Guardian on the Templeton

[sawyl]

When the Guardian ran their April Fools piece last week, I found myself complaining to my father that, so flaky has the Graun been over the last year or so, it wasn't much of spoof, so similar was it to some of their genuine articles. So today's editorial on Martin Rees and the Templeton prize, a piece so bad it would embarrass a Sixth Form philosophy student, might be disappointing but it isn't exactly surprising.

The opening is paragraph is particularly woeful. It consists of a lazy smear that implies that all scientists are crazy and hence unworthy of respect, followed by a lame argument that undermines the entire point of the piece:

There are evolutionary theorists who describe scorpion flies as rapists, and Nobel laureate economists who insist that affairs of the human heart are best grasped through cost-benefit analysis. Clever people are, if anything, especially prone to intellectual tunnel vision — recasting every discussion in terms of the one discipline they have mastered, with no regard for how ideas that enlighten in one context often make no sense elsewhere.

The intention of the argument seems to be the claim that, just because a scientist may claim privileged knowledge in one sphere, e.g. evolutionary biology, this doesn't carry over into other spheres and that anyone who believes that scientists have anything to say when it comes to religious matters is a victim of the halo effect. For this to be the case, it is necessary to assume that religions don't make empirical claims about the world — an area in which wielders of the scientific method are generally agreed to have privileged knowledge. Since the article goes on to make this point in another paragraph, it's probably charitable to put this objection aside for now and consider something else.

The argument claims that clever people are prone to tunnel vision. This relationship isn't argued but merely asserted, given the length of the piece, however, it's probably fair to accept the argument on trust and move on to consider its implications. If clever people are prone to tunnel vision and tunnel vision means that they are likely to be wrong, then it is foolish to listen to a clever person because they are likely to be wrong. But equally, it is foolish to listen to a stupid person because, although they may not suffer from tunnel vision, they are likely to be wrong either because they lack sufficient knowledge or because they're unable to construct convincing arguments. If the writer of the article is stupid, then we have good grounds for rejecting their statements because they're likely to be wrong. But equally, if the writer of the article is clever, we have good grounds for rejecting their statements because they're likely to be suffering from tunnel vision and therefore likely to be wrong.

Ignoring, for the sake of masochism, the hole beneath the waterline of the piece, and skipping over the paragraph that outlines Dawkins et alii objections on the grounds that religious claims do not stand up to scientific scrutiny — a point the piece accepts — the piece follows up with a rather ropy series of claims that seem to suffer from tunnel vision and wishful thinking:

Words can be used to joke or emote as well as inform, and neither scripture nor indeed poetry can be understood by mistaking it for something else. Metaphors ought not be metamorphosed into literal claims, while the test for moral edicts is reflective introspection and not the weight of the evidence that defines the scientific domain. Faith is a professional problem for scientists only where it demands that they close their minds to the facts. Neither Newton's religion nor Einstein's God of sorts (who refused to play dice) got in the way of their work...

It's undeniably true that metaphors ought not to be taken literally; but it is also clearly the case that scriptural metaphors often are taken literal claims, as intelligent design, geocentrism, young earth creationism etc demonstrate. And any attempt to deny this by claiming that these are not really what believers believe risks lapsing into a no true Scotsman fallacy. The question of whether moral claims are susceptable to scientific analysis seems to me to depend on the moral framework being employed. For example, it may be possible to weigh up consequentialist moral decisions using scientific methods, e.g. by employing utilitarian calculus rather than reflecting on internal motives, which rather suggests that the writer has presupposed a particular moral framework.

While I agree that faith is only a problem where it intersects with science, I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from the examples of Newton and Einstein. While Newton was able to reconcile science and faith both personally and professionally, others, such as Galileo, were rather less fortunate, suggesting that it doesn't matter whether an individual scientist is able to reconcile their own personal faith with their science but whether the religious believers around them are able to reconcile faith with science. Einstein's benign presence is also less than helpful, given that his comments about religion are so murky that they can be read as either atheism or theism (albeit of a limited, non-interventionist kind).

Perhaps I'm being unnecessarily grumpy. I don't agree the basic premise, but that's fine. I don't expect to agree with the Guardian's editorial pieces. I do, however, expect them to at aspire to cogency and properly reasoned argument otherwise I might as well be reading the Mail...