In an era in which science is under threat from religious fundamentalism, medical quackery, and general scaremongering, there has been a scientific backlash against all forms of thinking outside the scheme of rational empiricism. This is evidenced in the Channel 4 documentary entitled "Enemies of Reason," in which Richard Dawkins chases down such "primitive" beliefs and outmoded ways of thinking which "impoverish our culture." Likewise, in the United States, the biologist Jerry Coyne recently asserted at Edge magazine:

We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.

The economic and political reasons for this polarising antagonism are understandable (see this previous post). However, in historical terms this total rejection of supernaturalism can be challenged. The first half of my research thesis examines the history of supernaturalist encounters from within - rather than opposed to - mainstream empirical science. It shows how, from Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, through the nineteenth-century's Society for Psychical Research, through James Clerk Maxwell's thermodynamic demon, to Marvin Minsky's demonic model of consciousness, rationalists have engaged with the supernatural when science reached the limits of Enlightenment methods of enquiry. And whilst science since the Enlightenment has driven us through multiple technological revolutions in a remarkably short span of time, it is worth remembering (as Coyne clearly has not) that for the majority of human history supernatural ways of interpreting the world have been the dominant ones, and human knowledge and technology still developed over this far longer period, albeit much less spectacularly.

In my view, then, the distinction between scientific and supernatural epistemologies is not quite so polar as scientists such as Dawkins or Coyne make out (though I appreciate their motivations). I should add that my argument does not assert that supernatural methods are in any systematic way better than rational ones, nor that things like ghosts or demons or astrological effects exist in reality, only that thinking that they might exist and using alternative methods working under that assumption can produce insights normal science would struggle to reach were it to follow its normal tangents. Once the alternative approaches map out the new ground, often quarantined from normal practice by being labelled "thought experiments" or "placeholder terms," science invariably assumes control once again in matching, or falsifying the match between, hypothesis and reality. I have to be supremely careful in my research that whilst re-evaluating the historical value of supernatural modes of enquiry, I also demarcate the limits to it, where rational science takes over with its time-honoured methodological reliability.

The best way to tackle the assertion that supernaturalism is the equal to science, would be through systematically deconstructing supernaturalist claims and exposing them as empirically unreliable, whilst allowing that in special cases supernaturalism offers a subtle sub-set of the methodologies at its disposal. Nevertheless, given the level of scientific illiteracy among the general public, the influence of a press generally insensitive to the difference between good and bad science, and, in my own field, the belief among postmodern academics that science is a relativistic and ideological epistemology, it is very tempting to do a wholesale demolition job of supernaturalist beliefs, and lose the subtlety of their merging with rationality. Thus the acerbic tone adopted by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their critique of postmodernist theory, tellingly entitled Higher Superstition; the aggressive manner adopted by Richard Dawkins; the patronising voice adopted by popular defenders against Bad Science, such as Ben Goldacre and David Colquhoun.

But when I read the response to Dawkins' programme by Neil Spencer, the Observer's astrologer, I realised that in spite of the nuances of my research it can be very difficult to avoid taking this directly oppositional stance in the public sphere, when the claims made are so obviously empirically false, and the tone of the supernaturalist thinker is just as acerbic as that of the scientist about which he complains. Inspired by the methods of Goldacre and Colquhoun, I tried to deconstruct his counter-attack in which he asserts the value of superstition, astrology, and alternative medicine. I start with astrology:

There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that's eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology's basic personality types number 1,728.

Rather than "more being better," one would expect that a personality model that divides people into four types will be more reliable than one that uses 1,728, since even a randomised response to the Myers-Briggs test would give a subject a 1-in-4 chance of being placed in the correct category (although as I understand it the test actually uses 16). It is not feasible that I fit neatly into one of 1,728 personality types, whereas all standard personality tests do not give absolute categories, but percentages which allow for people to straddle groups. Further, the Myers-Briggs test relies on subjects answering questions about themselves, and draws conclusions from that data based on aggregate samples of a large population. By contrast astrology draws conclusions from the stars, and applies them to people based on nothing more than the coincidence of their birthday. Rather than people determining the range of possible personalities (which is what we do tacitly in everyday life when meeting another person for the first time, with a large degree of success), astrologers cherry pick from a pool of personalities and apply them to people according to the rigid and arbitrary rule of celestial mechanics. As Dawkins showed, a reading for one star sign such as Capricorn has the same predictive value for an individual of a different zodiac, as for the person actually born in January.

But if the numbers game does not work, there's always the name game:

Am I bothered by Dawkins calling me names? Not really. I'm in some esteemed company - Resurgence publisher Satish Kumar, and Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (and the Queen's physician) - also fall under Dawkins' stony disapproval.

Declaring himself unaffected by being called names, he nevertheless decides to name them instead, assuming we will be impressed where he was not. So, in keeping with this intelligent tactic, let us name names back at him: Pinker, Crick, Maxwell, Darwin, Kelvin, Einstein...Actually, rather than going on with this squabbling, which is conducted on the level of a playground argument, lets switch to some serious empirical scrunity:

Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.

I'm not sure which study Spencer was thinking of in asserting that animals respond to homeopathy. It certainly wasn't the large-scale, double-blind, placebo controlled trial on dairy herds in Sweden in 2003, which found no evidence of effect, but a "considerable risk to animal welfare" in the continuing use of the treatment. Nor was it this study from the Veterinary Record in 2006. Or this one from Oslo. Or this from Canada. In fact, if you use Google Scholar to search for "homeopathy animal placebo," you will be hard pressed to discover any of the evidence Neil Spencer cites (or, rather, fails to cite, given that he gives no further references).

But wait a minute. Clearly I am the one being silly by looking for such scientific studies at all. Perhaps the failure to detect any difference between placebo and homeopathic remedies is precisely that:

Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.

Now instead of tackling Spencer by evidence, I'm just getting angry. That bloody medical science, always so pernickity when deciding whether or not to produce expensive quantities of a drug and release it into a large medical population; so annoyingly demanding in its tests for the effectiveness of alternative therapies. There is certainly a case for containing the burden of proof on medical trials, and separating responsibility for testing from the pharmaceutical companies which produce the treatments (Goldacre himself comments on this in The Guardian this week). But in the meantime, I'm not sure I trust the coin-toss method.

Though having said that, according to Spencer, we are not certain of getting better even by drugs which have been subjected to such a lengthy, scientifically controlled testing process:

The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent.

True. But according to a study in the quacks' journal Homeopathy, the success rate of that alternative therapy is around 70 per cent, so not much better than mainstream medicine. (Though the study asked patients who had paid for and received homeopathic treatment - with no placebo control - whether they thought their condition had improved. Surprise, surprise, having handed over wads of cash, many of them did.) And when you consider that most mainstream medicine will often be treating otherwise chronic, life-threatening illness, whereas homeopathy will tend not to be used by people lying incapacitated in intensive care wards, the apparently lower success rate of some approved drugs is understandable.

Finally, keeping the argument at its markedly unsubtle ebb, we get back to names again:

Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.

It is noticeable that all these scientists date from before the eighteenth century, and it is entirely consistent with theories of paradigm shift that the new scientific methodology did not immediately replace the old, supernaturalist speculations. Today, four hundred years on, and having consistently proved its superiority, one would hope that the scientific revolution has been completed.

Nevertheless, the fact that it has not remains interesting; in the esteemed company of Boyle and Newton, I am intrigued by astrology and alternative therapy too, or I would not be dedicating a substantial chunk of my thesis to it. Likewise, the Times Higher this week reports of the nine "psi" research groups across UK universities. As parapsychologist Chris French explains, "The fact is that the majority of the population does believe in this stuff, and a sizeable minority of the population claims to have had direct experience of the paranormal. If psychologists have nothing to say about this topic, they are missing out on a broad part of human experience." Indeed, Dawkins' own programme featured a psychologist interested in the depth of belief in water dowsers; comically, they continued to believe they could dowse, despite their success rate being exposed as no better than would be expected by chance. I was disappointed Dawkins as an interested scientist did not ask the follow up question, which is that dowsing outside the laboratory conditions must have some effect, given its survival into the twenty-first century. Possibly water dowsers are excellent interpreters of natural signs, such as increased vegetation or changing lie of the land, and might well use this entirely explicable if implicit method, rather than explicitly a twitching branch, to predict where water might run. Learning how they become so expert at interpretation would be fascinating, as indeed was Derren Brown's analysis of the manipulations of "cold reading" used by spiritualists at seances (believe me, once the illusionist reveals the subtle pressures they exert on an audience, those who continue to do it believing they are actually communicating with spirits seem nothing more than silver-tongued salesmen).

As serious researchers correctly suggest, there is no doubt that astrology, supernaturalism, ghosts are part of human culture. Whether they exist or not in the physical world, they undeniably exist for half of us in the mind, which is why even the most rational of scientists sometimes use them in thought experiments to provoke the scientific community into debate. They are therefore worthy of physical, psychological, and in my case literary study, and it is this significance that proponents should assert. Were they to do so, they would make opponents like Dawkins appear to be attacking a straw man, and one moreover which allows itself to be subjected to the same rigorous empirical enquiry as the more mainstream science of which he is an exponent.

But this will never happen, so the view has to remain thus: it is interesting that humans fall for it; it is interesting that it once was thought to work; it has generated some valid knowledge in the past. But just as I could use a flint to light a fire, but prefer a match, true science has a way of getting things done which alternative therapies and superstitious beliefs simply cannot match. This is why I, like Dawkins or the other defenders of reason, find it hard to otherwise than to mock and patronise the absurd beliefs and false claims of a "primitive" such as Spencer.

Labels: astrology, Bad Science, Enemy of Reason, homeopathy, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture

Like a good old Roman bloodbath, there's something spectacular in seeing the seasoned intellectual warriors Terry Eagleton and Richard Dawkins, respectively the United Kingdom's best-known literary theorist and scientist, scrapping in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion, Eagleton accuses him of being "theologically illiterate," of producing a "vulgar caricature of religious faith," of "lunging, flailing, mispunching." Anyone who thinks academia is dull, dispassionate and impersonal should think again.

Not having read The God Delusion, I can only comment from the sidelines on this debate, and on Eagleton's review in particular. Eagleton has spent the last forty years exposing the materialist ideology that underlies culture, and so it is surprising that he does not really ask why Dawkins has felt the need to publish the book in the first place. If as Eagleton says "professional atheists" are "the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood," why would Dawkins jump into the melee so unprepared?

In A.S. Byatt's (yes, her again!) Virgin in the Garden quadrilogy, a grumpy, atheist English teacher, Bill Potter, sermonises to his family about the contradictory and placatory myth-making of Christianity. He is enraged and alienated when his daughter marries a clergyman in the second book. But he is equally angry in the fourth when he discovers that his grandchildren are not taught the Bible at school. How, he blusters, can one expect to understand and appreciate Paradise Lost without first knowing Genesis. This is the curious position most atheistic or agnostic literary intellectuals find themselves in. Unable or unwilling to believe in God, we read "in the beginning was the Word" quite literally, for without the Word our culture of literary words would not have assumed the wonderfully multiple shape it has.

Eagleton, a Catholic, points this out to Dawkins. But Dawkins knows and appreciates his literary canon as well (I remember his wonderful readings from Keats at the lecture I attended last year), and he too cannot have failed to notice the centrality of Christianity to it. Even if he adopts the uncompromisingly atheistic position of Bill Potter, he should, like him, surely see the significance of faith. That he apparently does not acknowledge this in his new book suggests that he is fighting so wildly because he has been backed into such a tight corner, and is unable to give an inch of ground.

The majority of Eagleton's essay is a corrective explanation of what Christianity is actually about (in this, he slyly slips his voice, so it is hard to recognise whether he is simply retelling the story as history, or making a statement of personal faith). He concerns himself by studying how religious belief might be alien to science, but he is too brief in his consideration of the reciprocal relationship of how science might be alien to religion, from which Dawkins' argument springs. When he does glance at Dawkins' motives, Eagleton says that The God Delusion arises from "a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste." But when Robert Hooke, perhaps the greatest of the early English empiricists, looked down his new microscrope at the eye of the common fly, he did not see himself as reducing the mystery of God's creation but elevating it, seeing in the thousand elements that constitute the eye the range of minute interventions of God in the natural world. Even after Darwin, there is surely (as Darwin writes in that glorious closing paragraph of The Origin of Species), a greater grandeur in the view of life as continuously evolving under elegantly simple laws, whether these have their origin in a volcanic vent or a being beyond the stars. No, there is no reason why common sense empiricism should lead automatically to a divide from religion.

And, as Eagleton notes, Dawkin's rigid empirical principles apparently desert him as he fails to ask why so many millions of people do hold a genuine belief in God. Even if belief has its foundations in the neurological structures of the brain, as a mechanism for survival, it is definitively in the world, as well as, so believers say, transcendent from it. Why does Dawkins deny even this? There must be another, deeper reason why Dawkins has written this book, at this moment, with such paradoxical ferocity, other than the old "two cultures" schism. From my personal experience, I see something of where Dawkins is coming from. For an agnostic like myself, in spite of my Bill Potter-like appreciation of religion as a textual artefact, I now feel under pressure to reject theology entirely. In the light of conflict in the Middle-East, knowing the brutality of Catholicism in allowing AIDs and dogma to spread in Africa in equal measure, in my fear of the grip evangelicals are exerting on objective knowledge, I cannot help but want to react, as Dawkins has done, by taking a swipe at the systematic whole, even if it means destroying the parts I appreciate for their literary import.

Although F.R. Leavis would disagree with me on this one, literary criticism has less potential than science to improve the world. It is neither literature nor religion which will develop drugs for AIDs (although neither of these things developed the weapons used in the Middle East either). Dawkins, then, must be feeling the heat of religion even more than I do. As he commented to Edge, the "tactically, politically savvy" thing to do would be to occupy the middle of the road between religion and science. His failure to do this has ensured that he has

come in for a lot of criticism from some of my scientific colleagues because...they feel that I'm rocking the boat and, as it were, giving aid and comfort to the creationists. And I think in a way they might have a point because I have heard that some creationists love to quote people like me because it lends weight to their claim that if you are an evolutionist that means that you have to be an atheist.

However, Dawkins continues

I'm concerned with what's true. For me the evolution/creation war is really just a battle. It's a skirmish in a larger war between supernaturalism and naturalism, and I don't think that I'm prepared to compromise on what I think is true in order to win a tactical battle in a skirmish in what I see as a larger war.

I do not agree with Dawkins' tactics. As with all wars, it generates martyrs rather than winning hearts and minds. Like all bad strategies (military or intellectual) it lacks a plan for exit by which one can give ground, gracefully, when the war is at last being won. But the thing that most interests me is that Dawkins knows this. The God Delusion does not spring, as Eagleton suggests it does, primarily from an ignorance of religion but from a fear of it, an anxiety that is fully self-conscious. The God Delusion may not tread lightly in the centre ground of the debate, but it certainly helps to show how extensively that debate has become polarised. The war promises to be long and brutal. At least the punches between Eagleton and Dawkins are going to be confined to the the letters pages of the LRB, and not the back alleys of Baghdad or the classrooms of our schools.

Labels: religion, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture, Terry Eagleton, The God Delusion

I knew he would be the one even before I got in to the hall. As people queued up outside, a man stood handing out leaflets. The man who was sat just in front of me when we eventually sat down, took one leaflet then, after a moments pause, another couple. I could see him, at various moments in the lecture, shaking his head solemnly. Then, when he shifted position, I could just glance over his shoulder to read the telling words in the headline of the website print out he was holding: "God..[line break]...Evolution." As the questions began, the man looked desperately around for the attendants stalking the room with microphones and, eventually, he got his question in: "Thank-you for your talk Mr. Dawkins. You think you have answered the 'How,' but what about the 'Why'?..."

Richard Dawkins certainly pulls them in. The conference hall at the Life Centre at which I saw him lecture was packed with 480 people. Having been lecturing for 30 years, as one of our best- known scientists after the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has a vast spectrum of experience and literature on which to draw. The lecture itself comprised readings, by himself and his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, from some of the most lyrical and passionate passages of his books. Although clearly a model Dawkins had worked on before, it was still entertaining, nice to feel through the delivery which parts of his numerous books he held most pride in. It was, however, towards the unknown of the subsequent questions that expectation was directed. When the issue of Intelligent Design arose, the breath seemed to stop for a moment, in anticipation.

However, there was none of that frisson that sometimes enlivens the moments after a lecture when a sudden incisive question puts the academic on the spot and the encounter (as I commented in my post about Steve Grand) takes on the quality of intellectual theatre. Through a few, clearly well-rehearsed analogies, Dawkins reinforced the grounds for dismissing Intelligent Design on which most people in the room already stood, judging from the applause after his response. Creationism appears little more than a dull ache rather than a thorn in the side of this scientist.

However, he had clearly failed to sway his questioner, who continued solemnly shaking his head for the rest of the evening. It strikes me that he probably never will succeed in contesting his opponents, since the problem Dawkins faces in this country as public enemy number one of Intelligent Design is very paradoxical. Here we have one of the most brilliant public communicators of science, who has perhaps done more than any other to make the deep insights of scientists such as E.O. Wilson available to the general audience through his literary use of metaphor and anecdote. However, he has perhaps been so successful in producing a poetics of evolutionary science that people do not feel compelled to read beyond the superficial rhetoric of "selfish genes," "replicators," "memes." They are not driven to seek fully to understand the science and to recognise that the fact that biology seems to occupy a despotic control over us, consciousness, language and all, is actually a powerful clarion call for us to harness the potential of culture, conscience, literature (and religion?) to subvert the tyranny of our genetic self-centredness. His complaint in the preface to the new edition of The Selfish Gene about those who read the language but who do not engage with the content is plaintive, but I think ultimately futile; even at the hands of those commentatating from a non-religious perspective, he will forever be a victim of his own successful use of metaphor.

When confronted by the challenge of creationism, that claims evolutionary theory as being itself a faith, thus competing on terms comparable with its own Christian beliefs, how should he respond? As the historian Lisa Jardine has pointed out through a very useful historical illustration in the BBC programme A Point of View, the balance is impossibly set: science needs and is expected to produce a great array of evidence for one theory, and indeed should be suspicious of any evidence that fits the theory without any ambiguity whatsoever. As Dawkins noted, as in a court science is directed only towards demonstrating things beyond reasonable doubt, providing explanations that are acceptable, and it neither could not nor should attempt to provide the entire narrative. (Alternatively, as Descartes put it in Discourse on Method, "It is truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.") Creationism contends that it needs only to highlight one ambiguous point in evolutionary theory to open up the space for it to wedge itself as a counter argument, promising what science can not: ultimate belief beyond any doubt whatsoever, with all the enticing possibilities (As Pascal argued, the stakes of infinite life after death are too high to risk holding atheistic doubts in this world). The aesthetic component to Dawkins' achievements leaves him very open to be tackled by competing epistemologies through the emotionally-resonant framework narratives such as Creationism offer.

Should Dawkins then evade this conflict by reversing Creationism's treatment of science as if a religion, and treat religion as if a science? Should he demonstrate the vast extent of evidence in favour of evolutionary theory - genetics, the fossil record, artificial life experiments, the Drake equation, behavioural psychology, biology - and tackle religious assertions on similar terms, showing how, for example, the ark could not have been built because it could not float? The trouble with this approach is that, firstly, it admits that creationism might, in theory at least, have something rational lurking behind the symbolism of the Biblical text, empirical data which might legitimately be applied to evolution. Secondly, it gets mired too deeply in the science, and takes away from Dawkins' traditional position as a communicator to the layman who - most happily in my case - can understand his theories with very little scientific background at all.

Labels: Intelligent Design, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture