Monthly Archives: September 2015

Is it worth arguing with Dawkins?

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witt vienna

What makes for a useful argument? There are several things that need to be in place before a discussion can be mutually fruitful, rather than such discussion descending, as politicians’ arguments so often do, into a simple exchange of soundbites and slogans. The classical form for understanding a particular subject divides the material into three categories – grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Grammar is where to begin, the ground stuff: the basic vocabulary, that which is needed in order simply to know what you are talking about. This is the stuff that needs to be learnt by heart before being able to progress any further, so it includes things like the alphabet, number sequence, basic dates of history and so on. Without this foundation it is literally impossible to progress any further in an understanding of the subject area.

After grammar comes logic. This is where the basic raw material has been learned, and now it is possible to apply reason to that raw material. This is where the rules of interpretation are established and put to use, where words can be formed into proper sentences, where numbers can be put through equations, where a story can be told around a particular historical sequence of events and so on.

Rhetoric comes last. Rhetoric is where things can become creative, for this is where those who have mastered the grammar and logic of a subject are able to begin building new arguments and ideas; that is, this is where it is possible to develop new rules for the logic. This is where creative and interesting work can be done – and sometimes this creative and interesting work is so profound that it completely recasts the grammar and logic of the subject in question.

The great problem with arguments about theology and philosophy of religion in our society is that those who make the most noise are people who think that they are operating at the level of rhetoric when in fact they have not yet even engaged with the basic grammar. Richard Dawkins, for example, hasn’t even achieved the level of being wrong. He is like a baby first learning to speak words, whereby it is mostly gibberish that comes out, and when there is a coherent word you cannot be certain that it matches up with a coherent thought.

Theology and the philosophy of religion have been studied by the finest minds in human history for three thousand years and more. There is a rich and fertile intellectual field that interacts with every other intellectual field, most especially the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language – it is not possible to have a rigorous understanding of physics without an equally robust understanding of metaphysics for example (as Aristotle knew). In order to make a coherent contribution to understanding in this area it really does make a difference if you have become acquainted with the way the topics have been debated through history, not least because by doing so you discover many of the most common mistakes that have been made in the past, and you are therefore set free to not repeat them.

This intellectual history has many twists and turns, new pathways and dead ends. One particular dead-end is associated with the rise of twentieth-century atheism. The roots of that form of atheism are clear. It flows from arguments put forward by David Hume in the eighteenth century, moves through the development of analytic philosophy with people like Bertrand Russell, took a canonical form as ‘logical positivism’ with the publication of AJ Ayer’s ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in 1936, and was taken as received opinion in undergraduate circles in the 1960s. The arguments that Dawkins and his ilk like to make are cut directly from the arguments made by people like Russell and Ayer nearly eighty years ago. He isn’t saying anything new. Of course, the tradition doesn’t stand still, and what was intellectually fashionable in the 1960s had begun to be dismantled by the 1990’s and is now regarded as rather quaint. Ayer himself has disowned the book that was so influential, stating that it was full of mistakes that he spent the next fifty years trying to correct.

So when someone who has been formed in an intellectual tradition like philosophy engages in debate with works like those by Dawkins, Hithens and their brethren, it can be immensely frustrating. There is no basic agreement on the terms of the argument, no consensus as to the grammar and logic, let alone the rhetoric. Dawkins himself is very clear about his distaste for theology as he consigns it all to an intellectual scrapheap (using what is basically a ‘logical positivism’ type of argument to do so). At that point, what can the educated person do? She can simply say ‘you don’t know what you are talking about’ and leave it at that.

Unless…. unless she sees that there is a genuinely enquiring mind behind the arguments and disputes. Where there is a good will and an open mind then it is possible for a shared understanding to be formed. Please note that this shared understanding does not at all mean that the beginning student using Dawkins’ arguments will end up being converted to Christianity. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to understand the tradition completely, to know the grammar, be an expert in the logic, and to be creative rhetorically within the mainstream Western philosophical tradition, and still be a completely convinced atheist. It’s just that such an atheist would not be intellectually lazy, parroting opinions at fifth or sixth hand, and most of all, such an atheist would have a proper understanding of what it was that he was rejecting. That is what is most missing from Dawkins.

My philosophical hero, Wittgenstein, was a part of the intellectual movement that I summarised above – he was Russell’s favourite pupil – yet, even though his own faith was murky at best, he had a very clear understanding of the nature of religious belief and the way in which the philosophical tradition both could and could not interact with it. When he was invited to address the Vienna Circle of philosophers (those whose work Ayer went on to summarise) he realised that they hadn’t grasped some of the basic grammar of what he was trying to do. He therefore turned his chair around and began to recite poetry, in an attempt to shock them into opening their minds. He didn’t succeed. As he later wrote, “What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.” That’s the problem that I see with people like Dawkins – they simply don’t want to understand.

The uses and abuses of scientific authority

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I believe that science is in need of a Reformation. By that I mean that science as presently practiced has travelled a very long way from its origins as a holy endeavour, characterised by humility in the face of the truth. The way that science is presently practiced involves a very great deal of intellectual dishonesty and manipulation, and these egregious faults pass generally unnoticed simply because of the immense social capital that “science” has generated as a result of technological success.

Scientists as such have a certain authority in our culture as they are seen as those who possess a form of knowledge which is beyond normal understanding, and the results of that knowledge are often awesome and inspiring – the moon landings being one particularly visible success. Yet there are clear limits to what science can tell us, and the distance between what an authentic scientist might say (authentic meaning one who has humility before the truth) and what a contemporary scientist might say (contemporary meaning one who simply makes bold claims without being able to back them up) is very stark.

Let us return once again to Richard Dawkins, the erstwhile Professor for the public understanding of science. When Dawkins writes about science, especially about evolutionary biology, he is excellent – a compelling writer, lucid, vivid, and able to explain complex phenomena in a way that the intelligent lay reader can understand. Dawkins has authority in this subject area because it is an area in which he has been trained thoroughly and in which he has decades of experience as a teacher. If you want to understand evolutionary biology then I can unhesitatingly recommend his writings.

However, what Dawkins is presently best known for is his writings on religion. This is not his area of academic expertise. He has not received any training in this area at all, and he has no academic experience. What Dawkins has done is use the authority that he has accrued as a writer in the sphere of evolutionary biology to try and strengthen his case in a different area. This is intellectually illegitimate; it is a form of fraud. As most people have little expertise in this area, and as most people give authority to ‘scientists’, Dawkins is given a hearing. Yet for those who actually have expertise in this area Dawkins’ arguments barely reach the level of being wrong. As the Marxist atheist Terry Eagleton memorably put it, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” I say this with authority because this is an area in which I have been fully trained and in which I have years of experience teaching – so yes, in this arena my qualifications are indeed much greater than those of Dawkins!

Dawkins is simply the most obvious example of a scientist who is cashing in on the general respect given to science by our culture in order to advance a different agenda. The subject of my last article, the medical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex is another. Modern medicine is indeed a marvellous thing. The ways in which we understand the mechanisms of the body and can often repair it when they go wrong, from broken bones to treating heart disease, this is wonderful and worthy of as many prayers of thanksgiving that we can muster. Yet the pharmaceutical industry has taken advantage of the trust that we give to doctors, a trust which is very much a subset of the trust that we give to scientists in general, and has manipulated that relationship in order to make money. Scientific research – that on which our whole system of modern medicine relies – has been systematically abused and distorted in order to serve the financial interests of huge industrial conglomerates, and any idea of intellectual humility before the truth was abandoned long ago.

A further example comes when we look at the issue of ‘climate change’, what used to be called – and what used to be more honestly called – ‘global warming’. The allegation was that as a result of modern industrial development we were pumping dangerous levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as a result of which the global temperature was going to continuously increase. The IPCC produced regular bulletins giving predictions about what was going to happen (they still do this, even though there hasn’t been any increase in global temperatures for around 17 years now, and counting). Yet we often hear reference to the figure of 97%, as in ‘97% of scientists believe in global warming’. Once again, we have an argument which is only given a hearing because of the general authority that is given to scientists. As soon as that figure is subjected to any sort of rigorous scrutiny – Where did it come from? How was it arrived at? – then the figure falls apart, as it is based on incredibly shoddy and manipulated research (those who are interested in the detail I would refer to the blog Climate Etc written by Professor Judith Curry, one of the world’s leading climatologists). Whenever you hear someone mention this figure, our Prime Minister perhaps, be certain that it indicates a profound ignorance about the subject being discussed.

The religious reformation began with an awareness that the institutions of the church had lost touch with their own highest purposes, and had succumbed, as human institutions so often do succumb, to the very human frailties of greed, vanity and pride. I believe that, taken as a social institution, science has succumbed to the very same vices. Just as the church was reformed by a protest movement, so too must science be reformed. Just as the church was renewed by a return to first principles – the slogan used was ‘ad fontes’ – so too must science return to its own best practice, restricting itself to saying only what can be known, and not prostituting its authority in search of worldly success, whether that be celebrity or cold, hard cash. Put simply, science will only be able to properly be itself when it recognises that it cannot function without those human virtues that I have mentioned, of humility, integrity, honesty, self-discipline and the like – and most of all, when it recognises that those foundations on which it depends can only be established on spiritual terms. In other words, science will only be able to function properly as science when it both remembers and honours the original queen of the sciences: theology.

Queen of the Sciences

Do you have faith in your pills?

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bad_pharmaIn recent years many of the insititutional pillars of society have fallen into disrespect. Politicians, obviously, but also journalism, the priesthood, the police, many others. Groups that were trusted who have now fallen from grace. Are doctors going to be next?

This is a question raised by Ben Goldacre in his extremely stimulating book ‘Bad Pharma’, which I read on holiday. Goldacre is a qualified medical doctor and psychiatrist, and presently a lecturer at Oxford. In his book, published in 2012, Goldacre sets out to show, in his words, that “Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects.”

Goldacre supports these contentions throughout his book building up a detailed critique of the pharmaceutical industry and the way in which it systematically distorts the medical process at every stage. The motivations for the pharmaceutical industry to do this are quite straightforward, given that it is a multi-billion pound industry and a successful new drug can mean the difference between a company flourishing and failing. However, in pursuit of that economic end, Goldacre documents the ways in which the industry undermines the scientific process in order to make more profit. The material that Goldacre presents is utterly shocking, and if I had any residual faith in the science lying behind much modern medical and psychiatric treatment, it has certainly vanished now.

Goldacre describes one example from when he was working in General Practice, which relates to the drug Reboxetine (Edronax), which is used as an anti-depressant. He had a patient who was not improving on other drugs, and was considering using Reboxetine to see if it had a beneficial effect. He looked at the available literature which seemed positive, and agreed with his patient that it was worth trying, and duly wrote out a prescription. However, shortly after this, a review of all the research on Reboxetine was published, which for the first time included data from medical trials that had not been published (one of the main ways in which the pharmaceutical industry manipulates things is by only publishing information about trials that show their drug in a favourable light, whilst suppressing information that is critical). Goldacre writes, “I did everything a doctor is supposed to do. I read all the papers, I critically appraised them, I understood them, I discussed them with the patient and we made a decision together, based on the evidence. In the published data, reboxetine was a safe and effective drug. In reality, it was no better than a sugar pill and, worse, it does more harm than good. As a doctor, I did something that, on the balance of all the evidence, harmed my patient, simply because unflattering data was left unpublished.”

The problems that Goldacre are describing are recognised as serious problems by some influential voices. The British Medical Journal, for example, recently published an editorial written by Goldacre entitled “How medicine is broken, and how we can fix it” so there are some grounds for hope. However, very little of substance is changing, and the pharmaceutical industry continues to operate with a great deal of freedom in how it manipulates the scientific process.

What really needs to happen is that the light of public attention needs to shine on this area in a sustained and intensive way. We need to become as worked up about what is happening in pharmaceuticals as we are about all the other scandals of our time. All institutions run the risk of becoming cocooned in their own ways of thinking and patterns of life, and sometimes it takes an outsider to come along and say ‘this is simply not right’. MPs doubtless thought that claiming expenses for the draining of their moats was simply how things were done; journalists doubtless cynically accepted that phone-tapping was the way in which the truth was discovered; church hierarchies were doubtless concerned that priests accused of child abuse had to be given a chance for redemption. In the same way I believe, following Goldacre, that the medical profession needs to be told that the present practice of relying on the pharmaceutical industry as the principal guide for the benefits or otherwise that come from any particular medicine is not acceptable.

I suspect that this will be a very difficult process because there is something different about the medical profession at the moment that doesn’t apply to the other examples. In our current society, as I have said many times, “science” operates in the role that theology used to, in that it is the overarching and dominant form of knowledge, which incorporates all others. Those who are learned in this form of knowledge are the priests of our contemporary age and, in particular, those who provide forms of healing on the basis of that form of knowledge function in the modern world in a very similar fashion to ancient shamans. Sometimes the healing can be entirely ritualistic, as is most apparent when considering the difference in effectiveness between anti-depressants and placebos (sugar pills) – both have the same healing effect, which rather suggests that such healing as takes place is a product of the ritual visit to the tribal medicine man. In other words, what we are dealing with here is not a simple, practical, technical problem that can be solved by the application of sufficient determination and good will. No, here we are seeking to topple the gods of our society, and Goldacre is a blasphemer and heretic.

There are, obviously, many ways in which the pharmaceutical industry has helped the common good, and Goldacre gives credit where it is due. However, it is equally clear that the present system is broken. I would thoroughly recommend Goldacre’s book to anyone who is interested in this subject. I shall be following the ongoing conversations with great interest.