On not idolizing science

I'll start with some self-description (which I've done before but worth doing again in this context): I'm an atheist; I  think reason and evidence constitute the only path to empirical truth; and I think that science and technology are central aspects of Western or, now, modern civilization.

Having said that, I want to say why I think this piece by Susan Jacoby is wrong: "The Myth of Separate Magisteria". The "magisteria" she's talking about are science and religion, or the teachings of science and religion, and while the term sounds pretentious it stems from a very good essay by Stephen Jay Gould, who took it from Catholic theology. Here, for example, is Gould on "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", or NOMA:

Just as religion must bear the cross of its hard-liners. I have some scientific colleagues, including a few prominent enough to wield influence by their writings, who view this rapprochement of the separate magisteria with dismay. To colleagues like me—agnostic scientists who welcome and celebrate thc rapprochement, especially the pope's latest statement—they say: "C'mon, be honest; you know that religion is addle-pated, superstitious, old-fashioned b.s.; you're only making those welcoming noises because religion is so powerful, and we need to be diplomatic in order to assure public support and funding for science." I do not think that this attitude is common among scientists, but such a position fills me with dismay—and I therefore end this essay with a personal statement about religion, as a testimony to what I regard as a virtual consensus among thoughtful scientists (who support the NOMA principle as firmly as the pope does).

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). ...

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectua] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

And here, by contrast, is Jacoby:

By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains — science in the physical universe and religion in the moral realm. On this website, the philosopher Roger Scruton recently made the sweeping declaration that “genuine science and true religion cannot conflict.” A 2004 editorial in Naturemagazine insists that science and religion clash only when the two “stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble.” 

One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings. 

I know both scientists and religious believers for whom the idea of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) has become an unexamined fiction designed to skirt the culture wars. It is clear, however, that NOMA (a term Gould adapted from Catholic theology; the "Magisterium" is the Church's term for its teaching authority) is not only a fiction but a useless fiction — from the standpoint of both religion and science.

 She is at least no skirter of the culture wars. But, as her nonsensical analogy with men and women demonstrates, she's no deep thinker either, a failing she shares with her co-belligerents, the so-called "new atheists". The notion that the two "magisteria" are necessarily in conflict has its origins in a crude positivism which holds that only empirical or factual questions or issues are of concern, when it's quite evident that not only are there important issues of aesthetics and morality, but also, in a more general but more directly consequential sense, issues of meaning, value, and purpose. Any and all of those issues can be aided, of course, to a greater or lesser extent, by factual matters, as everybody has always known -- and as Jacoby herself allows near the end, to avoid looking completely silly -- but none simply are matters of fact or empirical truth; i.e., none are matters of science.

The attention given to these simplistic and crude new atheists by the liberal-left, however, reveals an irony in that side of the politicized culture wars -- just as Marxism, for example, once wanted to vanquish religion and in the process simply became a new opiate for a class of intellectual acolyte, so now science is rapidly becoming the focus of a new idolatry among those who so often flatter themselves as "reality-based" but who accept uncritically the pronouncements of white-coated authority figures that flatter their political faith.  So now I want to take the opportunity Jacoby's essay provides to make a few points about how a misplaced veneration of science can easily lead people astray -- I'm copying these, by the way, from a comment I left on a posting by Itzik at BasmanRoseLaw which pointed me to the Jacoby piece in the first place, and for which I thank him:

• First, there's a difference between science and scientism -- and the "veneration" of science seems to stem from or lead to the latter (i.e., making an ideology of science, making lab-coated scientists into priests, etc.).

• Second, once you make an ideology of science, you perpetually risk turning your wishes, political fixations, and the like into pseudo-science (e.g., psycho-babble, random statistics, etc.), thinking that this confers on them some sort of validity which of course is spurious.

• Third, scientists, not being priests, superior beings, or aliens, are in fact just as human as anyone else, and therefore susceptible to intellectual fads, political fashions, and the religious yearning for purpose and meaning. This doesn't necessarily interfere with their purely scientific work as long as that work is sufficiently removed from their political, moral, or quasi-religious concerns. When it isn't, however -- as it isn't, e.g., in the current climate dabates, or in virtually the whole of social science -- then scientists too are motivated to "arrive" at politically correct results, and frequently do so in various inappropriate ways, all of which outside observers need to be aware of and be willing to discount.

Which is simply to say that we should avoid scientific idolatry, and bring the same critical intelligence to the pronouncements of scientists, particularly in political areas, that we do with any other profession.

"Climate change" 3 - a solution?

In the first post in this series, I talked about the radical uncertainty, as well as the futility, involved in any serious effort, over the course of many decades, through any and all economic upheavals, and even as most of the world's people are still industrializing, to suppress global carbon emissions to some early 20th century level. In the second post, I talked about how the irrationality of current political moves in this direction might be better understood as the result, not of science, but of a kind of pseudo-science used to cover a quasi-religious belief system. You can see this manifested in the moralistic, even messianic terms so often used to talk about everything from "wasteful lifestyles" (SUVs being a particularly despised symbol) to "saving the planet".  Now, the adherents of such a belief system, particularly given its pseudo-scientific cover, will of course disagree that there's anything irrational about their fervent backing of carbon emission reduction schemes and will insist that they're really just concerned with the potentially disastrous, or at least very costly, effects of AGW. But the test of this is their reaction to alternative possibilities for atmospheric CO2 reduction, an obvious one being direct carbon extraction, as in the Scientific American article cited previously ("Washing Carbon out of the Air", June/10). Such projects typically involve some sort of sequestration of the carbon extracted. But another, and much better possibility, if economically feasible, would be to use the carbon to produce transportation fuel again -- no longer "fossil" fuel now, but re-cycled fuel. And that, as I understand it, is just what a new carbon extraction technology called "STEP" claims to offer -- see "Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years":

By showing how to take advantage of both the sun’s heat and light for capturing and splitting carbon dioxide, the STEP process is fundamentally capable of converting more solar energy than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes alone. The experiments in this study showed that the technique could capture carbon dioxide and convert it into carbon with a solar efficiency from 34% to 50%, depending on the thermal component. While carbon could be stored, the production of carbon monoxide could later be used to synthesize jet, kerosene, and diesel fuels, with the help of hydrogen generated by STEP water splitting.

“We are exploring the STEP generation of synthetic jet fuel and synthetic diesel,” Licht said, “and in addition to carbon capture, we are developing STEP processes to generate the staples predicted in our original theory, such as a variety of metals and bleach."

No doubt there are a lot of problems to be solved yet, and a serious decrease in atmospheric CO2 would in any case be a costly project even if and when they're solved.  But for eco-True Believers, a process like this isn't even a potential solution but a threat, since it seems like it would take away the biggest opportunity they've yet seen to have a serious impact on "wasteful lifestyles", "the consumer society", etc. -- why, SUVs might proliferate like rabbits! So there's the test: if you think there's a rational basis to be concerned about carbon emissions -- and I do, for example -- then a process such as this and/or other extraction possibilities both known or yet to be developed should give you serious hope. If, on the other hand, your real concern is this quasi-religious moralizing about waste, and the concomitant desire to impose a personal ethos on everyone (everyone else, as a rule, as we can see from Al Gore's mansion), then you'll want to give serious effort to finding ways to debunk and otherwise undermine such a hope.

"Climate change" 2 - fad and dogma

Before The Wisdom of Crowds, of course, there was Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Delusions of which the recent, but now hopefully fading, AGW excitement is but one example. The point here, as the previous post tried to make clear, isn't that AGW isn't happening -- it probably is. The point is simply that the certainties of costs and the uncertainties of benefits from proposed carbon emission reduction schemes make the drive to implement them inexplicable on a rational basis.

If, on the other hand, this drive has more the character of a cultural fad, driven by irrational forces, , then it becomes more understandable, and the clues that this is the case with the AGW issue are everywhere. Note, for example, how its adherents tend to elevate it above the level of scientific theory to that of dogmatic doctrine, to the point where some have suggested criminalizing "heretics" who question it. Note too the way in which its adherents will  refuse to countenance the possibility of any benefits to warming at all, as though the present climate is in such a Goldilocks condition of perfection that any deviation will lead to apocalypse. Or the way in which they refuse even to think about any other means of dealing with the potential problems of climate change -- e.g., carbon capture, geo-engineering -- than through huge forced reductions in global carbon emissions, regardless of the economic costs and questionable viability of such an approach. Or the way in which, at the first hint of rational skepticism, they lapse into irrelevant, moralistic rants about wasteful lifestyles, consumer societies, capitalist depradation, limits to growth, industrial civilization, technology, plastic, war, and humankind as a cancer on the planet, etc., etc.

So it's impossible to avoid the observation that, once we get beyond the immediate level of some degree of climatic warming resulting to some degree from human activity, we're in the realm of a quasi-religious belief system, defended with the sort of righteous intensity that we see in True Believers of all sorts. It's perhaps not surprising, however ironic, that we see this kind of phenomenon turning up in an age of supposed unbelief, particularly among those who tend to pride themselves on their freedom from religious superstition. We all need some source of meaning and value, after all, and in the absence of the old Gods, "going Green", "saving the planet", etc. can serve as well as any other New Age substitute. What's pernicious here, though, is the attempt to use science as cover -- that is, to try to make science serve one's religious and political ends. In attempting this, the Greens at one end of the political spectrum, including the AGW believers, make the same mistake as the creationists at the other end.

UPDATE: See the next post in the series for a test of whether AGW concern is rational or quasi-religious at base.

When Prophecy Fails

What happens when prophecies of eco-doom, in particular, fail? "Festinger and his colleagues predicted that the inevitable disconfirmation would be followed by an enthusiastic effort at proselytizing to seek social support and lessen the pain of disconfirmation." Climate change anyone?

The political is religious

"Religion has long been a powerful force in American politics, of course, for good and ill. The difference with the more traditional varieties of religion was the open acknowledgment that they were religious."

E.g., Newsweek editor Evan Thomas : "I mean, in a way, Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God."