Preliminary Thoughts on Science Education

The world we live in is a place which we routinely dismantle from the top down and then attempt to rebuild from the bottom up. Science has been our latest plaything in this endeavour, a sharp and scintillating tool that illuminates more than it disclarifies.

But that is a little like demolishing a building, and then attempting to reconstruct the history of the people who lived in it, after reassembling it from its fragmentary ruins. The functions, the relationships, the transactions of and between each person and each person's deeds - these are lost for all time. And so it is with our universe.

For just as each building hosts phenomena which have external attachments (the working lives of each individual, the economic environment, and such), so too does our universe act that way. There are phenomena that we cannot apprehend, that work outside the framework of the building - or at least this is what our limited science hypothesizes so far.

It is probably time for new paradigms across the sciences. Too much is inexplicable by our present knowledge, although so much is already laid bare enough.

Responses 001 (May 2013)

The next lot of prescribed topics of this kind produces intellectual contortions of various varieties. Topic 1 reads:

In what ways may disagreement aid the pursuit of knowledge in the natural and human sciences?

There are clearly several levels of disagreement and pursuit of knowledge to think about here. However, we should begin by taking a little digression to establish what the natural and human sciences are in the first place. We'll look at the content of these large super-areas of knowledge and then what lies beneath them.

The natural sciences are areas of knowledge that stem from the observation of natural phenomena and the construction of theories and experiments concerning such phenomena. These would include the life sciences (e.g. biology, zoology, botany), earth sciences (e.g. astronomy, geology and meteorology), and physical sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, metallurgy).

The human sciences are areas of knowledge that stem from the observation of human phenomena and the construction of theories and experiments concerning such phenomena. These would include psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and so on.

There's more about the disciplines in the natural and human sciences in this topic from the previous session. Theories in the natural and human sciences also differ (prior argument here).

Because of the differences between the two large groups of disciplines, and the range within each group, you'd probably need to think about the general rules for each group; you can use the linked posts I've provided to think about what the rules are. Once you've decided what defines these areas of knowledge, you can think about how you would pursue that knowledge.

Which leads us back to how disagreement might aid such pursuit. What is disagreement? On one level, it occurs when two data or data sets do not agree; that is, they are just not the same or lead to different conclusions. On another level, it is a process of trying to produce arguments that contradict a given position. On a third level, it is the mindset of deliberately being contradictory in order to ensure that a fair skepticism is brought to bear when thinking about science.

The first case is perfectly natural. We define things by difference; our senses tell us what inputs are different from the previous state (e.g. 'it is getting brighter' or 'this water is warmer than normal') and our emotions are basically differences in physiological states that allow us to evaluate our environment and shift our psychological perspectives. Therefore, to make an observation requires us to determine whether or not what we sense and record disagrees with what we have sensed and recorded before.

The second case is an extension of the first. If we keep evaluating our disagreements or the disagreement of our 'new' data with the 'old' data, we will start constructing theories about why this is so — one famous case is the Hegelian dialectic, where a thesis is confronted by its antithesis and a synthesis resolves this disagreement.

The third case occurs when this kind of thinking becomes a legitimate and established process. Then the idea of disagreement with what we've found becomes a valuable tool that keeps us from being too conservative about knowledge. Disagreeing with what we think we've established earlier can also help us to learn new things (look up 'cognitive dissonance' and 'skepticism' elsewhere).

OK, that's my brief take on the first topic. Goodness, it's not as brief as I thought! How... disagreeable.

Velikovsky Redux

In Steven Shapin's review of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe by Michael Gordin (LRB Vol 34, No 21, 35-38, 8 Nov 2012), he concludes:

A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.

I think this is great advice for students attempting to collar a few books, collate the ideas therein, and collectivize them into an extended essay or two. Beware the self-proclaimed big ideas that claim to unify or to apotheosize existing ideas. And remember Velikovsky, who was probably better-read than you, had greater scope than you — and was likely more of a duck than you.

Faster, Better, Healthier

Fast food is actually healthier than you think. This thought has percolated in my head for about two decades of analysis. Do you know why this is so?

1. It's more highly regulated. McDonald's is probably a safer bet than most restaurants simply because it has fixed standards of preparation and cannot risk harming its customers.
2. It contains standard preservatives — salt, baking soda, sugar and fat. Lots of them.
3. It has lower water content. The higher the water content, the greater a chance of bacteria, mould and other forms of spoilage.

There are certainly other kinds of foods that are much healthier than mass-produced fast food. But as I've pointed out about two years ago here, people should think about food before being alarmist. The human body has a proven ability to deal with many foods, even ones that would kill a cat or dog. In fact, even if a food were deadly to bacteria or other living things does not mean that it would be deadly to humans (major examples: alcohol, coffee, chocolate, honey, celery).

One of the most egregious examples of false reasoning along these lines is the 'food that doesn't spoil' meme. The reasoning seems to be that if food doesn't spoil naturally, it shouldn't be eaten. Madness. Humans don't digest food by spoiling it in their stomachs; humans digest food by mobilising a vast range of otherwise toxic chemicals — acids, bases, enzymes — and applying these in relentless sequence in the chemical factories of the digestive system. It isn't easy to digest food.

Indeed, humans have spent the last few thousand years learning how to prevent food spoilage, so it shouldn't alarm us that Spam™ can last 20 years or more unopened, that modern baked bread (unless one is foolish enough to leave out the calcium propanoate) will last for months or years if kept dry, or that salted food will keep for centuries.

Don't eat fast food (or any kind of food) in huge quantities. Vary your diet, and get yourself a science-based (or at least history-based) education if you want to worry about food.

Naturalism vs Science

I have recently entered a curious pseudo-argument with some people. The issue has been my contention that science is a subset of religion, to which I got a common reply usually summarised as, "No way!" Well, way.

I would have written this up earlier, except that I was too tired, and fell asleep. Besides, there was the sneaking suspicion that such a simple argument must have been promulgated by some more powerful philosopher than I, and the other sneaking suspicion that I might have read it somewhere else and thus could no longer distinguish between what my formulation was and what someone else's was.

So I did due diligence and came up with a little entry by Plantinga in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Link to important section here.

Yep, it's as I remembered. "Naturalism is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion."

Science as a cognitive endeavour claims to seek truth, but Darwin's concern (as expressed by Plantinga) goes this way:

What our minds are for (if anything) is not the production of true beliefs, but the production of adaptive behavior: that our species has survived and evolved at most guarantees that our behavior is adaptive; it does not guarantee or even make it likely that our belief-producing processes are for the most part reliable, or that our beliefs are for the most part true. That is because our behavior could perfectly well be adaptive, but our beliefs false as often as true.

Darwin himself apparently worried about this question: "With me," says Darwin, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Darwin, 1887)

This is the issue of faith that underpins science as a religion. We have to be somewhat Cartesian, without knowing whether this is reliable; it is reliable only because we think it is — it is our thought that assesses our thought.

Naturalism (whether Dawkinsian or any other kind) thus militates against knowing whether science is truth or not. Eventually, scientism is forced to say things like, "Well, your computer works, so we know science is useful." Well, yes. In other words, the issue of faith is lost in works, just as it often is in religion.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity," saith the Preacher, king in Jerusalem. "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards." And much of this wisdom was the profit of painful years, for the Preacher pondered much, and the words of the wise are as goads.

I long ago figured out why religion is trouble. The stakes are very high. If religion describes reality ontologically, then disciplines like the sciences and mathematics, which limit their outcomes and scope of knowledge by their own rigour, cannot claim a monopoly on truth.

And yet, it is by their obvious stranglehold on description, manipulation, prediction and control of reality that science and mathematics have gained their hard-won prominence and domination over the souls of men. A scientific or mathematical theory, absent a 'falsifying dream' (as Hughes's Hawk Roosting has it), has great powers to describe, explain, or predict. It is on the basis of these powers that we are masters over reality as we know it.

But mastery over reality as we know it is never 100%. As the old school joke goes, "The more we know, the less we know we know." Science and mathematics are the guiding daimonia of technology and engineering, and humans will gladly forsake those daimonia for these material fruits of application.

That is why science as religion and mathematics as technology are uncomfortably true to life. No scientist knows anything except what he knows — this is the curse of the empirical and the rule of epistemology; no mathematician knows anything except by what he believes through the working of his rules — this is the curse of the logical and the rule of rationality.

It is only the religious who believe that not only do they not know, but that they cannot know, and what they cannot know is nevertheless of the greatest significance. And if they are right, the brightness of science and mathematics is like a light without lenses or augmentation; it is like using nothing but the visible spectrum and calling it 'diagnostic radiology'. In fact, it is worse; it is agnostic radiology.

This is why there are more and more people willing to blacken religion with the radiation of reason. It is the only way to preserve the new monopoly — by destroying the old one. But which one sees more? Which one is of greater value to humanity? Both might contend that they are the only truth. But the key question we have to ask is, "Can anything be supernatural and still be true?"

Responses 006 (Nov 2012)

The final question in the Nov 2012 list of topics is this: The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly re-test each other’s results. To what extent would you agree with this claim in the natural sciences and the human sciences?

I like the way this question sets up little traps. 'Ultimate', 'supposed', 'the way', 'constantly' — these are all potential pitfalls. For a start, 'ultimate' ought to mean 'to the farthest extent of one's range'; 'supposed' implies that it isn't always so; 'the way' implies there is only one way; and 'constantly' implies this continues to happen all the time. You can create a little counter-argument involving each of these.

I'm not going to deal with those in detail, but I will add that if a homogeneous class (e.g. 'scientists' all using one 'way' to 'constantly' do something) does anything, there is necessarily a built-in bias, against which there is no defence. I will also add that to suppose anything requires someone to do the supposing. Who do you suppose does the supposing here? Scientists?

Hopefully, at this point, I have succeeded in convincing some of my readers that this topic requires great care and detailed planning. For those who have survived this, I will now add a note about 'natural sciences' and 'human sciences'.

These superclasses of disciplines are difficult to define for some people. I have given a quick summary of what they include towards the end of this earlier post. Let me now define them in slightly more detail.

The natural sciences are the spawn of natural history (i.e. the empirical observation and recording of natural phenomena in chronological order) and natural philosophy (i.e. the development of theory based on induction from natural phenomena or deduction from reasonable rules based on empirical observations). They include astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry and physics — disciplines which in general are considered to have objective content even in the absence of human activity or existence. Some of these disciplines may produce results that are difficult or impossible to re-test.

The human sciences deal with human affairs in terms of human activities. By analogy with the natural sciences, human sciences are the spawn of human history and human philosophy. These would concern the observation, recording, analysis and theory of matters social, political, economic, religious, and military. They thus include linguistics, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, management and other such 'soft' sciences. These disciplines would be much deprived by an hypothetical absence of humanity. These disciplines tend to produce results which are often difficult to re-test.

Neither group would include many varieties of applied science, technology and engineering — these are not natural but are not generally considered human sciences either. The two groups would exclude mathematics, history, and philosophy because these are either tools or precursor disciplines; they would exclude the arts as well.

Well, you now have some of the basic elements of an answer. Give the topic a good try. This will be an educational experience.

Coleridge on Science

In the long 19th century, technë in all its forms still was the common ground containing science and the arts. And here is Sam Coleridge, the friend of Humphry Davy, William Wordsworth, et al.:

All speaks of change: the renovated forms
Of long-forgotten things arise again;
The light of suns, the breath of angry storms,
The everlasting motions of the main.

These are but engines of the eternal will,
The One intelligence, whose potent sway
Has ever acted, and is acting still
While stars, and worlds and systems all obey.

Without whose power, the whole of mortal things
Were dull, inert, an unharmonious band.
Silent as are the harp’s untuned strings
Without the touches of the poet’s hand.

Faith as a Basis for Scientific Knowledge

Thomas Huxley, who strongly supported Darwin's cause in the 19th century, had this to say about science:-

The one act of faith in the convert to science is:
the confession of the universality of order
and of the absolute validity,
in all times and under all circumstances,
of the law of causation.
This confession is an act of faith
because by the nature of the case
the truth of such propositions
is not susceptible of proof.

For those who have ever wondered if science and faith are opposed, this statement should set such fears at rest. Faith, by definition, is the acceptance of belief despite the fact that complete evidence is lacking and proof is unobtainable. It underpins all things, but some things more than others. And yet, if it underpins anything, that thing is based on faith.

It should be noted that Huxley continued by saying that this particular faith was 'not blind, but reasonable; because it is invariably confirmed by experience, and constitutes the sole trustworthy foundation for all action.' This statement, I leave to my readers to evaluate.

Popper does a Weasel

For me as a science major (note the careful choice of phrase), Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was exhilarating to read and frustrating to understand. The problem was that he had such good, strong, powerful ideas that it was hard to see where they failed.

He was the fellow who brought us the 'non-falsifiable statements are non-science' meme, thus inflicting decades of misery on both philosophers and scientists. For the former, the task of refutation was an itch that begged to be scratched, for the latter, head-scratching of the existentialist type was the problem.

He extended his philosophy to utterly refute Marxist theory, but in the end had to concede that whether scientific or not, humans did indeed often behave in certain ways. He was rather sore about the 'soft' or 'human' sciences, thinking of them either as proto-sciences — rather patronisingly, in the sense that if they worked hard they would grow up to be proper sciences (or 'Popper' sciences, I suppose) — or pseudo-sciences.

The main problem with Popper, of course, is that a true law of nature is impossible to falsify. Laws that you can falsify are laws to which you can imagine an exception. Some things cannot be imagined to have exceptions, and hence cannot be falsified. We would call those axioms, and if they could be modified to have exceptions, then we wouldn't know if the exception-making or the axiom-construction was the culprit.

And so, at the end of his days, Popper goes a-weasel. I must admit that he had us all going for a while though.

The Law as a Subset of Faith

After many posts on the shortcomings of science as scientia, by which we seem to mean neither sophia nor gnosis, I find myself digging once again in the old texts which form my personal foundations of meditation and philosophy. Indeed, I'm looking again at what some call the New Testament, but which is properly the final summation of an argument called the Old Testament.

The remarkable thing about the New Testament's epistles is that they are good examples of sound Greek reasoning, mostly, with a liberal compounding of Hebrew normative jurisprudence. What should the law be? What must we understand it to be, so that it has meaning? Let us use Greek logic to find out. And so on.

And so, we are told that living by the Law is a prison, and that he who lives only by Law will die by it, in total condemnation. This is true, I think of anyone who claims he lives entirely by science and scientific principles.

I once conducted an experiment in which I tried to emulate some sort of hypothalamic pause. That is, I attempted to use nothing but reason in my responses to my environment, while at the same time attempting to monitor what I was doing. The interesting thing was that I couldn't avoid being subjective, and there was no way to approach any form of Russellian rationality without feeling subcompetent.

I don't think it is possible for most people, without making them hypocrites. I suspect it is not possible for anyone. We are bound to be irrational, or perhaps hyperrational. I contend, while being unable to prove it, that all humans must live by faith, and that the assertion that one is not living by faith is falsehood.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that my years as a science teacher have allowed me to more clearly sketch the boundary at which science must fail. It fails whenever we are forced to be rational while still being ourselves. It's OK when solving a problem of language, symbols, objects, processes (etc, etc) that is outside ourselves; it is a complete failure when it comes to life.

I have met many rationalists (both theistic and not) who claim that the universe itself is sufficient to provoke a sense of wonder. Well, good. But one wonders why there should be any such sense.

The scientific rationalist answer is that there isn't any such 'sense'; it is merely a repurposed function of certain neurochemical behaviours which used to have (or may yet have) survival value in the long slog of evolutionary development. Good, then. But I think to myself about these people: I bet you felt good giving that as a response. And you can't help feeling something, can you? And in the end, you cannot establish any purpose for all those feelings without having to make assertions based on faith...

Science, you see, is like shining a bright flashlight in a dark room so that you can figure out what you are bumping into. But as we light up our universe, we realise that we don't understand how come the light works, and we don't know why there is a room. And guess what: we have no chance of answering those two questions using the flashlight alone.

Multipolar

The world is becoming multipolar, according to all kinds of sources. But that's a silly 'sky is falling' sort of statement. The world has always been multipolar; it's just that sometimes, the narrative has required some sort of Zoroastrian dualism (e.g. 'The American Way' vs 'The Evil Empire') or some sort of divine exceptionalism (e.g. 'Rule Britannia'). The complex poetry of the world has always been made prosaic by clever people who hate the messiness.

Look at science. Science is democratic. In theory, everyone can be part of the formal discourse because everyone shares the same starting axioms and the same reasoning process. In practice, science is elitist. It creates spiraling towers of horn and ivory, as more of it is formed into more and more specialised stuff and fewer and fewer people know what to do with it — or what can be done with it.

Look at democracy. Democracy is evil. Why? Because humans very well know that the worst thing to trust is humanity. And yet we claim that we want everyone to have the same rights and powers and privileges because all humans are equal in some sense. But democracy is good, because it gives us the comforting illusion that someone who is better than us isn't really better, and that anyone can be as good as anyone else.

These two forces are the greatest movements of the modern age. They have undeniably done much to improve human conditions from a human point of view. But they persist in making enemies, not because they are good things (and thus persecuted) but because they are human, and thus imperfect. And they love trampling over other ideas because they are good at it.

But shouldn't they win, since they are better ideas? The point is that we don't know for sure that they are better ideas. There is no objective point to view them except through the anthropocentric lens of being. We can philosophize all we want, but all we know is that they are convincing ideas to many humans. They win a lot of 'marketplace of ideas' competitions — but the marketplace of ideas can only exist in a world where democracy and science have a significant presence.

I like both democracy and science because they make my life comfortable. If that is how we decide what is good, then I guess that's good. But I'm uncomfortable about thinking that. So what else should I think?

I think I should not conform to the pattern of this world, I think.

Responses 009 (2011-2012)

Almost there. This is the penultimate post in the main analysis line of my responses to the most recent list. Question 9 states: "As an IB student, how has your learning of literature and science contributed to your understanding of individuals and societies?"

Without the first clause, this would be a rather stodgy question, in which two conveniently different-looking lenses from C P Snow's The Two Cultures are trained on what we might think of as their thematic synthesis, modern society. However, in the light of those four words, a different context presents itself.

IB students are of course exposed to a curriculum schematically represented as a hexagon of areas of knowledge around a set of core activities. The six broad areas are literature, language, individuals and societies, experimental sciences, mathematics and aesthetics.

To an IB student, therefore, the question takes on the nuanced meaning of 'having studied a Group 1 subject and a Group 4 subject, how have they helped you study a Group 3 subject?' That might be putting it too simplistically, but it's an obvious conclusion to be drawn, given the context-framing first four words of the question.

Like others in the present list, this appears to be a very IB-centred question. A non-IB student might answer it with a slightly different approach because to a non-IB student, literature is a humanities subject, and it comments on human nature and human society through the lens of human creative interpretation and description. Similarly, the sciences allow for analysis of individual human beings as well as human society through biology and materials science and suchlike.

However, that kind of reasoning (IB/non-IB) might be a trap. Perhaps candidates are really required to interpret the main question literally, but drawing on their experiences as IB students. IB students, perhaps you aren't supposed to be thinking about Group 1, Group 4 and their impact on your learning of Group 3? Or are you?

I like this question. It requires a fine balance. It is also slightly unfair.

Scorched Earths

The People's Republic of China controls 95% of the world's rare earths. To a chemist, this is a statement that should already hint at the world that is to come. A small number of nations appear to control petroleum, but the USA and USSR used to be net exporters while convincing everybody that the Arabs were sitting on all of it. And petroleum and natural gas are to be had all round the world.

But the Chinese control 95% of the world's rare earths. What does that mean? It means that catalysts, electronics, and about 500 other industries will all be paying higher and higher amounts to the Chinese, should they decide to clamp down on export. It is the reason I once said that if one could invest, one should invest in Chinese rare-earth mines. If. Failing which, of course, one should buy up the remaining 5% as much as possible. A lot of that, however, is in places like Mongolia. Or Tibet. And maybe Afghanistan.

It's hard to think of the educational future when the syllabi and curricula of this present moment are constructed on abstract premises that don't quite meet the realities of the world, the flesh and the Devil. Natural sciences, human sciences, and applied sciences, that is, for many of the people in these benighted days.

And what of the humanities and aesthetics? I think they ought to have been removed from the formal curriculum a long time ago.

What? Why?

Because the humanities and aesthetics should have been made part of our lives ages ago. That they have to be taught to young people shows us what a hash we've made of things in the name of pragmatism. The old ways of telling the young where we've come from, what our family, clan, community and social history is all about — those things are rare. And an appreciation of aesthetics, most often found in the young, evanesces too quickly and is gone.

So the second best solution is to keep the humanities and aesthetics prominent, while working out a curriculum that will teach people why the fact that China controls 95% of the world's rare earths is a very significant fact indeed.

Stuff That Can't Be Explained

You know, it hit me that we thirst for explanations to the point where we assume that everything must have a rational explanation. All things have a cause, is the theory. But we don't actually have a reason as to why things have reasons, or even why things should have reasons.

Consider the workings of the mind. At our current state of knowledge, we know that action occurs when a certain potential in the brain is exceeded in a certain direction. It is possible to see how this might be so, but the causes are complex. In principle, we can predict how a person should behave; in practice, we cannot. To make matters worse, it seems that we decide upon acting long before we actually are conscious of the decision, and that we appear to act on knowledge before we are aware of this knowledge. This leads to the illusion known as intuition. The final insult to the idea that our minds are rational is the fact that memory is mutable, and that our brains reconfigure with some sort of biased randomness in the direction of whatever seems most convenient.

It seems that the very lack of constancy, consistency and/or dependability of our minds and our world is what drives us to want things that are rational and consistent. This is why we invent mathematical structures and rules, and pursue the scientific paradigm. The fact is that we see data points all around us, and we confer upon them significance so that they become information. We weave information into structures that seem useful, and once utility as been conferred upon these, they become knowledge. We weave related-looking bits of knowledge together into elaborate tapestries, and they become areas of knowledge, disciplines, and more complex structures.

But what in all this is useful? The very term 'useful' ranges in utility, from being indicative of necessity (food, water, air, shelter), to denoting the very important (communication, education, construction and synthesis), to labelling the stuff we can demonstrably live without but which we cannot imagine living without (electricity, information technology, powered mechanized transport). Everything has its uses, little is completely useless.

The power of reason overheats the brain in a world that is changing faster and has more and more complexity. A lot of that complexity is man-created; the volume of knowledge constructed follows an exponential curve, but the value of that knowledge is also exponentially less accessible — it consists of stuff that fewer and fewer people need to know or which requires even more stuff to be useful at all.

Why build a Large Hadron Collider? What utility value does it have? There is a long list of questions that it certainly will answer when fully deployed and once the myriad (yes, at least 10,000) scientists, engineers and mathematicians around it get to work. Will it feed the poor, make people happy, tell us right from wrong? Not yet, if at all. But it does cost ten billion US dollars, which is not small fish.

As a teacher of science, I've heard and understand all the reasons why we 'do science'. I understand how and why scientific principles and discoveries have improved the standard of living starting from very basic stuff like what an electron is, or how gravity appears to work. But you can't build a case for future benefits from past successes, especially when immediate needs (urgency) may outweigh the importance of such benefits.

In a sense, we are all necessarily hypocritical. We enjoy the fruits of science and the illusion of its necessity as an industry and costly endeavour, while turning a blind eye to the problems that could be rectified by altruism. But altruism doesn't gain points, and it doesn't work, until material resources have been accumulated (or the illusion thereof, as in money). Such points are real because we have made them so. It is no longer possible to quantify a person's work in load carried or bits generated, but only according to the market value. And the market is all in our interactions and in our heads. It can be explained, but only in terms of our sub-rationality.

In the end, all of it can be explained, but none of it can be explained away. We are full of motives and reasons, excuses and theories. Our propensity for violence has been relatively lowered for a few brief shining moments in a murky sea of disease, death and destruction. This, we call civilisation. I don't think there is a comprehensive explanation for that.

Science is not Omniscience

There are many things that science does not see, and cannot by its nature see. It cannot see beauty, or suffering, or anything which requires a human value judgement. It cannot afford human value judgements. And yet, it is used as a tool to affirm and support human value judgements. This is like getting a set of tools and then deciding on the fitness of human hands by seeing how well they fit the tools.

The problems really arise when men, having created tools like the scientific method, then turn their tools upon themselves. Materialism and naturalism, having spawned such tools, are then investigated by these tools. It leads to paradox; how does the observer avoid seeing what he already knows he will see?

Look at psychological studies. The majority of those used to propound or defend widely debated and circulated views in the last 20 years have been carried out on Americans. It is like saying the brain is purely biological, and the biological American is representative of the human race because we are all human. Yes, this is true, but with caveats: the brain is shaped by environment, and as Americans never tire of telling the rest of the world, America is exceptional and exceptionalist.

The response might be, "Why not look at something more 'hard science', like physics?" Yes, but the harder the science, the less it applies to the mystery of why we should think what we think. The more we break apart the biochemical (or, at a higher level of structure, neurological) basis of thought, the less we find about what the point of it ought to be. If it is all a legacy of survival, then we no longer need artistry and comfort. We no longer need to think about evil, since it is hard to imagine why we would carry any moral responsibility at all.

It boils down to aesthetics. Either there is an aesthetic sense or there isn't. The aesthetic sense would say, "Evil is ugly, it is wrong, it feels bad." Science might say, all these are the chemical stirrings of survival traits. Well, then evil is an artifact, and debating the ideal society and the life of man and the destiny of humanity is about as good as studying metallurgy.

Where is the survival value in this huge overcapacity to debate the 'unnecessary'? We seem to be coming up with value-judgement excuses about why this might be necessary. We have built a huge armillary sphere of science-based arguments about how values arise from evolved processes designed to cope with the environment, and this is projected into a future where computing power allows us to cope with larger-scale and even larger-scale environments. And this, we can calculate, leads to something even more complicated, which will be indistinguishable from God.

It is far easier to think like a child and believe in God. But I don't think adult pride accepts such things. Even when they are in line with the sharpest edge of Ockham's Razor. Science is the tool of our self-justification, when it should just be our most useful tool for the physical and material world. We don't use the screwdriver to justify the hand.

When does Science become a Religion?

Over the years, I've thought quite a bit about the place of science in modern life. I think that science was once what it claimed to be, and now has become both quite a lot more and quite a lot less. Let me explain.

In the 19th century, and for a fair bit of the 20th, it was possible for any reasonably resourceful and intelligent human to get the equipment together for an attempt at empirical verification of any scientific principle, theory or statement. You could make your own telescope. You could build your own car or telephone. I have old children's books in which these projects are found.

I think the point at which it all collapsed was when the idea of atomism and the atom was examined further and the true natures (as far as we know) of the nucleus and electron were revealed. You see, not everyone has access to radioactive material or reliable sources of subatomic particles and the means of manipulating, tracking, and identifying them. Not everyone has an x-ray crystallography set-up or a nuclear magnetic resonance machine at home.

What this means is that a lot of modern science is now taken on faith. In principle, you can still go and see for yourself what seems to be happening. In practice, what you see is a digital readout which tells you what is happening. When an apple falls from a tree, you see it, you can catch it, taste it; the fall of an apple is empirical experience. When a radioisotope decays, you have a theory that is consistent with the facts of indirect detection; if you are lucky (or unlucky), you may have visible photon emission or some compound that will fluoresce when struck with the otherwise unseen emission.

In the old science magazines I read when I was a child, you could make your own batteries, taste the increasing tingle as you stacked the cells, correlate that with the increasing glow of an incandescent bulb. But electromagnetism was already something you had to take somewhat on faith, the invisible fields that prickled your hair and moved iron filings were things with no obvious material correlation. The only thing was that you could replicate the experiment at will, and thus persuade yourself that it was true — it was a bit like being able to read the Bible in a vernacular tongue.

Modern technology, the stuff that drives computers and cars, catalytic convertors and chemiluminescence, is something very distant from that practical level. It is disconnected from its scientific principles as far as human society is concerned. As my father-in-law said the other day, "You cannot fix your own car anymore, you can't even find out what is wrong until they plug it into the computer at the workshop."

Science is indeed becoming a new religion, one in which its acolytes and priests rule over a large laity of supposedly science-literate people and, by fiat, an even larger flock of agnostic semi-believers who have no choice but to go along. It is a lot of 'hand-waving' and quoting from researchers.

These researchers have published their findings and the findings can be replicated given enough time and money; this is why we believe in those findings. But increasingly, it is practically impossible to verify those findings, let alone the interpretations grounded in those findings. It is like having to read through a religious text and its commentaries in order to join in a debate, and the reading period gets longer and longer each day.

Right now, training a cutting-edge organometallic chemist probably takes about as long as it used to — six years after O-levels, for a bright young person. However, that person is basing a lot of practice (or praxis) on the shoulders of giants, so to speak; that person has conducted very few of the classic experiments of the past with the detachment that comes from genuinely not knowing the outcome. In many cases, the cutting-edge researcher is taking the entire argument as it is currently established without question simply because everyone agrees it is so and tells the student that it is beyond reasonable doubt.

Thus, science moves forward, like the reclamation of land from the sea, with layers of sand, stone and concrete covering up the foundations of the past that everyone takes for granted. Here is the first question I learnt from four decades of reading science fiction: "If some terrible disaster destroyed all technologies based on electricity and electronics right now, how long would it take for the human race to recover?"

In the past, this would not have included transport technologies — there was a point when land, sea and air transport used no electrical or electronic technologies. This would not have included food-processing technologies to the extent it does now. It would not have led to near-universal starvation, as it might now.

The second question is like unto it: "Would human progress slow noticeably if we waved a magic wand or alien abduction device or other McGuffin and removed the world's top 1000 scientists?"

The answer is probably, "No." But this would not have been true in any age up to about 1914 or somewhere thereafter. We have had an explosion of priests, so to speak, and there is now a large scientific 'middle class'. However, the gap between artisan and technocrat is huge and getting wider. You could make a crystal radio set at home; try making an MP3 player at home and you will see the futility of closing that gap.

Will the means of production catch up in some future nanotech age? Unlikely, unless we can craft intelligent agents to act for us. It would be too complicated, otherwise, for most humans to understand. We are looking into a future where men would be as gods. But the paradox is that none of our descendant futures seems to have transcended time and come back to visit us. Unless... that is what our gods are all about.

Science vs Religion (Again??)

I think it would be a poor sort of faith that shifted its positions based on new findings of empirical and experimental science. I also think it would be a poor sort of science that established its positions based on 'what ought to be' rather than 'what is'.

The problem in science has always, of course, been to establish 'what is' without allowing undue influence by 'what ought to be', because 'what is' is 'what ought to be'. For many religions, it seems to be the other way around — assertions of 'what is' without allowing undue influence by 'what ought to be', because 'what ought to be' is 'what is'.

The core of science is the idea that what we find consistent is actually related to reality. Absent any glitches, we have to assume the 'reality' model is consistent. If we didn't, things would be unreliable. We therefore have a human stake in believing that science gives reliable answers. This is why we believe in what is valid, what is reliable, and what is useful. This is also why we form theories and hypotheses and test them primarily for consistency.

Religions don't offer such consolation. In any religious system of belief based on a key text or a set of such, the words are treated as absolute, but because they are addressed to humans, the meanings are not. We don't even have the solace of proof, since a complete proof of any statement removes the need for faith and hence the burden of moral responsibility.

To put it another way, if we could derive a logical proof of a God or gods and a 100% certainty of the efficacy or truth of a consistent religious system with an all-or-nothing outcome, we would have no free will unless we were insane — you'd be mad to sacrifice everything to not conform.

Transdarwinian

In the last couple of decades, the determinists have hit the wall of reality while the atheists have been pushed to another wall by a tide of relentlessly unmindful religionists. The world is turning like Dorothy's house on a whirlwind simply because some people don't know where to stop.

For a start, I say to Christians (who the bulk of the relentlessly unmindful seem to be), "Have you considered what actually is necessary for salvation? Does it include the ideas that the Bible is a science manual and that Man is unable to write a Bible with errors in it? For if so, none are saved since those two points have been clearly and decisively disproved."

But in the humility of my own mind, knowing that I am all too fallible and human and prone to error of all kinds, I think of what might have been. I look at what the Bible says. And I look at what kinds of expression humans typically use. And I look at what we seem to see of history. And maybe...

Two hundred thousand years ago, God (in whose image man the scientist — as well as man the artist — was made) raised one particular kind of animal upright in the plains of Africa. For thousands of years, this animal had been viable, intelligent, but not going anywhere fast. And that is the message of Genesis 1, for it is clear that when God speaks, He speaks to an entire race of humans, male and female, and then He rests. They filled their African world, a world where no less than a dozen different population clusters of breathtaking genetic diversity could be found. This took 130,000 years.

Seventy thousand years ago, God inspired man. For some reason, the mind of man opened, as did the geography of man, and man exploded from Africa. But it was a slow and odd migration, for crossing the centre of the world (where Africa meets Eurasia) and then filling the rest of it with loose groups of random humans, took 60,000 years. And then man decided to build permanent settlements in Eden, where God had finally placed him — for that is what history tells us.

And somewhere around 6000 BC, where recorded history first begins in written language, the second narrative of Genesis has begun. For there are two creation stories in the first three chapters of that book, and one question has always been, why two? And perhaps the first is the story of Man the organism, while the second is the story of Man the inspired. Where inspiration arises, choice follows, and where choice appears, change will come.

Genesis 4 tells us that Cain, the farmer who founded a city killed his brother Abel the nomadic herder. It might have been literal, but it is certainly historical in vision. For the third son of Adam was Seth, and in his time, men adopted organised religion. There is no way to prove that any of these people existed, but history tells us that the kinds of people they represent did indeed arise in that order.

Who knows the mind of God? We see in part, as if through a glass darkly; we know in part and think in pieces. And we don't have all the pieces, and never will have, till time ends.

There is a strange world out there, with mysteries which we know because of our science and our reasoning will not be solved. The narratives we spin and contest may incite fear and division, or inspire great feats of achievement, or may have no meaning at all. But one thing is for sure — Christians spend too much time contesting the little firefights and not looking at the prize they claim to be aiming for. You don't need to fight science to be holy.

Consistency and Logic

Ah well, here I go rehashing old points again...

The thing about logic is that it doesn't indicate what's right or wrong. Rather, a body of logic is consistent or inconsistent; if inconsistent, it leads to contradiction or paradox. A body of knowledge is information held together by logic; if the knowledge is inconsistent with itself, it will likewise be self-contradictory or paradoxical.

However, as in all human domains of knowledge, there are areas which can be flagged as 'unknown' or 'insufficient data'. In some domains, such as those called 'science', we build an edifice that is consistent with everything we think we know, and if that doesn't work, we change the edifice to fit. (Note that 'edifice' roughly means 'thing used to edify', just as 'sacrifice' roughly means 'thing used to make sacred'.)

The only difference between good theology and good science is that theology makes axiomatic the idea of a non-human superior intelligence that is dominant in the universe. This intelligence is not provable within the logic of science, and hence not testable.

A scientist who says he doesn't accept theology is in roughly the same position as a physicist who doesn't accept that life exists — physics doesn't 'do' life and there is no way to use physics to define life or prove it exists because life-proving stuff is not built into physics just as theology isn't built into modern science. It's as simple as that.