The Quacks Are Showing

Never mind Prince Charles. Not only is Jeremy Hunt an enthusiast for homoeopathy, but support for it is also the formal policy of UKIP. So much so, that its principal Commons advocate, David Tredinnick, who was arguing in favour of it on the Today programme this morning and who was long ago one of the original cash-for-questions MPs, is worried that the Conservative Party is being “outflanked” on this issue.

At least, in itself, homoeopathy usually does no harm, although of course harm can be and is done by a refusal to use real medicine in preference for plain water. But UKIP is also in favour of herbalism, which is a whole other story. And of Traditional Chinese Medicine, but that, as we shall see, is different.

There can be no such thing as “complementary medicine” or “alternative medicine”. If it works, then it is just medicine. Traditional Chinese Medicine is medicine, correctly so called. It has nothing to do with philosophical systems that, as set out below, are inimical to science and depend on the concepts the condemnation of which, by the Church as such, uniquely made possible the emergence of science.

Rather, it expresses a philosophical culture particularly open to completion by, in, through and as classical, historic, mainstream Christianity. The Western Confucian has a number of posts on TCM here, and its ethos of treating the whole person used to be called “General Practice” not very long ago. Unlike quackery, it not only requires for public safety, but demands of its own merit, to be regulated by statute.

The current popularity of such things as homoeopathy and herbalism is, like so much else, the result of our culture’s having moved away from the uniquely Christian rejection of humanity’s otherwise universal concepts of eternalism (that the universe has always existed and always will), animism (that the universe is a living thing, an animal), pantheism (that the universe is itself the ultimate reality, God), cyclicism (that everything which happens has already happened in exactly the same form, and will happen again in exactly the same form, an infinite number of times) and astrology (that events on earth are controlled by the movements of celestial bodies).

Science cannot prove that these closely interrelated things are not the case; it simply has to presuppose their falseness, first established in thirteenth-century Paris when their Aristotelian expression was condemned at the Sorbonne specifically by ecclesial authority, and specifically by reference to the Biblical Revelation.

This is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe. And it is why science did not last, or flower as it might have done, in the Islamic world: whereas Christianity sees the rationally investigable order in the universe as reflecting and expressing the rationality of the Creator, the Qur’an repeatedly depicts the will of Allah as capricious.

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.

For the same reasons, there never really was all that much scientific progress in the Soviet Union. No less ruinous than the capriciousness of the Qur’anic Creator was dialectical materialism. It begat Lysenkoism, Japheticism, and Kuznetsov’s 1952 attempt to enforce “the total renunciation of Einstein’s conception, without compromise or half-measure.”

It was practically impossible for Soviet scientists to communicate or interact with those from several major countries. There was a heavy dependence on Western equipment. Even the atomic bomb and the space programme relied greatly on previous American and German work.

We all know about Soviet computers, and about Soviet attempts to copy Concorde. When British scientists were at work on penicillin, their Soviet counterparts were actually boasting that they were close to perfecting a synthetic drug “likely to have curative properties not inferior to those of Peruvian balsam.” Balsam of Peru was introduced to Europe by Nicholas Monardes of Seville. In 1560.

Forget the earth being flat. No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

That was as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to the City of New York.

Forget Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the earth moved around the sun (although he could not prove that scientifically at the time - we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing), but that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church.

That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing. Whereas the abuses of the Soviet system really did happen. Well within living memory.

By turning away from ecclesial authority’s articulation and protection of the Biblical Revelation, and by turning away from the Biblical Revelation itself, the civilisation that these things called into being has turned away from science and towards eternalism, animism, pantheism, cyclicism and astrology, to the extent that a few years ago a Doctorate of Science was awarded to François Mitterand’s astrologer by, of all institutions, the Sorbonne.

Furthermore, eternalism, animism, pantheism, cyclicism and astrology, inseparable from each other, underlie, among so very much else, each and every form of “alternative medicine” or “complementary medicine”, contradictions in terms that these are. But homeopathy, at least, is still being funded by the NHS. Allegedly, we cannot afford various actual medicines. Yet somehow we can afford this.

And IVF, women on which very occasionally become pregnant for no other reason than that they would have done anyway, just as people taking homoeopathic very occasionally get better for no other reason than that they would have done anyway.

And embryonic stem cell “research”, which has never yielded the slightest thing, whereas ethically unproblematic adult and cord blood stem cell research is working wonders, and would work who knows how many more if it did not struggle so hard to secure funding.

And Ritalin, the definition of simple maleness as a medicable condition to match the definition of simple femaleness as a medicable condition to be treated by means of the Pill, which on any objective analysis is a poison rather a medicine, since it stops health body parts from doing exactly what they are supposed to do.

It does so, moreover, purely so that women might be permanently available for the sexual gratification of men, a level of misogyny matched only by the definition of the preborn child as simultaneously insentient and “part of a woman’s body”. Is it the whole of a woman’s body that is insentient? Or it is only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?

Jeremy Hunt is manifestly happy with all of these, too. No doubt, so is UKIP. His and its position is that of Islamic fundamentalism avant et après la lettre; the position of the Soviet Union: the exaltation of ideology, in this case that “the market” must have what ever “the market” wants, over science.

That exaltation is always and everywhere the ruin of the latter. Since it rejects the only intellectual and cultural framework within which science has ever been possible. Or ever can be.