Public Understanding

To Richard Dawkins’s “it’s like a Monty Python sketch” remark about the fact that the Royal Society’s Director of Education is a clergyman, I was going to do the “Has he never heard of…?” line. But why bother? Of course he has never heard of any of the people whom I was going to list.

Dawkins’s science, as such, really does not appear to consist of much, if anything, more than a doctorate which must now be about forty years old. Yes, he is (like many a cleric before him) a Fellow of the Royal Society. But publicity-starved British science sometimes confers these things of anyone to whom it is grateful for flying the flag. The first science graduate to be Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, is an FRS, and not an honorary one.

This week, Dawkins is to feature on a BBC Four programme looking forward to the American Presidential Election. The other contributors are to be Nobel Laureates. I am surprised that they have agreed to appear with Dawkins, the face (and, of course, the gob) of the pre-publicity. Perhaps they don’t know.

Dawkins has let it be known that he will denounce not only creationists (to whom I shall return), but also opponents of abortion, as unscientific. He just can’t help himself, can he? The status of the embryo or foetus is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. The science could not be clearer as to when a genetically distinct entity, simply as such, comes into being. Those of us who oppose abortion may, for the sake of argument, be wrong philosophically. But we are certainly not unscientific. Science has no morality of its own. Like money, sex or power, the morality lies in what we do with it.

This week, the Guardian won a libel action brought by a medical doctor who had turned to quackery in the pursuit of profit, specifically in relation to AIDS. (He is not the only such profiteering quack – those who promote condomania in Africa and elsewhere are just as bad, as Africans themselves recognise.) There can be no such thing as “alternative medicine”. If it works, then it is medicine.

Quackeries, which can of course be fatal, are grounded in eternalism (the belief that the universe has always existed), animism (that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being), pantheism (that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God), astrology (that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars) and cyclicism (that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum).

But without the authority by and on which those errors were specifically condemned, making possible the emergence of science, how is anyone to see beyond what are always, in the absence of that authority, human beings’ beliefs about such matters? For that matter, how can a rapidly Islamising West and an increasingly Muslim-owned world retain any expectation to observe rationality and order in the universe when the increasingly prevalent culture sees everything as directly dependent on the will of Allah, a capricious will in several verses of the Qu’ran?

And as for creationism, take out our much more numerous Don’t Knows (of whom I assume that Dawkins does not approve), and the creationist proportion of the British people is comparable to the creationist proportion of the American people. Why might that be? Surely at least part of the blame cannot attach to the very high profile figure of this country’s only Professor for the Public Understanding of Science?