If You Can Read This, Maybe You Should

 

 

 

TEACH READING YOUNG

 

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
Harper Lee   To Kill a Mockingbird

Assumptions and prerequisites:

The method we used

Materials

Procedure

Reading material

Illustrations, alphabet, phonics and sundry items

Perils and Anathemata

Adult literature and corruption. . .

Teaching classes

In conclusion

Ghastly example

 

A surprisingly large number of years ago I wrote this essay on what we learnt from our attempt at teaching our sons to read. A few people asked me to publish it, and we feel strongly that the subject is important enough to justify more attention. Get it wrong and you can do harm. Use a little patience and good sense, and you can do more good than you might believe. The whole process proved simpler and cheaper than we had expected, but a few warnings and functional principles that I include might prove helpful.

Before we undertook the project of teaching our children to read we did a lot of discussion and heart searching in the light of dire warnings about everything that could go wrong. In the end we elected to damn the torpedoes because, as we saw it, potential harm as predicted seemed speculative at worst, and besides we could not imagine what harm would be worse than depriving the children of their second most important channel of communication.

Not to spoil your anticipation of the outcome, we had no regrets then, and have not developed any since. Trying to get any coherent evaluations out of our sons is not easy, because neither can remember learning to read, any more than he can remember learning to converse. Accordingly it is hard for them to imagine what the deprivation of pre-school reading might have meant.

So: for anything it might be worth, and hoping it does readers and prospective readers a lot of good, here is our basic recipe for teaching young children to read.

 

Assumptions and prerequisites:

·       The child:

o      is willing

o      has no relevant disabilities

o      can already speak fairly fluently

o      is at least of more or less average intelligence

 

·       The adults ·

o      have a good rapport with the child

o      can afford 10-20 minutes per daily session for several weeks

 

Note that these assumptions are not absolute; some of them require subjective, but sound, judgment.

Still, the less confident one can be about them, the poorer the prospects for good results. 

 

If reading is taught as fun, and enjoyable reading material is available, a child can learn basic reading skills in several weeks of brief daily sessions.  The method I describe here worked well for us and neither of our now adult children can remember learning to read, any more than they can remember learning to talk.  One of them can remember how, at the age of about four, he learnt to read silently instead of reading aloud: in our lessons he had learnt to read aloud, and it had not occurred to us that there was a distinction; in fact we did not even know about his epiphany till he mentioned it more than a decade later. Apparently he had been reading while his mother was on the phone one day and she had called out to him to be quiet. So he duly was quiet and discovered that he could go on reading just as well in silence, or even better.

That was that. The other cannot even remember any such experience, so I cannot answer for him. 

 

The method we used

The method is a derivative of that described by Glen Doman in his book “Teach Your Baby to Read.”  The edition we used may be a bit dated by now, and politically it is highly incorrect in some educational circles (hooray!!!) but the method works like a charm.  Doman himself stresses that the book describes basic principles, not rigid instruction. 

The essential points are that:

·       Most healthy children in a healthy emotional environment enjoy reading as much as they enjoy other media of communication; that is to say tremendously. 

·       To read effectively very young children need to have the necessary neural paths trained. 

·       One key difficulty is that normal print is too small for untrained brains. 

·       The solution simply is to:

o      present the first words in very large print, say with characters several centimetres high

o      keep the typeface simple and unambiguous (unambiguous in particular!)

o      start with simple words of direct interest to the child

o      move on to interesting text as soon as possible (avoid either teaching boring lists of unconnected words, or Dick-and-Jane, Janet-and-John inanities.)

Materials

·    First prepare flash cards containing one word each, written plainly and vividly in simple, unambiguous letters. 

·    Avoid typefaces in which say, lower case L and upper case I are identical.  This may be unexpectedly difficult.  Publishers of children’s books no doubt select typefaces simple-mindedly for their simplicity, but they very often offend in this respect.  At this stage the simplicity of a typeface is far less important than unambiguity. Simplicity is anything but simple.

·    The problem need not be fatal and there are a few approaches for dealing with it.  One option simply is to ignore it until children object.   If they do object, you explain why the letters are illogical and agree how stupid some people are, and you might say that if they print books when they grow up, they can use more sensible letter shapes.  Otherwise you can neatly ink a small curly foot onto the lower case ls.  It does not much matter whether the letters have serifs or not as long as each letter is clearly distinct in appearance. 

Many of the typefaces commonly available on computers nowadays are acceptable.  Trebuchet MS seems particularly suitable, but was not available in our day. Others that are not too bad include: Bookman Old Style, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, and the pointlessly maligned Comic Sans. I mention these not because they are the best, but because they are freely available and completely adequate for Western circumstances. Obviously, users of other alphabets and scripts would have to adjust accordingly, but I see no reason why there should be serious problems in general. 

·    At first use lower case only.  Upper case can wait till it seeps in naturally. As a rule one hardly needs to mention it.

·    Colour and illustration are important in that both should be strictly avoided at first.  This is one of the few firm rules.  No matter what your views may be concerning visual interest and cheerfulness or beauty, it is crucial at first to avoid distraction or confusion.  Colours should be simple and stark and there should be no distracting or confusing drawings or decorations;  certainly not at first.

Black print on white is fine; so is any other easily readable, strident contrast. It might be profitable to bear visual disabilities in mind, such as non-standard colour perception, but black on white covers most cases. If you are in difficulties, consult professionals for guidance. 

As a rule, keep all the print the same colour, especially in the first few weeks.  Only mix colours when there is a special reason to highlight something, and not until the child quite clearly understands that the words are the things that matter, not colour, illustration, decoration or anything else.  For instance, once you are well into the lessons and are building sentences, you might want to show every place that the word “and” appears.  Probably this is best done by using  a bolder or larger font, but one just might have a valid reason to use colour.

But for the most part colour, like illustration, has no place in this exercise.  It is noise, a source of confusion and distraction at a time when confusion and distraction are the last things one wants.   The more Spartan and uniform the presentation, the better.  At first there is just one objective: clarity plus distinctness to assist reading acquisition. 

Keep that objective in view; the aesthetics of variety and creativity can wait a few weeks. Art for the sake of art can be introduced into other activities, such as drawing, not reading text. That slight delay in introducing prettiness to text, can save months and save misery.

One convenient way to prepare the flash cards is by printing them with a word processor, using a laser or bubble printer, but one can do just as well with paint or ink on card, or even thick chalk on a board, if one works neatly.  Letters of say 8 cm or three inches high, written in thick, smooth, consistent, bold lines, do nicely. 

like  this  at  first

Only, some three or four times larger, of course.

Follow your own initiative with the use of computer screens or the like instead of cards, but don't get distracted from the primary objective, which is to help the child learn to read and to love reading, not to indulge your love of frills and gadgetry. That too, can wait a week or two.

Prepare a selection of words, each on its own flash card.  Many shops sell such printed cards nowadays, but home-made cards work as well if not better, as long as they are clear and stark; some commercial fonts common on such purchased cards are not particularly suitable, and in preparing your own cards you can choose fonts to suit yourself.  Also, in constructing one’s own cards, one can prepare a selection designed for building sentences that should suit the child’s interests and tastes.  Commercial cards often fail in this respect too. 

 

Procedure

Start with just two words on the first evening (Doman says one, but I found it easier with two, so that it was immediately clear that different cards could say different things.)  One word could be say,  “mama” and the other “baby” or “girl” or something equally basic and visually different, but in the same size, font, and colour.  The only difference should be in the spelling, not in the shape, size, or other visual clues, and certainly not pictures.  We are learning reading, not recognition. As soon as the reading is right, you may import crutches to your taste.

 

The first lesson is one of the most critical.  Let it once set the wrong tone, and you might have to drop the exercise.  The whole process should be in a mood of anticipation and excitement, with no distractions.  The lesson should last just one or two minutes. 

 

Show one card dramatically, holding it still and very visible. Which word you choose is up to you; just be sure that it is short, phonetic, something the child can relate to, can say fluently, and preferably is interested in.  Say: “This says: ‘head’!”  No explanations, no analysis into letters, just the bald statement.  Say it several times over.  You may hide and re-display the card as you repeat the word.  Then put the card face down and display the next card in the same way. It should be clearly different from the first; after showing "head", "hand" might not be a good idea, while showing "mom" should be fine, saying  “This says: ‘mom’!” You then can alternate the cards, each time with a  “This says:...!”  but do not swap them rapidly or confusingly.  Each time give the child a good, leisurely look.  Show the same card twice in succession  a few times.

 

If everything goes well and the child is obviously keen, then towards the end of the first evening you can hesitate before saying the contents and see whether the child supplies the word.  But DO NOT PUSH AT THIS STAGE.  Even just a little pushing can spoil everything.  If the child does not read the words on the first few nights, be patient. 

Do not be long-suffering; be eager and encouraging.  Be willing to go over the top; it is easier to teach restraint later than to instill enthusiasm by beginning with sighs and droning.  Doman said that the mother who screams: “WOW!” when the child gets something right, gets better results than the intellectual mother who says “That is very good,” even if she and her child are more intelligent. 

 

In a few evenings the child should be able to read a few words as the cards are flashed.  Do not show separate cards for little words such as “to” and “and”.  Concentrate on familiar names and concrete nouns at first.  Once there is progress, follow them with a few similarly clear verbs. 

 

Don't make the process of adding new words too long; when a few suitable words are comfortably mastered, begin to make short, simple sentences and let the child read them.  Put the little words into the sentences and deal with them casually in passing.  Most pupils will pick up those little words almost without noticing.  If the child asks about them specifically, just say: "Yes, this says ‘to’ and that says ‘and’," and pass on. 

 

It is crucially important that the lessons are a treat and that there is no pushing.  The child should be so keen on the lessons that after a while the threat of withholding them would be a serious matter in case of naughtiness.  If ever you push you have lost the game and should drop the lessons for months or until you can sneak in the teaching in some other guise. 

 

About at this point it becomes convenient to reduce the size of the print to say 3 cm or an inch or so.  At this size one can put interesting or amusing statements on a convenient size of page, say a favourite snatch of poem, or a sentence with a ridiculous unexpected twist, say:

 

Are you green? 

No, I am not.

How long have you been not?

 

Word tricks like this go down well and also serve to keep the child alert.  They help in preventing any tendency to recite expected words instead of reading.  Another game that children seem to love, is to set up a form sentence like:  “the big girl eats the red apple”  and keep swapping keywords:  “the big girl eats the red worm”, “the big apple eats the green worm” and so on.  Let the child suggest sequences. 

 

It does no harm if the child discovers your cache of words and wants to know what the unfamiliar words are.  When you answer, be sure to make the child confirm that each word has been learnt before continuing with the next word, instead of just telling the word and forgetting it. 

Pushing consists in telling words before being asked.  Anticipating lessons is no problem as long as it is the child’s idea.  But do not encourage it. 

 

Doman strongly warns against teaching the child letters and phonics.  His reasoning was sound, but the degree to which he emphasised this contradicted our experience.  Certainly one should not deal with phonics out of context, such as by teaching the child to drone the alphabet in advance, but when a child say, has initial trouble recognising the difference between “head” and “hand”, then one trick is to mask the word with one's hands and say  “Look, this is an ennnnn.  There is an ennnnnnnnnn in hannnnnd!” 

In our experience this worked marvellously.  There were no objections along the lines of “Why is it an n?  What is an n anyway?”  For a couple of evenings there was a quizzical “No nn?”  Head shake in reply.  “Head!”  This can also be made into a game with: “Look there is a ‘win’ in ‘window’!  An ‘in’ in ‘win’...”  and so on.   That same child, about a year later, heard the word “haberdashery” for the first time, asked what it meant, and without ever having seen the word, was able to spell it out of his head when challenged.  

What is more, as he came to the first “r”, he hesitated and said “r?”, looking at us for confirmation.  Though he never had been taught spelling explicitly, much less encountered the strange word, he had recognised that there was an ambiguity in the pronunciation.  Having got that right, he continued and finished the word confidently.  

 

Reading material

The next, and bigger, problem is to find reading material that will hold the attention of the children and keep them reading during the critical stage between when reading is a new thrill and when reading becomes an automatic skill. 

This may demand some persistent and intelligent shopping.  Surprisingly few books are suitable.  It is important at first that the fonts should be clear, that the letters are closely spaced within words, but that the  words  are  distinctly  separated  from  each  other.  Many children’s books deliberately aim for simplicity by separating the letters widely in words, and they compound the felony by setting the words close together.  That is about as bad a combination as one can get! 

We used to use an excellent series of small, cheap booklets by Methuen.  Their only shortcoming was that they had sans serif capital Is and lower case ls.  They ranged from really simple four-page large-print stories, to informative natural history suited to children of say five or so.  Incidentally, in retrospect, I thank the Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter books I read as a child, for what I now recognise as genuine natural history lessons.

Applause. Genuinely. OK, they weren't Darwin, but. . .

Be that as it may, in the Methuen booklets, even the simplest stories had a point:  At the beach the little girl’s bucket drifts away. . . despair!  Mummy fetches it back; triumph!  A more complex story at the next level tells of hermit crab looking for a new home; intriguing, accurate and exciting, but easy to read. 

A parent with a flair for creative writing for tots can bridge this stage with original works.  Alternatively, there are many fine works for children, but not in a suitable format.  With modern word processors, such material can be keyed or scanned in and printed in a suitable format.

Another trick is to leave notes to be found about the house, with little jokes or interesting trivia: (“A hungry snake can swallow another snake a little bigger than itself.”) or news of a surprise: "There is a new book (or an apple or some other treat) in the bottom drawer."  

Since writing the foregoing, I have encountered online a series of books that I dearly wish I could have known of before teaching our children to read. At the time of writing, it is available in electronic form online, and apparently also in hard copy from Amazon, though it no doubt is hopelessly out of print, having been written in the middle of the 20th century. The main author apparently was one Gerald Spellman Craig, a professor at Columbus University. The works were variously co-authored by Etheleen Daniel, Agnes Burke, Sara Baldwin, Mary Floyd Babcock and others who seem to have been prominent in various aspects of the teaching profession in those days and that region. I have not as yet been able to find out more about them, but am deeply impressed by their work.

Their format uses a simple, natural, unambiguous serif typeface with kerning (Century schoolbook?), permitting the letters to be closely spaced so that words form clear entities.  The lines, and words within the lines, are well spaced, the sentences short and simply structured, vocabulary clear and simple, but no baby talk or redundant repetition. The books are illustrated, but without captions that could confuse or mislead a young reader.

The subject matter is science, not as lectures, but as discussions and observations in everyday life; hot and cold, wet and dry, pushing wagons or braking them, biological and geological observations, all sorts of things that could be of personal interest or importance in the lives of young children. In short, material that could keep them interested and reading even when there are no adults around. If someone could bring the books up to date in modern editions, I think they might be improved slightly in places, but even as they stand they are beyond my capacity to praise.

 

The books can be downloaded freely from:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29+creator%3A%28Craig%2C+Gerald+S.%29

 

Particularly useful titles include:

New Pathways in Science (Primer and Books 1 to 6)

Note once more, that though the books are intended as introductions to scientific topics, I mention them here purely as aids for the transition from the first stumbling stages of reading word by word, to comfortable reading fluency. I do not suggest that nothing better exists: I simply point out that these show what can be done at low cost, and with minimal resources. For example, if you get or print the paper versions, no electronics are necessary; in our day that has its educational advantages.

Illustrations, alphabet, phonics and sundry items

In teaching young children to read, it is particularly important not to let pictures disrupt the acquisition of the reading skill.  At first the flash cards should be barren of all but the words.  Later on, pictures may appear in books, but at first they should neither lead the story nor illustrate any of the words.  As I mentioned, the Pathways in Science books are illustrated, but the illustrations are not captioned, so that they do not tempt novice readers into confusion nor distract them from the text.

Apart from reducing the challenge and encouraging mental laziness, illustration too closely associated with the text, or containing descriptive captions, can be misleading, so a child might for example read “tree” where the word printed is “oak”.  This may impede the pupil's progress, demanding a long time and much tact to repair the harm.  In this respect comic strips are particularly pernicious.  They do little harm in small doses once reading is fluent, but they are a bad influence during the learning phases.

Learning the alphabet can be done in any enjoyable way, towards the end of the first elementary reading lessons.  It is much more important that they can recite the alphabet in sequence than that they learn the letters in odd sequences as they learn to read.  One reason is that the alphabet is important for looking things up or sequencing lists, or to implement the concept of spelling.

The phonics of the letters the children will pick up almost automatically.  For instance, in our experience, a child that has not previously encountered the word, but sees "Philips" on an appliance, might understandably read it as "puh huh lips", but will without fuss accept correction when you explain that there are many silly spelling rules and that we say "f" when we read "ph", for instance, we say "filips" when we read "Philips". 

Perils and Anathemata

Horrible warnings against early reading are easy to come by.  Children will grow up unable to spell; they will develop language difficulties and be bored at school; they also will miss the joys of childhood stories.  Both our sons are multilingual, being fluent in at least three languages and competent in more, both have spelt excellently since the age of three or four and both did well at school.  Both were reading for their own pleasure before they were four years old, in spite of a major family relocation which delayed their home teaching for about a year.   Both read their own choice of stories before they were five, so that they actually read more children’s material than they would have done if they had had to depend on grown-ups for stories.  Both read to classes or to friends when appropriate, and in fact, in more than one language.  None of this reduced their pleasure in family readings of stories or entertaining non-fiction.  Obviously the worst consequences of early reading are not inevitable.

For many decades in South Africa the official teaching strategy was based on “reading readiness” and similar Piagetian naïveté that explicitly forbade schooling before the year in which the child would turn six. Our family rejected such nonsense, but somewhat reluctantly decided against formal home schooling. Instead we compromised. My wife located a demanding government school in the university town where we lived, and supplemented the official product with various external classes and educational activities of reasonable entertainment value.

But we could not get off scot-free. Our younger son we sent to a preschool crèche-type institution for one year, and because it was government-subsidised, they had to follow strict rules, such as: no numbers or letters on the walls, only pictures, in case innocent children afterwards went to school already offensively numerate or literate, or otherwise confused.

That led to a whole lot of incidents of varying annoyance, harm, and amusement.

For example, more than a decade later, that son and his mother happened to meet a young lady who asked whether he remembered her.

Err... sorry, no...

She then told my wife that on one occasion their teacher at that crèche had told the class to be quiet while she went to a meeting. The class predictably became rowdy in short order, but our boy wandered to the reading corner where the teacher sometimes would sit and read to them. There he happened on an unattended story book and settled down to read. This little girl came by and asked what he was doing.

“Reading.”

“Oh! Read to me!”

So they settled down amicably and he read to her. Others came by and pretty soon the whole class was listening to the story. Quiet as mice.

Then the teacher came back. Instead of incredulously thanking God to find the class quiet, she helicoptered, screamed, snatched the book away, and forbade the child ever, ever to go into the reading nook...

Etc. . .

After all, what if the inspector had shown up unexpectedly? Surely he would have invoked the shade of Piaget, and stopped their subsidy. . .?

Well, as the boy already had been reading at home for about two years, for his own pleasure, it was pretty late to shut that stable door.

However, he had forgotten the whole fuss till his erstwhile crèche-friend recounted the event. But what nonplusses me utterly, is how on Earth the authorities could maintain that such self-education was a sin and a disaster, in the face of such evidence; it can’t be rare.

Anyway, for authoritative illustration of the principle, patently drawn from life, read the second chapter of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

Learning to read other languages was also easy — practically automatic.  Our children were bilingual but learnt to read in English.  Almost without instruction, they spontaneously picked up reading Afrikaans.  When we found them reading Afrikaans newspapers, we did explain that g, v, w, and a few items like that sounded different in Afrikaans. 

They accepted the information without comment, but I suspect that our intervention was unnecessary.

One thing one might have to guard against, is bookworming; reading is an addictive vice.  "Go outside and get some fresh air and exercise! And if I catch you under the blankets with that torch again. . ."

It also may be necessary to enforce good reading posture to avoid eye problems (e.g. one of our children got a ‘lazy eye’ from, we suspect, lying and reading with one eye in the pillow.)

Adult literature and corruption. . .

If there are adult books lying about the house, and a child elects to read them, no problem.  Not if there is no pornographic illustration, at least. No real censorship is necessary.  The parts that one might censor usually will pass the child by.  At the age of six, one of ours found, read, and re-read a paperback copy of “The Broken Sword”, a Nordic fantasy by Poul Anderson, full of violence, non-explicit sex, incest and so on.  

The book did not dwell on such things; it just happened to be based on material from a tragedy in Norse mythology, and it was consistently in character. It happened also to be a rattling good story, well written.  (Well Anderson generally was very good, of course.)  Incomprehensible items in the book, such as sex, the child apparently skimmed over as uninteresting. 

One difficulty in later years was that by mid-primary school, they had exhausted the resources of the local public library's children's shelves.  In the face of considerable resistance, we had to persuade the librarians to permit them into the adult section to select books for themselves.  Again, there was no problem with their selection of books.  The bad stuff generally is boring, and the children do not grow fangs and exude green saliva as soon as they encounter unsuitable material. 

Anyway, browsing through a public library can be quite broadening to young minds. Having such clients can be instructive to librarians too. . .

What our modern book-burners would think of all this, I retch to imagine; I cannot bring myself to contemplate their dilemma with compassion, but I could weep for their children. . .

Teaching classes

We had no personal experience teaching classes of children; in fact we taught our two separately (the age difference was just over 1 year). 

All I can say is that separate teaching worked for us. I understand that children tend to teach other or learn very well from the teaching of other children. No doubt there also is a lot of on-line experience dealing with the likes of that. I suspect that the major constraint is whether one can work the topic into the ethos or activities of the group. 

In a group in which reading is valued, encouraged or admired, I should expect any "well-adjusted" child to progress not just rapidly, but almost unconsciously; in various ways the process of learning to read is suspiciously similar to learning to speak, and in particular is similar to learning sign language for the deaf. 

(For clarification of that point, I recommend the book "Seeing Voices" by Oliver Sacks, and this link: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-51372265/how-nicaragua-s-deaf-chldren-invented-a-new-sign-language  There will be many more, but those two should do for conveying the common themes.)

In conclusion

Our own experience has been of such low investment, and such lasting and nearly unalloyed benefit, that we cannot but recommend the approach to others.  

But let me add without further comment, other than the exhortation to think about it:

Some time, possibly in the late nineteen fifties, I saw a full-page advertisement for some or other educational initiative. I think it was the back cover of a Scientific American. It showed a black American soldier in off-duty clothing, sitting on an outdoor step, reading a paperback Western. The caption was something like:
"OK, so it isn't Shakespeare; but at least he is reading!"

Posted by Jon Richfield at 12/22/2013 03:06:00 PM

 

Postscripts:

Ghastly example

Since writing the above, I encountered the following horror story online  in

The New Yorker Daily For Thursday, September 1, 2022

Two and a half years ago, Jessica Winter’s kindergartner was learning to read, when Winter noticed something strange: her daughter wasn’t familiar with phonics. She soon discovered that her child’s school, in Brooklyn, was using a curriculum called Units of Study, developed by the education professor Lucy Calkins. The teaching is rooted in a method known as balanced literacy, in which young readers are encouraged to read books silently on their own, figuring out unknown words by looking at contextual clues: using “picture power” (guessing words based on illustrations) and memorizing common “sight words” (like “and,” “the,” and “who”).

“What Calkins was proposing, it seems to me, was literacy by vibes,” Winter writes, in which children achieve reading fluency through “proximity or osmosis” rather than through phonics. In a fascinating reported piece, Winter traces the history of what have become the reading wars in America, and the lively, often confounding, opinions of adults that have shaped the lessons of children. (President Theodore Roosevelt once proposed simplifying the spelling of “fixed” to “fixt” and “kissed” to “kist.”) And she delves into the continuing battle over balanced literacy, which has dominated New York City’s public schools—and many others across America — for decades.

—Jessie Li, newsletter editor

 

Notice the penalties for transgressing some rules arising from our experience. Clearly Jessica Winter is an observant parent, and one would expect her daughter to be receptive to a bit of corrective assistance, but the bad experience was quite unnecessary, and might put less fortunate children off reading. Osmosis is not phonics and is no substitute for phonics in the wrong contexts. 

That strikes me as a textbook example of how an accepted authority with a bee in the bonnet plus an impediment in principles of analysis and design, can hamstring whole generations of a population's education. 

I am reminded of another quite intelligent child who pointed out the word "pens" on a packet of felt-tips and volunteered that it said "chalks".  

So much for "osmosis"! Learning by content, contact, and context is valuable, but to learn outright errors for lack of guidance is to be avoided wherever avoidance is practical; what unfortunately is unavoidable, though generally not disastrous, is that the independent reader learns to pronounce some obscurely spelt words incorrectly. To compound that with misreading words altogether, is definitely harmful, and to compound injury with insult, it is grossly unnecessary, as I hope I have made clear by now.  

 

Post-Postscript: I TOLD...

I see that my previous postscript was two years ago. This next postscript is an embittered and stentorian: "I told you so!" 

And no, without a scrap of self-satisfaction. I could weep and smash crockery to think of the harm, even though I am not a US citizen.

I have just read an online article from The Atlantic ( https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-calkins-child-literacy-teaching-methodology/680394 ). The name "Lucy Calkins" did not ring a bell, but the approach did, so I came back here to check it up. And sure enough . . .

 

Now, I do not say that it makes practical or ethical sense to pillory Lucy here. Like Lucy, as you may read in this article, I emphasise that enjoyment is crucial!  But it is not enough; the children also need tools, such as phonics and grammar and context, and they need them in proper learning context. (You don't teach young carpenters that screwdrivers are OK for knocking in nails. Well, I don't, anyway. And when you find that they are no good for hammering, you do not reject screwdrivers, nor all forms of carpentry that demand screwdrivers. ) 

 

And as for "context", it is one of the most misapplied terms in this context. 

While you are teaching reading, pictures as such are out of context. Even when it is in context, trying to find a picture that gives you the right concept can be tricky. The word might be "smile". 

Simple: put up a picture of a smile. "Lips!" "No dear, try again!" "Teeth!" "Happy! Head!" "Not quite; what are the lips doing?" "Grinning! Talking! Laughing! Smiling!" "Ah! that is better, almost right!" "Silly!"

 

All those are contextually and conceptually related to a plausible picture, but they are at best tenuously related to reading the word!, And the context at this point is reading, not semantics!

 

A more functional contextual help would be, not any picture at all,  but words such as "mile", "vile", "stile", "smite". Their syntax would be the right context, not the picture, its content or associations. 

 

I refer the reader to my real-life example of "head" and "hand", in which the context was the ostensive phonic role of the letter "n". And the same applies to the "ph" in "Phillips". 

Not much tedious repetition there, and neither child had any difficulty with phonics afterwards. In fact, such items prepared them to learn the alphabet, which is too important to skip. They already knew what the letters were for. That was context enough. Pretty soon they could find their way through a dictionary.

 

As I read it, her situation was backed up by opportunistic educational publishers etc, whom I see as at least equally culpable. Instead of leaping at the novelty with its "Units of Study" or “teaching Lucy”" catchwords, why were they not asking questions such as: "why does it work?", "on whom does it work?", "how does it fail?", "what does it take to mend the failures?" "which aspects of language acquisition does it violate or exploit?", "how come phonics seem to be irrelevant instead of helpful?", "which aspects of reading logic does it deprive the pupil of?"

 

And more. 

Anyone who thought that research is easy, or that unthinking conclusions are cheap, had better try elsewhere (with someone else's children, please!)

But nooo!  So much more fun (and profitable) to jump onto bandwagons, isn't it? 

Did I hear someone mutter "New Math"? (And don't bother to explain New math to me either; I started my career in software during second generation days, and taught my 5-year-old son binary arithmetic in about ten minutes. And he retained the skills!) 

 

If you really feel you want a catchword, how about "language acquisition"? It really is meaningful when teaching basic skills such as reading and writing. I suspect even arithmetic, science, morals, and logic at the very earliest levels benefit from the same principles. And many of the extracurricular items can be absorbed painlessly when reading independently for enjoyment. 

 

But to achieve that, one must instill the basic skills and activities painlessly and unthinkingly, just as we naturally do in teaching comprehension of speech, so that they are tools, and not obstacles or chores. 

 

Note that my particular issue here is not with the enjoyment; enjoyment is one of my own long-standing points of emphasis. Nor do I deal with writing as a manual skill, much less with writing as a complex of skills of composition — I am dealing with reading as one aspect of language acquisition. One needs to understand language before one can express oneself in that language, let alone enjoy it. And that requires logical comprehension. And in turn that requires tools such as syntax, which includes components such as spelling and phonics. Inviting the pupil to guess semantics on the basis of illogic and exception and distraction is not just wasteful; it is counterproductive: harmful. 

 

Those are points of elementary semiotics — otherwise spelt: "common sense".

Teaching children by repetition is boring and off-putting, is it? Well, there is no point to whining about the sadness of things: it is your duty to make it more interesting. 

 

Just for starters, make rewarding books available for the pupils who have mastered the work, while the ones who need more coaching carry on with it. Form the class into teams of four, one top performer, one struggler, and two intermediate, and when everyone in a team can perform the current objectives, they can carry on with happier stuff, games, reading, whatever they do not see as boring. 

 

That is called "didactics" —  otherwise spelt: "teaching".

 

The successfully reading pupils are not examples of the effectiveness of the disastrous reading instruction: those are the ones who pick up the necessary corrections from domestic and social clues, commonly the ones who began their reading at home or from their friends, or, at worst, got corrected before the harm had been too badly aggravated.

 

So, the first thing is that the "Units of Study" started from confusion of objectives and failure to recognise functional requirements and objectives. No amount of correction and attempt at undoing of the harm will get anywhere before there is better comprehension of the nature of the process and the problems. 

 

Note that here I am not considering children with "special needs". That is something beyond my skills. But the failure of "Units of Study" is not restricted to special needs. My wife at one point did voluntary teaching of adult illiterates in a first-world country. They were not generally retarded, but had been failed by their education system, and should have emerged from the system functionally literate. 

 

The question then is: how much failure can we afford? And how much of our failure can our children afford?

 

Science, Religion,Evolution

Thursday, January 2, 2014

 

Science, Religion and Evolution

 

Table of Contents

Is Science really just another religion?

Science and Religion or Science as Religion?

What is Religion then?

What is Dogma then?

How does Dogma Fit into Religion?

So how is Science not Religion?

Science, evidence, and near‑proof

Well asked is half answered

Why dogma as the diagnostic criterion?

Science, religion and. . .

Evolution as a religion

Religion versus science

Dogmatism or fundamentalism as blasphemy

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

 

Is Science really just another religion?

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Thomas Huxley

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. Strictly speaking, most of the instances of where I speak of “science”. What I really mean is “scientific behaviour” or “scientific activity”, meaning activity governed by principles according to which we advance our rational discrimination between alternative hypotheses of physical reality.

If that strikes you as too pretentiously put, or too parochial or pedantic, please pass over the difficulty; if you insist on referring to all that mysterious stuff as “science” feel welcome, unless you then make assertions in which it does make much difference. But the views of most people concerning science or scientific behaviour are so vague and confused, that it rarely matters much.

My difficulty is that the way the term “science” is used, as opposed to “scientific behaviour”, is so confused that I am in no position to cast stones; I too offend. However, the distinction is so radical, that sometimes we need to be specific.

This essay describes and illustrates a simple criterion for distinguishing scientific activity from faith or dogma; it will neither please nor even satisfy everybody, but it is sufficient, necessary, and cogent.  The essay includes a brief discussion of claims that evolution itself is no different from 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.

Ohhh DEAR!!!

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 do tend to differ from each other in ways that matter in practice, is largely in how they establish, develop, and defend or extend opinions — their epistemology, if you like.

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, in scientific activity, 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, and on the Duhem-Quine 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 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, wake up, 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 three cubed equals nine. 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:  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.

So, to speak of, for example: "The Christian (or Muslim or other) religion" is grossly misleading; they are batches of separate religions. To point out that many of them hold compatible tenets, and assert that therefore they are really the same religion in essence, makes about as much sense as to point out (correctly) that doctors and mechanics share many of their skills and principles, and to conclude (incorrectly) that actually the two categories of professions are the same.

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, or at least hoped.

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 of authority 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 however, the occasional unregenerate might prove to be inconveniently literate.

There is little comfort for the biblical fundamentalists in this respect, because the word dogma does not appear in the English bible, and the word "doctrine" is used in several senses, including the sense that I have contemned as dogma; in the following verses the word "dogma" could comfortably be substituted for "doctrine":

 II John 1:9 - 11  Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.  If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed:  For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.

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 own 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!

Strictly speaking of course, if two of the faithful disagree on the words, or the intent of their godhead might be, that would mean that the two have different religions; after all, if the dogma is the product of an all‑powerful, all‑wise god, then every word, or letter, must be as important as every other, so every variation must be a different faith, commonly implying that the other will rot in hell as a blasphemer or apostate.

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 has 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".

In comparison however, such forms of dogmatic behaviour 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, welfare, 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 been forced into roles or status based on social, historical or ethnic criteria

There are plenty where that list 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 Boko_Haram, ISIS, People's Temple, and Project 2025 during Trump's presidency in the US as salutary examples.

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

Faith — which I define as unquestioning belief in dogma, or at least unquestioning acceptance, irrespective of logical or factual justification or absurdity — faith is what such religion commonly demands and exalts.  In such faith the worshipper explicitly 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. Electing 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 those elements 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. They could hardly all be independent fabrications.

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 understand, 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.

More sophisticated versions of the weaker forms of dogmatism take orms much like this: "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 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.

Commonly religions need not be based on reality; ill-defined, inaccurate, or even meaningless, assumptions will do, as long as they sound authoritative. To question them then is represented as being irreverent. That is very provident on the part of the apologist; consider the exchange at: Evil's existence

Religions typically are not fully 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:

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 that religious people, often actual religious functionaries such as priests, sometimes 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 not 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 actively religious.  Some reconcile their beliefs with their science, but others live mental double 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 but by no means always, which is understandable since I am a biologist myself) 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 scientific activities; 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.

One of the most amusing quotes from the New Testament is:

What? came the word of God out from you? or came it unto you only?
1 Corinthians 14:36

 

In context it should logically apply equally strongly to the whole book, and to all other sacred texts as well, Christian or not. And such criticisms of inconsistent standards are rife in religions. Consider how Jesus at first, reasonably referred his followers to put sources to the test, but then rebuked Thomas for putting the body of Jesus to the test.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.  Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?  Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.  Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:15 to  7:20

 

Which is so reasonable that the most captious sceptic could hardly object.

 

And yet in John 20:29:

Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed:

blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed

One rule of Jesus for the prophets, but another rule for Jesus himself?

Scientific practice is different.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself —  
and you are the easiest person to fool.
So you have to be very careful about that.
Richard Feynman

 

  

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 assert 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! Purely for examples, consult these discussions:

Theory and observation , Static , and Noise  

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.

A comforting thought. . .

And a 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 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 focus on the popes especially, you ask? Because they are so well documented, and had such profound, sustained, and widespread political influence.

Don't take my word for it; look up a few, the more the muddier; start with Pope_John_XII, Pope_Benedict_IX , or perhaps Pope_Alexander_VI

If you don't like those, as unfair examples, work through all the popes listed in Wikipedia (it is easy because they are listed in sequence by predecessors and successors).

And the only reason I picked on the Catholics is not because I think they are the worst, but because they are the most conveniently listed.

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 reinterpreted?"  

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.

Did I hear someone muttering "Climategate"?  Hmmm. . .

Still, 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 genuinely scientific behaviour.

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, such as here: Something or nothing

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 any 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 not being any valid kind of argument, nor 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.

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

From the emotional point of view of irreligism, I have no better assessment than the following conversation I saw quoted:

"What is it like, not believing in God?"

"Do you believe in Santa Clause?"

 "Of course not!"

"Well, that is what it feels like."

 

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 is not just not right; it isn't even wrong!)

                        Wolfgang Pauli

 

     One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Alan Perlis

     (Nor can one proceed from the formal to the informal by formal means)

Roughly speaking, one could consider two classes of science in our context: 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; factuality 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 forms, is isomorphism. The term "isomorphism" occurs in several disciplines, most notably in mathematics, but it is applicable wherever forms of entities match each other 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, the isomorphism 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 material 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 imperfect, but adequate mapping, I propose the term "plesiomorphism".

That term appears in a few other fields, such as cladistics and crystallography, but those are independent of the sense in which I use it here, so I retain it. It might be objected that it would be adequate to speak instead of "approximate isomorphism", but not only is that cumbersome, it is questionable use 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 for characterisation or quantification when a rough matching is adequate and infinite precision is not practically attainable. For example, plesiomorphisms between pixels on a screen, dots on paper, and mathematical points; and there are plesiomorphisms between a screen and a sheet of paper or a clay tablet.

There is a comfortable plesiomorphism between a chalk line or a chalk drawing 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.

And the role of plesiomorphism in material measurement, implication, or causality, forces one to recognise invalid aspects of some classes of assumptions in the application of formal disciplines to empirical topics. For example, in plesiomorphic work, there is no such thing as an irrational number, or if you prefer, there is no distinction between an irrational number and a sufficiently close rational number, nor is there any difficulty in finding the diagonal of a unit square, nor, for that matter, in the construction of any unit square at all.  

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 other instrumentation, forms a practical basis for a mental image. Such an image is a model that has relevant and practical isomorphisms or plesiomorphisms to some presumed underlying reality that has a meaningful relationship to that which is apparent to us. Aspects of the nature of the universe will be common to moles, bats, birds, whales, and humans. Such an assortment of creatures might not agree on much; each might be unable even to imagine some things that seem obvious to others, but they will agree with concepts such as 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, and the ubiquity of noise. This is the basis of concepts of randomness, and the ubiquitous applicability of statistics as a practical and philosophical tool in science, for example. In particular statistics is fundamental to dealing with imperfect information — and for practical purposes all material information is finite, and hence imperfect.

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.

The history of science presents many examples of assumptions and conclusions that were taken to be literally and materially incontestable, and were the basis for decades or centuries of work, and subsequently not only proved to be wrong, but not even coherent or meaningful.  

As David Lange, warned his biology students:

"Half of what you learned in college is wrong; problem is,
we don’t know which half".

 

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 questions of:

·      which points should be included in such a list

·      their relative importance,

·      how they should be worded;

·      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 would be getting pretty close to religion, please note! Commonly such a definition is flawed.

I discuss such considerations elsewhere in essays at:

Hilberts sixth problem

and

No point is real

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 the principle is no more than a convenient tool, a basis for principles of elegance of theory and parsimony of things assumed, it is no proof of validity.

What we consider here is mainly about empirical science — formal disciplines have little to do with belief: one can construct as many independent formal axiomatic structures as one likes, and construct them to be compatible with practically any coherent belief one likes, or with 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 fields of study and application in our current modes of thought. 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 converse 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 to establish 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 therefore also not‑X might turn out to be meaningless — being based on radical misconceptions.

This is all on the assumption that the hypothesis has been suitably expressed for the procedure to be meaningful: and that commonly is an irresponsible assumption; 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 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. I also commend serious workers to read the book: "The_Book_of_Why" by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.

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 in another connection.

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.

For example, 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 possibility of determining both the momentum and coordinates of a body to arbitrary precision; the impossibility of interconverting matter and energy . . .

All such and more were based on predetermined facts, ideas taken as 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.  

In a popular idiom, such work is built on sand, ill‑founded.

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 spot it, it may be difficult to justify his view that the paper, irrespective of coherence and competence, nonetheless 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 the treachery of that meaninglessness.

 GIGO . . .  

Whether empirical experiments have been well designed or not, if the observations are too poorly consistent with the predictions, we must discard the hypothesis, modify it, or try again with a totally new hypothesis.  

We never formally prove it.  

We never forbid anyone to doubt our work or to re‑test the hypothesis or to 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, our work has convinced ourselves, at least conditionally, and there will be more work to do while discussion proceeds. Such discussion may continue 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 as opposed to branches of science, such behaviour would be apostasy, and as such, traitorous.  In some quite major religions or sects, apostasy still is punishable by death.  In science such apostasy 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, being human, 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. A famous example was that Darwin withheld his own publication of his theory of the Origin of Species, until Wallace's enquiry forced his hand.

Again, sometimes recognition of major advances was delayed till after the discoverer's death. For example, Mendelian genetics, one of the earth‑shaking discoveries in biology, was rediscovered after the death of Mendel; it had hardly been known, let alone taken seriously, until about forty years after his work, and about twenty years after his death.

It happens; look around you — watch the news, both general news and developments in technical fields.

But still, as conviction of the guilty goes, the influence of compulsion or crookery in scientific work or in the associated politics tend to be exceptional and transient.  Within a century, or within a professional lifetime, perhaps within months, succeeding work will expose any such publication to scorn.  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 whistleblower.  We have seen several tragic and immoral examples in the past few decades.

We shall see more as they arise. The situation is intrinsic to the nature of humanity so far, and is likely to continue for a while yet. I expect it to 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 according to how we respect their skills

-        a claim's consistency with coherent and logical bodies of theory

-        criteria other 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 that currently is accessible to us.  

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 to some extent arbitrary and personal.  

Except in religion, or at least religious, dogmatic, behaviour, there is theoretically no such thing as absolute evidence, only a range of cogency that extends from, at one extreme, interesting speculation, to the opposite extreme: precise, repeated, independent observation, practical, predictable, quantitative, and explicable.

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; often 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 it is evidence, evidence of such a level as might justify immediate dismissal, or might justify serious abductive consideration in planning one's research program.

Conversely, repeatable, respectable, controlled research with high levels of significance, is not formal proof either; science is not about formal, absolute proof at all, but about probabilities and levels of confidence. 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, in principle, the omitted hypothesis might be the correct one; if that is so, then even the most compelling alternative cannot be correct, no matter how convincing it seems in the light of current work.  

·     One cannot so much as show formally that one has included the correct hypothesis (the "god's‑eye‑view", or some simplification or representation thereof) in the list at all, 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=0.000001, 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 they have 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 as the next generation of dogmatic professors.

Some of the most amusing, if upsetting, accounts of such thinking, which also evokes reflection on topics related to cargo-cult science, you might read in Part 4 of the book: SurelyYou are Joking Mr Feynman! in which Feynman vividly illustrated how futile memorising of scientific fact may be, given insufficient scientific thought.

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, that instance of unscientific behaviour, 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, go ahead and be affronted; 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 reemphasise 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 the thesis, 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 the 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.

That hunger for certainty, especially for unthinking certainty is so great that it can be terrifying, especially when it manifests itself in uneducated people and those who are educated beyond their capacity for analytic thought. Many an inquisitive child or tenderfoot has been punished for questioning an established fallacy, or even for finding a new technique that rendered an established skill redundant. Practitioners of the old way would be inclined to fly off the handle, sometimes violently.  

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 . . . " over and over!

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 person 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 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 such as epistemology or ethics, 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 to 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.  

As a tactic it certainly is the most intelligent 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 (nor 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 just 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‑qualified, re‑expanded and re‑thought. Successive generations of geneticists, zoologists, molecular biologists, botanists, evolutionary psychologists, palaeontologists, microbiologists, and ecologists, 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 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 in science there is nothing, not a solitary thing, that forbids anyone to present evidence to modify, replace, or even annihilate the theory.  

You might argue that such work never would 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, neither in practice nor 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 a "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 dogma in the correct 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, electrons, N‑rays, polywater, relativity, cold fusion or quantum mechanics. That brief list includes items now accepted as incontrovertible and some that are now rejected as embarrassingly nonsensical; 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, either pro or con, 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 the frequency of his steps is sufficiently high (typically some sixty steps per second for a human). 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 could 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 it 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; look about you. . .

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 know hardly 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, either within or between disciplines.  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 or observation, 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 immediately become 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 that have implications for other theories and enable us to make predictions that we can test, whether those predictions contradict established theory or not.  

Valuable theories also have a great deal of power to explain large classes of things.  For instance current 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 even so, within a few decades of John Dalton’s proposals that gave rise to modern atomic theory, 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 Dalton's 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 began to have 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.

Do not get too complacent about atomic theory though; we still are making discoveries today about atoms and their interactions and components. It is not yet clear when or whether we will know all about atoms.

Atomic theory was not the only example of a theory that had wide support in thinking about something that had not yet been undebatably demonstrated nor 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.  For example, the world of the Tooth Fairy then 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 to do is 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?

In science, are we immune to such difficulties?

Be careful!

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 fully correct answers, or correct at all.  

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, beg, borrow, or steal them, make them, or otherwise obtain them; it is not enough just to send letters to the North Pole.  But given that that is 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 skull of the Piltdown man began when the parties in possession of the skull, and who really 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 pilot 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 unvaccinated, 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 of dogmatic assertions, the thanks are small and the recriminations bitter.

In such connections we begin to see where the spheres of science and religion overlap, thereby falsifying the "independent magisteria" nonsense.  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 the King James version of the bible,  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 question, hopefully something more interesting.”

The psalmist, on the other hand, in the next verse, and in psalm 91, verse 19, goes on about breaking the teeth of those 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. Science has not only added colours to the rainbow, but shown that the rainbow is a minuscule sliver of the spectrum; and that is characteristic of every topic where pre‑scientifically ignorant priests and dictators tried to characterise the universe in terms of their limited vision.

Understandably, their views almost consistently, not only were radically wrong, but were so small minded in every dimension, in comparison to what we now are learning about the universe, that it casts a pall of tragedy over our intellectual and practical history. Depending on how one measures the progress of our history and prehistory our progress has been positive for something like one percent of our history.

If we had maintained the current trend of advance for the last twenty thousand years or so, where would we have been by now?

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 all the things that various faiths waste or destroy — the lives and the civilisations.

In contrast to religious dogma, the field of scientific endeavour has its own ways of dealing with the ignorance and error of its practitioners. The history of science is full, absolutely crammed, with hypotheses, predictions, or ideas that demand the existence of things unspecified or specifically predicted, but that either remain stubbornly unobserved, or are contradicted by unexplained events. A dramatic recent example has been the detection of gravitational waves: for nearly a century we failed to find them. In fact, at first it was widely accepted that they would never be observable at all. Gravitation is not my field, but I was among the sceptics who thought they would never be detectable, however real they might be. Then some idiots began to waste money and effort in trying to detect gravitational waves. And naturally they repeatedly failed to detect them.

Could anything be more dogmatically religious?

And then, just a few years before the time of my writing this, not only did the workers in that field actually detect gravitational waves after decades of repeated effort, but they immediately were able to apply their observations to advances in cosmological science, so much so, and so usefully, that routine observations now are being made, and more powerful and advanced gravitational observatories are being planned or constructed!

Compare such advances, and their cost and profit in time, effort, and effect, with the fields of religious dispute or conjecture!

  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 misunderstood 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, accordingly, 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 cruellest, most destructive dogmata, exploiting them for parasitism, demagoguery, and self‑aggrandisement.  Some of these beliefs class themselves as religions, some as manifestos, but their authors are unwilling to trust their followers to think for themselves; they are obsessed with the need to tell 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 even if it were, the followers of that perfect dogma could be imperfect and corrupt, and those that innocently mean the best would be at the mercy of those who preach the loudest 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.  

Arguably the crassest abuse of logic and good faith among religious zealots, fundamentalistic or not, is that when they are confronted by facts and good faith, they assume the Mantle of Religion and Righteousness, standing sturdy and monolithic in the face of Atheism, Satanism, too‑Cleverness, and "Science", not to mention, of course, Darwinism, even if they really don't know what that is.

(Denialists of evolution who do know what it is, more or less at a superficial level, cannot do more than piling up verbiage, buzzwords, and flat assertions about the nature of the discipline; they do the Gish Gallop at its worst, because the gallop is all they have.)

Now, the trouble is that there simply is no such Mantle to cover their nakedness. Each nominal religion, each sect, in fact, each individual zealot, has its own little rag or figleaf in default of a Mantle, and in the absence of the common enemy — common sense — they conflict; and when they conflict, they often exhibit more spite and hatred for each other than for the evolutionary arch‑foe.

An immediate question to such an apologist in isolation, could be something like: "And you claim to be speaking for. . .?" If the claim is "for all True Belief, for all Christianity!" (In reality it often is just for a local splinter community), one could ask: "How can you justify that? No one could justify such a claim. The sects and individuals disagree violently on all sorts of points. I have no reason to accept you as the authority.

"If on the other hand you claim to speak for the bible, then why should I take it seriously, or take your opinion of the bible seriously? It is a book compiled by assorted groups from assorted third‑party sources down the centuries. And the compilation began centuries after the accepted time of Christ; not surprisingly even its historical substance is full of patent self‑contradictions, mythology, and nonsense. Practically all its assertions concerning the reality and nature of divinity or the universe are variously meaningless and inconsistent. That does not prove that the book is without any merit, but it certainly robs it of all fundamental authority, and it lends no authority to your claims".

If the claim is more like: "No one; I speak for myself, much as you do, and am justified in claiming as much authority as you do, with all your book knowledge" then you are dealing with someone deserving with more respect; but remember that you are claiming no respect for your own authority beyond the substance you can present from biology, mathematics, physics, and chemistry, available for development and falsification, and increasing in power as we debate.

That doesn't mean that you necessarily are home and dry, but if you have done your homework, you are in as good a position as anyone reasonably might ask.

There always remains scope for more niggles based on various tactics of bad sense or bad faith, commonly based on assorted errors, lies, partiality, and logical fallacies; there always are more ways of talking nonsense than of talking sense. One that I recently encountered online was something like:

"If I cannot prove that something is impossible, then it is possible; and I cannot prove that god does not exist, therefore it is possible that he does exist."

From that it is a short step to: "so god does exist", and often to: "and it follows that Darwinism is rubbish at best".

Personally I see that as a pretty tenuous support for anything, but the sources seemed very smug about their own ingenuity. But the same form of argument applies equally to proving the existence of the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Flying Dutchman.

And indeed, to Darwinism. Any simultaneous proof of everything and of the negation of everything, is no proof of anything.

From fallacies like that, the parties who advance such argument, imply that the conjectural proof of possibility is practically as good as material proof of existence.

Now, that sort of thing is fairly typical of proofs of assertions concerning supernatural entities in general, but there are whole classes of assertions along similar lines: the main ones I have in mind at this point, demand proof or disproof of meaningless propositions.

As I already have pointed out, there is not much one can do about meaningless propositions, even if syntactically well‑formed. The reason is that one essential attribute of a semantically meaningless proposition is that, though one cannot say that it is true, it does not follow that one can say its negation is true, because negation does not generally introduce semantic content.  Suppose we decided that: "Woollen music enjoins havered diagonals around pain" is not true, we still could not validly conclude that "Woollen music enjoins havered diagonals into pain" is true; you cannot convert a pile of bricks into a building by overturning the pile.

This principle is categorically different from factual propositions. If I can say that the proposition that penguins are mammals, is false, then I can confidently negate the proposition to get the true proposition that penguins are not mammals. To claim that a penguin is a mammal is meaningful, even though it is not true, which is why its negation is true; I might have to do extra work to prove that a penguin is a bird, but I can already be sure of how to go about showing that it is not a woodchuck.

 

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 your literal view of your dogma as you personally interpret it.

 

Dogmatism or fundamentalism as blasphemy

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

Kin Hubbard

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

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde

 

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, is 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 certain 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.  

Of two points of difficulty, one is internal and one is 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, objectively 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 is bad, or at best mistaken, its assertions on matters of fact, being Untruths.

·     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 themselves 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 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.

The sketch of Jeremiah Fuller quoted earlier, was actually based on an real flat Earth fanatic, as documented by Martin Gardner, and lampooned on a 1962 45rpm record by Peter Sellers & Graham Stark: Fullers Earth. Gardner's description still makes instructive reading, and at the time of writing the recording still can be found online.

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 a 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. . .

In July 2024 I encountered 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 closely‑argued and educated discussion of the relationship between science, in particular evolution, and religion, anti‑science, their relevance, and other problematic topics.

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 a blog of my essays at this link.

Meanwhile, my admiration to Jerry Coyne, and thanks for a very good read.