Indistinguishable from magic

This entry is going to contain a lot of stuff that’s been swirling around in my mind for several weeks, and I’m not sure it all quite fits together, but I want to put some thoughts out there.

The first trigger was that I tangentially got involved in one of those discussions about whether science is better than religion. I normally don’t bother with that argument because it’s boring and frequently stupid, and also because I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison. Science is not only no good, but completely irrelevant, for organizing a regular rota of visitors to check up on an old lady with Alzheimer’s who is estranged from her daughter. Religion is not only no good, but completely irrelevant, for understanding how prions in the old lady’s brain aggregated to cause her to lose her memory and functionality. (I have no intention of asserting that atheists never visit lonely senile people, just that they don’t use science to do so, because they are not idiots.)

But anyway, I joined in with this discussion because Paul is intelligent and interesting, and there was an issue of terminology I was curious about. The discussion led to Paul asserting (relevantly):

I think it is fair to say that the established results of the physical and biological sciences are less likely to be overturned than those of the social sciences. Evolution is a fact, current theories of anthropology will be outdated in a few decades.

Woah! That really, really brought me up short. I mean, it’s trivially not true, but even if it were it wouldn’t be a good thing! The whole point of why science is “better” than religion as a way of understanding how the world works is that scientific theories and models get changed when someone finds new data that contradicts the old view. This is a really good example of the way that selling science as an alternative to religion does a massive disservice to science (I care surprisingly little about vocal atheists misrepresenting religion): it leads to people, intelligent people I respect, trying to treat science as a source of eternal verities. I also absolutely disagree that physical science is inherently better than social science; it just isn’t, but trying to cram science into the niche where religion or Humanism or other philosophical systems belong can really easily lead to that sort of misguided hierarchy between branches of science.

The thing is, “believing in” science in this way doesn’t just offend me as a scientist; it kills people. Let me talk about a lecture I attended recently. The talk was given by the DUETs people, who are working to put conventional, evidence-based medicine on an even more scientific basis. But they are not doing this by claiming that good science should still be true decades and centuries after findings are reported. Quite the opposite! They are claiming that good science, and good evidence-based medicine, should be flexible in how it responds to new evidence, and established views should be constantly challenged. This isn’t just to make people feel better intellectually, it’s a really critical aspect of patient safety.

Example 1: for many decades in the second half of the 20^th century, medical wisdom was that babies should be encouraged to sleep on their fronts. This advice was pretty universal, and even made it to Dr Spock’s famous book about childcare. It was based on the best evidence available at the time, but by the 70s there was an increasing body of evidence that sleeping prone is a significant risk factor for cot death. However, this evidence took a very long time (decades) to percolate into mainstream medical advice, because doctors and even the medical research community were reluctant to challenge the established scientific fact. They were especially reluctant to rely on data from soft sciences and observation of large human populations, in order to overturn data based on the “more reliable” physical experiments that led to the earlier bad advice. Dr Spock was wrong, not because he was a bad scientist (neither morally bad nor incompetent), but because cot death wasn’t really on the radar at the time he was writing. The data he relied on measured physical parameters of how well individual babies did, and was very likely correct that prone sleeping reproducibly improved those parameters in the short term. It was still wrong, and following Spock just because he had the authority accorded to a successful scientist still led to preventable deaths.

Example 2: some decades ago, there was some robust, reproducible, statistically valid scientific research showing that giving caffeine to premature babies helped to reduce the frequency of a condition called apnoea where the infant briefly ceases breathing. However, this research was often not applied clinically because there wasn’t any real evidence to show that reducing apnoea occurrence was particularly important. Nobody was being a bad scientist, nobody was following superstition or religious beliefs at the expense of evidence, there wasn’t even a big problem with doctors being unaware of the state of the art of research. It’s a perfectly medically valid decision that you don’t want to give a powerful drug with unknown long-term effects to premature babies who are extremely vulnerable anyway. It’s a perfectly valid ethical decision that you don’t want to do double blind randomized controlled trials on premature babies, with the very real possibility of harming them. Again, it took population studies and extrapolations from soft science observations to demonstrate that the frequency of apnoea is correlated with long-term risk of cerebral palsy and reduced life-expectancy. That’s a lot of avoidable disability and death because only one sort of clinical trial counts as properly scientific.

Example 3: some decades ago, there was some robust, statistically valid, properly designed and controlled research showing that steroids can be helpful in patients with severe brain injury. So doctors very sensibly started treating brain-injured patients with steroids. And scientists very sensibly did what scientists do, and repeated and extended the original experiments over the course of the intervening decades. They didn’t just assume that the original research must be “true” because it was “scientific”. They didn’t prefer to work on more glamorous, more prestigious new stuff at the expense of low-status confirmatory work. The effect size and statistical significance tended to decline with subsequent studies. This doesn’t mean that the original research was wrong, or that the original scientists were biased, incompetent or lying, it’s just an artefact of the way that scientific culture works. If you’re going to publish something novel, you have to have a pretty watertight case, with strong statistical significance and a relatively big effect, and that’s as it should be. But if you’re just confirming something that is already known, then rather less dramatic and conclusive results are acceptable because they support the established fact. And of course, we all know but can easily forget that 1 experiment in 100 will show that something is true at the 99% significance level purely by chance and sampling error!

After many decades, a consensus started to emerge that the effect of steroids in brain injured patients was small and not terribly reproducible. Not false, just marginal. Meanwhile, treating people with high doses of powerful steroids has known side-effects. The medical community started to suspect that the definite, quite serious harm caused by steroids was greater than the small, poorly reproducible benefits. But there wasn’t enough evidence to stop treating brain injured patients with drugs that might save at least some people’s lives, until there was a huge, expensive publicly funded trial involving 10,000 brain injury patients across the EU which definitively proved that steroids do more long-term harm than good in this situation. So, ok, you might well say that this is a happy ending, this is medical research and evidence-based medicine working exactly as they should. But you have to take into account that even an optimal scenario means several decades of people receiving treatments which are actually harmful on balance, and which undoubtedly caused unnecessary deaths and suffering during this time period.

What are the implications for “rationalist” rhetoric? I think the most important is that scientific research, and particularly opinions couched in scientific-sounding language which include numbers, technical jargon and statistics, should be treated with at least a comparable level of skepticism to “woo” and alternative medicine. Lay people can’t expect to directly evaluate every individual piece of research they read about; indeed scientists can’t do that either, because most of it is outside their field and they have to spend at least some of their time studying new questions rather than confirming, validating and challenging old conclusions. But just accepting something as fact because it’s “scientific” is not the way to deal with this!

Just accepting the authority of someone because they have scientific qualifications leads to things like believing Wakefield about MMR because he did experiments and used statistics and medical terms. It leads to believing a popular book based on extremely dubious research because the authors have some academic credentials. And because neuroscience is a “real” science, they have more authority to talk about anthropology and sexual psychology than, you know, actual anthropologists and sexuality researchers because human sciences don’t count. It leads to giving racist propaganda the benefit of the doubt, because it uses statistics and hard sciencey jargon. Yes, it is a basic principle of science that one should accept unpalatable results if they are supported by data from well-designed and well-executed experiments. But all those people who piously recite this principle in response to badly-designed, biased and thoroughly debunked “experiments” “proving” that white people are inherently superior to other ethnic groups are strangely unwilling to give the same benefit of the doubt to the vast body of good research indicating that, you know, racism actually harms people. True, you can’t weigh and measure those harms, you can’t do double-blind experiments, but that doesn’t mean that social science is just a matter of what’s politically fashionable just now.

And that brings me on to my second point: if you believe that science is the best way of looking at the world, you should also accept that social science is the best way of studying human societies! That’s especially the case if you (or the journalists you rely on for your information) can’t tell the difference between actual physical / natural science and people using vaguely sciencey technobabble, but even good physics is relatively unhelpful for looking at social and cultural phenomena.

And yes, that goes for medicine too; there is lots of really vital medical information that just isn’t going to be found by doing randomized controlled trials and measuring the physical outcomes and applying statistics. Partly because a lot of randomized controlled trials that would be informative are also unethical. And partly because the information that can be measured physically isn’t always the most important; “how fast do babies put on weight?” can be measured easily, but a more important research question is “how likely are babies to die for no discernible reason?”

Drug trials are (relatively) easy to carry out in the time-honoured “hard” science way; you give the drug to half the patients and a placebo to the other half, and you measure objective parameters about how well the two groups do. I’m in no way arguing against doing this kind of experiment – hell, I spend most of my working life doing that myself – but it doesn’t mean that drugs are the best possible treatment for all possible conditions! For example most patients with joint pain would prefer physiotherapy and exercise rather than strong painkillers (and by the way, the reason I know this is because social scientists did serious research into the issue, not because some arrogant biologist assumed that his credentials totally qualified him to throw together an internet survey.) There is some evidence that the former has more benefits and fewer side-effects for a greater proportion of patients than the latter. But it’s rather harder to do a double-blind trial of physiotherapy, and you can’t use pure bioscience to answer questions like “how well do patients on this regime integrate into their communities and lead normal lives?” which may be as important as “what is the level of pain-related chemicals in the bloodstream of patients taking this drug versus a placebo?”

And thirdly, I suppose, don’t put too much faith in the scientific process. In the best possible circumstances it is slow and inefficient and people get harmed while science is sorting out the answer to difficult questions. When we’re talking about medicine, individual variation within the population is inevitable, and however good the evidence is for a particular treatment, that best treatment will do nothing for or actively harm a proportion of patients. And to be honest, the best possible circumstances don’t always apply; it’s hopelessly naive to believe that all science is pure and unbiased and free of the influence of culture and political and financial considerations! Criticize superstition and woo and political bias, of course, but don’t couch your criticisms in terms of assuming that the scientific mainstream is always right. That’s bad rhetoric and it’s atrociously bad science.

Let’s discuss logic

Consider the following pair of statements:

A] God created the world.
B] A combination of random mutation and natural selection gives rise to new species.

There seems to be a persistent assumption that A implies not B. Even worse, there is a minor industry based on the false corollary that B implies not A, which really has no logical basis at all. This annoys me, because a lot of energy is being expended on debates which are logically stupid, but which also have harmful effects.

A is of course commonly known as creationism, and B is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution. I would argue that the two statements are almost independent. Without violating logic, a person could easily assent to both statements, or hold that both statements are false, as well as the more typical configuration of assenting to A and not B (the stereotypical fundamentalist Christian creationist), or not A and B (the stereotypical strictly materialist atheist).

Consider, for example, a Buddhist who does not believe statement A, because he holds that the world has always existed, and that there is no supreme being who could reasonably described by the English word God. I don’t think we can predict anything about what this person believes about whether or not new species evolve by mutation and natural selection. Consider also a positivist materialist type who is absolutely convinced that no such thing as a deity could possibly exist (not A). There is no reason to assume that this person believes in Darwinian evolution (B); she could for example be a strict neutralist, who believes that the persistence of some variants in a population is totally stochastic and natural selection has no significant effect. As for someone who assents to both A and B, I don’t have to make up an example; I myself hold both statements to be true (though my attitude towards the two statements is not at all identical).

Clearly the root of the problem is not in fact poor logic, it’s the existence of a very vocal group of people who say that they believe A, when in fact they also believe α, namely that the creation account in the book of Genesis is “literally” true. α can reasonably be said to imply not B, because if all the species were there at the moment of creation, then there is no speciation and no evolution. In fact, it’s not totally unreasonable to say that α and B are fully mutually exclusive; B doesn’t strictly imply not α (because Genesis could be literally true, but the standard interpretation of its literal truth could be wrong), but it’s close enough.

The people who are putting serious effort into convincing everybody of α and not B are, I believe, rather dangerous. Let’s call them political Creationists (to distinguish them from the much larger group of everybody in the world who believes A; that distinction is going to be important for the development of this argument). I don’t think that ultimately, political Creationists really care whether the account in Genesis is literally true. The originators of this philosophy are American fundamentalist Christians, and they have two rather unsavoury aims. The first is to force their brand of Christianity into a position of direct political influence, including in public schools. That means they’re working to undermine the US Constitution whose First Amendment prohibits establishment of any religion. In one way that’s kind of a local issue, but American politics does tend to spill over into the rest of the world.

The second aim is to undermine the credibility of science in general. In order to increase the powerbase of a fundamentalist religion, political Creationists are trying to make critical thinking more difficult. That’s what makes it really scary for those of us who are not Americans. It also explains why people who are not at all American fundamentalist Christians are getting involved in this, including a growing minority of Muslims and a few rather wacky Jews, as well as some other Christian groups. It seems like these other groups want a slice of the power that fundamentalists in the US are accumulating, and political Creationism looks like a way to achieve that.

It’s understandable that people are worried about this phenomenon. But I find there’s a big problem with the measures being taken to combat it. I think the people who are writing books and making TV programmes in which they eagerly try to convince people that evolution really does happen, claiming that this shows all religion is false, are actually allowing the unpleasant element to frame the debate. I am not saying that arguing with them gives them legitimacy, exactly, but more that arguing with them on their terms is already giving them a significant advantage, even if their arguments are weaker. (There’s also the fact that the militant atheist crowd annoy me because of the lack of logic mentioned at the start of this post; there’s no good reason to assume that all people with any religious views at all necessarily believe α, and it’s entirely fallacious to claim that evidence in favour of evolution is evidence in favour of atheism.) But more seriously, arguing as if verifying the Darwinian view somehow “proves” that God doesn’t exist (B implies not A), is only encouraging people who don’t understand or don’t find the theory of evolution satisfying towards the theist, creationist view (not B implies A). For one thing the theory of evolution is hard to understand and not at all intuitive. For a second thing, Darwin himself said some things that were wrong, and other evolutionary biologists have also occasionally said wrong things. Nobody sensible is claiming that scientists are infallible. But the way the debate is being framed by the political Creationists, and the way that framing is accepted by the militant atheists, make it tempting to infer that if Darwin was wrong, then fundamentalist Christians must be right.

In order to “win”, all the political Creationists need to do is to convince people that there’s a legitimate controversy about the theory of evolution. They don’t have to convince people that their version of the origins of life is correct, simply that the standard scientific model is “just a theory”, and it’s a matter of pure personal preference whether you decide to “believe” in evolution or in literal-according-to-the-fundamentalist-interpretation-of-Genesis Creationism. That’s enough to challenge the scientific edifice. Once this false controversy is legitimized, it’s easy to promote other similar false controversies, because you’ve encouraged an atmosphere where the scientific method is worthless, and it’s all just a matter of what view seems most appealing. There are similar bits of propaganda about climate change, with a false controversy about whether human activity is altering the global environment or whether God promised there would never be another flood so no person of faith needs to worry about sea levels rising. And about the effectiveness of various kinds of contraception and exactly how certain medical procedures work. If there’s believed to be a controversy, most people’s sense of fairness means that they want to give equal consideration to the two “sides”, even if in fact one side is utterly disingenuous and will say anything until they come up with something that sounds plausible, while the other is based on empirical evidence and entirely open to legitimate challenges.

Let me make a note about the different values of belief for the two statements. A is clearly a statement of religious belief. You can try to challenge it on logical or empirical grounds if you really want to, but you’re probably just going to end up annoying the people who hold the belief. I would venture that the vast majority of people who hold religious beliefs do not hold them because they are completely convinced by some practical evidence or some irrefutable logic. They hold the beliefs because they find them emotionally appealing, or perhaps because they come from a community where those beliefs are common currency. That goes for a lot of atheism too, I would argue. People who hold a particular philosophical or religious belief may try to rationalize it by presenting arguments and evidence, but in the end the justification is primarily a way to make them feel better about themselves, it’s not the reason for believing a certain way. (My personal opinion is that anyone who claims they can “prove” God’s existence is believing in something that isn’t God, and anyone who claims they can prove God’s non-existence has misunderstood the nature of religion.)

B is a scientific theory. I happen to think the evidence for it is pretty solid at this point, and it does seem to make good predictions about how biology works. Rationalists defending the theory of evolution often make pious (sic) pronouncements about how scientific theory can always be challenged by new evidence or a better interpretation of current evidence. In principle that’s true, but really, how many people have personally examined all the evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution and found it satisfactory? I know I haven’t, and I’m a professional biologist! So to some extent people believe B as a matter of trust; we believe in the scientific method, with its empiricism, its peer review, its assumption of induction. And we believe in the scientific establishment as people who are true to the principles of the scientific method, and who genuinely are willing to revise their models when new evidence appears. We accept things as being true because scientists have come to a consensus on them, which is essentially an argument from authority, when it comes down to it.

Now, I do happen to think that science is about the best method we have of understanding the world. But I also think that we shouldn’t go too far in assuming that “Science” has access to the Ultimate Truth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is an element of trust and assumptions involved. This situation also implies that scientists have a responsibility to communicate their results clearly and honestly to the non-scientific world, and people who are not scientists have a responsibility to be educated enough to maintain a reasonable level of skepticism.

Anyway, the main conclusion is that statements A and B are independent because they are different kinds of statements. If people want to argue for or against one, they shouldn’t muddy the waters by trying to talk about the other. The secondary conclusion is that there are some extremely unpleasant people who have a vested interest in convincing people of not B, and that decent people should be very careful in how they argue against such unpleasant elements, to avoid accidentally playing to their hidden aims.

Science and religion

A random passer-by contacted me to ask: Is it difficult to reconcile science and religion? The flippant answer is: in my world, they never really quarrelled. But I thought I might expand a bit on that, especially as a few people expressed interest in seeing my thoughts on the topic when I alluded to it.

I think asking this kind of question relies on certain (often unstated) assumptions about both science and religion. So let me have a go at defining why I am not religious in the sense that some random stranger probably assumes, and also why science is different from the conception of it I think the questioner holds.

I can’t remember who it was that said we shouldn’t assume that a certain strand of Fundamentalist American Protestantism represents all religion. (I also suspect that the media portrayal even of that sort of religion is an unfair caricature, but I’m no expert.) My religion, Reform Judaism, is closer to that assumed model than many; we’re working from a similar founding principle of monotheism, and we have one major text, the Old Testament, more or less in common. So we’re using some of the same metaphors. But I do think the differences between my religious approach and that stereotype is more profound than just, I’m nice and tolerant and emphatically non-proselytizing whereas they are mean old fundamentalists who hate gay people and want most of the world to go to Hell.

So what does religion mean to me? I will admit I am somewhat embarrassed about talking about my personal beliefs and religious understanding (you’ll get a readier answer if you ask personal questions about, say, sexuality, for sure). But I’ll have a go, and if you want to ask further questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

The starting point of my religion is monotheism: God is One, and almost everything else is up for grabs, but not that. God is so utterly unique that it is not possible to describe or define God, because God can not be compared to any material thing. There is some relationship between the nature of God and the nature of the universe and existence, which for a limited human understanding is partially approximated by talking of God as the Creator.

So far so deist; I suppose where religion comes in is that I believe that this God has, so to speak, chosen to enter into a relationship with human beings. Revelation, not creation, strikes me as the real miracle. By revelation I don’t necessarily mean that a particular set of texts were dictated word for word by God, but that God has given people some means by which they can try to relate to the Divine, however paradoxical this may be for a God who is so utterly unique and undefinable. I’m sorry if this is couched in rather abstract terms, but that’s the best I can manage for an explanation.

Claiming to know how revelation works would be like claiming to know how God works, which I emphatically don’t (to me, that is essentially idolatry). But it seems to me that part of it is living within and exploring the system defined by centuries of religious thought. And part of it is looking for God within God’s creation. Believing that God created everything we can observe (and probably a whole load of things beyond what we can observe too) doesn’t at all seem incompatible with wanting to know exactly how the universe works. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my belief in a Divine Creator encourages me to study creation in as much detail as I am able.

Science, to put it very simply, seems like one of the best tools available for doing this. To me, science is definitely a tool, a method, not a collection of facts. The only way science can be seen as being in conflict with religion is if science makes one set of assertions which conflict with the assertions made by a particular religion. I don’t think science is about making assertions anyway; it’s about making deductions from experiments to construct falsifiable hypotheses. And my religion is not making the kinds of assertions that conflict with empirical evidence either; I don’t hold it as an article of faith that the world was created in 7 days 6000 years ago. This isn’t because I have rejected that belief in favour of scientifically derived facts about the history of the universe, but because my religion never asserted that in the first place.

I am aware that to certain people at certain times, science has meant rational positivism or dogmatic materialism. If science is seen as being atheist by definition, then it’s pretty circular to point out that it is in conflict with theistic religions! But that’s not what science means to me. Equally, I am aware that some religious people, including a minority of Jews, believe that the Bible is literally true and discusses actual historical facts. That belief does require one to deny some empirically derived models of things like cosmology, evolution, and what happened several thousand years ago. I don’t think that denying those models is to reject science altogether, because science is not a dogma, but it is very likely to lead to rejecting science.

Anyway, that is not my attitude to the Bible; my religious tradition has a very creative relationship with sacred texts. They are spiritual and moral guides, and they give people an insight, as far as it is possible for finite human beings to have such insight (see above about the miracle of revelation) into the nature of God. My religion has no problem with telling God to butt out of discussions of Biblical interpretation, since God gave the text to us and our human perspective. And it has no problem with making interpretations such as from creating an imagined dialogue between Jonah and the whale about theology and eschatology, to creating an elaborate legal and practical system of separating meat products from dairy products based on the injunction not to boil a young animal in its mother’s milk. So it’s a long way from being a literalist tradition!

Science is a good tool for understanding how the material world works, and the latter is a religious duty for me personally, as I understand these things. Science is not a good tool for probing the question of whether there is anything out there which is metaphysical, whether God or anything else. Because by definition if metaphysical entities do exist, they are not susceptible to empirical analysis. God who can’t be defined is also God who can’t be measured or tested or analysed. Science is not a tool at all for defining moral values, because it isn’t really even possible to frame the right questions in a scientific way. But science may well be a good tool for working out the practical consequences of moral values once defined.

So, primarily I see science as a religious value because as a scientist, I am devoting a great part of my life to studying an aspect of how God’s creation works. It’s also a religious value because using science to know more about how the world works helps people to create technology to improve the human condition. This is not an essay about technology and religion, but if you are curious, I am (from a religious standpoint) absolutely pro technology. My religion does not give value to leaving God’s creation in its so-called “natural” state; we are specifically enjoined to have dominion over the earth, and later tradition has built on this to regard people as God’s partners in creation. The world is not perfect; to regard it as such is pretty insulting. I don’t claim to know why God decided to create an imperfect world, but I see it as a core religious value to try to improve and repair it.

As it happens I have ended up in a quasi-medical field. It’s easy to justify that helping to find better cancer treatments is a good thing for a religious person to be doing, but I am very suspicious of the attitude that directly medical research is somehow worthier than any other kind. Primarily, I think what I do is morally good because it adds to human knowledge, and that’s true of much less directly applied scientific research. I also think it’s religiously good to try to maximize one’s potential as a human being, and science is something that I happen to be good at so it seems morally right for me to put effort into that area.