Reflections from Nice

There are large collections of flowers, flags, balloons, football shirts and various other marks of remembrance both on the Promenade des Anglais and round the bandstand next to the Monument de Centenaire here in Nice.  Fully armed soldiers patrol in groups of four along the Promenade and up and down the main streets. Nice in July 2016 superficially feels a bit like Belfast 1986. But that was during a concerted campaign with a political agenda. Nice, an attack by a Tunisian resident in France, has been followed by a spate  of attacks in Germany by an Afghan asylum seeker, a bullied and anxious teenager and a failed Syrian asylum seeker who was facing deportation. All of these events were magnified by the quickly present mainstream media, amplifying the now ubiquitous social media.

Certainly if the objective in Nice was to terrorise the population, the enraged driver of that now infamous white lorry failed spectacularly. What passes in Nice for a beach is packed with quietly toasting bodies. Bikes (with both one and two wheels) still have to be negotiated by pedestrians trying to get to the beach. The cafes, restaurants and market stalls continue to do a brisk trade. Indeed, large as they are, you need to look to see the memorials to the recent attack, and can easily miss the extra security patrols. Life goes on. Reporting from the scene of one of the attacks in Germany, a BBC reporter commented that what struck him was the normality of life just a few hours after an attack. Life goes on; it has to.

Perhaps this is aided by the lack of a coherent campaign and accompanying narrative. The thing about the IRA campaign that began in the late 1960's was it had a clear cause, a strategy and a desired end-point. It provided a historical narrative as well as a contemporaneous one. The response was a "new normal", one that included both obvious and not so obvious security measures. People adjusted to a particular way of doing things that factored in an ongoing terrorist threat. It seemed to me at the time to be a bit like the way a society deals with other structural challenges like chronically high inflation or electricity only being available for a couple of hours a day. You adjust. You have to. Life goes on.

But currently, the randomness of the attacks on mainland Europe preclude this kind of adjustment. Neither the causes of them, nor the causers, have a high proportion of coherence or commonality. So the responses to them may well also be piecemeal and heterogeneous. There will be responses of course. Life goes on.

What you may ask, has any of this to do with my usual concerns of science and faith and God? Well, in the face of these recent events many of the issues I've been commenting on seem rather narrow. Not unimportant you understand, but narrow. None of them in themselves are life or death issues. No one is going to be heaping up flowers to remember them.  Of course we only have time and space to pontificate on narrow matters because of the usual absence of the kind of meaningless violence that has marked these last few weeks in continental Europe. Most of the time, in most places there is no need to look out for a deranged van driver, bomber or axe weilder. Our peace and security, a bit like good health, are perhaps things we only appreciate when they are threatened. They are worth appreciating, and maintaining. Easier said than done.

The kind of calm and space that I've enjoyed in my lifetime did not come at no cost. It may not last. The political and social stability that I've enjoyed may or may not be enjoyed by my children. But while it remains the predominant feature of my surroundings, sitting in Nice I'm reminded to make the most of it. In the words of the Apostle Paul "..making the best use of time.." (Eph 5:16). Perhaps then I'd better get back to narrower, less troubling, matters.

What is a scientist and why does it matter?

Questions are often easier to ask than to answer. So, before trying to answer this particular question, why is it worth trying to answer? Well, science is still generally seen as a good thing, and a useful way of finding things out. And scientists tend to be regarded as speaking with some authority. But this brings with it a couple of dangers.

The first is the propensity of scientists to speak outwith their area of expertise. I can speak with some authority on a number of fairly obscure topics. With all modesty, I know a thing or two about what modifies saccade latency (told you they were obscure). However, I have been known to express opinions on a range of other issues. How seriously should you take these? While I am entitled to a polite hearing and a civil response, my views should carry no more weight than yours outwith my areas of expertise and experience. If I were an economist, and we were discussing the economic implications of Brexit, then you might pay more attention (although apparently not). But if I’m an expert in eye movement control?

Science seems to have a lingering and subtle authority that has a certain cultural influence. Advertisers know this and often present their claims in a pseudoscientific way. So they will be made by a bespectacled, white-coated, grey-haired boffin. Or reference will be made to something that sounds like a scientific experiment that has been run, the results of which can inform your purchasing decision. Subtle biases are being evoked. It is probably true that these effects might be waning. And there does seem to be an anti-expert, pro-ignorance spirit abroad. This spectre was raised by President Obama in his Rutgers commencement speech recently, a speech that also specifically mentioned the merits of science. Never-the-less, if there is even a lingering authority, then those who speak as scientists will benefit from this. Time to try and answer that question.

You might think that a scientist is simply someone who has a degree with science in the title (in the UK someone with “BSc” after their name). And yet, with the advent of mass higher education, there are many thousands of science graduates who have no real practical experience of science. They’ve read about it, they’ve been exposed to some practical scientific skills, they’ve maybe learned how to review other peoples’ science. But this is some way short of actually doing science and being a scientist. And one of the real weaknesses of science education, at least in the western world, is that it is quite possible to do a science degree and at no point step back and consider what science actually is. What is “the scientific method”? Is there such a thing? Is there only one? How does one do a real experiment, as opposed to a prepared laboratory practical? A science degree should provide a basic level of scientific literacy. An understanding that might see through bogus science-type claims in the media and elsewhere. And this is useful. But can the holder really speak for science with any authority?

What about one level up, the “masters” level? Here there are various degree-types. Many of them are highly vocational in nature, preparing the student for specific tasks or careers. No harm in that. But does this qualify the holder as an expert in “science”? Interestingly, again in many of these programmes, there is no attempt to look more generally at science and how it works. Just as interesting, those that only examine the history and practice of science, are by definition not science at all. The next level up is the PhD, still the basic professional qualification in, at least, academic science. This involves doing science, and (ideally) becoming the initiator as well as the practitioner of the science concerned. So, it should involve all those elements of hypothesis generation, testing, falsification, discovery and confirmation. But this apparent breadth of experience comes at the cost of specialization. So most of the activity will probably all be concentrated on a tiny sliver of the broad endeavour that is science more generally. Specialization is a problem when making claims about science in general, as opposed to one little bit of it. I can talk for days about eye movement, but you can easily trip me up by getting me to hold forth on whether those Italian neutrinos really did go faster than the speed of light (I don't think they did)!

I suppose what I’m arguing is that we should all be very wary when we hear anyone claiming general authority to speak on behalf of “science”. In the apologetic arena, this applies equally to those speaking for or against propositions concerning the existence of God, the reliability of the Gospels and the rest. There’s no replacement for careful listening and critical thought. Factor in the specific expertise where it is relevant. So, of the discussion is about the age of rocks, you might want to give weight to a geologist. Be careful of course if they stray into the issue of when the book of Daniel was written.

There is also one place where many of these issues come together to annoy. This is in the final chapter of many popular science books written by senior scientists. The temptation is to bamboozle the reader with lots of brilliant science, both that of the author, and that of the author’s scientific heroes. Fine so far. Indeed, it’s often important and inspiring stuff. But having built up a degree of credibility and authority in the reader’s mind, often a final chapter will be slipped in that grinds various metaphysical axes well outwith the expertise of the writer. The author is, of course, entitled to hold and express such views. But what is really being perpetrated is a bit of con, whether conscious or unconscious. The hope is that the authority built up in the first part of the book, will spill over into the other stuff.

Of course, most of what I’ve been discussing has nothing to do with my area of expertise. So, you’ll have to judge for yourself whether I’m making sense.

It’s (not just) about the facts, stupid

James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, gets the credit (blame?) for coming up with the phrase “It’s the economy stupid”. This was designed to keep the campaign on track by keeping everyone’s attention focussed on what really mattered. Now you might think that an appropriate version of this in science might be “It’s about the facts”. After all science is all about facts – discovering and communicating them. It’s not about stuff like feelings. This is not to argue that facts are easy things to work with. It can be really hard to prise them out of the universe. Just think of the time and expense, trouble and complexity, involved in finding the Higgs Boson, of establishing as a fact that it exists. However, it turns out that even in science it’s not that simple. And beyond science, in the rest of life, if the last week in the UK has demonstrated anything, it’s that a lot of things besides facts are critical.

Definitions of the word “fact” abound. Let’s assume we mean statements about things, situations, objects, processes or people that are true. Just being able to state something (eg “Trump is a chump”) doesn’t make it a fact. Although, as an aside, it’s interesting that in the social media age, it seems that the secret to establishing something as a fact is simply to say it often enough, or to have it said by enough people. But to establish a statement as a statement of fact, there has to be some interaction with evidence, with how things actually are. This moves a statement from being an opinion to being a fact. So if a Trump did or said lots of chump-like things, then we might feel happier concluding that the statement was a statement of fact, not of opinion. Of course we have the practical problem of identifying, gathering and analysing the evidence. And this all turns out to be quite tricky.

What is going to count as relevant evidence, and who is going to decide? We tend to depend on various types of institution to decide what is and what is not relevant. So we have courts and judges and lawyers with rules to decide what’s relevant in the criminal sphere. In science, different disciplines tend to act in a similar institutional way deciding what’s relevant to a given issue. So it was particle physicists who decided the rules in determining what sort of, and what degree of evidence would be required to show that the Higgs existed and had been found. They would claim that they were guided by theories that laid out mathematical criteria for deciding what was what. But it was still a community effort. And even in physics, there’s still scope for a degree of interpretation.

But when it gets really interesting is when you realise that even once you’ve got a stone cold fact, that’s when the fun really begins. Because facts don’t exist in isolation. Every fact comes embedded in a whole bunch of contextual stuff. And it’s when both are taken together (the fact/facts and the context) that we determine whether we’re going to take a fact seriously (believe it, rely on it, act on it). Take the simple fact that “it’s raining”. If you run in to my windowless office (it’s not actually windowless, but bear with me) shouting that it’s raining, just before I leave for home, then you might expect me to pick up a brolly or put on a coat. But if I know you are a regular prankster, and you are known for never quite telling things as they are and for always having your own agenda (and if your name is Boris), even if it really is raining I might actually leave my office unprotected.

There’s also the issue of deciding between facts. It turns out that how we might interpret the same fact differs depending on context. Even in science, deciding which facts to go after, is rarely a matter of the facts themselves. Experiments guided by provisional theories (hypotheses) will prioritise some facts over others. So some are discovered, others remain hidden. And prior views (beliefs and theories) can be so powerful, even in science, that we have to guard constantly against things like confirmation bias – prioritising the facts that suit our views. Our prior commitments to theories, it turns out, can lead us to interpret the same facts in different ways. It can be so bad, that we become incapable of even communicating sensibly with adherents of other views. This has happened in science in the past, even (or perhaps particularly) in physics, the hardest of hard sciences.

This sort of thing is going on now in UK politics. We have just had a referendum that was in part about facts. Facts about the economic impact of Brexit. Facts about the numbers coming into the UK from both the EU and further afield. But how those facts were interpreted, or even whether they were accepted as facts, depended very much on the prior commitments of people. And during the campaign there developed a kind of mutual incomprehension between Remainers and Brexiteers. For many on both sides, the facts were so obvious and powerful, that communication became almost impossible. But it turned out it wasn’t just about facts at all. It was about a lot of other stuff too.

So when we come to other important facts, facts like an empty tomb for example, there’s no warrant for instant dismissal on one side, or a feeling that its implications should just be obvious on the other. There’s investigating to be done, evidence to be engaged with and carefully weighed. And an awareness of background biases and prior commitments. And if you’re tempted to feel that the facts are just so obvious that you cannot conceive of how someone can come to view that differs from yours given those facts, then go sit in a dark cool room and think again.

God on the brain

The headline reads “Did St Paul hear God’s voice or was he having a fit?” (The Times, 31^st May, 2016, p11). Tom Whipple, Science Editor of the Times, had picked up on a paper by Arzy & Schurr (a brief communication in Epilepsy & Behaviour 60:7-10) in which they reported on a patient with post-seizure psychosis, who claimed he had been approached by God to bring redemption to Israel. After treatment, they reported that “the psychotic state resolved” (ie the patient no longer felt he had encountered God, or had been tasked by Him). The interest in the paper is that by using brain recordings, Arzy & Schurr were able to localise the brain activity that correlated with the patient’s reported experience. The question posed in the headline is Whipple’s. He puts two and sixteen together to make oranges. The authors of the paper do not.

Sick people often say religious things or have religious experiences. Interestingly, what they say tends to be culturally specific. Thus it’s not unknown for people in the “Christian” west to claim to see Jesus, while those in India claim to see one of the Hindu deities. I have had colleagues in the past who were inclined to infer from this that all religious experience was therefore a manifestation of a sick brain! However, the leap from people with sick brains “hearing God”, to the conclusion that any interaction with the Almighty is due to the abnormal activity of neuronal networks in the left prefrontal cortex, is far too far to be made legitimately.

Let’s take a less controversial analogy. We know that the central processing of visual information begins in the visual cortex, at the back of the brain. This is why bumps to the back of the head cause us to “see stars”. There are less violent ways of experimentally activating the nerve cells in this part of the brain though. Discharging an electric coil very quickly (in a few microseconds) close to the skull, induces a magnetic field, which in turn causes nerve cells to fire in the cortex (a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation). When cells in the visual cortex are stimulated in this way, the activity induced is interpreted as having a visual experience. It’s not that anything is seen in the normal sense, and indeed these induced “phosphenes” are usually vague and incoherent (a bit like the “religious” experience of the patient in the paper). But what we don’t do is infer from this that all our visual experiences are the product of such stimulation; that would be crazy. Most of our visual experiences are obviously caused by us seeing stuff. That’s why our visual system sits at the end of the visual pathway to process what comes out of the back of the eyes in the first place.

Despite my unease at Whipple’s headline, there are parallels with Arzy & Schurr’s patient which are  interesting. There are bits of our brain that when stimulated give rise to experiences which are interpreted as being about god/s. But why are those bits of brain there in the first place? The visual system is there because we see things. The auditory system is there because we hear things. And the “god” system (if that’s what it is)? I’m not suggesting that any of this comes close to proving God’s existence. But nor can it be used to “explains away” religious experience. When I encounter the Almighty (which I do frequently – it turns out it’s not difficult), I’m sure that neurons are activated inside my head, just as when I experience a sunset. Both are caused (usually) by an interaction between me and an exterior reality. Both could be the result of neurons misfiring (for whatever reason), but that’s not usually what happens.

Of course what Whipple’s article also fails to take into account are all the other things we know about Paul. He was a highly educated and motivated member of the Pharisees (a sort of religious elite of the Jewish world); he came from a good background and had made it to the top in Jewish religious circles by around the time Jesus was crucified. It is extremely unlikely that he was (as was Arzy & Schurr’s patient) either epileptic or psychotic. These chronic conditions, while not understood in the ancient world, were known. Had Paul been a sufferer of either, he was more likely to have been an outcast than a well-connected operator in the Jewish religious life of his time.  There are other important differences too between Aarzy & Schurr’s patient and Paul. The patient wasn’t a particularly religious man before the incident reported in the paper. And in the midst of it when questioned, they reported that he had no concrete plans for accomplishing his mission. He seems to have been vague. Paul’s Damascus road experience was very different. As reported by both Luke (a physician) and Paul after the event, he was given concrete instructions during his “episode” that lead directly to a meeting with one of the Christians in Damascus. The rest, as they say, is quite literally history.

The weight of evidence that we do have (as opposed to the evidence that we don’t) is that Paul encountered the risen Jesus and it turned his life upside down. It has happened since to rather large numbers of individuals with healthy brains.

Told you to trust me – more on faith and science

I want to return to the issue of faith in science. But there are two ways in which I mean “faith in science”. The first is the role that faith plays in the practice of science. This is important because some appear to argue that science is a frostily rational business where we step from the solid ground of one fact to the next, illuminating causal links and generating new, reliable knowledge along the way. This is contrasted with the faith which is involved in religion, usually assumed to be anti-fact and irrational. Second is the sense that you dear reader, should put your faith in science, as the only true route to enlightenment and happiness. It’s the only sure way to provide us with the necessary knowledge to keep us well fed and warm. You may not understand it yourself, but that’s fine because there’s a cadre of reliable, trustworthy and clever people (called scientists), and they will keep you right.

What is the role that faith plays in the practice of science? This is a hotly disputed topic, because there are those who feel highly insulted at the very notion that religious faith and the intellectual procedures of science are in any way comparable. And of course there have been attempts to distinguish between the sort of faith exercised by scientists and that involved in religion (see for example Paul Bloom’s article in the Atlantic). I find few of the arguments advanced compelling. Partly this is because many of the claims made about religious faith seem to be very different to my experience of faith as a believer. Bloom makes the following claim in his article:

“Science establishes conditions where rational argument is able to flourish, where ideas can be tested against the world”

This is another version of the rational science vs irrational faith argument; he implies that things are different in religion. My experience of Biblical Christianity is that rational argument flourishes, and that ideas are tested. I don’t leave my mind outside the door on Sunday (or any other day).  And while there are clearly points of tension where what the Bible teaches comes up against what is popularly believed, this evokes careful, rational thought and reflection - testing. Where there is an apparent conflict between what science appears to have established, and what Scripture appears to teach, again, careful thought is required. Sometimes, it will turn out that how I have understood Scripture is at fault. Sometimes, what it is claimed science has established will have been at fault, and Scripture vindicated. Science, like all human activity, occasionally, and spectacularly gets things wrong, particularly where it is misapplied to areas outwith its competence. And sometimes, I’ll just have to accept that neither I, nor you, nor anyone else knows it all, and that we all might have to wait for things to become clearer. The point is that none of this is irrational easy-believism. So I’m not convinced that the thinking I do in the lab, and the thinking I do in Church, are two very different kinds of thinking. There are differences, but these are more subtle than some would allow.

As for faith, it is involved in both places. In my lab I trust the work of others, and seek to build on it. I place my faith in a whole bunch of assumptions and background information that I never question (at least as long as there is no apparent problem). Some assumptions are a really big deal and actually play a role in me turning up to work at all. And I simply trust them. Take for example the fine-sounding notion of “the uniformity of nature” (UoN for short). This is the idea that if I conduct an experiment in my lab in Liverpool, and do it properly, and I get a particular result, I’ll get the same result tomorrow if I do everything the same. So the information I generate today has value tomorrow, next week, next year and so on. And the same result will be obtained if the same experiment is conducted in London, Lisbon, Lagos or Lahore. The information generated has value everywhere. If this we not the case why would I bother? But what proof do I have that the principle of the UoN exists? None really, beyond the experience that so far it seems to have held. It’s not something that I’ve investigated in any detail. It’s an article of faith. And one could multiply such examples. So faith, in the sense of a trust in people, and a trust in certain principles, provides a basis and framework for my practice and operates in my professional life as a scientist.  

As for the second sense in which I mean “faith in science”, it will probably have escaped your notice that there is a crisis going on in science. The pages of Nature (one of the most prestigious and widely read scientific journals), have been taken up over recent months with the issue of just how reliable science, or least some aspects of science, actually are. In fields as diverse as psychology and clinical trials the charge is that one of the most important principles in science has been routinely and radically undermined – the principle of reproducibility. This is the idea that important results must be repeated; that they must be both confirmable and confirmed. It’s for this reason that when I write a scientific paper, I have to include a section that details how I did what I did. This is so that other people have enough information to repeat it all, to check my results. However, with an increasing number of studies, either there isn’t enough information to repeat them, or when they have been repeated, the results have been different (sometimes very different). So it turns out that what we thought was reliable, was not so reliable after all.

There are all sorts of reasons why this isn't a surprise, least of all to scientists themselves. In part it’s down to current problems in scientific publishing. Constant pressure to be “concise” has led to people skimping on detail.  There’s also a real problem getting confirmatory studies, as opposed to studies showing novel results, published. It is also the case that the number of journals has multiplied over the last few decades and a lot of what is published is poorly designed in the first place, and poorly reviewed (this was alluded to in "The strange case..."). Perhaps a larger part of the problem is explicable because science is done by people. And scientists are morally indistinguishable from the rest of humanity. This means some are good, most are average, some are poor, and some (probably relatively few) are frankly fraudulent. So the information produced by professional science is no more privileged than other sorts of information. It’s necessary and good for some things within a particular domain, but even there it has to be scrutinised and thought about carefully.

All of us should be careful about what and who we put our faith in. If I want my broken leg fixed, I have to confess that I'll have little time for the views of my pastor on the matter. I’ll go to see my doctor (although possibly via my pastor’s wife who’s a GP). But if I want my street lighting improved, the physicist’s understanding of the particle/wave duality of light will not get me very far at all. My local councillor is likely to be a better bet. I'll put my faith in him or her to improve my lot, or at least make it more visible at night. In both cases I might be disappointed with the outcome. But horses for courses; that's a risk I would take. Practical living turns out to be more complex than the average faith vs science argument would have you believe. But who and what you put your faith in is very context dependant. Personally, when the context is eternal salvation, I know in whom I have believed.

Faith and aeroplanes

Every year the eye and vision science community (or at least a fairly large proportion of it) decamps to the United States for the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. This year I combined this trip with a quick visit to colleagues in Athens, Georgia. So I had to get on an aeroplane in Manchester and fly to Atlanta, then a few days later get on another one and fly to Seattle via Phoenix, Arizona, and about a week after that fly to New York and then back to Manchester. All of this was booked using the interweb or some such. Indeed, before I arrived at any airport, I parted with a large sum of cash (actually I trusted various electronic systems about which I know nothing to move money from my credit card account, to the account of various commercial organisation) trusting that when I turned up at the airport (or the hotel in Athens, or the apartment in Seattle) they would actually know who I was and let me use their services.

Let’s focus in on that first flight from Manchester to Atlanta. I did no investigation of any of the principles of aeronautical engineering, the mastering of which I was relying to keep the aircraft in the air. I exercised implicit trust (or faith) in the aircraft designers and manufacturers, trusting that they had known what they were doing when they designed and built that particular plane. This despite the fact that I know they have occasionally got things wrong in the past. Neither did I investigate the people who were using the presumably airworthy aircraft once it had been built, to transport me to my destination. I trusted them to use it properly and to get me safely to where I was going. This despite the fact that only a few months ago, one particularly disturbed but clearly qualified individual flew an aircraft into a mountain, killing all on board. And I didn’t think too much about all of those charged with stopping bad people causing problems; all those security people I could see, and all of those I couldn’t see. Apparently there are those who want to do me harm by interfering with things like aircraft. I trust lots of people to stop them. But I myself don’t check the competence or commitment of the airport security staff. I trust others to hire them, screen them, train them, motivate, pay and monitor them. This, despite that fact that I know that occasionally, bad people have slipped through the net and have managed to do bad things to aeroplanes, with catastrophic consequences. No, I exercised faith all the way along the line. And the way I behaved was evidence of my faith. I booked my ticket, checked-in on time, made my way to the gate when called, boarded the aircraft, settled into my seat and (I’m glad to report) safely arrived in Atlanta.

The faith I exercised wasn’t blind faith, or particularly naïve, or irrational. This is a flight I’ve made safely before. And in fact, most such flights, many thousands if not millions of them, have been completed safely before. So I had good reason to believe that my faith was not misplaced. While clearly bad things happen to aircraft, and currently one feels for the families grieving for those lost in troubling circumstances in the Mediterranean, such events are mercifully and relatively rare. So in a few weeks’ time I’ll be getting on another aeroplane. My point is that faith was a key part of what I was doing.  And what I will be doing: exercising faith again.

In fact, when you begin to think about it, faith is a part of everyday life and we barely give it a thought. And while faith can be blind, irrational, or misplaced, it rarely is. It seems pretty basic. So here’s the question: is religious faith different in some fundamental way from the kind of thing I’ve been talking about?

When I think about my Christian faith, I don’t think about it in the abstract. I think about what (or who) it’s in. Have I placed my faith in an unknowable mystery? No. I’ve place my faith primary in a person who lived one of the most scrutinised lives in all of history. How do I know about that life? It is recorded (several times over) in one of the most scrutinised books in all of history.  To be honest, just as I (and I would submit, you) have approached other aspects of life, I personally did not do all of the scrutinising myself. As with anything I’m being asked to entrust myself too (like aeroplanes) I’ve looked in detail at some things, left some things to others who have particular expertise, and never had any reason (note the use of the word “reason”) to scrutinise a whole other bunch of stuff. I suppose if I came to suspect that I’d placed my faith in the wrong object, or found I was being asked to simply trust things that seemed internally contradictory, then I’d resort to more scrutiny myself. But so far, this hasn’t been an issue. My exercise of faith in this context seems to be more an act of will, than a process of discovery and persuasion. I didn’t wait till all the “i’s” were dotted and “t’s” crossed. I took a decision and ran with it, just as I do in life in general. So far I have no reason to review the basic decision.

One other thought. Sometimes faith is placed in opposition to science. People talk about science vs faith, or the science/faith debate. Occasionally I do this myself. But in one way I actually find this a bit odd. Science involves buckets of faith on all sorts of levels. But that’s for another day. Trust me.

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.