Thinking with science

First, some observations about thinking with science. Scientific discoveries emerge from a tissue of common-sense concerns, but a discovery can only be made when scientists break decisively with that common-sense background.Footnote ¹ The mark of such an advance is that it is not, at the time, intuitively obvious but, on the contrary, reverses or turns upside down conventional expectation. Scientific thought develops against the categories of common sense. This characteristic of the advancement of science has another face, however, for notable discoveries will, in time, be taken up by the wider population, who are not specialists, and put to work within the popular imagination of common sense. People use science to think with; that is, people employ representations of specific scientific discoveries as a part of their making sense of the world in which they find themselves. Science in this sense is recaptured and becomes part of the categories of everyday thought. The consequences of this employment are rarely anticipated and may be, to an extent, unpredictable.

As an example of what I mean, consider the reception of Newton's discovery of the force of gravity, which excited extraordinary interest for an extended period. Experts still debate the precise nature of his theories, but the popular perception was clear: Newton was concerned with the influence bodies – in particular, planetary bodies – exert upon one another at a distance, and he offered a description of the regular movements of planetary bodies in terms of the gravitational forces exerted between them. And whatever Newton supposed gravity to be, many readers supposed ‘gravity to be an innate property of bodies, and to act immediately at a distance’.Footnote ² Such views fed into contemporary debates which we might label anachronistically as being to do with ‘physics’: concerning the nature of matter and the forces to which it could be subjected. But they also underwrote more speculative or unorthodox popular contemporary accounts, including a renewal of astrology: for if it is the case that planets exert specific – though invisible – forces upon other bodies at a distance, it is reasonable to suppose that the relative position of the various planets at the time of a person's conception or birth may influence that person's life chances and possibilities, and that the influence of the planets may continue to act day by day. We may reply that while it may seem reasonable superficially to suppose these connections, nevertheless it is a wrong supposition. But you can see how astrology in its modern form is essentially a meditation upon a popular understanding of Newtonian physics, a meditation indeed that exploits real ambiguities in the notions of force and influence in the theory. The point at issue is that the prestige of science, of Newton's name in this case, lends itself to thinking about a series of human questions, concerning problems of personal meaning and destiny and how to account for good and bad happening in a life. The term ‘prestige’ is meant seriously; science is taken to be an authoritative source for human understanding and well-being, and its discoveries are taken up and used to think with in a fashion that commands widespread assent, even if we ourselves do not subscribe to the particular use that is made of them in this instance. In fact, the influence of ‘Newtonianism’ in this sense spread widely; popular recensions of Newtonian physics concerning the nature of matter, the porosity of bodies and the influence of ill-defined, invisible forces in them link a range of nineteenth-century practices concerned with what we may term ‘healing’, activities that included, as well as early forms of medicine and what is now called psychiatry, such unofficial practices as mesmerism, spiritualism, spiritual healing, phrenology, herbalism and vegetarianism. These have been traced out by a number of authors, in particular, Logie Barrow, whose work I have drawn upon in offering this sketch of the issues.Footnote ³ A notable scientific discovery is put to work in a series of attempts to discern and assure human well-being.

In considering the popular uses made of scientific discoveries, then, we have to consider the milieu of reception, in which a range of unorthodox or alternative practices develop. For people are not content simply to read about the advances of science; they want to put them to work for their own advantage. A number of characteristics mark these enterprises, three in particular. They claim to have a scientific status, drawing upon the vocabulary of the sciences of the time. They look to education as the means of enlightenment and spreading the truth. And they are ‘democratic’ in the sense that they hold knowledge to be open and available to all. At the same time, they typically exhibit certain stylistic features, in particular, a mixture of appeals to immediate experience, premature generalisations and imponderable universals that hinder this kind of approach precisely from developing scientific or critical thinking. Yet by these characteristics they form part of what Barrow calls a ‘plebeian’ culture, originating in a working-class elite, linked therefore in their time to Nonconformity, Methodism and socialism, and showing a shared concern with the problems of self-definition, self-education and the control of man's destiny, and so even with explanations of suffering and views of man's salvation. In this milieu, confrontation with ‘orthodox’ structures (be they of science, medicine, education, the church or the state) is a central part of the process of self-definition, and has served to protect from criticism the non-cumulative nature of these ‘alternative sciences’ and the non-falsifiable nature of their utopias and universals. These ‘moral’ employments of scientific discoveries are potentially profoundly polemical. In short, ‘scientific knowledge’ in these accounts plays the role of esoteric knowledge, a secret which the seeker after truth may be offered, initiated in and drawn deeper into. In this way, it imitates the practices of scientific learning, in particular benefiting from the break such learning makes with received wisdom.

Such approaches are largely unremarked as a class of activity and, when remarked, often partially or ill-understood, and yet they are enduring and adaptable, for they take on new forms with each notable scientific advance and are far more extensive than one might at first imagine. There is indeed an increasing body of work that construes the varieties of religious life from the late nineteenth century onward not as independent growths nor forms of throw-back to earlier practices, but as informal or alternative contemporary attempts to think about – and, moreover, actively to respond to – questions of self and salvation, in response to local turbulence, employing the various authorities available – most notably science and the Bible – in a variety of combinations.Footnote ⁴

And the matter does not stop there, at the limits of the small-scale institutions of civil society which are studied by sociologists of religion. This is where we introduce the notion of a broad literary genre. For there is a vast spectrum of contemporary publishing that runs from overtly religious or cosmological speculation, through science fiction and fantasy literature, to popularising science texts, all of which play variations upon the motif of using contemporary science to think with whilst meditating upon the human condition, and which share the characteristics of these unorthodox or alternative appraisals of the world, without necessarily seeking any practical outcome other than entertainment or enlightenment: they deal in representations of scientific discoveries, they are didactic, and they are frequently distrustful of institutional powers, to the extent sometimes of discerning conspiracies. In every case, they carry conviction through conveying esoteric knowledge to the reader. It is of interest to note that this spectrum is ill-defined, ill-studied (with certain honourable exceptions) and very popular: it sells well.Footnote ⁵ In short, there is a series of overlapping genres that runs from fundamentalism to The Da Vinci Code and beyond, which deserves, I suggest, greater attention and, indeed, respect, than it usually gets from academics.

The Da Vinci Code indeed presents all the features with which we are concerned. The crux of the story is a secret (a trivial secret, it turns out, but that is of no importance): it is an imponderable universal which permits a set of generalisations and appeals to experience, which are laid out by the narrator in a series of dialogues and a plot leading finally to the revelation of the secret. The knowledge at issue is ‘scientific’ (symbological, in the instance), which can be handed on through a didactic education, and is potentially open to all. The knowledge is of course made up in this case, but it is defended from examination by the invocation of a conspiracy by interested parties to prevent the secret becoming public knowledge. In brief, the structure of the plot is the revelation of esoteric knowledge deliberately concealed.

Questions of style

These kinds of concerns – particularly regarding publishing and the new media – are important in understanding the range and impact of contemporary forms of unorthodox thinking. My aim, however, as I have suggested, is modest; the preceding account allows me to suggest a way of reading the most recent book of Richard Dawkins,Footnote ⁶ in a fashion that both may do justice to the text and also account for the success his writing enjoys and the authority he exerts over many readers. I am proposing to locate Dawkins within the loosely constructed but long-established genre of ‘thinking with science’. My stimulus to do so came from trying to characterise the effect of reading Dawkins' The God Delusion, and therefore to address questions of style. For he leaves a strong and by no means unpleasant taste in the mouth, but one that is not immediately easy to place if you start with the assumption you are reading a scientific book. Listening to a critic review the book on the radio, she said it was like sitting at a table in the pub with a man who is determined to argue, no matter how much you agree with him. That I think is right; Dawkins' essential characteristic is that he sounds like an autodidact – a man of considerable intelligence and wide reading, but insufficiently acquainted with the disciplines and histories that lie behind what he has read. He simply believes that the books that he agrees with are true, and the books he disagrees with are wrong. This is a recurrent problem with adult learners: they know how to read new material and put it to work for their own ends, but cannot or do not wish to learn or relearn the ability to be changed by what they read. They are already shaped and so, from another perspective, unteachable. Dawkins is not looking for instruction, but wishes to impart what he has read, to one particular end, which may be summed up as écrasez l'infame: let us root out religion.

Is this a fair characterisation? Certainly, he covers a lot of ground: we are given samples of reading encompassing aspects of metaphysics, moral philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, the Bible, contemporary Islam, American evangelicalism and the Moral Majority, and European Catholicism. This is not an exhaustive list. But more important is the way he handles these eclectic materials. By ‘autodidact’ I mean to point to the following. Although he claims to be a scientist (as, indeed, in real life he has been), there is no evidence of a scientific approach nor of scientific habits of mind. There is simply a display of knowledge, of examples that serve to illustrate the argument, and no sense of the materials developing an argument. The knowledge he invokes is therefore inert, rather than alive. In accordance with this approach, he cites writers he agrees with as authorities, and likewise derides authors with whom he disagrees; there is no notion of evaluating evidence – although we are incited to refer to evidence rather than opinion, that is not the practice of the author. Matching this, he fails to give any sense that the various disciplines he invokes have their own histories of debate and discovery of provisional findings, and that each case-study provides specific answers to specific questions, and that it is important to know what the questions were to which these are the answers. Instead, we are given an accumulation of facts, which are held to be self-evident and universal in their application. Moreover, in the course of an argument, Dawkins moves to and fro in terms of scale between the particular and the universal; he can start from a small-scale example and move to a broad assertion, which he will then further illustrate with examples drawn from other contexts. He lacks any constructed ‘middle distance’, in which the general and the specific (which may well themselves be less large and less small respectively than the universal and the particular) are held together in certain amalgams and relations. Last, because he lacks any concept of context or necessary connection, we are never offered the thorough coverage of any question, breaking down a case into simpler elements and building up the patterns of relations; rather, we are given the tracing of single elements (often a word) through different frames and contexts. In a sentence, this is not Baconian science, but only a simulacrum of it. The stylistic parallels with much science fiction and fantasy are striking, for these forms of writing, as well as telling a story, have to tell the reader the conditions under which the narrative will work, and so to lay out the science that underwrites future possibilities in the one case, and alternative worlds in the other. The knowledge to be conveyed here is precisely inert, didactic and universal, and this often presents the author with the literary problem of how to communicate the ground rules with economy and elegance.

The effect in Dawkins' case is paradoxical, because while on the surface we are offered a positivist account of facts, to be opposed to human history and culture, at a deeper level we are caught up in a thoroughly cultural, historical product, a discourse on ‘science’ and ‘religion’, a thoroughly polemical account, indeed, which warns us not to believe all that we have been taught. And in doing so, it offers us a particular employment of ‘science’, to which we should pay attention. One should be pretty cautious in trying to offer a characterisation of ‘science’, not least because the various sciences do not have much in common. But, following on from the remarks about a break with common-sense categories (above), one might suggest that at least some sciences work through a dialectic of materialised theories (in equipment) and theorised materials, giving rise to a series of successive controlled approximations. The fascination and power of scientific thinking lies then in the specificity of the understanding it produces in each case, including an awareness of the limits of its application. Therein too lie its disappointments: it cannot readily generate universals. Even a ‘theory of everything’ is in practice an equation that claims to relate four other equations. Yet Dawkins' account lacks insight into the motivations and values of scientific research, and instead develops a rhetoric that draws upon the prestige and interest of the sciences without paying attention to their practices. In doing so, he shares in the techniques and aims of a whole range of scientists who write for a popular audience and of writers who attempt to explain recent scientific advances to the same audience, who tend to create explanations of the nature of the world and evaluations of its possible futures that not only draw upon the prestige of the sciences but also utilise a concept of ‘Science’ (with a capital S) as a cornerstone of these accounts. I shall return to this topic below.

Before doing so, let me point out that the tension between the claims to factuality and the essentially humanistic discourse that is developed beneath their protection is expressed in the text in a lack of focus, a certain slippage between topics, and in uncertainties, even vulgarities, of style. This is worth pointing out because it is missed by many readers. Take this comment from the back cover, by Philip Pullman (a writer of fantasy aimed principally at children): ‘The God Delusion is written with all the clarity and elegance of which Dawkins is a master. It is so well written, in fact, etc.’ Or this one, from the same place, by Steven Pinker (a populariser of science): ‘Richard Dawkins, one of the best non-fiction writers alive today, has assembled his thoughts on religion into a characteristically elegant book’. Pullman and Pinker are mistaken; the book is neither well-written nor elegant – if elegance stands in opposition to caprice. Dawkins has a limited imaginative grasp of the authors he agrees with, and less of those he disagrees with, but he also writes badly, with abrupt changes in register and the rather clumsy insertion of jokes; worse, he tells you what to think rather than showing you how to make judgements – hence the use of adjectives and adverbs to prejudice the reader – and he cannot choose in what genre to write, turning to polemic, testimony, journalism and popularising science in turn. When his critics praise the elegance of his writing, they mean little more than that they agree with his project. This is a perfectly proper thing to do, so let us try in turn to understand Dawkins' thesis.

A Darwinian theodicy

As well as supporters, Dawkins has had his detractors. However, attempts to refute one aspect or another of the work cannot offer a successful way to understanding Dawkins' thesis. Eagleton's ironic and perhaps condescending review entitled ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’,Footnote ⁷ whilst something of a master-class in pointing out the subtleties of classical theological readings and contemporary Christian defences, would not convince anyone sympathetic to Dawkins' approach; indeed, it would simply offer confirmatory evidence. Here is a statement on behalf of a religious system, determined to win on its own terms – even if the system is represented by a fellow-traveller rather than a paid-up Party member. Similarly, discussion by a cognitive psychologist as to whether Dawkins has fully grasped the thesis that ‘religion is a by-product of the workings of normal, cognitive mechanisms . . . that have evolved for reasons unrelated to religion per se’Footnote ⁸ is beside the point. We should consider the positive case that Dawkins proposes, for that is what moves his sympathetic readers, and this case I believe is organised through two strands of argument.

The first strand is a polemic against religion, often cast in terms that are reminiscent of Nietzsche, who is not, however, mentioned in the index. In the unlikely event of his not having read him, Dawkins might enjoy him, for they share a common objective, which is to make the world a better place by freeing man from his debilitating illusions, religion among them. There is much to applaud and enjoy in these polemical sections, although the reader picks and chooses according to taste – Eagleton, for example, is quite content to allow Dawkins to gnaw on the Neo-Cons, the Taliban, and Texan fundamentalists. Dawkins' problems in this strand lie in two connected issues. On the one hand, even if he was right, and religion were in large part responsible for the world's ills, he has not got much to set up against it, for a rational scientific understanding seems a weak force to set up against the hard-wired motivations and commitments expressed in religion: understanding, like regret, will be too little and too late. On the other hand, his is not a plausible thesis: even were it possible to conjure away religion, there is enough evidence that bad things would continue to occur unabated, quite as much as good. Dawkins works hard to show that good does not depend upon God and, somewhat obsessively, that the bad of Stalin and Hitler does not depend upon their atheism. Yet, at another level, it is naïve to link reason, especially in its scientific or technical forms, to ethical behaviour, whether or not you see religion as being capable of being more than an ideological expression of error. Goods and ills emerge in this world in a far more complex, ambiguous and inter-connected manner than Dawkins can account for, and this absence underlies the sense one gains in reading of a certain lack of moral imagination.

Despite these limits (which are remarked with much greater felicity by other critics, including Eagleton), a great part of Dawkins' appeal to his readers lies precisely in this account he offers of the world and of the place of men and women in such a world: he offers a theodicy, an account of good and evil, of wisdom and folly, and of man's consequent well-being and woe. His account bears the characteristic marks of the genre outlined above: claiming a scientific status, looking to education to enlighten and spread the truth, and being ‘democratic’, holding knowledge to be open to all. In these respects, Dawkins' theory resembles accounts of the world that he would – and does – strongly reject, in particular, mesmerism, spiritualism, spiritual healing and phrenology. These, as remarked earlier, were also widely held theodicies that built upon an appreciation of contemporary science, in the instance, popular apprehensions of Newtonianism. The reason that this comparison offers something more than a superficial resemblance is that the second strand of Dawkins' account – its heart and the source of its authority – relies upon an apprehension of Darwinism.

In Dawkins' perspective, Darwinism consists in individual units seeking their own self-interest (defined as self-replication), controlled by competition. This mechanism is required to explain all aspects of human life, including the social: it is the principle of intelligibility of human behaviour. It is important to note that Dawkins proposes a series of Darwinian accounts at different scales – the gene, the individual, the meme (the last his own coinage) – that purposely exclude the social group: his intention is to derive various kinds of collective or social behaviour, including religious and moral behaviour, as by-products of these forms subject to selection. The thrust of the argument is not so much anti-religious, then, as anti-sociological. The notion of memes – units of cultural inheritance – is clearly the most relevant to the discussion of religion and morality, and yet is the least clearly defined as to how they exist and their means of passing on. For Dawkins, memes allow that there be a pool of cultural options, on the analogy of a gene pool, so that competition may drive down some forms and elevate others. We might think of such forms being transmitted by social institutions, but the issue for Dawkins here is one of scale: his examples include limericks, knots, stitches, origami patterns and useful tricks in carpentry and pottery. He is therefore consistent in excluding social behaviour from any kind of explanatory function.Footnote ⁹ Once one places intelligibility in the effects of competition between individual units (at whatever scale), collective phenomena must be secondary and explicable in terms reducible to the basic mechanism and may be construed in this way as error. For this reason, Dawkins expends a good deal of energy upon the traditional topics of duty and compassion – or altruism, in its biological guise – in which individuals appear to make claims on others that trump those others’ self-interestedness. In these arguments, the focus is the contrast between scientific explanations that emerge from competition between individual forms, on the one hand, and social explanations that misleadingly claim to substitute for them, on the other. So (to offer my own example), biological reproduction and genetics would be concerned with facts, whilst anthropological notions of kinship would be based upon illusion; Dawkins distinguishes in this sort of case between ‘factual’ and ‘non-factual’ beliefs. There is a difficulty, however, with this kind of contrast; it may be well and good when the purpose is to distinguish between the positive truths of science and the illusions of religion and morality, but the shears of relevance cut too far, for scientific rationality is also a collective, social institution, just as much as are the rejected forms of social life. Just as in the first strand, where it is naïve to imagine good and bad effects are sufficiently distinct natural kinds that are generated by truthful and illusory forms respectively, to be readily distinguished and separated, so in this instance the proffered basis of intelligibility does not allow us to choose unambiguously between distinct forms of life. Too much indeed is conceded by recourse to a purely Darwinian account; it is not clear, if we were truly Darwinian (in this version), what could be the communicable basis of scientific truth. If we were Darwinian without remainder, we could not know it.

Popular Darwinianism

The limitations are not, of course, crucial, any more than those of the polemic against religion: they are simply the price to be paid in this kind of writing, with its mix of appeals to immediate experience, premature generalisations and imponderable universals, some of which we have begun to identify. Beneath the appeal to Science, embodied in the genius of Darwin, we have a deliberate, skilful and rhetorical presentation of a theodicy, to be sold in the market-place of such ideas, with the aim of persuading and even converting hearers to a secular salvation. One might notice in this regard Dawkins' concessions to the practice of using appearances, even when they go against the truth, to support a cause.Footnote ¹⁰

The success of the book may then be explained by its belonging to a tradition, going back two hundred years, of simultaneously deploying popular accounts of the Christian religion with popular accounts of the latest scientific discoveries in order to offer some kind of moral picture of the present. The two major forms of authoritative truth available to us are brought into some kind of a relationship to explain who we are and where we are going and what our potential might be. The relationship will include aspects of cooperation as well as of opposition between the two forms of authority (Dawkins, like Nietzsche, admires Jesus as an ethical innovator and cannot stand St Paul). Dawkins therefore fits somewhere in a spectrum that includes not only spiritualism and astrology, but also, as hinted earlier, fundamentalism and the New Age, fantasy literature, science fiction and popular science, as well as a great deal more. As remarked, a good proportion of what is currently published and which sells well belongs to this kind of writing. To have begun to build a popular Darwinianism, comparable to the popular Newtonianism of the nineteenth century, is a remarkable achievement, although the tribute may not be acceptable to the author. And although it claims to be a true account, that motif is part of the genre, as are the various stylistic and argumentative features we noted at the outset, not least the polemic, explicit and implicit, against established forms. Dawkins is in these respects closer to Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code) than he is to Gregor Mendel, and the reception (and success) of his writing needs to be thought about in these terms. He is offering us a secret, one that previously has been concealed from us by interested parties. This realisation means it is quite difficult to appraise his account of religion, because it is a meditation upon some rather arbitrarily chosen aspects of the world, a bricolage using elements drawn eclectically to tell a certain kind of modern myth. Curiously enough, the task of people of faith may be more akin to that of scientists, for it is to engage experimentally with the world and to produce sincere, reliable (and so testable) knowledge, even though this engagement may be expressed in terms such as ‘weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire’,Footnote ¹¹ and despite the acknowledged fact they frequently fail in this calling. Dawkins presents only a simulacrum of such practices, and he would not sell well if he did otherwise.

The two cultures

There is one other feature to be considered, that sets Dawkins out from his fellow authors, and that is the degree to which he has been endorsed by the British scientific establishment. The names praising Dawkins' work on the back cover are exactly the kind one would expect if you accept my argument: they are drawn from fantasy literature, popular science writing, experimental popular music and conjuring. But Dawkins is also a Professor at the University of Oxford and, more particularly, a Fellow of the Royal Society. What are we to make of that? Dawkins' chair is in the Public Understanding of Science, and the tradition of academic freedom, including allowing appointees to develop their post as they see fit, is long-standing in British universities. The Royal Society, however, has a scrupulous system of scrutiny before election, so it is legitimate to ask whether this style of thought and expression is representative of what is acknowledged to be excellent by the best British scientists and, if so, should it be a matter for discussion that they cannot tell the difference between what they do and this kind of representation of their activities and achievements? The answer lies somewhere in the gap between the practice of scientists and the notion of ‘the public understanding of science’, and the difficulties of conveying the significance of scientific work to the public mind, including establishing its claims upon the public purse. We might remark that the tone and style Dawkins adopts are reminiscent of a good many of the contemporary writings of eminent scientists addressing a wider public; they too are didactic rather than demonstrative, they tell rather than show how. Although he is more successful than they, Dawkins points to an interesting problem that haunts the profession as a whole: how to communicate the discoveries of scientific research without recourse to what we might call a ‘Metaphysics of Science’. I would tentatively propose this general principle as a guide – if only to provoke counter-instances – that natural scientific discoveries become interesting with respect to thinking about human societies and moral practices precisely at the point at which they are misapplied.

This recourse to such a metaphysic may in turn be linked with the practical problem of recruitment of students to study the sciences that confronts British universities: if this is the face that laboratory science currently presents to intelligent young people, some of the best may be confused and even put off. There is therefore an issue here, not of the self-understanding of the scientific establishment precisely, but of its self-presentation in an era of mass culture, and there would be a place for some scientists trying less hard to take up the presumed interests of their desired audience, and writing more about the detail of their profession in cold blood.

The broad issue underlying this paper therefore concerns the place of educated or critical thought in public life. It is not novel. It is at least worth comparing the excitement raised around Dawkins' work to that connected with an earlier debate from the 1960s around C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures, which focused upon the relationship of the sciences to the arts and humanities. The major protagonists were Snow, a scientist who, after a brief laboratory life, had become a public figure, a writer and an administrator, and F. R. Leavis, an academic concerned with the detailed practices of education and moral formation. Many of the same issuesFootnote ¹² come up in one guise or another, though it is notable that Dawkins now need take no account of literature as an academic project. We have moved on, and the targets have become rather the last resistances of the social scientists. But the forms of the debate, and the intellectual problems they pose, persist over a longer time-scale, and are in some sense definitive of our time. While I have been concerned to identify a widespread genre which may hold the place of a modern, urban folklore in our culture, underlying the enquiry is the role critical thinking plays in contemporary civilisation.