Richard Dawkins, the Clown Prince of the New Atheism, is at it again. I suppose he's always at it, but I don't follow him on Twitter and only notice some of his wackier performances. This past weekend he posted this:
Followed a day later by this one:
The first thing to notice about these tweets is that they are not examples of "science's truths," not produced by the Scientific Method <genuflect>, not science or scientific at all. They're just Dawkins in his familiar idiotic hawker mode, ranting about issues he doesn't understand.
Let's begin with the first tweet. Typically for him, Dawkins equivocates. "Science" does not only mean "science's truths." It means science, and for Dawkins that means Western science, which is a historical and social construct that did not always exist and may not always exist in the future. Western science originated as a form of magic, seeking not only knowledge but personal power for the practitioner. Notoriously, some crucial figures saw Nature as a woman to be forcibly disrobed, her private parts probed. (The metaphor of Nature as the [male, of course] scientist's female adversary, trying to keep her secrets covered, is still very much with us.) As a historical phenomenon, Western science has often been wrong. Far from being disinterested seekers after "truths of the real world," scientists have always served the state and the military. None of this has any eternal, independent existence: it's shaped by human (again, mostly male) hangups and other limitations.
A day after the first tweet, having realized or been told that he hadn't made his point well, Dawkins returns to the fray. "OBVIOUSLY", he begins, proceeding to pontificate things that aren't obvious at all. And then he talks like a religious apologist, which is what he is: you can't blame Science for what are now considered bad doctrines, they are the result of human frailty and error. The trouble with those "scientific beliefs during any particular era - phlogiston, etc." is that in their era they were not "beliefs" but "science's truths," "objective reality." And scientific progress is not impeded only by religious institutions, perhaps not even mostly by them; it's resisted by scientists, like the Ptolemaic astronomers who rejected Copernicus, or the biologists who rejected Darwin; partly for scientific reasons, such as his lack of a theory of heredity or the fact that his theory required longer periods of time than science's truths at the time allowed. Another reason for scientific resistance to Natural Selection was that many biologists wanted to believe in evolution as a linear, goal-directed process rather than the messy non-linear one Darwin theorized. Einstein's resistance to quantum mechanics didn't even pretend: he just didn't like the kind of universe it presupposed.
That's why that bit about "the truths about the real world that science aspires to find" is so funny: Dawkins is canny enough to qualify his claims a bit, and he knows that the "truths" scientists claim to have found often turn out to be false. (By the way, there is no "science," only scientists.) Even when scientists' claims hold up for a while, it is never certain that they won't have to be rejected later. But more important, and more unsettling, it's never certain that the truth about the real world will be found. Take the extinction of the dinosaurs: the theory that it was caused by an asteroid striking the earth looks pretty good for now, but there are other candidates. We may never know what happened, and it's not science's truth until science has actually found it. I'm reminded of the "Princeton Bible" postulated by certain Biblical scholars a hundred years ago: the text of the original autograph manuscripts of the Bible, which are irrecoverably lost and therefore can't be appealed to.
As for "objective reality," what is it? It's one of those terms, like "science," "religion," "truth," or "beauty," that people love to throw around without defining them because OBVIOUSLY, everybody knows what they mean and only "post-modern pseuds" pretend otherwise. Phlogiston used to be objective reality; so was eugenic sterilization. I regret having to harp on the latter, but it's still with us, and you may remember that Dawkins recently tried to defend eugenics as a coherent scientific program. Even if he rejects sterilization of the "unfit", as I suppose he does though for non-scientific reasons, his sputtering efforts to validate eugenics last year showed that he thinks that "improving the species" has some kind of agreed-on meaning, which it doesn't.
I'm a social constructionist myself, though I disagree vehemently with many other social constructionists. I'd even answer to "postmodernist," for some versions of the term -- it's like "faggot" in that regard, it's meant to refer to people like me, even though it may or may not fit. But I haven't found that many self-identified postmodernists do any better with the concept than someone like Dawkins does. But I also concede the validity of "objective reality," as the nutcase Philip K. Dick defined it: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." The trouble, whether you're a philosophical naif like Dawkins or a quasti-Gnostic mystic like Dick, is that even though "objective reality" is right there in front of us, we can't quite get at it. Science is, among other things, the attempt to make models of and describe that reality, but models are not reality and descriptions aren't reality either, so they are always incomplete at best. At best they're good enough that there aren't very dire consequences from using them; but you never know in advance where or when they'll fail you.
The discussion, to put it loosely, that followed Dawkins's tweets was entertaining. Several of his crew claimed that Science is like Mathematics. One declared that pi is science, true before the foundation of the world and true after it. But pi isn't out there in objective reality, like phlogiston or the Selfish gene: it's an irrational number, and that irrationality has always frustrated those who wanted the world to make sense. The relationship between mathematics and science is contested, to put it gently, but Pythagoras didn't produce his theorem by studying thousands of right triangles in the lab and producing a theory about them. Mathematical proof is not remotely like science, and though scientists like to concede the point, insisting that scientific proof is totally different from mathematical truth, they find it difficult to remember their concession for long.
Even if Dawkins were right about the nature of scientific knowledge, that wouldn't mean that his statements about society, religion, women, philosophy, or any other subject, should be taken seriously. None of them are the result of scientific research, and they seem to spring from nothing but his personal neuroses. From that point of view Dawkins might merit our sympathy (forgive him, for he knows not what he does). Even in his field he can't be trusted, as in his incoherent use of "selfish" in his best-known work The Selfish Gene. His popularity in certain circles can't be because he's right, since he isn't. His burblings must have some emotional appeal, just as religion does.
