SCIENCE AND BELIEF

Rupert Sheldrake. The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry. Coronet, 2013.

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Lawrence M Krauss. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. With an afterword by Richard Dawkins. Simon and Schuster, 2012.

These books are excellent examples of how science can become caught up in culture wars. Even though he was trained as a naturalist, Rupert Sheldrake does not really like modern science at all. This is because he sees it as materialistic and atheistic. Lawrence Krauss represents just that sort of atheistic science that Sheldrake deplores.
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The science in Krauss’s book is fine, and presents modern cosmological ideas in a way open to the lay person, and shows some considerable scepticism towards string theory and the like. The problem is that it is used to bolster a personal ideological position, anti-theism. In itself the latter is also fine, it is the linking of the two together, so that science becomes a battering ram against ideas the author disapproves of that creates problems.

Equally there are aspects of Sheldrake’s arguments which are (at least to me) unexceptional, for example the possibly that physical ‘constants’ may actually fluctuate over time, and how standardisation of definitions may prevent this being detected. He is surely right in arguing that sceptics should not dismiss possible new phenomena on purely metaphysical grounds. The interesting thing is that in mainstream science, scientists don’t actually do this; when reliable claims for compounds for what were then called the ‘inert gases’ came in the 1960s they were taken up not suppressed. The claims for cold fusion and faster than light neutrinos both led to races to replicate the experiments not to suppress them; mainstream palaeoanthropology took the ‘hobbit’ in its stride, and now has taken ‘modern’ human/Neanderthal interbreeding on board. Physicists in Germany have now found a ‘trick’ to get a gas below absolute zero (at least on one metric), which is about as ‘impossible’ as it comes.

If science can entertain the possibility of faster than light neutrinos and below zero gases (regardless as to whether the claims will eventually pan out) then why do the claims advanced by people like Sheldrake lead to such ire? You might think it as something to do with evidence, but I suspect it is more to do with the fact that these claims are advanced by people like Sheldrake, who advance them not because they have an interest in the anomalies as a means of advancing mainstream scientific knowledge, but in order to subvert the whole scientific world view.

The particular claims advanced by Sheldrake may or may not be true, whether dogs can know when their owners are coming home, whether animal behaviour can predict earthquakes or people can tell when someone is staring at them, and so on, but they would not be any more ‘impossible’ than some other things that science has found an acceptance for, however difficult their explanation might be. The real problem is that he, and others like him, are not really interested in the anomalous ‘facts’ themselves, but as weapons in the ideological struggle against ‘materialism’.

The first problem is the use of that word ‘materialism’, actually Sheldrake means ‘physicalism’ or more generally ‘scientific naturalism’. Sheldrake says he uses the word ‘materialism’ because it is better known, I suspect he is being disingenuous here, and uses ‘materialism’ because it sounds more pejorative.

Now he is perfectly free to reject ‘naturalism’ as an absolute metaphysical truth, but not to reject ‘operative scientific naturalism’, because that is the rule of the game called science, a rule (with very few exceptions) accepted by theists, deists, agnostics and atheists alike when doing science, it allows people with very different religious and philosophical backgrounds to work together with a common language.

Despite his Jeremiads against ‘materialist’ science, and for a naturalist he gives me the impression of not actually liking the messy world of plain natural stuff very much, his own theories really do not make much actual difference. ‘Morphic fields’ if they exist are part of the natural, physical world, they must be to have an impact on the physical world, if some influence causes people to be aware they are being stared at, then this influence must be part of the physical world. Indeed the strange quasi-Platonic theory of vision that Sheldrake advances seems to be to be more materialistic than anything in the mainstream.

Add to that his wholesale rejection of much of modern biology and empirical experience, it seems there is little room for dialogue. Those with radical ideas, who tend to argue that everyone else is wrong fall into two classes; visionaries and cranks. The former come up with genuinely new ideas that no-one has thought of before, they are few and far between, and a fair proportion are genuinely mad. Cranks on the other hand look backwards to past ideas and the day before yesterday’s orthodoxy, they recycle old ideas, cite old sources and quote old authorities. I rather fear that Sheldrake is closer to the latter than the former.

That said there is no doubt that the kind of quasi-religious scientism increasingly promoted by Dawkins and his allies does science no real good. The strange fact is that Sheldrake and Dawkins come from rather similar backgrounds, middle class, religiously orientated boarding school educated, English naturalists and appear to have come to diametrically opposed world views, yet perhaps share a common intolerance of views other than their own, and quite impressive sense of self confidence.

• Peter Rogerson