The strange case of the disappearing (usurped) Creator

Language is, of course, a tricky business. Words carry with them levels of meaning that are piled on to them by history, context and culture. So care has to be taken. This even extends to words used in science. Science relies on communication (it is supposed to be open and transparent) and communication relies on words. And words carry baggage. So I have no way of knowing what was really in the minds of Lui et al (PLOS One 11(3):e0151685) when they credited the Creator (with indeed a capital “C”) with the effective design of the human hand. And I have no notion what was in the minds of the reviewers and the editor when they let this pass unchallenged (if they did). I am giving them the benefit of the doubt in believing that they actually read the manuscript when it was submitted.

A storm of criticism immediately followed the publication of the paper on the PLOS One website, leading to its retraction. The interested reader can catch up with the detail on the web (see for example RetractionWatch). At least one response has appeared, purporting to come from one of the authors (and quoted by Retraction Watch), which contains the following comment:

“What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is a proper design by the NATURE (result of evolution) to perform a multitude of daily grasping tasks.”

The authors claimed that their problem was that they were not writing in their native language (presumably Mandarin as they are Chinese) and had just used the wrong word (Creator rather than Nature). We haven’t heard much from the editor concerned (an academic in the US), who is apparently no longer an editor for PLOS One.

There’s lots about this tale that is intriguing. Selfishly I suppose I am disappointed that the credibility of PLOS One as a scientific journal has probably been undermined, at least among some sections of the scientific community. That’s because I have published there, as a cost effective way of getting out data published in an “open access” journal. My experience of the reviews I’ve received is that they have been no more or less rigorous than those received by other mid-ranking journals. They’ve tended to be the usual mix of reasonable critique from fellow scientists who have read the manuscript and spotted dodgy language and issues needing clarification, and trivial comments about stuff that a reviewer just hasn’t read properly. The editors I’ve dealt with have been fair minded, and eventually the papers have appeared, probably better for the scrutiny. I’m pretty sure if I had given the Creator the credit He is surely due for the bits of the Universe I happen to investigate, it would have been spotted and criticized. Whether it would have led to challenge and rejection, I can’t say. That I don’t give the Creator credit in this way is entirely appropriate. And here’s why.

Science deals with things which can be observed and measured, or the predictions of provisional theories that can be observed and measured. We tend not to worry too much about ultimate causes, well beyond those we can see, measure and manipulate. But the knowledge generated by science is not the only knowledge we have about stuff. That’s because there are plenty of things that matter to us all that can’t be measured, prodded and poked. Analogies abound in books about science and faith, from the complementary explanations required to understand what appears on a TV screen when you’re watching “Trooping the Colour”, to the levels of explanation required to understand the enigmatic smile on the face of Mona Lisa. There are other sources of information.

The other important source of data I have to consider is found in God’s self-revelation of Himself in Scripture. From this it’s clear to me that all that there is came into being because of the exercise of His power, and that it has continued in existence because of the continual exercise of His power. But why won’t you find such statements in my papers in PLOS One (or Experimental Brain Research, or the British Journal of Visual Impairment etc, etc)? Because it’s not relevant to the issues that we discus in such places, where we are concerned with the latency of eye movements, patients’ views on treatment and such like. I understand this, and Liu et al should have understood it too.

The response of Liu et al (as reported), which suggests a willingness to swap the word “Creator” with the word “Nature”, doesn’t really help the situation. It suggests further confusion, perhaps linguistic, certainly philosophical. All it does is take the credit for design from the person to whom it should go (although I recognize this is a statement of faith and not science), and direct is to a series of processes that don’t “design” anything. They even qualify design by calling it “proper”. What would improper design look like? If they're serious about this use of words, then they are suggesting that we go back to a state of affairs in which “Nature” is deified. This is an ancient and for many an acceptable view. However it turns out that it is inimical to the development and practice of the scientific method. It is a Biblically shaped world-view, one that believes that what is around us is understandable, and that it should be questioned, investigated and understood, that leads to science. It was no accident that science as we now have it, only fully developed where and when it did. I don't suppose many of my colleagues would agree with this. It turns out that it's not just in the words of Liu et al that the Creator has been usurped.

On “Moralistic gods” – at least we're taking them seriously now

Usually when the subject of religion crops up in Nature (the top ranking scientific journal), it’s because some perceived great obscurantist evil has to be exposed. The impression given has been that there is definitely nothing good or intellectually wholesome to be found in religion. At best, it’s for the weak minded. However, recently Nature published the report of a very large study by Purzycki and colleagues (“Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality” 2016, Nature 530:327-330). They conducted an experiment investigating how the beliefs of people in eight different, widely separated, communities about their god/s affected how they viewed anonymous, distant, coreligionists.  Long (and interesting) story short, the more you believe your god knows about your thoughts and motives, and wants you to be nice to fellow believers (even if you don’t know them and they live far away), and the more you believe that he/she/it has power to punish you if you don’t do what he/she/it wants, the more you’ll do what they want. So the effect is that you’re kinder to strangers you have no genetic links with. Simple “selfish gene” accounts struggle to explain why humans have come to live in large socially complex cooperative groups rather than small, selfish, genetically related ones. Religious belief, which simple observation shows is rampant, seems to provides at least one explanation.

There’s lots about the experiment that’s really interesting, and some aspects that seem distinctly odd. It’s not clear to me whether the label “Christian” has much of a meaning in the Biblical sense, at least in Western Europe. It seems merely to name a vaguely connected set of cultures that for a long time have been separated by quite some distance from the person one of whose titles provides the label. It would be churlish to claim this, and not accept that there are devout Muslims who feel the same way about the word “muslim” being applied broad-brush to large swathes of the world. After all, if I claim that your average IRA man planting bombs and shooting policemen in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s can’t in any sense be called a Christian without the word being emptied of usefulness, doesn’t the same logic apply to the “muslims” trying set up their Caliphate in Syria/Iraq? Yet this is portrayed as being about Islam and muslims, rather than power and politics. But that aside, there’s something more interesting about the publishing of this paper.

It’s now apparently intellectually respectable to take religion seriously. Strange as it may seem, this is a change. It used to be that religion was an epiphenomenon to be dismissed, or that it was a primitive intellectual parasite that the advance of science would finally put an end to. Or that it belonged to humanity’s violent adolescence, a passing phase we would collectively grow out of. It turns out that as a minimum, the influence of religion, for good or ill, now seems to be accepted as playing some fundamental roll in the development of complex societies. None of this means that what is actually believed by the religious (and that is probably all of us) is true, or even helpful. It’s just that it is observably deeply ingrained in us all. Indeed that it is probably all encompassing.

Now of course I see all this from a particular perspective. Because it’s just what I would expect if in fact we were all the product of (creatures of) a “moralistic” God, who held us accountable for our actions. A God who had designed us to know Him, and enjoy Him. Even if we denied Him, these facts of our design would not disappear; how could they? They’re just brute facts. The way things are. If we tried to observe the state of things from a standpoint of neutrality as to whether He (or “they”) were real, these features of how we are made, and how this worked itself out in our relationships would still be observed.

These observations neither prove that this God (let’s call Him the living God) exists, nor can they explain Him away (although it won’t be long until at least the later of these is being claimed). But at least now it’s respectable to have a sensible discussion. The reality of  Him having “placed eternity in the heart of man” as I might put it (or actually the writer of Ecclesiastes 3:11), and the large scale effects this has had, and still has, is no longer being denied.