Since the late nineteenth century, science has dominated and transformed the earth. It has touched everyone’s lives through technology and modern medicine. Its intellectual prestige is almost unchallenged.Read more at location 239
Although most of its power comes from its practical applications, it also has a strong intellectual appeal. It offers new ways of understanding the world,Read more at location 241
claiming that knowledge of nature was God-given, not inspired by the devil. Science was a return to the innocence of the first man, Adam, in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.Read more at location 247
He equated man’s knowledge of nature with Adam’s naming of the animals.Read more at location 249
This was literally man’s knowledge, because Eve was not created untilRead more at location 251
The key to this new power over nature was organised institutional research. In New Atlantis (1624), Bacon described a techno cratic Utopia in which a scientific priesthood made decisions for the goodRead more at location 255
The general purpose of this foundation was ‘the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things;Read more at location 259
a direct inspiration for the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660, and for many other national academies of science.Read more at location 263
In England in Bacon’s time (and still today) the Church of England was linked to the state as the Established Church. Bacon envisaged that the scientific priesthood would also be linked to the state through state patronage,Read more at location 268
Scientists play the role of an established priesthood, influencing government policies on the arts of warfare,Read more at location 271
But the success of scientists in eliciting funding from governments varied from country to country.Read more at location 274
until the latter half of the nineteenth century, most research was privately funded or carried out by wealthy amateurs like Charles Darwin.Read more at location 276
In France, Louis Pasteur (1822–95) was an influential proponent of science as a truth-finding religion, with laboratories like temples through which mankind would be elevated to its highest potential:Read more at location 277
after the Second World War expanded enormously under government patronage, as well as through corporate investment.Read more at location 284
But governments and corporations do not usually pay scientists to do research because they want innocent knowledge, like that of Adam before the Fall.Read more at location 288
Most funding is a response to Bacon’s persuasive slogan ‘knowledge is power’.Read more at location 290
Truth can be determined only by the judgement of experts . . . Everything is decided by very small groups of men, in fact, by single experts whose results are carefully checked, however, by a few others. The people have nothing to say but simply to acceptRead more at location 293
Bacon’s vision of a scientific priesthood has now been realised on a global scale.Read more at location 298
Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a scientific mind capable of knowing and predicting everything:Read more at location 301
Thomas Henry Huxley, who did so much to propagate Darwin’s theory of evolution, extended mechanical determinism to cover the entire evolutionary process:Read more at location 308
When the belief in determinism was applied to the activity of the human brain, it resulted in a denial of free will,Read more at location 315
Yet this conviction rested not on scientific evidence, but simply on the assumption that everything was fully determined by mathematical laws.Read more at location 316
Even today, many scientists assume that free will is an illusion.Read more at location 318
For example, in 2010, the British brain scientist Patrick Haggard asserted, ‘As a neuroscientist, you’ve got to be a determinist.Read more at location 319
Under identical circumstances, you couldn’t have done otherwise. There’s no “I” which can say, “I want to do otherwise.”Read more at location 321
However, Haggard does not let his scientific beliefs interfere with his personal life: ‘I keep my scientific and personal lives pretty separate. I still seem to decide what films I go to see,Read more at location 322
In 1927, with the recognition of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, it became clear that indeterminism was an essential feature of the physical world,Read more at location 326
Quantum theory deals in statistical probabilities, not certainties.Read more at location 330
Does quantum indeterminism affect the question of free will? Not if indeterminism is purely random. Choices made at random are no freer than if they are fully determined.Read more at location 331
In neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory randomness plays a central role through the chance mutations of genes, which are quantum events.Read more at location 333
With different chance events, evolution would happen differently. T. H. Huxley was wrong in believing that the course of evolution was predictable.Read more at location 334
not just quantum processes but almost all natural phenomena are probabilistic, including the turbulent flow of liquids, the breaking of waves on the seashore, and the weather:Read more at location 337
Weather forecasters still get it wrong in spite of having powerful computers and a continuous stream of data from satellites. This is not because they are bad scientists but because weather is intrinsically unpredictable in detail.Read more at location 339
Even the orbits of the planets around the sun, long considered the centrepiece of mechanistic science, turn out to be chaotic over long time scales.Read more at location 344
The belief in determinism, strongly held by many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientists, turned out to be a delusion.Read more at location 346
The sciences have not come to an end by abandoning the belief in determinism.Read more at location 348
astronomer Simon Newcomb wrote, ‘We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.’ In 1894, Albert Michelson, later to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, declared, ‘The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remoteRead more at location 351
‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’Read more at location 357
These convictions were shattered in the twentieth century through quantum physics, relativity theory,Read more at location 358
Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth century, the fantasy of omniscience was back again, this time fuelled by theRead more at location 361
In 1997, John Horgan, a senior science writer at Scientific American, published a book called The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.Read more at location 363
one must accept the possibility – even the probability – that the great era of scientific discovery is over.Read more at location 366
he took it for granted that the tenets of conventional science are true.Read more at location 371
The founders of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century, including Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, were all practising Christians.Read more at location 374
Boyle, a wealthy aristocrat, was exceptionally devout, and spent large amounts of his own money to promote missionary activity in India. Newton devoted much time and energy to biblical scholarship, with a particular interest in the dating of prophecies.Read more at location 376
Seventeenth-century science created a vision of the universe as a machine intelligently designed and started off by God.Read more at location 380
This mechanistic philosophy was revolutionary precisely because it rejected the animistic view of nature taken for granted in medieval Europe,Read more at location 382
Until the seventeenth century, university scholars and Christian theologians taught that the universe was alive, pervaded by the Spirit of God, the divine breath of life.Read more at location 383
No one could explain how minds related to the machinery of human bodies, but René Descartes speculated that they interacted in the pineal gland,Read more at location 388
After some initial conflicts, most notably the trial of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition in 1633, science and Christianity were increasingly confined to separate realms by mutual consent.Read more at location 390
at least until the rise of militant atheism at the end of the eighteenth century.Read more at location 393
Even in the late twentieth century Stephen Jay Gould still defended this arrangement as a ‘sound position of general consensus’. He called it the doctrine of Non-overlapping Magisteria.Read more at location 395
However, from around the time of the French Revolution (1789–99), militant materialists rejected this principle of dual magisteria, dismissing it as intellectually dishonest, or seeing it as a refuge for the feeble-minded.Read more at location 399
The materialist philosophy achieved its dominance within institutional science in the second half of the nineteenth century,Read more at location 404
take the doctrines of materialism to be established scientific facts, not just assumptions.Read more at location 406
materialism led to the cheerless worldview expressed by the philosopher Bertrand Russell: That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;Read more at location 408
How many scientists believe in these ‘truths’? Some accept them without question. But many scientists have philosophies or religious faiths that make this ‘scientific worldview’ seem limited, at best a half-truth.Read more at location 417
In addition, within science itself, evolutionary cosmology, quantum physics and consciousness studies make the standard dogmas of science look old-fashioned.Read more at location 418
The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity.Read more at location 423
However, religious beliefs and the pursuit of a scientific career can interact in surprising ways. As an Indian scientist wrote in the scientific journal Nature in 2009, [In India] science is neither the ultimate form of knowledge nor a victim of scepticism . . . My observations as a research scientist of more than 30 year’s standing suggest that most scientists in India conspicuously evoke the mysterious powers of godsRead more at location 426
the doctrines of materialism are the rules of the game during working hours. Few professional scientists challenge them openly,Read more at location 433
And in deference to the prestige of science, most educated people are prepared to go along with the orthodox creed in public,Read more at location 434
However, some scientists and intellectuals are deeply committed atheists, and the materialist philosophy is central to their belief system. A minority become missionaries, filled with evangelical zeal.Read more at location 436
Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), which by 2010 had sold two million copies in English,Read more at location 439
Mechanistic science in itself gives no reason to suppose that there is any point in life, or purpose in humanity, or that progress is inevitable. Instead it asserts that the universe is ultimately purposeless, and so is human life.Read more at location 448
secular humanism arose within a Judaeo-Christian culture and inherited from Christianity a belief in the unique importance of human life, together with a faith in future salvation. Secular humanism is in many ways a Christian heresy, in which man has replaced God.Read more at location 450
Instead of redemption by God, humans themselves will bring about human salvation through science, reason and social reform.Read more at location 454
It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself.Read more at location 458
Ideally, science is a process, not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask new questions and build new theories.Read more at location 459
In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the historian of science Thomas Kuhn argued that in periods of ‘normal’ science, most scientists share a model of reality and a way of asking questions that he called a paradigm.Read more at location 461
Kuhn helped focus attention on the social aspect of science and reminded us that science is a collective activity.Read more at location 467
Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (1987) is one of the most influential studies in this tradition. Latour observed that scientists routinely make a distinction between knowledge and beliefs. Scientists within their professional group know about the phenomena covered by their field of science, while those outside the network have only distorted beliefs.Read more at location 472
millions of people have been converted to this ‘scientific’ view, even though they know very little about science itself.Read more at location 485
Gervais is an entertainer, not a scientist or an original thinker, but he borrows the authority of science to support his atheism:Read more at location 489
Gervais’s idealised view of science is hopelessly naïve in the context of the history and sociology of science. It portrays scientists as open-minded seekers of truth,Read more at location 495
