Sense About Science

A comment here yesterday seems to have struck a chord with a lot of email correspondents, that there never really quite was the Keynesian closed shop in academic economics alleged by the rising neoliberals of the 1970s, but there really is a neoliberal closed shop today, with the disastrous effects that cannot now have escaped the notice of anyone beyond the very highest and most luxurious of ivory towers.

Meanwhile, on and on they spew into my inbox, insisting that the natural-scientific method is self-validating, that merely because it works in its own terms then that means that those terms themselves are philosophically respectable. It is thanks to that lazy, historically aberrant way of thinking that we have the popular, and even elite, attitudes that I bemoaned yesterday: hypochondria about potential food supplies, quackery at public expense, the superstitious drivel that deprives us of nuclear power, and so on.

As I also wrote then, we have the highly politicised use of climate change hysteria, and we have the pouring into useless embryonic stem cell "research" of the money that should be spent on adult and cord blood stem cell research, which really works. I should add that we also have the transformation of this country into a bioethical rogue state, with spare parts babies, with human-animal hybridity (I'll say that again - human-animal hybridity), and with two women or even two men listed as the parents on birth certificates (also worth repeating until it sinks in). As time goes by, the effects of all of this will be utterly calamitous for public confidence in science. I do not want this any more than my interlocutors do. But I know what to do about it, and I am determined that that be done. Why aren't they?

In reply to other correspondents, no, I have no time for Intelligent Design, a warmed-up Deism devised by scientists and lawyers who are too arrogant to ask the sort of clergy who are appointed to parishes or congregations containing lots of scientists and lawyers. And although Arab science led the world between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries (above all in astronomy, mathematics and medicine), it then went into sharp decline as Christian Europe surged ahead at the start of the process that is still going on, and which has now spread throughout the world, including to the Arabs.

How and why did this happen?

In part, it was because the Catholic Church insisted on Her independence from the Sate, initially with regard to the appointment of bishops, but rapidly, once the principle had been established, in other areas as well. Under Her aegis, universities, cities and what we would now call professional bodies became legal entities in their own right, providing forums for free discussion. Islam simply did not, and does not, work like that.

But mostly, there was the impact of theological beliefs on the ability to do science. Many of the Arab scientists were in fact Christians, even if heterodox ones such as the translator ibn Masawagh of Baghdad, and his pupil Hunayan, who translated all the known Greek works into Arabic and Syriac, as well writing many medical treatises. The Christian physician ibn al-Quff of Damascus wrote one of the first treatises on surgery.

In Christianity, it is because God is both rational and free that His universe is both orderly and contingent. Since God is free, the universe is not necessary, and could have been otherwise: He need not have created it, and He might have created it any other way that He chose. If God were rational but not free, then His universe would be necessary and could not be other than it is, so that there would be no need to conduct experiments in order to understand it. Or, if God were free but not rational, then His universe would be so chaotic that there would be no observable order within it, and so science would again be impossible.

In Islam, however, everything is directly dependent on the will of Allah, a view which weakens any expectation to observe rationality and order in the universe, even before considering how capricious that will is presented as being in several verses of the Qur’an. Thus was science arrested in the Islamic world even as it soared away in Christendom. The contemporary resonance could not be clearer to and for those of us who care profoundly about science.