Science

Steve Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317488323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God's activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by science. In "Science", Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one. Fuller sympathetically explores what it might mean to live scientifically. Can science give a sense of completeness to one's life? Can it account for the entirety of what it is to be human? And what does our continuing belief in scientific progress say about us as a species? In answering these questions, Fuller ranges widely over the history of science and religion - from Aristotle and the atomists to Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists - and takes a close look at what science is, how its purpose has changed over the years, and what role religion and in more recent years atheism have played in its progression. Science, argues Fuller, is now undergoing its own version of secularization. We are ceasing to trust science in its institutional forms, formulated by an anointed class of science priests, and instead we are witnessing the emergence of what Fuller calls Protscience' - all sorts of people, from the New Age movement to anti-evolutionists, claiming scientific authority as their own. Fuller shows that these groups are no more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic. Fearless and thought-provoking, Science questions some of our most fundamental beliefs about the nature and role of science, and is a distinct and important contribution to debates about evolution, intelligent design, atheism, humanism, the notion of scientific progress, and the public understanding of science.

1 The gospel according to Dr Strangelove

DOI: 10.4324/9781315710235-2

The pursuit of science is more often defended for what it makes possible than for what it actually does. In fact, what science actually does is readily seen as hard, boring, dangerous and often morally dubious. Yet, opinion polls repeatedly show that public support for all branches of science – including basic research without any specific policy goals – remains strong. The strength of this support is all the more remarkable given the destruction and risk that the planet has had to sustain in the name of “science” over the past hundred years alone. There would be no aerial warfare, mass surveillance, mass extinctions, forced sterilizations, gas chambers, nuclear threats, environmental despoliation or global warming without many of the most advanced natural and social sciences. While the public may be ignorant of the basic facts and theories of science, they are certainly aware of the facts I have just cited. Yet lay belief in science flourishes in a way that would be the envy of any religion, devotion to which normally involves some serious acquaintance and engagement with the relevant doctrines.

This point does not carry the weight it might because we implicitly adopt an “end justifies the means” approach to science. The parts of science that have become the signature products of our humanity – including the theories of Newton, Darwin and Einstein – are unequivocally “good” only if you operate with a very forgiving sense of unintended consequences and extend indefinitely the time frame for the desired impacts to be felt. If you are inclined to entertain such a generous sense of cause and effect, then you might as well believe in Divine Providence too. And perhaps you already do without realizing it. Many if not most people believe that some science has immediate practical benefit but the rest of science is worthy of support in the vague hope that it too may yield fruit someday, or at least will prove to be of more good than harm, even if some harm is committed along the way. Yet, given the dearth of historical accounts of science’s effects that might empirically underwrite these convictions, it is easy to conclude that faith in science is the modern superstition. When a new medical treatment or technological convenience comes along, its scientific pedigree is trailed, its benefits are trumped up and all prior scientific failures and malfeasances are forgotten. This is very much how belief in miracles works to maintain people’s faith in God through hard times. Science, like faith, breeds perseverance in the face of adversity.

You would be wrong to think that I am trying to cast science in an unfavourable light. I only mean to redress any biases that the reader might bring to this enquiry. I certainly don’t mean to dismiss our faith in science. After all, the attitude seems to work: many of us are here now considering the problem I have posed from a position of relative comfort. From that alone, it would seem to follow that science has yet to be the source of our ruin. I only wish to suggest at the outset that we need to appreciate the source of this faith in science – which is not especially well grounded in science’s actual track record or balance sheet – and see it for what it is. It is a faith based on a familiar theologically inspired idea about the cognitively privileged place of humans in the cosmos.

Moreover, the source of this idea is quite specific. It goes back to the biblical Abraham, who was driven in old age and without offspring, by a voice he took to be from God, to leave the land of his birth and settle in an unknown land, where he proceeded to prosper and even bear children. However, that same voice then told him to sacrifice his male heir, Isaac, which he followed once again until it told him at the last minute that a ram would suffice. From that point onwards, the path to human redemption began to be charted. The three religions that have been most responsible for the rise of science – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all claim this story as their founding moment. For our purposes, two things stand out in the Abrahamic narrative, one relating to Abraham himself and the other to the deity in which he believed. Let us dwell on Abraham first.

What is striking about Abraham was his belief that the future will be better than the past – indeed, so much better that it led him to stake just about everything on it. This sort of brinkmanship, whereby individuals willingly sacrifice themselves and each other for a “promised land”, no matter the cost, really comes into its own with the deployment of science as a vehicle for modernizing the world. And like Abraham, our own failure to self-destruct in the process has served to leave us stronger. Dr Strangelove provides a burlesque update of this distinctive sense of self-belief in Stanley Kubrick’s eponymous 1964 film version of the Cold War world-view. Strangelove, who comes across as a rehabilitated ex-Nazi, proposes a US nuclear strategy that goes so far as to suggest that those few survivors of the doomsday bomb would be, as if through a process of divine election, the ones truly equipped to take humanity forwards to perfection. In any case, the ability of our species to bounce back from quite obviously science-led catastrophes in the twentieth century – only to embrace science with more gusto – reveals just how strong our taste for perseverance has become.

Of course, there is a less theistic way of justifying our continued faith in science: that there is a human condition at all is one big cosmic crapshoot, but by focusing on the upside of science we are gambling that it might provide just enough help to prevent its downside from eliminating us altogether. Thus, science delivers us salvation by the principle that “necessity is the mother of invention’, a phrase associated with the great Enlightenment prophet of progress, the Marquis de Condorcet, whose spirit lives on in every “technological fix” that purports to solve the latest problem besetting the planet. The risks that human beings, both individually and collectively, have undertaken – willingly or not – in the name of “science” over the past quarter millennium far exceed the limits of Darwinian cognitive propriety, according to which we are only one among many species struggling for survival in a chance-based world. If anything, contra Darwin, science has been promoted precisely to raise our game above the risk-averse survival strategies of the other species, possibly to a level that would allow us to manage all life on earth, if not the entire universe.

In the jargon of the emerging transhumanist movement, science is the ultimate proactionary enterprise, always in the business of pushing back the limits of our knowledge (and our being), in line with the principle that opportunity costs are real costs. In other words, except under the most extreme circumstances, the effort spent in trying and failing is worth more than the effort saved from never having tried at all. That is the exact opposite of the more fashionable precautionary principle long favoured by environmentalists that gives the upper hand to harm avoidance. Not surprisingly, those who would advance the cause of science have typically adopted a “no pain, no gain” attitude towards human life, not least their own. The image of scientists trying their concoctions on themselves may be the stuff of B-movies but it also has a distinguished pedigree reaching back to Newton’s alchemically inspired ingestions of mercury and the diverse pharmaceutical portfolio of the scientific method’s founder, Francis Bacon.

In this context, we need to resist the sort of glib, pious claims often repeated in ethics classes that the medical doctors in Nazi concentration camps perverted science. Of course, they violated conventional morality. But science presupposes the moral universe of someone on the verge of gambling with all reality for all time, not simply the lives of those who happen to be around at the moment. That we now happen to be attracted or repelled by certain courses of action is thus not a sufficient ethical gauge. We need also to consider how those actions would look to target groups in the past and the future whose approval we would seek to justify whatever we do. (An interesting argument may be had about the relative weighting given to past and future audiences for our actions.) It is clear that the people we count as the great heroes from the past – and not only in science – have gone against the grain of their times, often suffering many years of misunderstanding and even abuse, some into their graves. In contrast, those who appeared reasonable and measured in their day are now remembered mainly as well-intentioned temporary blockages to the overall flow of history. In short, the value of the past vis-à-vis the future, and of the individual vis-à-vis the collective, is bound to be unconventional – even under the most democratic of political regimes – if one is acting as a scientist.

The Nazi doctors overstepped an invisible ethical line that scientists routinely approach simply by virtue of being scientists. A scientist does not measure the value of life simply in terms of those who happen to be living now. There is always a bigger picture to care about. To be sure, none of this justifies Nazi atrocities, but it does give prima facie credence to claims by Nazi scientists that, when compared to the “politically correct” Weimar Republic, they found Hitler’s regime a freer environment for conducting research. After all, Weimar, as the seat of Germany’s first representative democracy, was especially sensitive to the interests of social groups that had historically lacked an expressive outlet. In that respect, it was more focused on redressing past damages than offering future direction – and, if nothing else, however much it builds on the past, science always faces forwards in time.

This sense of science’s extended existential horizons is sometimes invoked to demonstrate an unbridgeable gulf between scientific and religious sensibilities, the latter typically identified with ordinary moral scruples. Thus, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has gone so far as to suggest that alienation from the things that normally give meaning to our lives is constitutive of the scientific mindset. It leads him to see an elective affinity between the scientific worldview and atheism. The profound wrongheadedness of this claim reminds us that scientists are rarely the best defenders of science. On the contrary, what makes science so demanding on conventional morality is not its indifference to meaning but its principled pursuit of meaning as an end in itself. What appears “cold” and “alienating” about the scientific worldview to any given generation is bound to become part of the normal self-understandings of later generations, just as long as science is treated as not merely an exotic hobby but the vanguard of humanity. Weinberg’s failure to appreciate this point ends up reducing his lifelong quest to arrive at the mathematically simplest formulation of nature’s laws to a self-indulgence that he and his colleagues have somehow managed to delude the American taxpayer into subsidizing for more than half a century.

One distinguished physicist who not only manages to grasp science’s intimate relationship to our humanity but also leverages it to imagine alternative futures, is Freeman Dyson. Being a decade older than Weinberg may have helped. Born in 1923, Dyson began as the bright young British protégé of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman on the “Manhattan Project”, which built the first successful atomic bomb. Dyson accepted their efficiency-based arguments for nuclear arms as a deterrent to conventional warfare. Without ever quite renouncing that view, he has spent the past sixty years on just the right side of scientific respectability challenging orthodoxies in physics and biology about life’s origins and prospects, typically by fuelling various counter-Darwinian currents that would free us in various ways from our biological past. Perhaps Dyson’s most famous hypothesis is that human life could thrive indefinitely in artificial environments in outer space. His career has been that of an avuncular Dr Strangelove, had he appeared in a Hollywood sequel, now in atonement for having worked on the project that did the most to underscore our transience as an earthbound species. It is also easy to imagine Dyson’s evil twin in a counterfactual world where the Nazis triumphed, or at least survived the Second World War. He would be an Albert Speer-like figure, who out of a vague sense of guilt for the slaughtered Jews decided to devote his life to the support of indigenous peoples to remain, just as they themselves would wish, in “separate but equal” environments.

Faced with Weinberg and Dyson as alternative artists of scientific living, many will wonder which is worse: someone who takes science as antithetical to conventional morality or someone who takes it as the basis for a very unconventional morality. But this Hobson’s choice obscures science’s ultimate problem with the public, which has less to do with what science is trying to sell than the hardness of its sales pitch. Under favourable political conditions, science has a tendency to impose itself too much on too many too quickly. What the Nazis failed to see is that if science constitutes the ultimate form of human self-realization, it is defeated if much of Homo sapiens ends up being regarded with contempt, if not subject to segregation or outright extermination.

Nevertheless, it was easy for Nazi doctors to abuse their freedom from both a scientific and a moral standpoint, since the two malfeasances can easily converge, as when subjects feel compelled to engage in deception simply to placate threatening experimenters. Absent conventional moral scruples, scientists might be inclined to apply more pressure on recalcitrant subjects to deliver salient data. This is why the radical character of human cruelty can be easily mistaken for the profundity of scientific discovery: both disclose hidden vulnerabilities that in turn provide opportunities for unnatural manipulations.

The difference between cruelty and discovery ultimately turns on whether there is mutual consent between the enquirer and the enquired. But what counts as an appropriate channel of communication in this context is open to considerable debate and negotiation. On the one hand, the scientific worldview is increasingly popularized and incorporated into everyday life, which in practice means that we have become quite used to the idea that others (suitably credentialled) might know more about our own bodies than we do and hence are entitled to do things to it that we ourselves would never countenance; hence an increasingly invasive medical profession. On the other hand, scientists’ disclaimers to the contrary, even the most seemingly artificial encounters in the laboratory bear the traces of various power asymmetries found in the rest of society, not least class markers linked to accent and comportment – some acquired, others inherited.

Popper, one of the few twentieth-century philosophers relevant today, was right to lay the blame for “blind faith” in science squarely on the blindness of such faith – by both scientists and subjects – rather than on science itself. Indeed, Popper would have scientists check their own behaviour in the same way as they would check those whom they study. Reflexive awareness of this sort would ensure that a substantial transformation of the human condition on the basis of a science-based policy is licensed only if it is reversible in the light of any negative consequences. Thus, not only would scientists have the freedom to reject a hypothesis they previously accepted in light of falsifying evidence, but also a society subject to a policy based on such a hypothesis would be empowered to reject it at the next electoral opportunity, should it not turn out as desired. This principle could serve as science’s Golden Rule and would serve to safeguard against Nazi-style excesses.

Just how literally one should take Popper’s reversibility condition will be an increasingly interesting question for denizens of the twenty-first century. A completely reversible experiment operates very much like a game, in that once play is over, no matter who wins or loses, the players resume their lives as if the game had never been played. Of course, no experiment – or game, for that matter – is completely reversible in that sense. Subjects retain psycho-physical traces of their participation, which makes a literal restoration of a subject’s state of mind highly unlikely, notwithstanding Hollywood’s recent sentimental take on neurology’s hopes for what Alexander Pope originally called “the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”. Thirty years earlier Stanley Kubrick (once again) had it right in his film adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange. By the final scene, the film’s protagonist Alex has experienced both the application and the reversal of a radical form of aversion therapy designed to cure him of antisocial behaviour. He comes to realize that if experience is reversible, then reality is no more than a very rigorous dream. Armed with this insight, Alex stages his own “triumph of the will”, exclaiming sarcastically, “I was cured all right!” Here we catch a glimpse of a being incapable of guilt – and perhaps even harm – because he lacks the opportunity to regret actions that cannot be undone.

But it is not clear that subjects are morally required to be restored to some pre-experimental state of being in order to participate in scientific experiments. They may accept an attenuated version of “reversibility” as, say, “commutability”, whereby subjects end an experiment in a state that they regard as functionally equivalent to the one in which they began. In fact, that may be necessary to ensure that what I dubbed science’s Golden Rule does not inadvertently inhibit the experimental ethos altogether. This raises the question of adequate substitutes for aspects of subjects sacrificed in the name of “science”. These may range from insurance policy payouts and prosthetic replacement parts to regenerated organs and the wholesale re-embodiment of the subject’s mind in a more durable, not entirely carbon-based, container. However the issue is resolved, it is destined to be a high priority item in future science and public policy.

Religion, far from opposing or resolving the predicament of blind faith in science, set the precedent for its expression. When did the Christian Crusades against Islam in the Middle Ages cross over the line from legitimate attempts at conversion? When do Muslim jihads against the West – or US-style “freedom crusades” in the Islamic world – cross that line today? Questions of this sort start to get asked only once one has already accepted, at least in principle, that some physical violence may be necessary in the pursuit of one’s ends. The problem of blind faith – in either religion or science – is that the end ceases to justify the means. In the other words, the spirit of the end is lost because the means so blatantly undermine the purported end. In short, a system of belief or enquiry that degrades actual human beings in the name of advancing the human condition always potentially defeats itself. The question is where to draw the line.

This is a good place to consider the role of God in the Abrahamic narrative. God ends up finding a proxy sacrifice for Abraham’s son in a way that enables him to test Abraham’s faith, but at a much lower cost to all concerned. Understandably Abraham sees God as merciful for sparing his son from slaughter. But that is not how God sees the matter at all: as if God were somehow moved by Abraham’s emotional state. It is more plausible to suppose that God, having realized that Abraham was already inclined to do his bidding, judged that Isaac’s sacrifice was unnecessary and that perhaps sparing Isaac would have the added benefit of stiffening Abraham’s resolve in the future.

In ascribing to God such a “cunning” sense of reason – as Hegel might put it – I suppose that the divine intellect is an indefinitely extended version of our own. This may be hard to take nowadays, even for religious believers. For anyone who has come of age only in the past twenty years, when the fall of the Berlin Wall has been followed by the collapse of the global credit market, the phrase “masters of the universe” would seem to ridicule everyone from Dr Strangelove to his Wall Street counterpart, Gordon Gekko. All of them have thought they could adopt God’s eye-view over their fellow humans to gain strategic advantage. And yes, they got it wrong – even horribly wrong. But that does not necessarily invalidate the spirit of their enterprise. An implication of “spirit” is that it always transcends its immediate mode of expression. Thus, Strangelove and Gekko should be seen as inadequate, even primitive and corrupt versions of what might nevertheless be achievable in the fullness of time. It is exactly this prospect for development that science promises. It aims at a mode of being – call it “divine” – in which we are endowed with a much greater storehouse of information, capacity to act on the world, powers of prediction and, perhaps most importantly, universe of concern, specifically one that extends not only to the normally foreseea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The gospel according to Dr Strangelove
• 2. Can science live with its past?
• 3. Styles of living scientifically: a tale of three nations
• 4. We are all scientists now: the rise of Protscience
• 5. The scientific ethic and the spirit of literalism
• 6. What has atheism – old or new – ever done for science?
• 7. Science as an instrument of divine justice
• 8. Scientific progress as secular providence
• 9. Science poised between changing the future and undoing the past
• 10. Further reading
• Index