A life in science

Reg Naulty writes about a new book by Richard Dawkins

The second volume of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography is entitled Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science and is more interesting than the first. As Dawkins has engaged in a herculean contest with religion, now, near the end of his life, one would expect his view of it to come through loud and clear.

It does: ‘Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea of what was going on.’ The human being has worth and dignity, he argues, ‘when not debased by the infantile babblings of religion’.

What lies behind all this is that the scientific method reveals nothing about religion. However, we should be careful about ‘the’ scientific method. A scientist once remarked to me that there are as many scientific methods as there are scientists. But it is not quite that various. It is more like a big fuzzy ball. In his television series The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski said that Galileo practised the scientific method – in other words he built the apparatus, did the experiment and published the results.

That would satisfy many scientists, but not all. Peter Medawar, Dawkins’ mentor at Oxford and, if anything, a crueller controversialist, followed the philosopher Karl Popper in arguing that the scientific method consists of the hypothetico-deductive method. This is not as formidable as it looks. It means that if a theory or a conjecture has a consequence, and the consequence turns out to be false, then the theory, or conjecture that implies it, is also false. This inference has a name – modus tollens – and is a matter of pure deduction. That is the logic of falsification, but it says nothing about the logic of confirmation, which is more complex, as the arguments about climate change illustrate. It also says nothing about data collection, which is what many scientists spend their time doing. Nor does it mention quantification, which some people allege is central to science.

So, his ‘paean to the scientific method’ should be taken with some reservations. Richard Dawkins also discriminates between scientific methods himself: ‘There are mathematicians and physicists who sashay into biology, thinking they can clean up its act in a week. They can’t; they lack the intuitions and knowledge of a biologist.’ It is necessary, he writes, ‘to reason constructively in the particular ways required by the subject’. Exactly. The method of investigation has to be appropriate to the subject under investigation.

When we want to find out about a person, we ask about them and then question them ourselves. When the person is spiritual in nature, we do the same and, in the end, we address them. Spirit calls to spirit, as in the Psalms. The reply, when it comes, may be Spirit becoming present to spirit. This is something that happens within the person; it is private to them. It is inconvenient from the point of view of publicly available evidence, but it is the nature of the case.

Dawkins has had an interesting life and, after a slow start, makes it interesting to the reader. There are scientific sections towards the end which some may find tedious. If so, skip them and return to the text at ‘Models of the World’. It contains great comic writing.

Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life In Science by Richard Dawkins, Bantam Press, 2015, ISBN: 9780593072554, £20.

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