Although it’s really my last post that prompted this one, I am admittedly returning to something I’ve blogged about before. It was a while ago, so I won’t take it personally if you can’t remember what those particular posts were about. I’ll try not to repeat any of the specifics here as you can obviously go back and read them (eg here and here). But having opined about why theology matters (about which I know relatively little), it seemed only fair to reflect on what I spent most of my adult life working in.
However,
there are a couple of issues we have to deal with first. Although it’s common
to talk about “science” as though it is a single institution, it really isn’t.
There is no single body that polices a rule book, and the reality is that there
is no single agreed definition or set of rules. There is also no single agreed scientific
method. It used to be thought that a single recipe for doing good science might
be either discoverable or definable, and that a single, coherent method could be
established. And of course the philosophers got busy trying to cook one up. But
with due respect to the likes of Francis Bacon, John Locke, William Whewell,
Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, none of them really produced anything that you
could pull off a shelf, apply to a problem and obtain a “scientific answer”.
Indeed the most many of them managed was an attempt at describing what scientists
actually did. This is an interesting exercise in its own right. Mind you, it has always seemed to
me that they were overly infatuated with physics, from which they drew many of
their key examples. If of course science is just one thing, and there is a single method, then why not start with an area of science that seems to have delivered. Perhaps this explains why “big physics” is often reported in the media and is supported
by such massive sums of public money (over the last decade the UK has invested an average of £152M per year in CERN alone). Biology has usually suffered in comparison. The
philosophers didn’t seem to like biology that much, it was maybe too wet and
messy.
It’s odd,
but all this philosophical effort, individually and cumulatively, has had
relatively little impact on the activities of scientists themselves. By and
large they just got on doing “it”, and apparently quite successfully. It looked
like there might be a common core of things that were a good idea, things like
collecting evidence, forming tentative explanations, and then testing these
rather than just blithely accepting and asserting them. But single, codified,
rigorous method? Not really. Occasionally, individual scientists were influenced
by reading about what they were supposed to be doing in the writings of one or more of the aforementioned philosophers or thinkers (many of whom were not themselves scientists). They might try to construe their activities in the sort of terms they had read
about. But this all tended to be rather post-hoc. Suspiciously, such accounts
tended to crop up in books written at the end of careers, as though they were a
relatively recent discovery.
Now this
all may be a good or a bad thing. But part of the problem is that relatively
few pure science degrees (particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world) provide a
rigorous introduction to the intellectual procedures involved in science. There
are lots of lectures, lots of learning about great previous experiments,
occasional attempt to repeat them and so on. Such degrees are
certainly fact-packed (and very often great fun too – mine was!). But as to the
principles of how your thinking was supposed to operate, one was rather expected
to simply imbibe or intuit this. To be fair, this is a criticism that has so
often made, that in many degree programmes today there may be an optional module
in the philosophy of science. But it is rarely a key component of the education
of a young scientist. And this has the disturbing consequence of a highly
skilled but philosophically unsophisticated workforce.
None of
this means that science (in its various forms) has been generally unsuccessful;
clearly it hasn’t. But one unwelcome effect has been the unfortunate inability
of many of us scientists (and I include myself in this) to helpfully articulate
why science has been successful, what its product has enabled, and why this all matters. What we often end up with is hubristic, triumphalist babble that can
sometimes seem more like paternalistic
propaganda. Scientists do all have skin in the game of course, because many of
us earn our money from the scientific enterprise. And the source of that money
is very often hard-pushed taxpayers, and in the case of the health and clinical sciences,
patients. When we try to explain what we’re up to and why it matters, we can sometimes sound rather as though we’re saying that you should simply trust us (and keep
paying us) because we know what’s best, and it would be far too
complicated to explain to you.
Now there
is a sense in which this is true. These days the technical details are often
complicated, and a degree of trust is required. But the problem is that because we
have not articulated well enough or often enough how science works (in its
various forms), trust is now rather lacking. This is illustrated by the range
of responses to the undoubted success of the vaccines developed to combat the
COVID19 pandemic. The mRNA vaccines that have been so successful are the
product of a completely new approach to vaccine development that emerged from
years of patient and largely unheralded basic science, working out the details
of what goes on in cells at a molecular level. The speed at which this led to highly
effective vaccines coming into use and saving lives was unprecedented. And yet,
all over the world there is significant resistance to their use and a marked
reluctance to their uptake.
Part of the
problem is that science doesn’t exist within a bubble. The “modern” world that science both grew up in and helped to shape, has now morphed into a very different context. Intellectual
authority is now a weakness and trust has been undermined. We now have facts,
duly established by tried and tested procedures (technical and intellectual)
duelling in the media with alt-facts (opinion, suspicion and assertion dressed
up as facts). And the individualism that stemmed from the same revolution that
gave rise to modern science, means everyone is an expert who has to understand
the evidence, even when everyone really isn’t an expert and really can’t weigh
the evidence in an appropriate way.
Science
really is the best way we have to generate certain types of reliable
information of critical importance. It cannot answer any and all questions, but
it has and can answer some really important ones. At the edges of course, there is scope for debate as to what is and
what is not an appropriate question that can be answered scientifically.
Over-claiming, often by prominent scientists, or putting down other approaches in
non-scientific domains (like theology among others) has done science no favours. But make no mistake –
science has mattered in the past, is making a big impact now, and will be
needed in the future. It will continue to matter - bigtime.
