Cultural Diversity and Scientific Truth: In Conversation with Philip Ball

fdoesPeter Harrison

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I am grateful for Philip Ball’s careful and considered engagement with Some New World. I have long admired and learned from his work. His impressive catalogue of books exhibits not only a mastery of the relevant sciences and a capacity for lucid explanations of challenging material, but a genuine openness to the perspectives of other disciplines. This distinguishes his writing from those popularisers of science who can be prone, at times, to an incipient scientism and a penchant for trotting out triumphalist pseudo-histories of their discipline. This brings us at once to one of the issues animating Ball’s commentary, the question of why most scientists, and many promoters of science, are either uninterested in the history and philosophy of their discipline, or are wedded to mythical versions of it. 

As Ball himself suggests, much of the attractiveness of dubious histories of science lies in the fact that these stories generate a sense of community. This is a general characteristic of myths, which function sociologically to maintain order and reinforce norms in communities. I have argued that the inculcation of such myths is often part of scientific formation, of the induction of initiates into the literal discipline of science. These stories are also a powerful source of social legitimation for the natural sciences, something that is especially important when the authority of science is under threat, as seems to be increasingly the case these days.

Unfortunately, the comforting narratives beloved by many scientists fall well short of the standards of historical scholarship. They flatten out the complicated trajectories of scientific development, elide the influence of philosophy and theology, amplify the individual contributions of heroic figures, and often posit some enduring or inevitable conflict between science and religion. One of the goals of Some New World was to contest those stories: to show just how central theological commitments have been to emergence of modern science and even suggest that elements of a covert reliance on theological premises might persist into the present. The prevailing rule of naturalism in the sciences turns out to be deeply indebted to a theological understanding of the regularities of nature. That said, in the face of widespread, religiously motivated resistance to aspects of science and especially evolutionary theory, the dubious story of science’s gradual historical displacement of the irrational forces of religion helps make sense of the present moment and inspires confidence that one is on the right side of history. 

Peter Harrison. Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, Cambridge University Press, 2024. pp. 488. $49 (hardback)

The field of the public understanding of science sheds further light the wide acceptance of false historical narratives about science. "Narrative’s ability to create its own version of truth is what makes it attractive to scientists looking for alternative ways to influence public opinion," as one researcher has put it. The myth-makers of the nineteenth century who popularised the science-religion conflict narrative—T. H. Huxley, John Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and others—tacitly exploited this principle. This helps explain why the assiduous efforts of historians to provide corrective accounts based on the relevant historical facts have often been in vain. The problem is less to do with a lack of availability of information, and more to do with the rhetorical appeal of "heroes and villains"-style narratives. For their part, scientists attempting to put across their messages to a sceptical public are victims of the same phenomenon.  Anti-evolutionism and vaccine hesitancy arise not out of an information deficit, but from subscription to a set of values thought to be incompatible with those of materialist science. It difficult, then, not to feel some sympathy for defenders of science, such as Jerry Coyne, with his plaintive insistence that ‘evolution is true’. The truth, as historians have discovered, is no match for myth.  As Ball puts it, "real history lacks the rhetorical value of these falsified histories." The uncomfortable truth is that scientists may be just as prone to the allure of myths as the religious fundamentalists whom they oppose.

Compounding a fondness for historical myth among some scientists is a lack of curiosity about historical and philosophical questions, which in some cases extends to an active hostility towards the humanistic disciplines.  Richard Feynman, Lewis Wolpert, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are all on record as having dismissed philosophy as completely irrelevant to science. These, unfortunately, are prominent figures who speak for science with some authority. The contrast with scientists of the past is stark. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) was to some extent the villain of my story, given his pivotal role in pioneering a particular version of scientific naturalism and the construction of influential myths about its perennial nature.  But what I find admirable about him was his curiosity about historical, theological, and philosophical topics, and his willingness to engage with the arguments he found there. Huxley also had the courage to prosecute a controversial case for naturalism, at risk to his personal and profession standing. It is also significant that a good number of the early twentieth-century scientists who revolutionized modern physics and astronomy were also deeply engaged in philosophy, (and in some cases, religion, too—Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Eddington, Ronald Fisher, Georges Lemaitre).

Admittedly, much has changed since then. One of the downsides to the remarkable growth in our knowledge of the natural world is that there is now simply too much to know. Incentives to publish and to present every experimental outcome as a significant advance does not help. Disciplinary specialization has also been accompanied by the rise of technical vocabularies that militate against easy translation between disciplines.  Our educational institutions are far more narrowly focused than they once were. The reality is that many practicing scientists lack the time to engage in extra-curricular interests even if they had the inclination. 

But it is worth speculating about whether the innovations in physics characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were related in some way to the broader intellectual training and interests of the key players. While our present-day hyperspecialization works well for the conduct of what T. S. Kuhn referred to as "normal science" (a mopping up exercise that deals with residual problems within a paradigm), perhaps what is needed for genuinely revolutionary science is the kind of spur to creativity that cross-disciplinary interests might provide. 

Of course, creative pressures for revolutionary change in the sciences do come from within the practices of "normal science," as Ball’s own accounts of the current states of physics and biology suggest. Quantum mechanics seems to posit the impossible. But we seem now to have lost the puzzlement that preoccupied its pioneers, with the ruling edict now being "shut up and calculate."  Ball has suggested that on any reasonable reckoning, quantum mechanics poses questions that are deeply metaphysical. If we take quantum mechanics at all seriously "we need to critically revisit our most basic assumptions about nature." The need for a radical revision of some of our basic scientific assumptions is becoming increasingly evident in biology too, where recent developments, considered together, herald "the beginning of a profound re-thinking of how life works."[6]  (I say "taken together" advisedly, since even within the single disciplinary grouping of biology, gaining a bird’s-eye perspective can be a challenge.) In my view, this is not a matter of tidying-up a few loose ends, but of a radical reconsideration of the very categories that we use to describe nature and which we simply take for granted in our present scientific endeavors. For an exercise such as this, we may need to look beyond the sciences as presently conducted to discover the resources needed for the task. 

What history has to offer is a record of the contingent nature of our present sciences, and of the categories that we deploy within them. It points to paths not taken, which may yet have life in them. And it provides numerous precedents, if not roadmaps, for radical change.

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Peter Harrison is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is the author of eleven books, including The Territories of Science and Religion (winner of the 2016 Aldersgate Prize) and most recently, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age. He is the Co-Director of Marginalia's Meanings of Science Project.