James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , Friday, June 19, 2009, 18:25 (5634 days ago) @ David Turell

Sorry I've been away, folks, and I haven't had a chance to respond to some of your interesting entries. Since you mention Why Us? by James LeFanu, I thought some of you may be interested in a little critique of this book I wrote recently, as follows. (It touches on the origin of life problem, incidentally.) - The more I reflect on science, pseudo-science and all sorts of quasi-religious woo-woo, the more I see a world in general content to bag the intellectual and applied gains of science and yet content to hugely ... even proudly - ignorant about the scientific method and its heuristics. I'm afraid that this book reveals Mr LeFanu as part of that world. - To be fair, he is good enough on the history of his subject and the lucidity of his account makes those parts of his book an engaging read. Why Us? contains just enough good science to convince the reader of his erudition but not enough, finally, to convince. What, after all, is his argument? For me, the red flag was right there at his first reference (one of many) to "materialist science." This is a term - like "Darwinism" ... that is a firm favourite of the pseudo-scientific and those with a mysterian or religious agenda. These terms are often used to imply that there is another sort of science or that Darwin's theory is just one of several, equally deserving of our attention. But what, exactly, are these theories and what does non-materialist science look like? LeFanu is predictably silent. - He doesn't even seem to understand the word "material." At one point, risibly, he refers to gravity as being a "non-material" force, a point I'll touch on later. He strains to make space for the supernatural, a grievous error if he wishes to be taken seriously as a writer on science. LeFanu stops short of spelling out which particular brand of woo-woo he wants to insert into our understanding of the world, but his constant pejorative references to "materialism" makes it clear that he dearly wishes for one. - It was plain to me from early on in the book that LeFanu has a hidden religious agenda: what's remarkable is that he was so unsophisticated in leading us to it. He makes the common, and profoundly misguided, error of supposing that because we have yet to explain an aspect of nature, it is unexplainable. He forgets that to base any conclusion on the gaps in our current knowledge is a foolish endeavour, almost certainly doomed to failure: after all, science is a work-in-progress, a mere few centuries old. To be sure, it may well be the case that there are in-principle limits to scientific investigation. It may well be, for instance, that we can never devise a technology to test string theory and the "hard problem of consciousness" may forever elude our grasp (as you are doubtless aware, this term refers to the problem as to how the three pound mound of jelly in our skulls translates into subjective experience). But it's way too early to call: it takes a peculiarly brave or arrogant person to pronounce on the end of science, let alone to draw metaphysical conclusions based on the gaps in our current understanding. The tide of advancing science, and the retreat of magical and religious explanations ought to provide sufficient warning. All phenomena of nature, after all, are natural. And the magisterium of science is all of nature, a point over which LeFanu is plainly confused. - To base a metaphysic on such a profound misreading of the scientific project is plain wrong. He just doesn't seem to get science: at one point he complains about children being forced to learn the leaden facts gleaned as a result of scientific discovery. Actually, I agree with him ... there is nothing more off-putting to young minds than the regurgitation of facts. But the point here is that science is essentially a method, not a set of cold facts. Its objectivity and openness make it the only reliable way of testing truth claims about the world and on that, the most important of all quests we have undertaken as a species, it has been spectacularly successful. It is designed to compensate for the all the biases and limitations of human thought that so frequently lead us to unreliable conclusions. And it's self-corrective. What would LeFanu prefer in its place? He is predictably, if disappointingly, silent on this - and the reason is that, deep down, he must realise that there is, and will only ever be, one show in town when it comes to Nature and that is scientific enquiry. - Cont'd