The Enemy of Reason, In Spite of Himself

The Stephen Hawking business today is a complete non-story. But Richard Dawkins last night was almost right so many times that it was almost heartbreaking to hear how wrong this apparently amiable man, a highly intelligent believer that people need to know the Bible stories in order to understand this country's culture, still managed to be. (Incidentally, at least for today, the militant atheist lobby did not used to take that view of Biblical literacy, just as it has only very recently stopped campaigning against Christmas as a public holiday, as it now often claims that it never did. It is still battling on over Easter, but it has sold the pass.)

He began by asking why, when people stopped believing in religion, they also stopped believing in science. But he made no attempt to answer that one, perhaps because he does in fact know the answer: the natural-scientific method, as we now understand it, only arose because the Medieval Church condemned, by Her own authority in interpreting the Bible as Divine Revelation, the theories of eternalism, cyclicism, animism, pantheism and astrology that had resurfaced in their Aristotelian forms. Science presupposes, but cannot prove, the existence of a rationally investigable order in the universe. It derives that presupposition from Christianity.

Dawkins set up two of his favourite straw men, the lots of people who claim that science makes the universe less beautiful, and the lots of people these days who deny the myriad practical benefits of science. Who are these people? Where are they? Have you ever met any? I haven't. Then we were treated to how "most people know the character of their star sign", on which Dawkins should speak for himself, and how astrology is believed in by "a quarter of the population, more than believe in any god", of which, even if the first part is true, the second part certainly is not.

As for the fifty per cent of people who believe in "paranormal phenomena", what does that mean? Not necessarily anything more than that they, or someone they know, has had such an experience, and is not aware of the scientific explanation for it, which may or may not yet exist, and which (this is obviously where I really do part company with Dawkins) may or may not ever exist. But there may already be such an answer, merely unknown to the respondent. All in all, one in two is not a surprisingly high, but a surprisingly low, figure.

So many of Dawkins's targets so richly deserved it, and he was so right both to bemoan the decline in Science A-levels and to see the root problem as Postmodern relativism, the term that he actually used, as if he were John Paul II or Benedict XVI. But his own scientism is itself a form of Postmodern relativism, destroying the intellectual and cultural basis of science as surely as radical pluralism is self-invalidating in its own claim to be an absolute truth; as surely as radical eclecticism is self-invalidating in its refusal of the mediation of whole systems of thought by whole cultures, even including the whole radical eclectic system as mediated by the whole radical eclectic culture; as surely as historicism is self-invalidating in its denial of the enduring validity of any truth, even including the asserted truth of historicism as a proposition; and as radical pragmatism is self-invalidating in its failure to recognise the fundamental human need to be more than pragmatic alone.

There are certainly those who say the natural-scientific method is just another meme. I do not believe that any more than Richard Dawkins does. But I both know how to counter it and am prepared to do so. Why doesn't he, if he doesn't? Or why isn't he, if he does?