“Science and religion are incompatible,” said a middle-aged French gentleman at a dinner party the other day. I said nothing, and there were two reasons for my self-restraint.
First, my ability to frame a nuanced argument in French doesn’t inspire self-confidence. Second, these days I don’t engage in such jousts even when they are conducted in languages I know better.
Being a combative sort by nature, I’m happy to debate any idea close to my interlocutor’s heart – provided it is indeed an idea and not a mindless cliché mouthed without the benefit of any prior thought.
When an argument starts with a mindless platitude, it has nowhere else to go but to more of the same. So I knew exactly what that chap would have said had I taken exception to his inane statement.
Religion is just superstition, he’d have explained, strictly a matter of personal faith and hence lacking any claim to objective truth. Science, on the other hand, deals not with ghosts but with hard facts. Therefore, it’s in possession of that objective truth that eludes believers in God.
Science to such people means specifically natural science, because things like history, sociology, economics, philosophy or, God forbid, theology don’t qualify for that exalted status. But natural science is the ultimate deity of modernity, weaned as it was on the Age of Reason, so defined by those whose capacity for reasoning was weak.
As a general observation, one must point out that science is rather fickle for a deity. The objective truth it identified yesterday can easily become suspect today, a strictly antiquarian exhibit tomorrow and something one scrapes off one’s shoe sole the day after.
That point, however, is too obvious to stand on its own hind legs. After all, men honestly pursuing truth may approach it in incremental steps, never hesitating to move on to the next one if their quest compels them to do so. If they qualify their findings with something like ‘as things stand today’, they are in the clear as far as I’m concerned.
However, the operative words here are “honestly pursuing truth”. If scientists did nothing but that, one would have to believe them to be immune to the toxic effects of modernity, those that afflict every walk of life, from art to politics, from education to medicine, from architecture to sport. Such immunity strikes me as unlikely or rather, equivocation aside, impossible.
Enter Matthew Syed with his article in The Times. Mr Syed is among those former sports journalists who have expanded their horizons into general social commentary. Most of them are men of the Left, meaning they don’t feature prominently on my must-read list.
Mr Syed is no exception, and normally I give his articles a miss. But I’m glad I’ve read this one.
He writes about Parliament blocking the legislation banning marriage between first cousins. MPs who voted against it cited scientific evidence that, shows Syed, was nothing but a result of “scientific malpractice”.
You see, most consanguineous marriages occur, or rather are usually arranged, within the British Pakistani population, one to which Mr Syed himself belongs. Marrying first cousins is customary there for any number of reasons, religious, economic and social.
However, consanguineous couplings may produce progeny suffering from genetic disorders. Alas, few people know how bad that problem is, and that’s where “scientific malpractice” is to blame.
Finding anything wrong with any custom of a racial minority smacks of racism, the eighth deadly sin that, unlike the traditional seven, can end a career in any field, emphatically including science.
Yesterday I argued that liberal democracy is neither democratic nor particularly liberal. Quite the opposite: the range of permissible public inquiry is steadily narrowing throughout the West. Hence, writes Mr Syed, geneticists are told in no uncertain terms to desist from any research into the medical consequences of that particular custom – or else.
The received view, “endemic throughout the media, from the BBC to The Telegraph”, is that cousin marriage doubles the genetic risk compared to unrelated couples. “Journalists,” writes Mr Syed, “trust what scientists tell them”.
But scientists lie: “When inbreeding persists through generations (when cousins get married who are themselves the children of cousins), the risks are far higher, which is why British Pakistanis account for 3.4 per cent of births nationwide but 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders, consanguineous relationships are the cause of one in five child deaths in Redbridge [a heavily Muslim community] and the NHS hires staff specifically to deal with these afflictions.”
The article is so good that a paraphrase would do it an injustice. Might as well quote at length: “What I hope you are gleaning from all this is how scientific inquiry is being distorted and suppressed out of an almost crippling fear of offending cultural sensitivities; how information vital to the public interest is being censored out of concern that it might be prejudicial to the ‘customs’ of immigrant communities.”
We are gleaning just that. Moreover, Syed’s conclusion isn’t only correct but also utterly predictable. However, I wonder if he extends his integrity into researching areas less close to him personally.
For consanguineous marriage, with its implications for Muslim populations, isn’t the only area where scientists would tread at their peril. Another such is the innate differences in IQ among various races.
In their 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray showed, data in hand, that average IQ differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin.
Their findings were far from indisputable, and in fact Thomas Sewell, one of today’s thinkers I respect most, disputed them convincingly. But there was little doubt that the authors conducted their research in good faith, searching for that ever-elusive truth.
However, true or false, that particular issue is simply not up for discussion to modern scientists, which point was quickly hammered home. The authors suffered instant ostracism, which has never been reversed.
Would Mr Syed welcome objective, dispassionate research in that area? Somehow I doubt it, but I am open to a pleasant surprise. Another such surprise would be his honest comment on the science of global warming, perhaps the most glaring and definitely the most consequential example of scientific legerdemain.
Western, especially European, governments are busily driving their countries into penury “to save our planet” from the catastrophic effects of warm weather. The Australian climatologist Ian Plimer has published two book debunking the chapter and verse of that ‘evidence’ for the scam it is.
Among other things, he shows that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is but a trace gas of a trace gas having next to no effect on climate. Most of climate change comes from solar activity, and all fluctuations are strictly cyclical. In fact, the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known life. (In Roman times, grapes grew profusely in Scotland.)
Dr Plimer also proves the falsity of the notorious ‘hockey stick’ graph, supposedly showing a steep rise in global temperatures. This came from the straight swindle of choosing a biased statistical subset, covering too short a period for any far-reaching conclusions.
Every sentence in Plimer’s books comes with a long list of references, citing eminent scientists in various disciplines. Yet modernity chooses to trust only scientists who tell it what it wants to hear. And what it wants to hear is Greta Thunberg’s hysterical shrieks against capitalism, not Ian Plimer citing reams of serious evidence.
And yet people who are too busy with their quotidian existence to think and study for themselves repeat any falsehood if it can be attributed to ‘science’. They can’t believe in God, but the need to believe in something doesn’t go away. So they put science on their mental altar and genuflect, not realising that they are praying to a false god.
My French dinner companion was only partly right: religion is indeed incompatible with that kind of science. However, an honest inquiry into the physical aspect of life is perfectly compatible with the knowledge that the physical aspect isn’t all there is.
Science and religion are complementary, not contradictory. But to realise that, one has to do some reading and thinking on one’s own, which task escapes most people nowadays.
If God exists, then what is the origin of atheism?
Free will, is the short answer to that.