn’t always so. The stamp ‘religion’ used to provide claims with much more authority than ‘scientific’ and in the past it was that way that authority was pursued.
This authority is coupled to a social responsibility. After all, if people believe (perhaps a poor choice of words) or act upon the claims you provide, you had better thought about them properly. The boundary between science and ‘the rest’ currently is as important as the boundary between religion and ‘the rest’ used to be in e.g. the 15th century.
Sokal argues that not everybody can be trusted to wield this kind of authority: but scientists can. The sole remain question is why scientists can?