Full Duplex: Science, Religion and Evolution

One spoiling tactic that many apologists for various anti-scientific themes resort to is the claim that science is neither more nor better than a religion, and as such has no more persuasive merit than any other superstition. This quibble is scientifically, philosophically, religiously, and ethically bankrupt, but even to begin to refute it we must establish a clear criterion by which to distinguish science from religion.

This essay describes and illustrates a simple criterion that will neither please nor even satisfy everybody, but that is sufficient, necessary, and cogent. The essay includes a brief discussion of claims that evolution itself is nothing more than a religious faith or dogma.

Science and Religion or Science as Religion?

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

Thomas Huxley

In some circles it has become a cliché that science is merely an instance of a religion. For such an assertion to be meaningful, much less correct, it must be possible to demonstrate some attribute that defines any particular thing as a religion, and to show that science has that attribute. If on the other hand we are to demonstrate that it is unreasonable to class science as a religion, we need to establish diagnostic criteria that distinguish between science and religion: "X is (or is not) science (or religion) insofar as it meets (or fails to meet) criterion Y."

Note that this would not necessarily imply that everything must be either science or religion.

Nonetheless, given such a criterion, any particular thing or class of things might be one, the other, or neither, but not both. An elementary NAND relationship in formal logic, if you like. As we shall see, this is a bit optimistically simplistic, but we can achieve a good first approximation for practical purposes.

Whatever else they might be, science and religion both are activities based on conceptions or bodies of theory, and for the most part both depend in practice on their adherents being able to persuade others of their ideas. (“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations. . . ”) Nothing forbids a hermit to worship without preaching, or a scientist such as Cavendish to do ground-breaking research without publishing, but for the purposes of this discussion, we may ignore introversion as irrelevant, however devout or profound it may be. At the least such practitioners work to convince themselves of the validity of their own ideas, so we may regard the hermits as degenerate cases, rather than counter-examples.

Such distractions notwithstanding, is it possible to formulate and demonstrate criteria for distinguishing science from religion?

One argument in favour of regarding science as religion is the claim that, in spite of the belief common among scientists and the public, science has all the answers. Now, science in fact, as a means of establishing facts, is fallible, and in particular, conclusions that have been derived validly, or arguably validly, by scientific procedures, are accordingly fallible.

To begin with, I cannot answer for all members of the public, but I don’t know any scientist who believes in the infallibility of science. For example M. Cartmill, an anthropologist, put it vividly as follows:

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty,
and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist.
This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

Wry, but realistic — and penetrating . . .

Indeed, many people claim that in contrast to science, it is religion that has all the answers, including in particular all those answers that science lacks. This is ironic, because one of its cardinal strengths is that religion does not always need answers, particularly not morally or logically cogent answers. For reasons that I mention later, religious answers do not as a rule need to stand up to ethical, logical or even factual criticism. They do not even need to be consistent, let alone sensible or compassionate. In a similar connection, Daniel Dennett quoted without attribution:

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned."

In either science or religion, arguments may or may not involve material evidence and the search for new insights, therefore such argument is not helpful in distinguishing science from religion. Where science and religion tend to differ from each other in ways that matter in practice, is largely in how they establish, develop, and defend or extend opinions. Science in particular demands the construction of arguments with which, if they please, sceptics may convince themselves, perhaps using their own methods and data, rather than accepting assertions unquestioned. In practice such a stage of persuasion and scepticism may be protracted, heated, sometimes embittered. In the long run it even may turn out to have been mistaken and pointless, when the disagreement is based on common views that later are found to be mistaken, or on shared terminology that turns out to be based on mutually conflicting semantics. However, if all the sceptic achieves is the conviction that he has as yet no conclusive counter-argument, even that is progress of a sort.

Instead of course, the sceptic might convince you that his argument or evidence rests on stronger ground than yours. That also happens. If your change of mind is rational, that too is progress.

Science is based on the opinion and insight of the scientist. Its recourse to, and reliance on, observation, prediction, disciplines, logic, and cogent theory, does not alter this fact; the scientist has nothing but his own opinion to justify his certainty of the reality or accuracy of his observations and theories; he has no more ultimate justification for these views than any believer. Scientific research produces wrong or incomplete answers and trivialities more often than it produces durable scientific "laws". It progresses by its heuristic nature, not by its infallibility. "Further research is necessary . . ." is almost a reflex cliché in articles reporting on research — and with good reason.

"Material", or "empirical", scientific "proof" is based on material "induction" from "abduction", which unlike formal induction, is not logically compelling; not formally logical proof at all.

Many a scientist and philosopher would happily crucify me for that assertion, those who did not assume that I had typed the statement inadvertently. But no, I did nothing of the type. I too, am well aware that nowadays in many circles there have been attempts to eliminate induction. Popper in particular tried to substitute the idea of basing scientific work on hypotheses to be falsified, but in my opinion he achieved nothing more substantial than a change in terminology. In the views that he presented through the decades, the old difficulties with "induction" remain, and so do most of the pre-Popperian merits; hypotheses do not emerge from a vacuum. His views might have startled and impressed many people whose views were superficial, but really, his major assault on induction had been invalidated even before he published or developed it. For an introduction to major examples, see the articles on underdetermination ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdetermination ) and on the Duhem-Quine thesis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis ) I cite those as being easily accessible, and as offering references that readers may follow according to need or taste; interested readers also could proceed to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/ and search for those two terms, but beware: though the fields are absorbing, there is a lot of material, in many contexts, and demanding serious thought; if you skim it and find the topics trivial, better sniff the coffee, and think again!

Even the so-called analytic sciences — logic, mathematics and the like — are founded on belief; not necessarily belief in any particular assertions that practitioners might make, but in the validity of logical operations such as deduction, implication and so on — and belief in any particular formal proof of anything may be an error; for example, the constructor of the proof might have made an unnoticed slip, or the premises might include an invalid assumption or false data.

Please note however, that in saying so I am not guilty of the solecism of asserting that formal axioms are in any way essentially true, false or even meaningful; the possible errors I refer to are in the derivation and application of the formal procedures. It is perfectly possible for me to accept standard axioms of arithmetic, and yet to blunder in accidentally and erroneously deriving say, the conclusion that two cubed equals six. Errors occur in the formal disciplines as well as in laboratory or field research, and in the work of some of the greatest intellects.

A major example — I am uncertain to what extent it was humorously intended or not — was Gödel's ontological proof of the "existence of God". It appears under that name in Wikipedia, and if you are interested, that is as good a discussion as I have seen anywhere.

Some scientists might argue that this class of procedure, of deriving inferences from theory, hypothesis, and observation is not really belief, but something more like conditionally and transiently entertaining a given hypothetical structure, but that is doubtful pleading. A scientist rarely does much work on hypotheses that he flatly disbelieves; he looks for, and tests, the ones that he thinks are most probably right, or at least suggestive, viable, and defensible, in terms of his ideas or initial observations, as they survive these processes. Roughly speaking, deriving such bases from which induction and deduction may proceed, is a process of abduction. In case the concept is unfamiliar, there is a good discussion at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abductive_reasoning

As everyday opinions go, although the evidence for the idea is strictly abductive and inductive, and accordingly tentative, even conjectural, it would be a highly atypical scientist who does not believe firmly that on Earth stones fall (i.e. more or less, that their trajectories end in the position of lowest potential energy accessible on the surface of solid earth unless they are propelled into space with sufficient velocity.)

As Kipling put it in "The Gods of the Copybook Headings":

We were living in trees when they met us.
They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us,
as Fire would certainly burn . . .

Patently then, belief as such also is not useful as a criterion for distinguishing religion from science.

Science is a term applied to a broad range of concepts and contexts, but some of them apply broadly too. One is "nullius in verba" it is a topic in its own right, and rather than discus it deeply here, I refer readers to that entry in Wikipedia, and also the entry on "Social Epistemology".

I also would lightly paraphrase an item I found in Steven Pinker's book on Rationality, in which he quoted a typically trenchant quip of Fran Lebowitz, which seems to me to encapsulate much of the essence of nullius in verba:

"I feel no need to believe in anything that needs to be believed in".

What is Religion then?

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but
the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Eric Hoffer

Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith:
the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated,
but maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason.
I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas
and riddles of the Trinity — with incarnation and resurrection.
I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with
that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, "Certum est quia impossibile est".
I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point;
for, to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith, but persuasion.

Religio Medici. Sir Thomas Browne

Then how do we show that science is distinct from religion? First let us see what religion is; if we cannot find any criterion defining religion, then it is hard to see how we can be sure of defining non-religion.

Immediately we encounter a difficulty. Religion is enormously miscellaneous. What unites say, Nama/Kung Mantis veneration, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judeo-Christian-Muslim beliefs, Mormonism, Marxism, Norse, Classical, aboriginal American, and Australian religions? Far from being no more than mutually contradictory, even mutually hostile, many religions, and even sects in nominally the same religion, are, in effect, mutually incomprehensible. In fact the closest approach to unanimity among religions, be they never so in favour of ecumenism, is almost of necessity that each asserts or implies that the others are in error. To me this recalls Piet Hein's
Commutative Law of Similarity:

No cow's like a horse,
and no horse like a cow.
That's one similarity
anyhow.

After all, if two religions did not disagree in any respect, it should follow that they were the same single religion. What else could they be? For two religions to concede that there were no differences between their beliefs, at least one would have to die, or subsume itself in the other, possibly both.

And yet. . .

Apart from sharing their mutual dissimilarity, all religions do have at least one thing in common:

they all have dogma.

Here the term "dogma" raises hackles and prompts denial, often furious and abusive. And yet, in the technical sense, it is not specifically pejorative; it does not refer to closed-minded assertion as such. In this sense "dogma" is the technical term for that part of a body of belief that is given as non-negotiable. If you like, it is the statement of that part of a religion that adherents unconditionally believe. Call it the doctrine or tenets if you prefer (some persons go ballistic, even hysterical, if you characterise their tenets as (horrors!) dogma instead of say, faith!)

Why is everyone so stubborn? Nein! Nein! NEIN!!!
German NO vote from Ustinov's Diplomats

Perhaps you wish to draw fine distinctions between such terms as doctrine and dogma, but for present purposes they are not likely to be very relevant. For the rest of the discussion I mainly shall use the term “dogma”.

Don't assume that the distinction is a semantic irrelevance; I have had online shouting matches with people who insist that dogma is completely different from "doctrine" and "tenet", and they have kindly undertaken to instruct me on the point at ninety-five decibels, even by reference to dictionaries — dictionaries that they tend to quote partially, inaccurately, or inappropriately.

Sadly, such quotes, even accurate quotes from up-to-date dictionaries, are inadequate in such contentions. Apart from the fact that the current fashion in lexicography leans towards recording usage, rather than prescribing it (often to my personal disgust) there is the fact that I too own and use dictionaries in several functions, so I am less embarrassed in dismissing dictionary-derived objections, than dictionary purists had no doubt intended, much less expected. The reality is that many words have more than one clear meaning, and even words that have multiple, closely related, meanings often have different senses and sub-texts in different contexts. And, as similes for "dogma", every one of several English or American dictionaries that I have consulted, gives one or more of: "doctrine", "teaching", or "tenet".

However, that fails to pacify, or even give pause to, those who most rabidly buttress their assertions with selective quotes from the likes of dictionaries. If facts, logic, or philology fail, one can always slap the sacred text or the dictionary in appeal to the authority of the unanswerable.

Unfortunately for their peace of mind, the occasional unregenerate might prove to be inconveniently literate.

So, I do not for an instant apologise for use of the term dogma in its general sense, and in case anyone reads the term as pejorative, then I refuse to accept any blame for readers' blood pressure: that is for them to take up with their English and their religious hierarchies and the sensitivity of their physiology to their own prejudices.

Also, as I point out later on, believers, comparative theologists, and the like, might find the criterion too inclusive. They might wish to distinguish religions from heresies, sects, cults, superstitions, and so on. They might insist that if it is not based on virtuous assertion of god, then it is not religion, even though various religions differ in their concepts of god or gods or their nature or significance, let alone their commandments. I also explain why such distinctions, however valid in other contexts, are irrelevant to this essay and why I lump them all together into the same category, without prejudice to whether they have anything else in common, or even whether or not they are diametrical opposites in every other respect (as is logically possible).

It is after all likely that the origin of the very word "religion" ultimately stems from the Latin word religare: "to bind". And such an interpretation certainly would fit the concept of commitment to the dogma.

Some religions prudently forbid that their dogma be questioned or even so much as discussed; some might not even permit their lay members to know the detail of the dogma, let alone study the high secrets reserved for the priests. Other religions do permit some questioning, as long as the answers unthreateningly leave the dogma intact, on pain of charges of heresy, vanity, and even more heinous transgressions. Historically it sometimes has turned out to be dangerous even to be too helpful in suggesting rational support for their dogma — simply to suggest that the fundamental beliefs or sacred scriptures might be in need of such support would in itself be heretical!

If your stomach is strong enough, you might like to do some background reading on the history of religious conflict concerning say, infra- versus supralapsarianism, or on transsubstantiation.

Such persons commonly would hate to permit even the publication of rival views. Caliph Omar allegedly said of the books in the library of Alexandria: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." The story is disputed by some scholars, and I do not stand bail for it, but it certainly is consistent with many other events before and since and elsewhere. I accept it here for the present as an illustration of a persistent attitude. What certainly is true is that book burning on the grounds of religious prejudice occurred at intervals throughout history.

This was not limited to religion of course — burning or other modes of destruction of books and other objects of bigotry or political rivalries, have been popular modes of entertainment and rabble-rousing since prehistoric times, and still persists, at the behest of dictators, fascists, authors such as Marxists, and their followers.

My favourite quote from Freud is: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books".

Such forms of dogmatic behaviour however, are directly opposed to scientific behaviour by the very essence of the nature of science, as I expect should become obvious if you read on.

A related obsession of many religious bodies is hatred of the apostate, and one can easily imagine how damaging it might be to the mental peace of the faithful, to see how someone who had at one time been blessed with faith in the dogma, could come to believe that after all it was worthless, untrue, or at the least, that there were better and higher things in this world or the next, if any. Throughout the history of humanity the rage of the faithful in such religions has led them to revile, persecute, or murder anyone who came to believe that their initial faith had been misplaced.

Don't take my word for it — read your headlines, look about you, think of the threats and attempts on the lives and rights of persons who have suffered, say because they:

have had the courage to voice their own views, or
have claimed their rights to independence of views foisted on them
have been gulled into accepting dogma, and afterwards rejected it
have been born in such a community and willy-nilly dragooned into the faith
have had roles forced on them as slaves or sexual chattels
have forced roles or status based on social, historical or ethnic criteria

There are plenty where those came from!

In many religions lately, secular restlessness has led to increased flexibility of interpretation of dogma, but that is a detail of circumstance, not a refutation of the principle of founding a religion on a body of prescribed belief. Conversely, many a faith has increased its dogma and discipline to hysterical levels of intensity in the face of public debate, rival political views, or disagreement.

Some people have instanced Project 2025 in the US as a salutary example.

Historically, dogma originally has been formulated arbitrarily and ad hoc by ignorant persons, and for ignorant persons: it accordingly tends to be rife with absurdity, fossil topicality, and wishful thinking. It therefore is a frequent rationalisation in religions, to represent unquestioning faith as a positive virtue.

Faith — which I define as unquestioning belief in the dogma, or at least acceptance, irrespective of logical or factual justification or absurdity — faith is what such religion commonly demands and exalts. In such faith the worshipper deliberately or implicitly renounces his reason in embracing absurdity or even meaninglessness, and represents the renunciation as a virtue, and represents any reservations on the creed as sinful at best, heathen typically, and evil always.

The claims I make here might seem unlikely, as though I were inventing damaging evidence as a polemical trick, but no, there actually are extant religious writings by Christian believers mourning the fact that the dogma did not demand the belief in more impossibilities. For all I know, similar statements may have been made by fundamentalists in other religions as well. According to such persons, faith is a poor thing if it is based on whatever anyone could see is true; real faith, worthwhile faith, is belief in the face of whatever anyone could throw at the believer, even facts or logic. The seventeenth century genius, Sir Thomas Browne, satirised such views in his Religio Medici, as quoted in the epigraph on this section. His work is available online, and well worth a read even today. How truly religious he was in private, I cannot say, but he certainly asserted that he was.

For all I know, some religions might have a dogma denying that they have dogma, but this essay is not based on whether they accept or reject the idea that they might have dogma or not, or whether the tenets that define their beliefs should be called dogma or not, only whether they have certain items of belief that they assert unconditionally, without which they refuse to accept that a person is in good faith a member of their belief.

So don't think it was my idea or that I am misrepresenting anyone. Mind you, I must emphasise that I do not claim that this attitude is in the majority. I have no idea how frequent it is, nor how strongly it affects the typical day-to-day thinking of such people — or anyone else.

Note that I state that dogma is the essential component of religion; I do not insist as a logical requirement that everything that asserts dogma must be a formal, ecclesiastical religion. Whether to do so would be a defensible position, but not essential. Dogma certainly is frequent in dictatorships of all kinds, for the good and simple reason that the dictator depends on dogma, and cannot personally bully every subject every minute of every day. Dogma is the simplest substitute for such personal domination. Furthermore there is no clear distinction between what we might call the ecclesiastical and the temporal attitudes in everyday life and politics. If you wish to distinguish them taxonomically, go ahead: taxonomy always has elements of arbitrariness, and one learns to live with them as appropriate.

As an example of secular dogmatism in despite of available facts, Hitler's rule was more vivid than most, though a study of such pathologies in various oppressive regimes throughout history, ranging in modern times from soccer hooligans to national dictatorships, could fill an entire category of historical studies. Consider one small extract from the 1949—1950 book by Franz Halder: "Hitler as War Lord".

. . . Hitler stiffened in his opinion that the Russians were ‘dead’. In angry words he daily accused the General Staff of lacking ‘guts’, even of cowardice masquerading as prudence. He ridiculed the reports, now coming in almost every day from reconnaissance and wireless interception, of the continual appearance of new Russian divisions, saying that only completely naive and simple-minded theoreticians would let themselves be taken in by this clumsy swindle of Stalin.
When he was read a statement compiled from unimpeachable sources which showed that in 1942 Stalin would still be able to muster another one to one-and-a-quarter million men in the region north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga and at least half a million more in the eastern Caucasus and the region to its north, and which proved moreover that the Russian output of first line tanks amounted to at least 1,200 a month, Hitler flew with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth, at the one who was reading this statement, and forbade such idiotic twaddle.

That is just a sample: it is so consistent with many other reports, both of Hitler and of other dictators deluded by their own preconceptions throughout ancient and modern history, as not to be worth following up: too commonplace to justify the trouble.

The reason that I presented the text at all, is because the behaviour that it described is eloquent of the arbitrariness and wishful thinking that underlies authoritarian dogma in general: the violence of the rage against reality or logic, seems almost to be an index of how unanswerable the objections may be. This is characteristic of prescriptive authorities, whether ecclesiastic or secular.

Accordingly, though I do not insist on calling all such things religion, I feel comfortable in regarding any such thoughts and deeds as at least being decidedly the opposite of scientific, no matter who harbours or perpetrates them.

What is Dogma then?

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard
a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.
It keeps him young.
Konrad Lorenz

That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
P. C. Hodgell

At some time people thought that the potential that people had was not developed
because everyone was ignorant and that education was the solution to the problem,
that if all people were educated, we could perhaps all be Voltaires.
But it turns out that falsehood and evil can be taught as easily as good.
Richard Feynman

Dogma may take stronger or weaker forms:

Strong forms of dogma say, more or less: This creed is what you believe, no matter what any fancied reason or evidence might show to the contrary, and no matter whether you understand its details or not; if you are too stupid to understand it, don't let that worry you: just keep reciting the slogans, shouting, if necessary and attacking dissenters. (The less secure the religion, the stronger the dogma, and the more probably it will add codicils to the effect that even your questioning is evil, and prescribe in its compassion, a therapeutic grilling at stake, or stoning, plus eternal damnation for the good of your soul.)

Weaker forms of dogma will typically say (also more or less): Here is the body of what we believe. Such and such an absurd detail of our creed is patently mythical. It either is included to test our faith, or is a parable that remains true in spirit, when subjected to appropriate hermeneutics. As long you still don’t understand, you need instruction, till you admit that you do, or at least till you do not doubt the dogma, whether you understand it or not, and you accept that you are the one in error.

Weaker forms of dogmatism used to be much rarer than they are nowadays, simply because weak dogmatism simply was unnecessary in the old days. Their modern incursion has arisen largely from the increasing need for once impregnable theocracies to incorporate sufficient flexibility to weather the prevailing climate of rationalism and functional literacy. Compromises, such as those intrinsic to the weaker forms of dogmatism, remain commoner and more troublesome than theocracies wish; anything less than absolute abjection of the faithful worries the authorities, and aggravates the murderous rage of the least secure among them.

A more sophisticated version of the weaker forms of dogmatism is: "This non-parsimonious, non-Occamist doctrinal material is presumably unfalsifiable. It is the substance in which you must believe if you wish to count yourself as one of our belief, but if, against all reasonable expectation, you find really compelling evidence against it, then very well, we shall adjust our view accordingly". (An example, I understand, is the Buddhist belief in any doctrine, even reincarnation.)

How does Dogma Fit into Religion?

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.
(Variously attributed to Horace or Hugh Walpole, without source, but too good to omit)

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine
wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend
the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage

If a body of belief has nothing corresponding to dogma in any such form, it is hard to know how to call it a religion, except that many religions, or at least schisms, are too incoherent to define any clear body of dogma at all. Such religions may amount in effect to politics or con games, but their sincere members do insist that great truths underlie their belief, and that rivals are mistaken or evil. The more pernicious examples include a few of the grosser evangelical scams and movements like the People's Temple of Jim Jones or Scientology, not to mention the bible-waving of biblical illiterates like Donald Trump. Others are blander, tailing off into tea parties for the rich and inept.

Religions typically are not abstract: they incorporate specific imperatives, such as worship. They may be more or less good, or evil, or simply incoherent, but their goodness or otherwise is not what defines them as religions: by the criterion of dogma, Satanism and dogmatic atheism intrinsically are classes of religion as definite as Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Hindu-etc faiths. (Any particular version of agnosticism may be a religion, or may not, specifically insofar as it entails dogma.)

As formal ideals, dogmata defining any religion as a body have little to do with the private beliefs of individual members (which, to the extent that they conflict with the established formal dogma are by definition heresies) or with their personal behaviour (sins) or their sociology and politics outside the commandments or routine practice of the religion. In most religions only a small minority of the members have the slightest grasp of the dogma that they theoretically espouse, or even realise that there is such a dogma, or even know what a dogma is or what its significance might be. Many do not even explicitly realise that there is such a thing as a body of belief, such as one might learn in a catechism.

In fairness, not to present the position of science too smugly, only a minority of practising scientists could coherently discuss philosophy of science, and only a minority of those can do so cogently, much less state any items of basic behavioural principles. Many of the rest simply consider philosophy of science to be so much hot air, fit only for obsessive academics and for superannuated scientists who are past their best, and no longer fit for research. The abjurers speak of the "philosopause". How much this actually is of practical importance in either case is debatable.

Even Richard Feynman, whom I admire greatly, and whose death I lament, notoriously said something like: "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds", and yet his own writings were full of aphorisms that implicitly amounted to philosophy of science, some of them valuably, such as:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool;

and:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

and, one of his best:

It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

But however we look at it, the fact is that neither deviant belief nor deviant behaviour in individual adherents is a general criterion for distinguishing science from religion.

Notice that it does not follow that every opinion in a given religion need be dogma. In fact, in most religions it is likely that most statements are not dogma, no matter how dogmatically they might be presented; they may deal with everyday concerns and be open to debate, interpretation, and adjustment. For instance, one might, but need not, include in one's dogma or its immediate implications, the rules for how and when to clean one's teeth, or on what parts of the body to shave one's hair, or what to wear on one’s head, or the question of whether penguins or bats are birds, or whether elephants can jump, or whether mountains might come when called. (All of these are actual examples, and not of my own invention; there are limits to my morbid creativity!) It is in fact well known for religious people, often actual religious functionaries such as priests, to do good scientific work — one even might debate whether most of material scientific progress historically has been made by believers. After all, throughout most of history, most research and discovery was carried out, either by believers in ages when education did not encourage free thought, or most people professed to be believers because it certainly was the safer and more socially acceptable option.

This is characteristic of most periods in which dogmatic bodies hold social and legal power. I cannot offhand remember any freethinking community in which equally stringent persecution in the opposite direction was the rule.

Be that as it may, it is clear that even one's opinions in secular matters are of much use in distinguishing religion from science.

None of this affects the main point: that there is in each religion a core of dogma, and that anything conflicting with that dogma may (must logically?) be defined as heresy. In principle that means that insofar as it is heresy, it is unacceptable unless apologists can rationalise it by arguing that there was not in essence any conflict. For instance, during a reformation religious authorities might decide, commonly have decided, that the traditional view actually had been a misinterpretation of the dogma. Such arguments have cropped up repeatedly in the history of the major religions, either locally or at the highest levels of authority. They are the basis of what is known as "the god of the gaps".

Commonly, tolerant religion clashes as little with science as with any other day-to-day matters of reality. In fact fairly many scientists, including some evolutionists, are religious. Some reconcile their beliefs with their science, but others live double mental lives, believing their science with one part of their minds and their religion with the other. They rationalise or even radically divorce their conception of their work from their faith. Presumably most do it largely unconsciously, but I have met research workers (usually biologists, which is understandable since I am a biologist myself, but by no means always) who unapologetically believed one thing in their laboratories and another thing in church.

Mind you, some so-called scientists who would be deeply offended at my saying so, have only the vaguest concepts of anything like a defensible philosophy of science, even if they do acceptable work in research on scientific questions. One category of this attitude is that of some QM theorists with their: "shut up and calculate!"

Too bad. I offer no apologies!

For my part I do not understand any such intellectual process, but it is not for me to tell anyone to change the beliefs on which he founds his mental or social peace. A religious attitude seldom makes much difference to how one practices one’s science; most scientists worry about as much about the philosophy of science as it affects their work, as most carpenters worry about the xylem cells that make up their wood. Still, the history of science is rife with examples of workers who insisted that the result of every scientific investigation must support their personal religious or political dogma.

One way or another, that core of dogma is what lies at the heart of anything we can reasonably call a religion.

So how is Science not Religion?

Nullius in verba

Knowledge is growing and changing, the world is large and Man is small,
and except in matters of faith, there is no pope.
Anon Scientific American 1964

So much for religion.

And science? Is science dogma free? Really? Could anyone cogently support such a claim? And if so, how?

Dogma may seem to you like a very strange, small difference to pick on; in fact, the proponents of that travesty that its proponents call “creation science” have claimed that science is itself a religion. They say that science places its faith in observation, in Occam’s Razor (the principle of parsimony and elegance) and in scientific method; it has its own wars and splits and dogma and accordingly has no special merit compared to religions.

And yet these are not points of dogma in science, not at all at all. . .

Science in the sense that we are discussing, differs from religion in that, far from relying on dogma, or even recognising it as a basis for justification of action, science intrinsically has no conceptual scope at all for ideological dogma. Science does not even deny dogma, any more than religion denies noise. (Nor of course does science deny "noise"; in fact, unlike most religious adherents, practically anyone practising in a scientific discipline needs to understand noise very well!)

Science in essence is a range of processes for finding and using information for constructing, identifying, urging, or selecting, the strongest candidate hypotheses to answer any manageably meaningful question.

No appeal to dogma, in fact, no appeal to any assertion at all, whether empirical or philosophical, transient or eternal, has cogency in science, because the only means available for convincing persons who refuse to accept your arguments, is by letting them convince themselves in the light of available evidence, including any evidence that they unearth for themselves. And conversely, your adversaries' options for convincing you of their views, are equally constrained in turn.

It follows that no statement is sacred in this essay for example. Anyone might take issue with any point. By replacing enough of the principles I assert, the concept of science could indeed be modified or even destroyed outright.

Certainly you would have to convince the scientific community first. Convincing them is the essence of scientific progress.

In science there is no pope.

That assertion itself is not dogma, it simply is failure to imagine a role, let alone a function, for any such a papal entity. What form would a pope take in science, and what could anything like a pope be expected to do? What form would dogma take in science, and what would any rational practitioner in science do with such a dogma?

Paradoxically, if you think you can make out a strong enough case to support your denial that science is popeless rather than hopeless, then feel welcome to do so; just do not demand that anyone in particular should take you seriously. And if anyone did take you seriously, that need not yet mean that anyone else must take either of you seriously.

That is not how science works.

And science works very well compared to absolutely any other discipline in human history — certainly compared to any religion. Ask any doctor, engineer, soldier, or technologist. For that matter, ask yourself, or any religious apologist, as you fly in a jet airliner less than two centuries after sailing ships still were as much the dominant means of crossing the waters, as they had been for millennia.

It is magic, you know. The divine winged sandals that Hermes lent Perseus, bore him each day a seven days journey. At that rate Perseus couldn't even have kept up with a modern cheap car driven by the proverbial little old lady on the way to church, let alone a pre-World-War-II airliner.

Remember Clarke's third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And you know what the Abrahamic faiths said about magic:

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Comforting thought. . .

Curious rationalisation. . .

Meanwhile of course, if your arguments are not in themselves convincing, let alone correct, that is a separate problem. Nothing in science promises that your beliefs are correct or even meaningful, and whether they are or not, there is no guarantee that they will convince anyone soon or at all, and nothing in science demands that anyone be interested in listening to you, or having once believed you, should continue to believe.

It is not that scientists loathe or love dogma, that dogma is evil or stupid, or even that particular dogmatic or scientific propositions are true or false, but that in the process of convincing someone who will only accept arguments that he can understand and confirm for himself, dogma as such has no meaningful role.

Granted, in scientific controversy, appeal to authority, or even to the mob, often may be tempting (Thus spake Maxwell! Ipse dixit Al Kwarizmi. Also sprach Einstein. My professor said. . .) but such appeal constitutes no more than an argument of convenience, a substitute for time-consuming exploration of probably unrewarding avenues.

After all, life and education impose practical constraints: we cannot delay Biblical Hermeneutics 101 while each student personally decides whether to accept the book of Job as literally true or as allegorical, or downright poetical, as required by the associated curriculum, any more than we can delay Biology 101 while each student personally verifies every individual assertion presented in class, concerning cells and their structures, or symbiosis in ecology, or thousands of other topics.

But conversely, the appeal to authority might be used in bad faith to intimidate those whose critical faculties are not up to scratch. Right?

True.

Science and scientific standards of conduct, can no more guarantee universal good faith or understanding or knowledge, than religion can guarantee universal good faith; and that is saying a great deal: it is well known that many a sworn witness, irrespective of faith, will perjure himself in court. Bertrand Russell put it succinctly thus:

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because
religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

I think he had a point. Certainly in recent decades a lot of evidence of of abuses among religious authorities, or even abuses in the name of religious principles and communities, should give any thinking, responsible member of any given faith grounds for choice between faith and thought.

And this is no novelty. Not to pick on any particular faith, but reading through the recorded history of the deeds and pronouncements of the popes should shock any humanist. Why the popes, you ask? Because they are so well documented, and had such profound, sustained, and widespread political influence. Other, smaller bodies often are no less pernicious on their own scale and in their own ways. Consider the likes of Jim Jones, the Waco siege, the Heaven's Gate suicide, and many more.

And as for socially parasitic TV evangelists. . .

In religion, to reject the revelations of the charismatic or the authority of the ancients often is criticised as a sin of pride. Historically the punishment has ranged from grilling by your spiritual counsellor, to grilling at stake.

In science the sin of pride (and futility) is to demand that others shall not differ with your pronouncements and wisdom.

In science there also is a matching sin of humility: forbearing to differ when your insights or evidence suggest a flaw in the received wisdom of authority. The punishment in either case is likely to include painful levels of cognitive dissonance.

In particular, although hardly anyone routinely devotes all his time and resources to systematically opposing received wisdom and established opinion, there is no prescribed penalty for doing so. No unexpected anti-dogma police drag heretics off to the COMFY CHAIR. Anyone at any time is in a position to ask in effect: "How does the establishment position make more sense than alternatives proposed in the light of new findings or new arguments, or for that matter, old work that has gone unnoticed, or temporarily been forgotten or overlooked or now has been re-interpreted?"

Granted, withholding of grades, degrees, tenure, cooperation, honour, and lucre, or even attention, are sometimes represented as being almost as effective, almost as barbarous even, as religious persecution. There certainly have been many ugly examples of such, and there have been even uglier examples of so-called scientists who have tried to stifle views that conflicted with their political dogma, stifling them by authority, or even by inciting public riots against speakers, not to mention sexism and other abuses of parochialism, but actual religious martyrs faced with physical torment and death, would be unimpressed by the fate of our contemporary dissidents among scientists. Even Galileo and Urban VIII would probably have snorted dismissively.

So: in science the fact that a hypothesis is long-established wisdom, is no reason for pioneers or dissidents to refrain from criticising it and from refuting or even replacing it if they can. (Have you had any recent debates with supporters of phlogiston theory for example?)

Conversely, the newness of a proposal is no argument for establishment supporters to adopt it. Cold fusion and quantum theory, jumping genes and polywater, introns and N-rays — each encountered scepticism in its turn. From the point of view of the fundamental principles of science their respective rejection or acclaim had nothing to do with newness or authority.

The point of view of individual scientists might be another matter, but the question of whether the temperaments of particular workers happen to cause them to prefer new ideas or old, has little significance in the long run. It is true that it may take time for people to get used to an idea, mentally to integrate its attractions, its non‑cogencies and its potential, but that is a reasonable consequence of the difficulties of dealing with imperfect information on unfamiliar material. In itself, the novelty or originality of an idea is neither a merit nor a demerit, however well or poorly it might reflect on the originator.

Political persecutions such as of Vavilov by Lysenko have nothing to do with science, only with politics, and in particular with a religious version of politics: in this example, the Stalinist version or sect of Marxism, which is as pernicious a religion as any. Nor does the incitement of mobs to shout down unwelcome opinions or evidence that contradicts one’s dogma, have any scientific merit. It is said that fifty Nazi physicists once collaborated on a book refuting the "Jewish science" of relativity. Einstein reputedly remarked that this was totally needless; if his theory was wrong, a single scientist would have been sufficient.

In saying so, he vividly demonstrated a keen understanding of an essential aspect of science.

Whether to class the behaviour of the anti-scientists as religious in any particular case, is moot. This discussion is not much concerned with discriminating between politics and religion, much less discriminating between religions.

Science (as incarnate in the body of scientists and scientific record) does not deny spiritual planes or intelligence in the universe; it largely ignores them until someone can show which phenomena to observe in order to obtain material upon which one could found hypotheses or rationales in terms of relevant conceptual structures.

If you like, you could say that until we have some idea of how to talk about what we think we are talking about, we are not talking science.

This frequently is a difficulty with questions of the form: “Why. . . ” Such questions are very treacherous for the naïve to deal with because they sound simple, but the word "why" is so deeply ambiguous that discussions of such questions often are meaningless, and even more often are at cross purposes. Some “why” questions are outside the province of science because they have no demonstrable empirical consequences. According to some points of view they therefore are metaphysical. Certainly one needs to distinguish between different meanings of the word, meanings that might include say: causation or history; deduction or implication; justification of values or opinions; rationale or motivation. Often it is simple temporisation ("Why, so can I, or so can any man, but . . .")

Possibly the main nontrivial example of such a question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Some people think it is the supreme question in science and philosophy. Some think it is simply stupid. Some claim that it is metaphysical. For my part, I am not sure that it has yet been defined clearly enough to count as a meaningful question, and until it does, it is not a question that can be taken any further in any constructive formal or scientific investigation. For what my opinion is worth, I suspect that for there to be nothing would involve a self-contradiction, but whether that suspicion is in itself meaningful, I cannot yet say; conceivably it is a question that will resist emergence from abduction. . .

Still, I begin to think that some questions in philosophy, quantum theory, and cosmology are beginning to tickle the tail of that sleeping dragon, and in case any reader is feverishly interested, I do discuss it in greater detail elsewhere:
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html

Neither science nor the philosophy of science is static, and accordingly some meaningless questions of yesterday might be meaningful today.

None of this has any more to do with Kuhnian paradigms and scientific sociology, than the sins, heresies, and sociology of the faithful have to do with a religion's fundamental dogma or philosophy. Classes of techniques, procedures, disciplines, and conventions have been developed for choosing between rival hypotheses in science, but again, these do not define science any more than prayer in general defines religion in general; they simply are the tools currently established locally.

Some people might find it amusing to reflect that, while there is nothing stopping anyone in a particular religion from formulating an immutable dogma concerning science, at the same time, in contrast, any scientific hypothesis concerning any aspect of any religion would be subject to the same forms of attack as any other scientific question.

In case anyone wonders what one's attitude could be called, who rejects religious dogma and also rejects atheism and agnosticism in most of their senses as discussed in this section, I have coined the term "irreligism", and I call myself, not an atheist, but an "irreligist'. The meaning is neither particularly one of belief or unbelief, but of rejection of any form of dogma, not necessarily as true, false, or meaningless, but as being any valid kind of argument, or as being otherwise binding.

Such irreligism excludes any acceptance of any concept of religion, and in particular religious dogmatism, as cogent, or even as being of intellectual interest, whether it comes in the form of conventional or overt religion, or less conventional variants such as satanism on the one hand, or unscientific behaviour such as prescriptive atheism or agnosticism on the other.

It is however compatible with most forms of scientific endeavour and rational humanism, and with ethical or moral principles.

Science, evidence, and near-proof

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck

Das is nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!
(That isn't right; it isn't even wrong!)
Wolfgang Pauli

Roughly speaking there are two classes of science: formal and empiric (or if you prefer: analytic and synthetic; no terminology satisfies everyone, but then, the terminology is not the core of the question).

Formal activities are those based on defined sets of axioms and operations. Examples are branches of or topics in mathematics, logic and, at least in some of its forms and applications, philosophy. Formal assertions can be criticised meaningfully only in terms of their consistency with the axioms and operations on which they are based, which in turn can only be criticised in terms of internal consistency (or para-consistency), completeness, parsimony, elegance, relevance, interest, and the like. To criticise them in terms of their material factuality would not generally be meaningful; that is not what they are based on.

In contrast, empirical or material science deals with some aspects of the world we seem to see ourselves in, and so the axiomatic structure of such science must be compatible with empirical evidence. In empirical science we therefore have no unconditional axioms about our world — we can do no more than propose theories based on assumptions about our observations and the perceived behaviour of the world.

Now, for us to discuss anything about any entity, whether formal or material, if the discussion is to be meaningful, the logical or conceptual form of the content of the words or assertions must suitably match the form of the subject matter. A term for such matching of form, is isomorphism. The term "isomorphism" occurs in several disciplines, most notably in mathematics, but it is applicable wherever forms of entities match in some definable way or another, and in particular, when the relevant form of an assertion fails to match that of the entity to which it refers, it cannot be valid in all contexts.

However, in our material universe, pure, abstract isomorphism is something of an exception, and I have been increasingly dissatisfied with one aspect of the application of the term "isomorphism" in science and technology. In the formal or mathematical sense it is possible to speak of a definitive and precise isomorphism, because the items being matched are finite in the terms of their matching — say, the terms of an algebraic mapping. But in the matching between physical items (say, between a photo and a landscape, or between a waxwork and a subject, or between a bird and a bat) there always are indefinite numbers and degrees of discrepancies. So, for the matching between four crystals of sodium chloride, we could say that their crystal forms were isomorphic, but some other attributes would not be. In contrast, given four sets of say, three numbers, each number in each set being the number five, we could state that the cardinal number of each set is perfectly isomorphic to that of each of the others.

It does not follow that the correspondence of form in an imperfect isomorphism is necessarily wrong or futile, but sometimes one needs to to distinguish between perfect formal isomorphism between abstractions, and "good-enough" "physical or empirical isomorphism", which in my opinion generally cannot possibly be perfect. For that kind of mapping, I propose the term "plesiomorphism". The term is used in some other fields, such as cladistics and crystallography , but those are independent of this sense, so I retain my usage here. It might be objected that it would be adequate to speak instead of "approximate isomorphism", but not only is that cumbersome, it is a questionable usage of the concept of "approximation".

"Plesiomorphism" in this sense means something like: "matching form nearly enough in context, to be useful in empirical or physical applications". I find the concept useful in almost all concepts where characterisation or quantification must be applied when infinite precision is not practically attainable, but a rough matching is adequate for conceptual purposes. For example, there is a plesiomorphism between a pixel on a screen, a dot on paper, and a mathematical point, or between a screen, as opposed to a sheet of paper or a clay tablet. There is a comfortable plesiomorphism between a chalk line or a chalk representation of of an equilateral triangle, and a Euclidean line or equilateral triangle, but the chalk isn't even a line at all, so calling its relationship to a Euclidean line an isomorphism is something of a convenient fiction. And sure enough, the imperfections of Euclidean geometry as represented in physical drawings sometimes lends itself to puzzling fallacies.

For practical purposes we generally assume such things as that:

-   the world operates on principles consistent enough to permit us to generalise meaningfully, in particular to generalise according to axioms in logic and mathematics, chosen according to their being suitably isomorphic or plesiomorphic to the apparent behaviour of the objects under study.
-   such information as we can derive about the world from our sensory perceptions and instrumentation, forms a practical basis for a mental image, a model that has relevant and practical isomorphisms or plesiomorphisms to some sort of presumed underlying reality that has a meaningful relationship to that which is apparent to us; there will be aspects of the nature of the universe that will be common to moles, bats, birds, whales, and humans. They might not agree on many things, each being unable even to imagine some things that seem obvious to the others, but they will agree with the concepts of physical obstacles, aspects of gravity, and so on.
-   for practical purposes the theory of probability may be assumed to be isomorphic or plesiomorphic to relevant behaviour of entities in the perceived universe, particularly according to the limits on the availability and reality of information. This is the basis of the concepts of randomness, and the ubiquitous applicability of statistics as a practical and philosophical tool in science, for example.

The foregoing plesiomorphisms are just a few examples, but the principles are important. If we cannot rely on something of that kind, it is hard to know how we are even to attempt to discover anything about the world with any confidence of anything like success. At the same time, such assumptions still amount to no more than working hypotheses. Anyone is free at any time to present arguments for thinking we are wrong, or at least that the assumptions are not logically justified. Conversely no one is constrained to be interested in those arguments.

In fact, in any sizeable community of philosophers of science, you can be sure of a lot of heated dissent even on such basic points, let alone the question of which points should be included in such a list, their relative importance, how they should be worded, and what they imply for the meaningfulness of science or what form meaning in science might take at all.

In short, those assumptions are about as far from dogma as one can get; assumptions are not even axioms except to particular workers who choose to define them as such. And such a worker is getting pretty close to religion, please note! Commonly such a definition is flawed.

I discuss such considerations elsewhere in essays at:
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2022/05/hilberts-sixth-problem-some-thoughts.html
and
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html

And notice that Occam’s Razor is not one of the basic practical assumptions. It certainly is enormously useful as a rule of thumb and only a fool would fail to test his ideas against Occam, but it is no more than a convenient tool, a basis for principles of elegance of theory and parsimony of things assumed, not a proof of validity.

The current discussion is mainly about empirical science — formal disciplines have little to do with belief, since one can construct as many independent formal axiomatic structures as one likes, to be compatible with practically any coherent belief one likes, or none at all. These structures would not differ in "correctness" but only in their interest or usefulness and applicability.

A whole field of practical and conceptual relevance opens out in some modern fields of study and application. Readers might consider starting their study of one aspect with the following link to the article "Why black box machine learning should be avoided for high-stakes decisions": https://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-022-00172-0

In spite of the popularity of the phrase: "scientific proof", empirical science has little to do with formal proof. Because of their inherent uncertainties and assumptions in terms of underdetermination, as Duhem and Quine variously pointed out, observations cannot formally prove anything — that is because they can hardly ever be formally isomorphic to the subject entity — but they do permit us to compare the defensibility of rival hypotheses that plesiomorphically imply observable phenomena. Observations that constitute confirming instances of predictions, can be used as a basis for establishing working hypotheses: a weak form of support that can be assessed in terms of statistical theory, for example.

The currently most popular example of such a confirming instance is called falsification. When the prediction of a hypothesis X fails, then this is taken as confirmation of the hypothesis not-X.

Naïve practitioners have been known to regard such falsification as “disproving” X, i.e. “proving” not-X, but such fatuity has nothing to do with science as such. Having "falsified" hypothesis X, we have done no more than establishing that in terms of our (well-designed, well-executed) experiment some version of not-X becomes a stronger hypothesis than X — given that no more persuasive evidence is forthcoming from other, independent research or explanation. For example, both X and not-X might turn out to be meaningless — being based on complete misconceptions.

This is all on the assumption that the hypothesis has been suitably expressed for the procedure to be meaningful: and that assumption is large, because the design of experiments is a treacherous field — it is subject to the venerable principle of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

An important problem in testing any new hypothesis is that it can only be tested on the basis of a lot of other assumptions. It is a tricky business to test a combination of more than one hypothesis at a time, so we commonly go to great lengths to test just one variable, making the assumption that all other circumstances are held constant according to already established facts: known truths or givens. That is what we call a controlled experiment. More sophisticated approaches may be necessary when several variables occur in the same study.

The best-known approaches use Latin Squares, or even Mutually orthogonal Latin squares. A more sophisticated approach is that of Taguchi methods: these all are discussed in various contexts in Wikipedia.

No matter how sophisticated the experimental design however, the problem that remains, is that the assumptions about already established facts amount to extra hypotheses. If we were wrong about any of them and our experiment yields results that contradict our predictions as dictated by our new hypothesis, then our conclusion that the new hypothesis is incorrect is unsound, even meaningless, and if our predictions were in fact borne out, then our acceptance of the new hypothesis as a working hypothesis in turn would be unsound.

We would have fallen victim to our trust in our black box.

If we concluded that we had in fact been victim to such errors, then we would say that our experimental setup is underdetermined, meaning that there could reasonably be more than one interpretation of the results, including that our proposed interpretation could be meaningless rather than wrong, as Pauli remarked on another occasion.

This class of limitation on our ability to determine our experimental controls and the hypotheses that we test in any experimental programme is in line with what I have mentioned as the Duhem–Quine thesis. Readers unfamiliar with the field might find it helpful to read about underdetermination in Wikipedia, or in the Stanford article on Underdetermination of Scientific Theory.

But, you might object, how is it possible that one could be mistaken in one's known truths, one's predetermined facts?

It is possible.

It happens.

In the past, predetermined facts included: flat Earth, planetary epicycles, phlogiston, spiral "nebulae" being inside our galaxy, relative speed of light being affected by its path through the ether, the upper bound on the age of the Earth and sun on the assumption of Newtonian physics, the impossibility of interconverting matter and energy . . .

All such and more were based on predetermined facts, givens in their own places and times, natural assumptions on which we based our controls in our scientific research, often unconsciously.

For such reasons even modern scientific practice, no matter how advanced, produces a great deal of wasted research and outright error. For much of such work, the fundamental reason that it is a waste, is that it is based on misconceptions or misformulations, and yet even peer-reviewed publications may report favourably on just such research. Having missed the hidden conceptual flaw or error, the researcher may perform the rest of the work coherently and competently, but of course futilely.

If the subsequent research work is indeed coherent and competent, it may be very difficult for a reviewer to spot the flaw, or if he does, to justify his view that the paper none the less is ill-founded. A major source of such disasters is not poor work or poor thinking, so much as experiments based on reasonable, but erroneous, preconceptions or poorly constructed or inapplicable questions. As a rule, even flawless work on meaningless questions produces meaningless answers, and preconceptions often mask or rationalise that meaninglessness.

GIGO . . .

Whether the experiments have been well designed or not, if the observations are too poorly consistent with the predictions, we discard the hypothesis, modify it, or try again with a totally new hypothesis. We never prove it. We never forbid anyone to doubt our work or to re-test the hypothesis or propose alternatives or extensions. We never demand that anyone accept a hypothesis. In empirical science the closest we come to proving a hypothesis is by presenting evidence so strong that to deny it one would have to be perversely unreasonable.

Of course, we do not generally stop our work and wait until everyone agrees that we have shown that which we set out to do. After all, by that time we have convinced ourselves, at least conditionally, and there will be more work to do while discussion proceeds. Such discussion often continues for generations. And when it is resolved, that resolution commonly does not occur within the discipline, but unexpectedly as an outcome in a different field: an outcome that invalidates key assumptions in the disputed field.

The other side of the coin is that, when anyone else proposes a hypothesis, we in turn reserve our acceptance until we have convinced ourselves of its merits. And of course if we do accept it our commitment to the new hypothesis (whether our own or anyone else’s) is fundamentally temporary. It lasts only until we are sufficiently convinced that yet another hypothesis is superior. In most religions such behaviour would be apostasy, and as such, traitorous. In some quite major religions or sects, apostasy still is punishable by death. In science it is no more than common sense, and to stick to a hypothesis in the face of the balance of the evidence is regarded as mental ossification, the weakness of an old fogy (or much worse still, a young fogy).

Nor is our acceptance any guarantee of correctness, not even temporarily and certainly not permanently.

It does not matter whether this is necessarily because "we" as "scientists" are so virtuous, so liberal minded, that we would never dream of imposing our diffident opinions, or because we just have too much good sense. The reality is that if we did try to impose our views it would have little effect, particularly in the long term. That simply is how the process works. It depends on conviction, not imposition.

Conviction by fashion, compulsion, peer pressure, authority or even riot, certainly has worked very frequently and widely in history and in contemporary education, religion, business, and politics. Science and scientists are not immune to such influences. Anyone who has never seen a senior who refuses to let a junior publish embarrassing or unwelcome evidence, cannot have been in the field for very long. And in the history of science and technology there are major examples of discoveries and developments that were withheld for long periods, sometimes till rivals scooped them, or until serious consequences resulted.

Look around you. Watch the news, both general news and developments in technical fields.

But still, as conviction goes, the influence of compulsion or crookery in scientific work or the associated politics is exceptional and transient. Within a century, or a professional lifetime, or perhaps months, future generations will hold to scorn, any such behaviour in the conflict. Brash young students will sniff at the very idea that anyone could have been stupid enough to fall for such rubbish.

Simplistically retailed history, including history of science, generates either simplistic adulation or simplistic disdain. One is tempted to despair. . .

Unfortunately, work presented in bad faith, though it has no long term effect on the body of science, has led to the ruin of many a promising career, often the career of the whistle blower. We have seen several tragic and immoral examples in the past few decades.

We shall see more. The situation is intrinsic to the nature of humanity so far, and is likely to continue for a while yet. I suspect it will get worse before it mends.

Interestingly, it seems to me that there have been far more cases of good faith retractions of work lately, sometimes very prominent work, that turned out to be in error or at least unrepeatable, and the reaction of the scientific community has generally been muted, even sympathetic. It is a sad reflection on the effects of ambition, greed, malice or vanity, that bad-faith parasites can corrupt such a beneficial system.

Be that as it may. . .

It does not follow that because a hypothesis is untestable by any observation accessible to me, it therefore is not investigable and falsifiable by any other subset of the scientific community, perhaps even by just a single member. Members of any subset, however right or wrong their hypotheses might be, may be perfectly scientific in their work. Nothing in the nature of science guarantees that every proposition that is meaningful to one worker, in terms of falsifiability or induction, must be equally meaningful to every other worker. There might be differences in skills, in equipment, in resources, in chance observations. There might be differences even in personal senses or aptitudes, such as perception of harmony, taste, or colour. How is one to react to a scientific claim that one is not in a position to test personally? Is every such claim meaningless by definition to everyone but the observer in person?

Not necessarily. It depends on our personal world view and intellectual taste, how high a level of confidence we demand before we are willing accept a given assertion as a working hypothesis. The principles of science neither demand that we believe, nor that we disbelieve. The world is too large for everyone to investigate all of it personally in detail, or even to acquire the necessary skills to do so. In discriminating between rival hypotheses, we need not consider only formal falsifiability by personal experiment; it is reasonable and in practice it also is necessary, to give appropriate weight to weaker evidence, such as, in no special order:

-   a claim's consistency with our experience, reasoning, and opinions
-   the word of other observers
-   the opinions of persons whose skills we respect
-   a claim's consistency with coherent and logical bodies of theory
-   other criteria than direct evidence, such as parsimony and explanatory richness.

None of these is proof either, but they are useful in practice and historically they have been of enormous power and value.

Weak or indirect evidence still is evidence — evidence is everything that has weight in rationally influencing one's choice of particular hypotheses as being the most persuasive. Strong evidence carries the most weight; weaker evidence carries correspondingly less. There is no general, cogent basis for assessing the weight to assign to any item of evidence; its strength keeps changing according to context and relevance, and in any case according to one's appraisal of context and weight: all such necessarily are largely arbitrary and personal. Except in religion there is theoretically no such thing as absolute evidence, only a range of cogency that extends from an interesting speculation at one extreme, to repeated, independent observation, precise, practical, predictable, quantitative, and explicable, at the other extreme.

Similarly, I reject with contempt the cliché that "the plural of anecdote is not data". That may be true as a trivial point in philology, but it is not science. Sometimes anecdote is all we have; and in the real world the scientist makes such bricks as he may with such straw as he may. Certainly anecdote is not formal proof, but repeatable, respectable, controlled research with high levels of significance is not formal proof either. Science is not about formal, absolute proof, but about probabilities. And when anecdote is all you have, then you make of it whatever use that you may, even if that is no more than abductive.

If you are a real scientist.

Well asked is half answered

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Thomas Carlyle

There is yet another problem with the concept of formal proof in empirical science:

One never can show formally that one has listed all possible meaningful hypotheses about something that in principle is observable and falsifiable; if one has omitted such a hypothesis, then that might be the correct one; if so, then one cannot select the most compelling alternative.

One cannot so much as show that one has included the correct hypothesis (the "god's-eye-view", or some simplification or representation thereof) in the list, let alone that the truly correct and meaningful possibility is the one that the observations support best.

One cannot even be sure in principle that one's conception of the phenomenon is framed in terms that can meaningfully and non-trivially be related to the "god's-eye-view".

Consider the technological sophistication of the typical hunter-gatherer, no matter how intelligent, in particular, one who has no conception of electricity or magnetism, and no knowledge of metals or chemistry. Such a one would have great difficulty formulating a meaningful theory about how a battery operated fan works. We in turn at present, have no idea of how many levels of sophistication we stand below the TOE (“Theory Of Everything”) of the god's-eye-view.

These difficulties make sense in view of the well-established and repeated observation in the practice of science, that the greatest scientist is not necessarily the one who finds the best answers, but very likely may be the one who frames the best questions.

Now, framing relevant questions in meaningful terms is a major challenge in the design of meaningful experiments. Our hunter-gatherer might well ask whether that fan works because it has trapped the spirit of a dragonfly or rather because it has trapped the spirit of a hummingbird.

As a good scientist the hunter-gatherer might proceed to carry out experiments to resolve the question. Statistical analysis of his results might well yield high significance, but an industrial engineer who designs electromagnetic fans might have a harrowing time explaining why, in spite of significance at a level better than p=0.00001, those experiments do not constitute strict proof that the fan works because what it has in fact captured is indeed the spirit of a hummingbird, and not a dragonfly.

One of the engineer’s difficulties in convincing the investigator might be the fact that both the experiments and the analyses were impeccable. Attempts to point out flaws in basic assumptions tends to be dismissed impatiently as airy-fairy academic quibbling beyond the rational concerns of practical, down-to-earth experimentalists who know all about dragonflies and hummingbirds, and can see that they have nothing to do with the nature of amber and the fur of cats, neither of which in turn could have any conceivable relevance to whirring fan blades.

Note that this is a classic example of underdetermination, with the added observation that it does not follow that because you know that there is underdetermination, you know nature of all the possible operative antecedents; you may not at all be in a position to include the operative antecedent in your list of conceivable determinative hypotheses.

In fact, you might not be equipped to guess at or understand the operative antecedent at all, any more than the hunter-gatherer could imagine such a thing as a magnetic field or an electric motor.

In our case, say in our conception of modern cosmology, we do not know whether we are any nearer understanding the universe in terms more meaningful than the hunter-gatherers' conception of the principle of the operation of the fan. Would the Olympians with their god's-eye-view laugh at the idea of the multiverse? Of superstrings? Of the Big Bang? Of red-shift? Of gravity? Of dark mass or energy? Of quantum theory, and in particular of quantum entanglement? Of information? Of evolution? Of matter? Of mind? Of spirit? Of ideas? We don't know. And if those Olympians do laugh, we certainly do not know what they would replace such things with, or in what contexts.

Much less can we guess whether there are still higher meta-Olympians who laugh at our Olympians.

But we can go on with our asking, doubting, thinking, measuring, induction, synthesis, and falsification. All abject activities no doubt, but, offensive though they seem to some people, they have yielded proud results time and again.

And systematically improved results in subsequent generations.

And those results have certainly been more impressive in the past few centuries, materially, philosophically, and ethically, than religion or tradition has yielded at any time in the past twenty or so millennia.

Scientists as a group do not tend towards conscious modesty, I incline to think; and yet the philosophy of science implies an implicit humility so deep as to transcend the mental horizons of the arrogance of dogma. Subjection of oneself and one's Weltanschauung to a concept, be it never so small, or so counter-intuitive, or transcending the scale of every vision of humanity or the universe, and dropping it or accommodating it according to what one can show about it; there is humility to vaunt, if you like!

My humility does not extend to omitting another quote of a Piet Hein aphorism:

The road to wisdom? -- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
      Err
          and err
          and err again
      but less
          and less
          and less.

Note yet again that these principles we observe in today's science still are not dogma. They certainly are resilient, because they are based on views that have developed through the centuries and have taken coherent form, most spectacularly since the mid nineteenth century, though the pace still shows no sign of moderating its rate of acceleration.

In that process the bodies of theory and of empirical evidence have undergone generations of criticism and have been adapted accordingly. Whether formal or empirical, they are subject to review, dissent, and replacement at all times. Each adjustment to the underlying view may have been disconcerting, but always has been assimilated once it has outlived the fogies, young or old.

Note that such assimilation need not imply compulsory acceptance of new conjectures or theses as truth to be read and revered by all, on tablets from the mountain. Every adjustment, however useful or impressive, remains open to doubt indefinitely, and open to question and revision in its context, in its turn.

The problem for the innovative scientist is to persuade the community (or let it persuade itself) that some particular new or dissenting view is preferable (for now, in some particular context at least). In fact, if you discuss the philosophy of science in different circles you will find a great deal of variety in the details of all the opinions, but one thing that no one but a crackpot would tell you, is that in science the way to persuade a sceptic is by exercise of violence, majority, authority, threat, or even reproach. It is no part of science to prove the formally unprovable formally, or force anyone to believe anything by moral or physical pressures.

This no more suggests that any particular person who does work in scientific fields is ethically sound, dogma-free, or religion-free, than that any religious person must be without sin, heresy or doctrinal error. In effect many a professor in a field of scientific study does accept something as dogma and does force it on his students, and most of his students will swallow it as dogma, often without even token inquiry, and without even being aware of the nature of dogma.

Many of the top scoring students actually will object bitterly if asked to accept views as conditional; what they want is hard fact that they can master for the examinations. Some of them never outgrow such childhood diseases, even if they in their turn succeed dogmatic professors in their role of the next generation of dogmatic professors.

All that is sad of course, but it still is better than some other instances and forms of dogmatism. No auto da fe is required in eventually mending matters.

Mind you, commonly such students and professors would be bitterly offended if anyone pointed out the unscientific nature of their behaviour. Very likely the class notes contain a solemn passage on the intellectual independence and dignity of science, and the students can get marks for mentioning it in the exams.

So?

So that dogma is the creation of that professor, not a component of the field of science. That fact makes no difference to the demands placed on the professor's rivals or associates. The proposition that his dogma asserts might be robust or it might be transparent delusion. All that the scientific community requires is that the work that a dogmatist presents is subject to the same scrutiny as the work of anyone else. If the dogmatist takes such scepticism as a personal affront, then so be it; the responsibility of the innovator is to present theories, logic, or evidence, not to convince every audience, let alone convince everyone forever.

Interestingly, I have read a lot of Feynman's informal writings, and his stated opinions have so uniformly clashed with his quip that: "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds", that I would give good odds that he was making fun of the staid philosophers of science, and those who philosophised without personal competence in the fields about which they sounded forth. Such most certainly are in goodly supply. I have encountered several myself.

In science the word "scientist" as applied to a person, is far less meaningful than the word "scientific" as applied to his behaviour or his work. Furthermore, on many occasions in history, unscientific work performed by people under total misapprehension as to its meaning, has produced material of value. For one dramatic example, read up about the invention of the triode. One even could argue that, until perhaps two centuries ago, material progress based on such misconception was rather the rule than the exception.

Sometimes it still happens. What the scientists of two centuries in the future will say of formal and professional science in our time, we can only guess, or if we prefer, wait and see.

Why dogma as the diagnostic criterion?

There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is,
the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.
Charles Pierce

Science necessarily and sufficiently can be distinguished from religion by the criterion of its absence of dogma. This is sufficient as a basis for saying whether something that must be classified as either religion or science, is one or the other. It is not to say that everything must be one or the other, just that it cannot be both. Nor does it guarantee that there is some mystical justification by which our spiritual eye can see that if something is based on dogma, it is religion, otherwise it is science.

Rather, our distinction is a basic operation in the formal discipline of systematics:

-   identify the (super)set you are dealing with
-   find by inspection of some subset of its elements, one or more attributes that are not attributes of the rest of the elements of its superset
-   by definition you thereby have established two subsets whose membership can be diagnosed, using those attributes as criteria, and as a defining context.

How useful these diagnostic criteria are, is another matter. It depends on such things as:

-   how practical the diagnosis is (can one rely on identifying elements and telling which elements have which attributes?) and
-   how relevant it is (Is it evidence, i.e. is it reasonable to expect it to affect anyone's opinion?)

Given n objective, mutually independent attributes of elements in a set, there could be a large number of ways of partitioning it into up to n subsets. We simply choose the one that seems most useful in context. If anyone can demonstrate a more coherent and relevant (i.e. more useful) partitioning, we are free to reconsider.

Let's consider a simplistic example. We have a set: (pigs, pigeons, penguins, balloons, emus, aeroplanes, albatrosses, and bats). How should we partition them into subsets according to their respective attributes? Obviously pigs are closer to emus and penguins. And pigeons closer to bats, aeroplanes, and albatrosses, right? You see where this is going? One classification would give the biologists strokes, while others would horrify flight engineers or philologists or any of many other disciplines.

The problem is not novel; if you have never read "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, have a crack at it and find the passage in which he concludes that whales are fishes.

Well, the point is that if you wish to classify categories, you need to be very careful in your choice of diagnostic criteria. Bear that in mind and read on.

In our current exercise of separation of the sheep from the scientists, the diagnosis is pretty comfortable and the distinction that emerges is in fact the point at issue. It distinguishes what most of us associate with religion, from what most of us perceive as science, so yes, I think we quite easily can justify the choice of dogma as a practical criterion. By all means supply clearer criteria if you can think of any that would be relevant to the distinction and definition.

I re-emphasise that this assumption does not deny that there are other ways of splitting the set. It does not even imply that we have inspected the set of belief structures comprehensively. We have performed a notional exercise and it seems to meet the needs of our discussion. It also seems sufficiently persuasive that if anyone rejects the view that our superset is indeed usefully to be partitioned in that way, we can invite them to produce counter-examples that destroy or at the least demand adjustments to the thesis.

Or possibly demonstrate a different partitioning that is still more persuasive and accordingly more useful.

In particular note that comparative theologists may regard some dogmatic belief structures as religions and others as sects or cults or superstitions or moral aberrations or the like. Also adherents to some beliefs are likely to class their own beliefs as religion and other beliefs as anything from paganism to heresy. None of this affects the validity of the terminology in this essay within its own context. Granted, in other contexts the terminology could be inappropriate, but that does not affect the current theme.

Scientific behaviour can be distinguished from non-scientific behaviour primarily by the attitude to falsification or functionally related epistemological principles. Science can indeed be applied to the study of religion, personal experience, emotional views, and the like, to the extent that the statements concerning such can be expressed in falsifiable terms. The only secure faiths are those that avoid falsifiable statements.

But security of such a nature tends to be vacuous and accordingly need not imply persuasiveness.

Science, religion and. . .

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Abraham Maslow

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
Voltaire

Note once more that not everything is either science or religion. Some things are nonsense without being either of the two. Is sport a religion? Some people might argue that for some people it is, but even if it does turn out that in some cases this literally is true, certainly it is not generally a reasonable thing to assert. Is sport science? Certainly science or scientific method can be applied to the study of sport, or used to improve performance or technology in sport, but again, simply and sensibly, sport as such cannot be regarded as being science.

To say such a thing about sport or other examples is neither praise nor criticism; it just reflects differences between sport and science, or indeed, between sport and religion.

On the other hand, whether science or religion is sport depends on the attitude of the particular practitioners or spectators. It does not affect the science or religion as such.

There are dogmata in fields other than those we normally call religions. Some are milder, but some are about as fervid as formal religions. Think about traditions, superstitions, racism, patriotism and party politics. There are many such.

Humanity seems to hunger for certainty, including certainty of prejudice, rather than hungering for truth or cogency. In fact, that hunger might well be the fundamental drive that impels the religious faithful in the first place. Once the dogma is firmly established by tradition, you have the most important components of a fully fledged religion, complete with illogic, intolerance, rage, and righteous cruelty.

Dogma is the most convenient substitute for cogency, though one liberal minded dogma of the last century or two is that what the human mind yearns for is creativity, dignity, and freedom to think for oneself, and that the human faithful hate dogma.

But dogma saves the pain and effort of thinking; and suitable dogma can be memorised and recited to give a comfortable sense of authority, superiority, and righteousness; in that form it can justify any kind of cruelty and greed and lack of thought, and if there is danger of argument, then, as long as they are loud enough, rage and repetitive recitation will always work more conveniently than sense or honesty, preferably in a crowd that is large enough and supportive enough and enjoys howling down the opposition with slogans.

"Use not vain repetitions as the heathen do"?

Really?

But the heathen know that repetition is fun: "On top of old smOOOkyyy . . . "! They know that repetition is easier than thought; that it trumps sense, and is good for shouting down the opposition, and that there is nothing better than dogma for shouting slogans with a sense of righteousness.

The same sort of reasoning could be applied to deciding whether art, law or business should be regarded as science or religion (or perhaps sport. . . ?) When we develop a scheme of classification, we should not forget that if some objects do not fit into any of the classes, it does not necessarily make sense to force them into one or the other, rather than allocating them to separate classes of their own.

Science and religion largely are classes of attitudes and activities. In the role they play in anyone’s life, they similarly largely are matters of context and degree. Not everyone is necessarily and categorically, nor at all times, purely a scientist or purely a religious adherent. One might take a scientific view of one matter, and an essentially religious view of another. Notice again that according to the criterion of dogma, such a religious view need not even imply worship or virtue. A religious Abrahamist who believes dogmatically in the existence of of Satan might actively disapprove of Satan and Satanism, but none the less would logically be closer to being a Satanist than an atheist who firmly disbelieves: such an atheist could not logically be a Satanist whether he wishes to or not. Nor could anyone else who is not religious, whether an irreligist or not.

Even apart from such questions, it does not follow that every body of theory must be all science or all dogmatically based religion. A believer in a flat Earth at the centre of the universe with the sun circling it daily in accordance with his holy scripture, could make perfectly valid astronomical observations and perhaps make valid scientific deductions from some of them. Some points of his views would be scientific and some would be religious.

What is more difficult is to imagine how any one point could be both.

Intrinsically dogma need not necessarily be all bad. For one thing, for the bulk of humanity the best weapon against bad dogma is not something as confusing as science or cogently sound philosophy, but something simple and clear, like good dogma: unquestioning belief in the tenets underpinning healthy ethics, practical modes of life, and sound information. The human mind seems to have a level of dogma which is healthy; traditionally religious people sometimes tend to have a resistance to some superstitions that run riot through the ranks of say, New Agers.

And what counts as "bad" or "good" dogma? Or even non-dogmatic "bad" or "good" belief or opinion?

That is a matter of personal and social values: it accordingly is beyond the scope of this essay. Rather than follow that point in detail, I no more than point out in passing the following principle:

Any system of choice of behaviour, including any prescriptive system of ethical behaviour,
that by its own nature, either implicitly or deliberately strives against its own success,
whether it succeeds in this or not,
earns no right to survive: natural selection militates against it.

Artificial selection, and larger scopes of definition of systems, are more complicated, but they are not immune from that same principle.

Evolution as a religion

Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, in "De Genese ad litteram" said:

It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world — respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation, and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever perceiving him to be as wide of the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.

And the real evil is not that a man is subjected to derision because of his error, but it is that to profane eyes, our authors (that is to say, the sacred authors) are regarded as having had such thoughts; and are also exposed to blame and scorn upon the score of ignorance, to the greatest possible misfortune of people whom we wish to save. For, in fine, these profane people happen upon a Christian busy in making mistakes on a subject which they know perfectly well; how, then, will they believe these holy books? How will they believe in the resurrection of the dead and in the hope of life eternal, and in the kingdom of heaven, when, according to an erroneous assumption, these books seem to them to have as their object those very things which they, the profane, by their direct experience or by calculation which admits of no doubt? It is impossible to say what vexation and sorrow prudent Christians meet with through these presumptuous and bold spirits who, taken to task one day for their silly and false opinion, and realizing themselves on the point of being convicted by men who are not obedient to the authority of our holy books, wish to defend their assertions so thoughtless, so bold, and so manifestly false. For they then commence to bring forward as a proof precisely our holy books, or again they attribute to them from memory that which seems to support their opinion, and they quote numerous passages, understanding neither the texts they quote, nor the subject about which they are making statement.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much
disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure
in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
George Orwell

Evolution? What is special about evolution in this connection? Not much really; the relevance is just that at present no branch of science is more rabidly attacked by religious fundamentalists and zealots. At the same time many such parties claim that evolution is no more than another religion – that claim is a rearguard debating tactic intended to nonplus those who claim that the study of evolution is a scientific discipline.

It certainly is the most intelligent tactic that creationists have conceived so far. Creationists are not much into intelligence, as any reading of "Intelligent Design" demonstrates.

Of course, to speak of evolution as either a religion or a science is careless terminology. Evolution is a process; it is a range, a structure, of phenomena. You may believe in evolution or not, study it or not, theorise about it or not, revere it or not, but it could no more be a religion or a science than say, a glacier or the colour red could be such a thing. And whatever you believe about it is no more (or less) of a religion or science than what you believe about thermodynamics or cosmology or Bigfoot.

No, what people usually mean is something like: the religion called evolution is the study of evolution, the attitude towards evolution, a body of theory on evolutionary themes.

Such loose terminology is understandable, if a little sloppy, so I make no fuss about it. In fact, I might be as sloppy myself at times, as I forgive those who trespass. It is not at all unusual even for scientists to speak of “evolution” when they mean “evolutionary theory”, "evolutionary adaptation", or the like.

And to conflate "evolution" with "natural selection", is a very frequent verbal or terminological blunder, even within the disciplines.

Certainly there are evolutionists whose behaviour would be appropriate to religious zealots. We see them all the time. Some of them are actual professional biologists, and many others are militant self-styled sceptics who have read the latest popular book and are ready to go out and shout down anyone who has not seen the light. Sometimes they currently are students who have studied one or more modules dealing with evolution.

They often are impressively informed, articulate, and partisan: beware the zealotry of the proselyte; it makes an uncomfortable ally of him!

Of course, evolution as a field of study has nothing much to do with such things. The fuss and bother are the product of human vanity, sloth, wrath, avarice, and envy. I am less sure about lust and gluttony, but I cannot exclude them outright.

But then how seriously are we to take the claim that evolutionary theory, as she is spoke, could be religion? Let us apply the acid test, or perhaps the touchstone: if it is religion, then where is the dogma?

Famously, Darwin based his theory on a few observations concerning the exponential propagation of populations, the inevitable resultant mortality, its favourable effect on those sub-populations that bear suitable attributes and so on.

None of these is dogma.

All of them have been observed or deduced, and exposed to falsification in the field or the laboratory in context after context, experimental, observational, and philosophical. And they continually get re-exposed, re-thought, and re-qualified. Successive generations of geneticists, zoologists, molecular biologists, botanists, ecologists, evolutionary psychologists, palaeontologists, and microbiologists publish, observe, and experiment. Drop by drop they enlarge the flood that swells fuller with marvels as the studies roll, revealing the expected and the unexpected.

And for all we know, some of those dogmatists may worship, and sanctify, and proselytise. . .

Certainly many of them speak outright nonsense on one point or another.

How could things be otherwise? We all are in the image of the Homininae.

And then, oh so cunningly subtle, there is the Great Darwinian Tautology: How-Do-We-Define-Fitness? After all, fitness is that which permits an organism to reproduce effectively. How do we know the organism is fit? Why, simple: see how effectively it reproduces!

Surely this is about as cogent as any typical Jesuitical exercise in apologetics? (Please bear in mind that I use the term “Jesuitical” in the traditional metaphorical sense of intricate, casuistic, hair-splitting, persistent argument or invective, commonly in bad faith. I am sure that any self-respecting modern actual Jesuit would scorn and deprecate such practice.)

So, with dogmatic baggage like that, how is Darwinism any better than religion?

For what that is worth, relative fitness in Darwinian work is well-defined and is measurable by actual correlation of genetic attributes with reproductive success. One might as well call magnetism a tautology because it is something that acts on a magnet, while a magnet is something acted on by magnetism. Over a century ago Ambrose Bierce was wittily acrid on that very point, but since his time we have generated a great deal more substance to discuss when we argue about magnetism.

Mind you, even in Bierce's day geniuses like Maxwell and Faraday were establishing some really sound theory describing the nature of magnetism, but we cannot demand that scientifically illiterate literati like Bierce should let things beyond their ken inhibit their wit.

In discussing circular arguments in evolutionary theory, we are even better off than physicists discussing magnetism. Even Darwin would not have found it a challenge to refute the charge of tautology, and since his day huge volumes of work have addressed the measurement, prediction, nature, and effect of fitness in hundreds or thousands of contexts. In fact I cannot think offhand of much contemporary work on evolution, that does not focus on identification of the components and mechanisms of fitness and their measurement.

As a concept, fitness is quite simple; it comes down to the effect that a heritable variable has on the reproductive success of a population.

That need not imply that the work necessary to investigate or establish such a an effect or concept need be anything like simple, please note!

Among popular books describing the subject, “The Beak of the Finch” by Jonathan Weiner is a particularly convenient example. At a more professional level, every modern textbook of evolution defines the concept and measure of fitness both verbally and mathematically in various forms or contexts, as appropriate. Measurement of the concept is neither arbitrary nor as trivial as it sounds. Even in non-sexually reproducing populations measuring fitness certainly is hard work. In sexually reproducing populations with overlapping generations and wide geographical ranges over long periods, it becomes downright tricky.

But no one has shown that just because the phenomenon of evolution is a topic of scientific study, it has to be simple. Well, at least the idea is simple. As Thomas Huxley said: "My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the ‘Origin’ was, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’ I suppose that Columbus’ companions said much the same when he made the egg stand on end".

Given such a vast background of support in practice, and theory, and simple common sense, it is beyond me to imagine any realistic prospect of the idea of fitness or of natural selection being shaken in future. But there is nothing, not a solitary thing, in science, that forbids anyone to present evidence to modify, replace, or even annihilate the theory. You might argue that such work would never get published, and you might have a point. It certainly would not be easy to find anyone to take you seriously, any more than you could easily find anyone to take seriously the theory that the sun really is hollow. But it still would not be forbidden, and if the new work really were cogent you could be pretty confident that eventually the new insights would prevail.

And they would not take another four hundred years to prevail.

Such cases do occur in science. One of my favourites lately has been that of the jumping genes that Barbara McClintock discovered: she struggled for decades to convince her colleagues of their nature and reality.

The resistance to such new ideas typically comes, not from doctrinal conspiracy of suppression, but from people's refusal to believe – which after all no one will force them to do.

So much for tautology and Jesuitry in science!

Still no dogma.

The closest I can come to anything of the type is the playfully named “central dogma of molecular genetics” of Crick and Watson. This stated that DNA in nature would be transcribed into either DNA or RNA, and RNA into RNA or protein, but not into DNA. There was a bit more to it, but the bit that I mention is the bit that matters here.

Like most real dogma, that did not last long in the face of the progress of science, but in any case it never was a real dogma, either in practice or in intention, just a conveniently challenging hypothesis with a provoking title. Crick and Watson had never seen anything like that type of transcription, nor did they have any strong reason to propose that it could happen in nature, so instead they proposed their "dogma".

It turns out in fact that Crick had proposed the term "dogma" in ignorance: he had misunderstood what the word "dogma" meant, thinking that dogma just meant something like a concept.

And like an honest scientist, he advertised his own error once it was pointed out to him.

Big Deal!!!

But that is by the way.

And it still has nothing to do with real dogma in the ordinary sense with its associated subtexts of compulsion. For one thing, there never was the slightest fuss about changing it; in science empirical observations rule, OK? In due course virologists did discover reverse transcription, for example in cells infected with RNA viruses. Scientifically that was enormously important, enormously exciting, and enormously interesting.

Possibly surprisingly to the layman though, although it certainly was an exciting and important discovery, it was not particularly startling: so the necessary enzyme did actually exist in nature did it? Fine. That was that. Let's take it from there. What next?

And as the overthrow of dogma goes, it was about as earth-shaking as a typical report on a minor intra-denominational ecumenical congress.

Still I find nothing in the study of evolution that as a biologist I am compelled by authority to believe, nothing that I must not criticise, any more than if I were studying physics.

And is physics dogmatic? If you like, I suppose some people could argue the point. And yet, no one got burned at stake for proposing the existence of plate tectonics, N-rays, electrons, polywater, relativity, cold fusion or quantum mechanics. A lot of people explained loudly how hot they became under the collar at various times, but that was about as hot as they got. It is not for you and me to claim that therefore they were dogmatists or that their theories were dogmatically based. As far as I know, no one even lost tenure or anything like that.

Similarly those evolutionists who functionally amount to religious zealots make no practical difference to the status of evolutionary study as a branch of science rather than religion. However devout their professions might have been, however influential their work may have been, it all got exposed to the same erosive or supportive criticism and discussion, helpful, scornful, enthusiastic or simply dismissive.

If it got sifted out, it got discarded, or at least archived, no matter how slowly, how justly or unjustly, and no matter how passionate the originator might have been.

Of course, as a matter of practical fact the nut cases among the professionals in the discipline are the exception — the rare exception — rather than the rule. Your run of the mill evolutionist is an enthusiast, as well he might be, given such a beautiful, varied, surprising, subtle, and absorbing field, but that does not mean that he foists, demands, or accepts dogma, or that he is shocked to have to defend his ideas and evidence with no support beyond verifiable observation and falsifiable theory.

If anyone insists that such a situation also is characteristic of his religion, good luck to him and his dogma, and may his dogma match sense and material fact; if it does not, then something must give: trying to impose dogma on realities is like ordering faith to sustain Peter walking on the water; whatever Peter's faith, it only works while Peter's density is sufficiently low. And claiming that it does work, has all the dignity and conviction of assertions that New Agers bouncing around on their bums are achieving levitation by mental power.

Serious opponents of evolutionary theory in general nowadays, have lapsed into spoiling tactics, for sheer lack of material substance to support their objections, whether factual or logical. In debate, the likes of "creation science" and "intelligent design" have been reduced to the persuasiveness of the so-called "Gish gallop": the tactic of presenting floods of incoherent, inaccurate, irrelevant, frequently meaningless, assertions and quibbles as arguments. At its best it can shout down anyone trying to present actual material for reflection. To refute each one takes many times more time, space and effort than the challenge took, and is not worth it: anyone taken in by the noise is unequipped to take in the substance.

I admit that the gallop tactic is effective: it takes education and sense to recognise the dishonesty, and people with deficient sense far outnumber those with educated minds. Mark Twain recognised this, and portrayed it in the novel "Huckleberry Finn" in the passage:

"H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side?
And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

Or any country for that matter. . .

For those whose attitude is scientific, outcomes remain rewarding as long as the universe fundamentally behaves consistently: it certainly remains characteristic of science that its conclusions can outlive opponents and obstructionists.

After all, because science as a body is not chained to any practically immovable body of dogma, it can adjust to new findings almost as fast as they emerge and can be evaluated. Religions can at best change inconvenient dogmata as fast as their hierarchy can explain that what had seemed like heresy before, actually had always been the dogma, but that a few evilly inspired people might have misunderstood.

The history of religious pronouncements in the Abrahamic faiths makes informative reading, though unappetising.

I hardly know anything about other beliefs.

Religion versus science

“Mr Fuller, correct me if I am wrong: you have already incorrectly forecast the end of the world
on four separate occasions. According to you we were supposed to have had doomsday
in 1923, 1931, 1937, and as recently as 1950.”
“What are a few years here and there sir,
when measured against the limitless backcloth of eternity?
What are they but as grains of sand. . . ?”
Fuller’s Earth

Having distinguished religion from science, we might take the view that they really have nothing to do with each other. After all, if science has no dogma, then on what basis is the scientist to criticise religious beliefs? When a scientist has religious views of one kind or another, why should there be a problem? Religious dogma that deals with metaphysical, unobservable, unverifiable, and unfalsifiable concepts should be outside the field of scientific research, surely.

Philosophers of various schools have glibly referred to such dogmatic and empiric fields as being of separate magisteria, and accordingly claimed that to discuss them in common terms is invalid.

Well, maybe, but I reject such a view as unrealistic as well as spineless: it funks the need to deal with salient difficulties. Consider the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. It is not possible to prove formally that they do not exist, any more than one can prove formally that paranoid conspiracy theories are groundless. Formally proving a negative in the empirical world, always is a tricky matter, and we have to fall back on weaker, informal, forms of “proof” such as presenting evidence so strong that to deny it one would have to be unreasonable.

Like finding a coin under your pillow where you had put a discarded tooth the night before. . .

Now, for any dogma or assertion to belong to a magisterium distinct from that of empirical science, either it must be nugatory, or it must make some assertions about reality, assertions that differ from what would be the case if the dogma were false. Given such assertions, they then are open to observation by scientific activity.

Which immediately and intrinsically disqualifies them from being in a magisterium other than that of empirical science.

In science there is not much scope for respecting any theory that has negligible relevance to anything else. In essence, it is hard to guess how such a theory could be meaningful at all. To take such a thing seriously, simply would not make much sense, even outside formal science. One might as well argue about whether the Seven Dwarfs wore beards or not, and if so, when, and in which styles.

In the practice of scientific work, the most valuable theories are those have implications for other theories and enable us to make predictions that we can test, whether they contradict established theory or not.

Valuable theories also have a great deal of power to explain large classes of things. For instance modern atomic theory explained all sorts of things about the way matter behaves, whether in the form of gases, solids, or liquids, or the way energy affects matter. This did not happen all at once, but within a few decades of Dalton’s proposals, there was hardly anything in physics or chemistry that neither ultimately nor directly referred to the atoms that made up matter.

And that happened before our understanding of atoms was more than speculation. And during the investigation of the implications of that theory, fallacy after fallacy, reasonable or not, was proposed and dismissed in its turn.

How could things be otherwise? Facts beyond our powers of observation don't obligingly manifest themselves in ways that are ready for typesetting in our textbooks.

It was well into the twentieth century before we had anything like a direct view of actual atoms or molecules; and yet most of our current knowledge had progressed very nicely thank you, together with the predictions of vital classes of objects and effects beyond the imaginations of non-scientists, or even of brilliantly competent scientists of earlier centuries.

Atomic theory was not the only example of a theory that had wide support about something that had not yet been undebatably demonstrated or understood. The seventeenth-to-nineteenth century theory of ether was another good theory, or perhaps I should say, collection of theories and their implications. In contrast to atomic theory, the theory of ether was discarded near the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps permanently, but in its time it supported a lot of ideas that led to work that in turn led to much of recent physics. Such ideas that at first look reasonable, but later are rejected as wrong are rather like scaffolding that supports the construction of later theories, and then gets broken down and discarded once the building can stand on its own.

Even today residues or mutations of ether theory are making small waves.

Only a fool fails to respect the scaffolding that is necessary for new and great constructions.

Now, suppose a theory cannot be criticised because it can answer all objections of people who cannot see any evidence for it (“You cannot see the Tooth Fairy because she can make herself invisible; you cannot detect her gravitationally because she is too light” and so on).

Such immunity to criticism may sound marvellous to anyone who does not understand science. The problem is that as you go down that road you soon find yourself at the point where every prediction the theory makes is just the same as if the theory were left out. The world of the Tooth Fairy looks just the same as if there were no Tooth Fairy. This follows because if things were not so, then we could find evidence for or against the Tooth Fairy. All we need do is to see what difference the Tooth Fairy would make, and then look for that difference. If we do not find that difference after looking long and hard enough, then we assume for the present that there is no Tooth Fairy.

Have we thereby proved that there is no tooth fairy?

Of course not, but there is no practical limit to the number of things we could imagine but never could detect. How about a separate Tooth Fairy for every tooth in the world? Can you prove that to be false if you accept even one Tooth Fairy?

When we refuse to accept the existence of something as long as the only evidence for its existence is that you cannot prove that it does not exist, then we are following an important principle in science and simple common sense. This is the principle of parsimony or of theoretical elegance. I already have mentioned it; it sometimes is called Occam’s razor. Cut out every assumption one can do without. The fact that for the present you can do without those assumptions does not prove that they are wrong, but it does mean that a sceptic is on strong ground if he refuses to believe when belief demands extra assumptions that violate that principle.

Historically in fact, the effectiveness of Occam’s razor has been so great that it seems almost suspicious. Why should the simplest possible assumption nearly consistently turn out to be the best in practice?

I say again: Occam’s Razor is not a scientific axiom, just a useful tool, a rule of thumb. Still, it is an uncomfortably sharp tool. Failing the razor test is a bad, bad thing for dogma. It is so bad, that commonly it disqualifies a hypothesis if there is insufficient good evidence to rescue it.

Then there are various rules that depend on the consistency of theories with predictions based on those theories. For instance, Darwin proposed that there should exist undiscovered species of insects with particular types of mouthparts, because on the basis of his theory and the structures of particular orchids, no known species could have pollinated them. Sure enough, decades later, in fact after Darwin's death, a hawk moth was discovered that did pollinate those orchids. If the moth had never been found, then some other theory would have had to be tested, say: that some undiscovered tribe had bred the orchid artificially. And of course, if the moth had died out before anyone had discovered it, then perhaps we never would have discovered the answer to that question at all.

Such things do happen: the universe is not run for the convenience of research workers; nothing in science promises that we shall find the answer to every question, nor that all the answers we find are correct answers.

Such principles are basic to science and if you think about them carefully, they are basic to common sense as well. So much so that some people characterise "science" as "glorified common sense".

Now, according to the principle of parsimony, the less a dogmatic belief has to say about anything we can test, the less seriously a sceptic need take that belief. If it offers us nothing to test, dump it straight into the Santa Claus bin: it makes no practical difference in life. If we want Christmas presents, we cannot rely on the Santa hypothesis: someone must buy them or make them or otherwise obtain them; it is not enough just to send letters to the North Pole. But given that as the case, we might as well ignore Santa; leave out the assumption that there is any Santa. We pay just as much to just the same people as if there were no Santa, whether we have been good children or not.

But if there is something to test, such as the tears of a statue turning to blood for one day every year, then the sceptic may argue that he has grounds for disbelief if he is not permitted to perform or witness the test to his reasonable satisfaction, or if the statue fails the test.

This is not a special attack intended for the destruction of religious claims; it applies to everything in science as well. Some of the earlier scepticism about the Piltdown skull began when the parties in possession of the skull, and who passionately believed that it was genuine, refused to let sceptics examine it.

Not that every such refusal immediately amounts to grounds for absolute disbelief of course — there may be many reasons for not letting self-confident amateurs play around with irreplaceable specimens. For instance, the custodians of the Archaeopteryx fossils refused to let the late, brilliant, but biologically naïve, Fred Hoyle experiment on the material that he wanted to prove to be faked.

And if he and some others elected to believe it to be faked, too bad! We do not gratify a religious zealot who claims that an aircraft is a delusion and a fake, by letting him fly an airliner to demonstrate the truth of his dogma — we care far less about his belief or disbelief than about the costs and risks that his attempt would entail.

Of course, we might not force him to accept vaccination when he insists that his faith will protect him from infection, but then we might not permit him to mingle with other people whom he might infect.

But suppose we were to turn out to be wrong in rejecting his dogma? Well, suppose we actually were? People have proved to be wrong in science throughout the history of science.

And how do such errors get corrected?

Through more science.

And how do dogmata get challenged and corrected?

Commonly through scientific work.

And how gratefully do the dogmatists accept the helpful correction?

Ask the custodians and believers in the Turin shroud, or the liquefaction of the alleged blood of a saint: alleged blood kept in a reliquary, and that is said to liquefy periodically at particular ceremonies. It is not clear to me why that should or should not be holy, but each to his own faith. . .

But when investigation falsifies such correction, the thanks are small and the recriminations bitter.

In such connections we begin to see where the spheres of science and religion overlap. Science cannot disprove assertions whose implications are not in principle observable, but commonly it certainly can give strong reason either to accept, interpret, or reject observables that have been predicted. If items of dogma entail the predictions, then testing the predictions can make or break those items except for the perversely faithful.

See whether this sounds familiar: “ . . . they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely . . . ”

In case it does not sound familiar, you may find it in Psalms 58, verses four and five. You also may find a difference between the attitudes of scientist and Psalmist. Scientists say in effect: “Suit yourself whether you believe my argument or not; now, unless you have some new and relevant material, excuse me while I carry on with the next interesting question.”

The psalmist on the other hand, in the next verse, and in psalm 91, verse 19, goes on about breaking the teeth of the naughty, naughty adders and the young lions.

Ah well, each to his own! But it was the scientists, not the tooth breakers, who revealed the creation to be vaster and more wonderful than anyone had imagined from readings of the bible. Myth-mongers described the universe as being most relevantly a garden; scientists showed it to be ineffably larger, older, and more complex than any garden — and more wonderful. There is a smug pride, not just a cruelty, but a smallness of mind and conception, in prescriptive and proscriptive formulators of dogma, that I see as being mentally destructive in the highest degree. Nothing shows up the sin of pride more mercilessly, more accusingly.

To religion of that flavour, science very rightly is the arch fiend, the destroyer of faiths.

Never mind what faiths destroy — the lives and the civilisations.

What science does overtly conflict with is what, speaking loosely, I will call religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are believers who deny, abjure, and commonly forbid, anything they see as clashing with what they take to be their given “truth” or dogma. If they believe that their dogma demands that the world be flat or just a few thousand years old, then everything that suggests say, roundness or billions of years, is a delusion and probably a deliberate Snare of Evil. And so is anything that suggests that in their fundamentalism they themselves might have mistranslated or misunderstand their own dogma or anything it might entail. Logic need not come into it. Even innocent questioning or discussion of the matter may be evil.

What really is wryly amusing, is that fundamentalists as a rule, vigorously object to logic and evidence as criticism of their dogma. "Logic isn't everything" they shout, when challenged with logic. Then they argue back with… (wait for it!) logic and evidence — of sorts.

Ask such a person why they reject logic, and the answer is likely to begin:
“Because. . .”

Now, anyone who starts a statement with “Because” is implicitly trying to state an implication. That is to say that he is trying to use logic. Otherwise there is no implication — and no "because".

I admit that the fundamentalists do not go out of their way to be consistent. Their logic and evidence often are flawed, and they abandon both logic and evidence and common decency and courtesy when caught contradicting their own dogma. Afterwards they feel free to come aboard again at another point. At this point they are likely to employ the Gish Gallop, hoping to mask their weakness by lots of noise and more distracting claims than anyone will have time to refute.

These are convenient practices for point scoring in bad-faith debating, discrediting their own gods with their own abject and polluted ethics — it would cause sleepless nights for anyone who tries to be honest with himself, but it nicely suits that sort of ethics.

What other kind of religion does one get? Are there religions of honesty, of humility in recognising that perhaps neither the author of the dogma, nor the faithful, might have known everything, might have been right about everything? Or indeed, right about anything non-trivial?

Think about it. And then think about how the rabble-rousing types harness even religions with pretensions to love and compassion, to propound demonstrable nonsense, the cruelest, most destructive dogmata, exploiting them for parasitism, demagoguery, and self aggrandisement. Some of these beliefs class themselves as religions, some as manifestos, but none is willing to trust its followers to think for themselves without telling them what to think.

Don’t bother to read my lips; just look about you.

How is that sort of abuse possible, let alone perennial and ubiquitous? It has been with us through the ages and around the world. As I see it, the fundamental reason is that no humanly formulated dogma has ever been complete, let alone perfect; in fact I do not believe completeness or perfection is possible, and if it were, the followers of the dogma would be imperfect and corrupt, and those that innocently mean the best would be at the mercy of those who preach and do the worst.

But the dogmata never are complete anyway, and this is why we get schisms and sects: no matter how passionately the crowd begins in unison of worship, as soon as they settle down to to discuss the technical details, they discuss details of difference, and afterwards the most persuasive of the rogues are the turds that float to the top.

For such, science is an abomination, of no use except in helping to produce new and more media for domination, and more effective instruments of destruction: it was science that led to the technology that provided them with the media that amplified their power.

Media that some of them have used without conscience or responsibility or reserve.

And yet, surely a civilisation that relies on hiding the flaws in its unjustified beliefs cannot command much respect, or expect much progress.

Anyway, that sums up most of it. In science your final arbiter is what you see in the world about you; in religion your final arbiter is your dogma; in fundamentalism it is the literal view of your dogma as you see it.

Dogmatism or fundamentalism as blasphemy

When you cannot prove that people are wrong,
but only that they are absurd,
the best course is to let them alone.
T.H.Huxley

The fellow that agrees with everything you say
is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.
Kin Hubbard

Notice that this section does not deal so much with dogma — which might be justified in some connections — as with dogmatism, which, as far as I can see, it would be hard to justify at all.

What is the difference, you ask? After all, dogma is that which you certainly must not deny, and as a rule, that which you must assert. If assertion of dogma is not dogmatism, then what is?

That sounds reasonable, but it overlooks some important differences in subtexts and the way people deal with their dogmata. It also shows a weakness in the concept of rigid doctrine as a basis for a belief. Given a structure of dogma built on a number of basic statements of religious tenets, it might in theory be correct that every one of those is literally true. It certainly is true that some people do believe this of their own dogma.

There are two points of difficulty, one internal and one external.

The external difficulty is that there are many groups of such people, each as passionate as the next, but no two agree on each point, each vital point; sometimes they differ on practically every vital point. And sometimes they are willing to kill to assert a single minor point. This is not too serious from the point of view of any particular fundamentalist, because although it certainly is impossible for two such groups to be correct simultaneously, it is theoretically possible for just one to be correct.

And of course each of them is willing to die for his belief that his is that correct one. The alternative possibility, that every single one of all the rival beliefs is built on hot air and social parasitism, is not to be entertained.

So we shall not entertain it. Not here and now.

The other difficulty is more serious and is harder to fix. Fortunately for their own peace of mind, fundamentalists are not generally inclined to be analytical; after all, if they were, then they would not be fundamentalists in the first place. The only reason that many of these sects have more than one member is that practically none of the members seriously get together to work out what each really sees as the true implications of the tenets of his faith. In fact it is rare for such a faith to include anyone at all capable of seeing anything of the kind. If they had been so capable, they would not have been members of the faith in the first place.

Now, by the time you have enough material to base any impressive religion on, you have enough to guarantee that no two people will see all of it the same way. However, there are a few things that practically all religions agree on; for instance:

Each claims to be true, based on the true fount of wisdom.
And to be good.
And each of the others are bad, or at best mistaken, a wrong assertion on matters of fact, of Truth.
Or, in ecumenical charity, they at least have a poorer conception of crucial matters than your own sect has.

Let a zealot have his head in an environment like that, and you have a recipe for disaster. For one thing he is working with a mass of material that it is not possible for any person to make full sense of — don't take my word for it, just see how often you find two persons reading the holy scriptures of any religion and giving the same independent answers to penetrating questions without having colluded with each other. It only happens when the questions are among those their catechisms provide boiler-plate answers for; answers that might or might not be meaningful or substantial. And such questions accordingly are not very penetrating.

In fact, doing something of that kind to demonstrate to members of such a sect that they differ in their views and faiths, is a good way of starting up new schismatic sects! And there is no bitterness greater than one finds between rival schismatic sects that regard each other as traitors.

Another thing to try is to get a lot of predictions about the world around us, predictions that follow from the sacred texts. Even though our tame fundamentalist theologians take their respective scriptures as the literal truth, they don't often agree with each other in detail, though they don't let that put them off pontificating about it. And insofar as their statements are about the empirical world, they necessarily are either falsifiable or nonsensical. And practically every non-negligible prediction ignominiously fails the test of falsification.

It follows that practically all the nontrivial statements of the dogmatists cannot be the word of any honest and omniscient godhead, which is just what the faithful claim it to be. And to claim that incoherent untruth, in fact, commonly incoherent nonsense, is the word of that transcendent god, when it can at best be the frothings of fallible humans, as a rule fools or parasites, automatically amounts to blasphemy.

Just as well for them that they are talking nonsense, or by now the whole lot would have been blasted as horrible examples by their respective gods.

They remain a nuisance to the rest of us though . . .

Update: The fellow who agrees with everything you say. . .

I have just (July 2024) encountered and read the 2009 book by Jerry Coyne: "Why Evolution is true". If he ever reads this essay, he no doubt will be saddened to find that I do not in fact agree with everything he says. . .

But it is a pretty close thing!

I recommend his book as a most closely-argued and educated discussion of the relationship between science, in particular evolution, and religion, anti-science, their relevance, and other problematic topics, that I offhand can remember reading.

Readable too!

Anyone who reads his book in the context of my remarks in this essay can tell that Professor Coyne and I use slightly different definitions of "science". And, having read his views on "Free Will" as retailed in Wikipedia, I differ with his thinking there. Some of my tangent reasons appear in my essay at:

Full Duplex

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Science, Religion and Evolution

Is Science really just another religion?