Professor Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy, Polyani Professor for the Public Understanding of Science (having succeeded Richard Dawkins in the Chair), is currently presenting a series of TV programmes about mathematics and nature entitled ‘The Code’. Viewers could be forgiven for believing that what he is presenting is a mainstream view of mathematics rather than peddling his own peculiar brand of atheistic metaphysics. Since no appropriate caveats have been employed by the BBC, we feel it necessary to make a few of our own.

Firstly, Du Sautoy’s view that, as the Pythagoreans expressed it, ‘Number is everything’ is of very ancient pedigree; but, nothwithstanding, it is undemonstrable (which should be anathema to a mathematician) and a faith-based religious concept. Secondly, philosophers of mathematics and informed students of mathematics know that there is, to date, no satisfactory understanding of the relationship, if any, between mathematics and reality; to suggest that there is a relationship, and what such a relationship might be, is an act of faith. And thirdly, it is very unfortunate for scientists to be working with mathematics as though mathematics itself is the original reality to which the physical world ‘must’ conform through such things as ‘laws’; science has been hideously corrupted in the last 80 years because of this.

Some Christians might be heartened to see and hear Du Sautoy suggesting that numbers are at the root of all reality, that this is in some way all grist to the mill of Intelligent Design. Not so fast: Du Sautoy is an avowed atheist (who not very wittily gives his religion as ‘Arsenal’) who by his own admission is trying a more ‘softly softly’ approach than Richard ‘The Rottweiler’ Dawkins (whom all can see is a bigoted fanatic) and is not appealing to design, or even apparent design, but to some mysterious entity he calls ‘The Code’. A code at the very least implies information content, but The Code (as a proper noun and with the definite article) suggests something unique and powerful. Thus Du Sautoy:

…underlying everything that surrounds us, from the natural world to the cities we live in, there is a hidden code that explains why things look and behave they way they do.

[This hidden code (‘The Code’)] has the power to unlock the laws that govern the universe.

The Code is the truth of the universe, and its numbers dictate the way the world must be.

So, this hidden code, this entity that Du Sautoy calls ‘The Code’, has total and complete explanatory power, is identical to Absolute Truth, can lead us into All Truth, and is completely deterministic. This is unquestionably a religious position. And it is none other than the old heresy of Pythagoras, the pagan Greek philosopher, re-worked by gnostics, Kabbalists, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Illuminists, and now, it appears, New Atheists. What a wheeze if they can pull this one off!

Most people know very little about Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans other than the Pythagorean Theorem of the triangle, which was attributed to Pythagoras, but was most certainly known and used for well over 1000 years before Pythagoras lived. Pity. Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century mathematician and philosopher, whilst unsympathetic to Pythagoras, stated,

I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as he was in the sphere of thought.

Not someone we should have forgotten about, then.

Pythagoras and his followers believed that all relations could be reduced to number relations, that mathematics (holos) is the real reality, while the world (cosmos) is a construct of our minds. The Pythagorean ontology was that ‘The Essence of Being Is Number’, number being understood to be ‘that which prior to all things subsists…by which and from which all things are coordinated, and remain connumerated in an indissoluble order.’ (Christians will notice a usurpation of the divine Logos therein). The Pythagorean philosophy was dominated by the ideal that numbers were not merely symbols of reality, but were the final substance of real things.

Aristotle fleshes this out in his Metaphysics, where he states that the Pythagoreans

…believed that the principles of mathematics were also the principles of all things that be. Now, since the principles of mathematics are numbers, and they thought they found in numbers, more than in fire and earth and water, similarities with things that are and that become (they judged, for example, that justice was a particular property of numbers, the soul and mind another, opportunity another, and similarly, so to say, anything else), and since furthermore they saw expressed by numbers the properties and the ratios of harmony, since finally everything in nature appeared to them to be similar to numbers, and numbers appeared to be first among all there is in nature, they thought that the elements of numbers were the elements of all that there is, and that the whole world was harmony and number.

Jetting around the world, the place Du Sautoy starts the programme is Chartres cathedral, the first of the great French Gothic cathedrals. The association is not lost on us. In the Middle Ages the cathedral school at Chartres was the centre for revival and development of Pythagorean ideas, and there is even a sculpture of Pythagoras in the cathedral. The cathedral was built on the site of a Druid temple, the crypt beneath the cathedral being a dolmenic chamber. Diodorus Siculus, writing in 36 BC, describes how these Druids followed Pythagorean teachings, and it is today one of the main centres for those interested in the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Lost Ark, the Holy Grail, bloodlines and all that baggage. The cathedral contains a mass of Masonic, gnostic, pagan, astrological and Pythagorean symbols. In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, his fictional character Robert Langdon lectures on the pagan symbolism of Chartres cathedral. Starting the TV series here is a dead giveaway.

At least the masters of Chartres tried to ‘Christianize’ some of the ideas and put them to some use in theology, hence as Otto von Simson (The Gothic Cathedral, Harper & Row, New York, 1956) states,

The masters of Chartres, like the…Pythagoreans of all ages, were obsessed with mathematics: it was considered the link between God and the world, the magical tool that would unlock the secrets of both.

David J. Stucki remarks

…from the dawn of Western Civilization and through the Middle Ages the heart of mathematics was strongly tied to religious thought. Eventually, however, the humanism of the Renaissance and the empiricism of the Scientific Revolution began to open the door for the breakdown of this marriage. Scientism, the granting of absolute authority to the empirical and objective, became the mistress of the modern mind. The resulting ‘mathematization’ of science and culture (Howell & Bradley, 2001) had a myriad of consequences. The Church was no longer perceived as having a monopoly on Truth. The success of mathematics in accounting for the structure and behavior of the physical universe ultimately led to a naturalistic version of the Pythagorean ontology that ‘Everything is number.’ The divorce of theology and mathematics in the modern age created the 20th century crisis of ‘Foundationalism’ in mathematical philosophy…[and] epistemological progress in mathematics is devastating to Christian theology under the Pythagorean legacy.

Clearly the Pythagoreans are still around; Du Sautoy for one, but also an increasing number of physicists are being seduced into thinking that ‘the principles of mathematics are also the principles of all things that be’, that somehow mathematics is primary reality.

For example, I. V. Volovich, CERN physicist, in his paper Number theory as the ultimate physical theory concludes that

the fundamental entities of which we consider our Universe to be composed cannot be particles, fields or strings but numbers.

Others have dived into the deep end, for example Vasilios Gardiakos:

That ‘all is number’ will allow us to create what many theologians thought only God was capable of…all can be numerated and computerized…Mathematics is the most basic requirement for existence. It has no mass, dimension and time and yet it can create these and many more phenomena.

The Thales era which brought us science is near the end. It is to be followed by the Pythagorean era with…the realization that ‘all is number’…we will gain the vision that ‘all is mathematics’…This is the point that we begin to perceive our existence as numerical.

The philosophy of mathematics is a contentious issue. It explores, but never resolves (apart from theology), the debates between the Platonists and the Formalists, the Realists and the Nominalists. The Pythagoreans aim to cut through the debate by making both views redundant through asserting a radical third way, which aims to dominate the whole scientific enterprise.

Platonists/Realists believe that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind, declaring the existence of an abstract and immutable world apart from this material universe in which absolute mathematical truths reside. In this view, mathematicians do not create mathematics but discover it. But if these entities are not part of this universe, how can they be discovered and recognized? The standard answer to that it is by intuition or divine revelation and illumination, which are not attractive to atheists. Christians might be attracted to such a view, in that such entities ‘exist’ in the mind of God, (or somehow in God himself, who is transcendently not part of this universe, and yet immanent within it, though there is an ever-present danger of lapsing into panentheism when applying this to the created universe). St Augustine was generally Platonist in such things.

Formalists/Nominalists on the other hand deny the existence of mathematical entities, making mathematics a construction of the mind (whether the mind of man or the mind of God). In this view, mathematics is a very useful common language and tool that can help us try to make sense of the world, and can lead us into some very fruitful lines of enquiry, but which is nonetheless conventional rather than real. Augustine interestingly had some thoughts along these lines as well, that numbers are the universal language conveyed by God to us as confirmation of the truth.

Whereas Realists and Nominalists are agreed that there are no mathematical entities within this universe, the Pythagoreans assert that mathematical entities are not only within the universe, but actually comprise the universe: this is attractive to reductionist atheists. In summary:

Realism: asserts that mathematical entities exist outside the reality of the universe. The connexion, if any, between these entities and reality is a debatable issue.

Nominalism: asserts that there are no mathematical entities; mathematics is a product of the mind apart from reality.

Pythagoreanism: asserts that there are mathematical entities within the universe, which constitute the whole of reality: all else is a product of the mind.

We will explore the development of these philosophical concepts in subsequent posts, but suffice for now to say that Marcus du Sautoy’s Pythagoreanism (or Neopythagoreanism) is in no way representative of the mathematics or physics community at large, and it is disingenuous that the BBC are promoting what amounts to a religious view under cover of a programme about patterns in the world.

St Augustine had said,

If you see anything at all that has measure, number, and order, do not hesitate to attribute it to God as craftsman.

Just imagine the howls of disapproval, and the threats by the New Atheists, if this TV series had introduced a subtext of Intelligent Design underlying the patterns and numbers highlighted!

Luther's room where he engaged in 'table talk' over meals with his students

It never ceases to amaze how scientific myths manage to get recycled ad nauseam. We have all heard the absurd myth that people once believed the earth was flat, but then (since characters are involved) there is the more mischievous myth that the Protestant Reformers, Luther and Calvin, vehemently opposed Copernicus. In truth, you will find nothing in their writings, their letters, their sermons or any other productions where Copernicus is even mentioned. But, amazingly, in textbooks you will find that “Luther attacked Copernicus” (Berman and Evans, Exploring the Cosmos).

I recently read a comment stating that Martin Luther called Copernicus “the fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down” and that Copernicus found it difficult to get his work published by the University at Wittenberg, and that his supporters found it difficult to get or retain jobs there.

You will search in vain within the large corpus of Luther’s works to find the abovementioned quote, or anything like it. If anyone has the candour to give a reference it will finally be traced back to an entry in the Tischreden or ‘table talk’, which contains a lot of highly entertaining but doubtless embellished and spurious material that purports to be things Luther said at the dinner table. These sayings were written down by dinner guests decades later and are practically worthless as a historical source.

The quote attributed to Luther is given by Anthony Lauterbach, who was one such dinner guest in 1539, and he says of the conversation:

There was mention of a certain astrologer who wanted to prove that the earth moves and not the sky, the sun, and the moon. This would be as if somebody were riding on a cart or in a ship and imagined that he was standing still while the earth and the trees were moving.

Luther is said to have remarked:

So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down.

Now, knowing Luther by his writings as we do, this is a very mild comment indeed. We should note that Luther was far from being a dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian when it came to the natural sciences, for in his Open Letter to The Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520), addressing the needs for reform of the university curricula, he wrote

Aristotle’s Physics…should be altogether discarded, together with all the rest of his books which boast of treating the things of nature…I venture to say that any potter has more knowledge of nature than is written in these books. It grieves me to the heart that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has with his false words deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians. God has sent him as a plague upon us for our sins.

Luther held that the world was on the brink of a scientific revolution, where nature would be studied for what it was rather than described according to unfounded dogmatism. If we are going to admit ‘table talk’, then let us be sure to include the following:

We are at the dawn of a new era, for we are beginning to recover the knowledge of the external world that we lost through the fall of Adam. We now observe created things properly, and not as formerly under the Papacy.

Secondly, it is doubtful whether the ‘fellow’ referred to was Copernicus because the conversation over dinner was four years before Copernicus even published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. On the face of it, it is also doubtful whether the issue was heliocentrism at all; rather, the subject appears to be the apparent diurnal cycling of the sky, moon and sun that we now know to be due to the rotation of the earth on its axis. Some very eminent natural philosophers and theologians such as Jean Buridan, rector of the University of Paris, bishop Nicole Oresme and cardinal Nicholas de Cusa had proposed the rotation of the earth to explain these phenomena, long before Luther’s day. But even if it referred to relative motion, De Cusa, whose writings had decisively influenced Luther, had rightly stated back in the mid-fifteenth century that

Whether a man is on the earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless centre, and that all other things are in motion

In fact, it is because of the very truth of relativity that De Cusa outlines that the commonsense ‘default’ view was bound to remain the apparent one from the position of a terrestrial observer, i.e. of a geocentric cosmos with a non-rotating earth, until shown otherwise. So, of course, if other more unusual ideas were to get traction then they would indeed turn the whole of astronomy upside down.

Contrary to popular opinion, Ptolemaic-style epicycles were still required in Copernicus’ heliocentric system to match observational data since perfect circular motion was assumed: Kepler’s discovery that planets orbited the sun in ellipses, thus obviating the necessity for epicycles, was still some decades off in the future. As noted, there was no compelling observational evidence in favour of heliocentrism in Luther’s day: confirmation that at least some of the planets orbited the sun would have to wait until the telescope (invented in 1608) revealed the phases of Mercury and Venus, and even then there was no observational evidence in favour of a Copernican heliocentric model over the geo-heliocentric model of Tycho Brahe, which had all the planets (other than earth) orbiting the sun, and the sun and the moon in orbit around the earth.

Back in the 1530s we have Luther accepting astronomy as a hard science, but rejecting astrology as idolatry and superstitious as beyond empirical demonstration. Again, if we are going to admit ‘table talk’ then we have the following clear distinctions:

I like astronomy and mathematics, which rely upon demonstrations and sure proofs. As for astrology, it is nothing.

Astrology is no art; it has no principle, no demonstration, whereupon we may take sure footing; it is all haphazard work…Astronomy, on the contrary, I like.

And just as for astrology, there was not a scrap of empirical evidence in favour of heliocentrism in the 1530s, so as Burtt has pointed out (The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science):

sensible men all over Europe, especially the most empirically minded, would have pronounced it a wild appeal to accept the premature fruits of an uncontrolled imagination, in preference to the solid inductions, built up gradually through the ages, of men’s confirmed sense experience

Given the historical context in the 1530s, Luther’s alleged remark about a pretentious astrologer advancing indemonstrable novelties that would require astronomy to be turned on its head is quite innocuous, as well as rather witty and wonderfully prescient. It is extremely bad scholarship to project the knowledge and understanding we enjoy today back onto the knowledge and understanding that men could have had in the past. Thus the treatment that some historians have made of an alleged remark over a dinner table, the sentiments of which are nowhere found in Luther’s writings, is nothing short of disgraceful hubris: Neyman (The Heritage of Copernicus) calls Luther’s remark the “crudest imaginable piece of dogmatism”, and Butterfield (The Origins of Modern Science 1300 – 1800) brands it a “scathing condemnation”. Kearny (Science and Change 1500 – 1700) writes that Luther’s attitude in the matter was similar to a savage looking at a watch. These writers are very hypocritically indulging in the very behaviour they are baselessly accusing Luther of, and demonstrating their biases to boot.

As for the idea that the Lutherans and the University of Wittenberg made it difficult for the Copernicans, let us examine the testimony of history. But first, what do the propagandists say about it: the notorious anti-Christian propagandist Andrew Dickson White wrote that “all branches of the Protestant Church …vied with each other in denouncing the Copernican doctrine”. But whatever White says about the Church, the opposite is likely to be a surer guide to the truth. Even the esteemed scholar of Copernicus, Thomas Kuhn, said that “Protestant leaders like Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon led in…urging repression of Copernicans”.

Ultimately, it was none other than Copernicus himself who held off publishing his treatise. He states in the work itself that he had been sitting on it for 36 years.  Copernicus had, in fact, written his first work on heliocentrism, an untitled forty-page treatise now known as Commentariolus, as far back as 1514 or earlier, and had distributed it to close friends. Then in 1533, a series of lectures was given in Rome outlining Copernicus’ theory, which were attended by Pope Clement VII and several cardinals, who showed considerable interest in the heliocentric hypothesis. Indeed, in 1536  cardinal Nicholas Schönberg of Capua wrote to Copernicus from Rome requesting a copy of his writings “at the earliest possible moment”. Copernicus himself mentions in De Revolutionibus that cardinal Schönberg, as well as the Roman Catholic bishop of Chelmo, Tiedemann Giese,  and many others had encouraged him to publish his heliocentric theory. But it was eventually the Lutherans from the University of Wittenberg who sought him out, convinced him of the capabilities of the printers, did a ‘test marketing’ of his ideas, and undertook to see the whole project through to completion, with Osiander, a Lutheran minister, penning the preface to head off criticism and allow wider acceptance and dissemination. How did this come about?

Let’s remember that Copernicus, superbly educated though he was, was living in a Polish backwater. As Owen Gingerich has pointed out,

On the one hand, he was far from the major international centers of printing that could profitably handle a book as large and technical as De revolutionibus. On the other, his manuscript was still full of numerical inconsistencies…

Furthermore, Copernicus was far from academic centers, thereby lacking the stimulation of technically trained colleagues with whom he could discuss his work. Then, in 1539, the situation changed: a young professor from the Lutheran University of Wittenberg arrived to learn about the new cosmology.

The Lutherans at the University of Wittenberg would sort all his difficulties.

Luther’s right hand man Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) was an educator who re-organized the whole educational system of Germany, founding and reforming several of its universities. He presided over the curriculum at the University of Wittenberg, and in 1536 helped Georg Rheticus obtain an appointment teaching astronomy and mathematics at the university. In 1539, Melanchthon arranged a two-year leave for Rheticus to study the technical capabilities of the printers and make contact with eminent astronomers. Rheticus took this opportunity to visit Copernicus in Frauenburg (now Frombork), Poland, and spent most of his two years with him. Rheticus brought Copernicus books in mathematics, and demonstrated the quality of printing for technical treatises that was available in German-speaking cities. Copernicus in turn entrusted Rheticus with a copy of his early Commentariolus (this particular copy eventually ended up with Tycho Brahe). Since Luther’s alleged comment dates from around 1539, it is possible that some very tentative ideas about heliocentrism had filtered back to Wittenberg via Rheticus.

Though Copernicus was reluctant to publish his heliocentric theory, he allowed Rheticus to publish a short summary, Narratio Prima, to test the waters: First report to Johann Schöner on the Books of the Revolutions of the learned gentleman and distinguished mathematician, the Reverend Doctor Nicolaus Copernicus of Torun, Canon of Warmia, by a certain youth devoted to mathematics, which appeared in 1540. It was favourably received, and after two years, Rheticus finally convinced Copernicus to publish De Revolutionibus, and oversaw much of the printing of the book. On May 24, 1543 Copernicus was to hold a copy of the finished work on his deathbed.

Luther would not himself die for another three years. His right hand man, Philipp Melancthon accepted the importance of teaching Copernican ideas at the University of Wittenberg, and his son-in-law Caspar Peucer (1525-1602) taught astronomy there, educating the students in Copernicus’ treatise. As a result, the University of Wittenberg became the main European centre where Copernicus’ work was studied. Erasmus Reinhold (1511–1553), a leading mathematician and astronomer at Wittenberg who became dean and rector of the University, became interested in heliocentrism on the basis of reports from Rheticus even before the publication of De Revolutionibus. After publication, Melanchthon persuaded Albrecht Duke of Prussia to support Reinhold financially in the production of a new set of planetary tables from Copernicus’ work, called, after his patronage, the Prutenic Tables. Reinhold’s calculations paved the way for a more complete acceptance of heliocentrism when additional evidence became available through the work of Kepler, a devout Lutheran, and others.

As for Rheticus, he praised Copernicus in his treatises, for example in 1557, comparing him to one of the greatest of the ancient astronomers,

Nicholas Copernicus, the Hipparchus of our age, who is never praised enough…I have always cherished, esteemed, and honoured him not only as a teacher but also as a father.

Katherine Tredwell (The exact sciences in Lutheran Germany and Tudor England, PhD dissertation) has it right:

 The educational reforms of Philip Melanchthon…ensured that Wittenberg and other Lutheran universities produced a number of highly competent and creative astronomers…Lutheran mathematicians agreed that Copernican models were superior in some respects to existing astronomical models…Both the geocentric majority and the tiny group of heliocentrists expected that a complete course of astronomical studies would include both Ptolemaic and Copernican models.

Elizabethan authors frequently cited and even translated Lutheran works, suggesting that Lutheran influence played an important role in the English mathematical renaissance. Most readers turned to Lutheran sources for technical guidance, in part because Melanchthon’s followers had produced the leading works on Copernican astronomy.

None of this squares with the oft-repeated claim that Luther or the Lutherans regarded Copernicus as a fool, or suppressed or persecuted heliocentrists. Quite the reverse. As usual, the lie seems to travel better than the truth.

Galileo’s Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which argues for the superiority of the heliocentric Copernican over the geocentric Ptolemaic system, is a classic straw man argument. By 1632, astronomers had all but abandoned the Ptolemaic system, which had become untenable in the light of the evidence from telescopes for more than 20 years, which showed, for example, that Mercury and Venus orbited the sun. By that late stage, the majority of astronomers had adopted the geo-heliocentric model, such as that of Tycho Brahe, which had all the planets (other than earth) orbiting the sun, and the sun and the moon in orbit around the earth. Adapted to include a rotating earth, it was indistinguishable from the Copernican system on the basis of empirical observations of our ‘solar system’ from the vantage point of a terrestrial observer.

The Tychonic system was still highly regarded until the end of the seventeenth century when Newton’s discovery of principles of gravitation, and their application to the solar system, caused it to be abandoned as an explanation of reality, though it continues to this day as an elegant method for generating the terrestrial observer’s view of the motions of heavenly bodies in our solar system, for example in planetarium projectors.

So, Galileo was incapable of making a case in favour of Copernican heliocentrism over against the majority view of Tychonic geo-heliocentrism based on observation of the sun, moon and planets, and he could not do so based on physical principles as he rejected the idea of gravitation beyond the earth’s atmosphere and had never bothered to read up on Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which had been sitting on his bookshelf for over 20 years. He also believed that no practicable terrestrial experiments could establish whether the earth was in motion, for he says in his foreword “all experiments practicable upon the earth are insufficient measures for proving its mobility, since they are indifferently adaptable to an earth in motion or at rest.” Thus he deliberately contrived to make his case using the artifice of a straw man argument, with not even a mention of the then chiefest of the world systems, the Tychonic model.

That method of argument, putting up the discredited and disproved Ptolemaic system as his straw man, was bad enough. But labouring to advance a fanciful ‘proof’ for the motion of the earth (which we will later see he actually knew was refutable), Galileo claimed support in the terrestrial phenomenon of the tides, having dismissed the truth (since it could not serve his purpose) that the attraction of the moon was of primary importance. He put mention of the argument for the moon’s attraction into the mouth of Simplicio, the feeble apologist for Aristotle and Ptolemy, whose name also connotes ‘simpleton’ in Italian, simply to shoot it down:

There are many who refer the tides to the moon, saying that this has a particular dominion over the water. Lately a certain prelate has published a little tract wherein he says that the moon, wandering through the sky, attracts and draws up toward itself a heap of water which goes along following it…

To which Galileo’s alter ego in the Dialogue, Salviati, the learned apologist for Copernicus, cuts in with

Please, Simplicio, spare us the rest; I do not think there is any profit in spending the time to recount them, let alone the words to refute them. If you should give assent to any of these or to similar triflings, you would be wronging your own judgment.

No attempt to deal with the argument – just a put down. And later:

But among all the great men who have philosophized about this remarkable effect, I am more astonished at Kepler than at any other…[who has] lent his ear and his assent to the moon’s dominion over the waters, to occult properties, and to such puerilities.

Once again, there is no engagement with the argument, but instead a disgraceful put down of one of the greatest astronomers and scientists of all time. Kepler had recently died, so was unable to defend himself against the charge of assenting to puerilities. And the charge of having ‘lent his ear to occult properties’ such as gravitation was completely below the belt in Kepler’s personal situation since his great aunt had been burned at the stake as a witch, and Kepler had lost his own mother shortly after her being incarcerated and threatened with torture on similar charges. But still, Galileo was a nasty piece of work, who also played the religious hatred card when it suited him, tossing out epithets such as ‘heretic’ and ‘heresiarch’ against Protestants who were better at science than he.

Pope Urban VIII, an able mathematician and patron of the sciences, had quite rightly disagreed with Galileo’s line of reasoning that the tides proved the motion of the earth, and held that they were no proof at all. He had even granted Galileo six private audiences and had insisted that his own objections be included in the Dialogue, i.e. that Galileo’s argument for the tides was not compelling, and that the Creator was well able to order secondary causes in a way yet to be discovered and understood so as to cause the tides, without relying on the motion of the earth around the sun.

Indeed, Galileo’s argument, which in the foreword he describes as an ‘ingenious speculation’, was fallacious: the tides did not prove the motion of the earth around the sun, and nor did Galileo’s argument prove the tides: his argument was internally inconsistent, and logically led to the conclusion that tides would not occur at all. Urban was absolutely right to discern that, as was Kepler in attributing the tides to the attraction of the moon: the natural agency for the tides is gravitational attraction in the earth-moon system, which would only be intellectually apprehended in mathematical form towards the end of the century.

Faced with the demand to insert this ‘spoiler’ against his particularly fanciful ‘clincher’ (having dismissed the true explanation of the tides as occult puerilities not worthy of refutation), Galileo committed an act of gross stupidity and affront. One would have expected Urban’s reservations to be placed in the Dialogue in the mouth of the fair-minded interlocutor Sagredo, the representative of the intelligent, astute scholar, who was not credulous and and was sensibly sceptical – like Urban, in fact. But Galileo had spent his whole career thus far trying to make others look stupid, or plagiarizing their work, or claiming priority for their discoveries, in order to promote himself, and had made a whole host of enemies along the way.  He was now about to get his comeuppance. Urban had been his friend and supporter, but for no longer. Unable to pass up an opportunity to poke fun, Galileo left the Pope’s justifiable reservations about his contrived ‘proof’ of the motion of the earth to the very end, putting them into the mouth of Simplicio, the dim-witted dullard, whom he had contrived throughout the Dialogue to lose all the arguments, make an utter fool of himself, and be the butt of all the put downs. By the end of the book, the reader would know that anything Simplicio said was to be treated with contempt. So Galileo put the Pope’s argument into his mouth:

I maintain that your explanation of the tides is neither true nor conclusive, and that… God by his infinite power and wisdom might confer the reciprocal motion of the oceans in some other way than by making the containing vessel move…[and] beyond the apprehension of our intellect…this being so, it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the Divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own.

And to Sagredo, the fair-minded interlocutor, he gave the jaw-dropping put down to Urban’s reservations, the irony dripping off the page with undisguised sarcasm:

What admirable and angelic doctrine! And so well in accord with another doctrine, also Divine, which, while granting us the liberty to debate about the constitution of the universe (perhaps so that the working of the human mind will not become attenuated or grow lethargic), adds that we cannot discover the work of His hands.

Such impious sarcasm is likely to get the hackles up on any pious person. Quite understandably, Urban was personally offended, and enraged, and forever maintained that Galileo had tricked him. And so he had. Yet Galileo got off pretty lightly, in the circumstances.

But did Galileo himself hold to the Copernican system that is contrived to come out on top throughout this straw man contest? After publication he affirmed under oath his own personal conviction that

I have neither held nor defended the opinion of the earth’s motion and sun’s stability; on the contrary…Copernicus’s reasons are invalid and inconclusive. (April 10, 1633)

However, the very foreword in the Dialogue ‘To the discerning reader’ states

I have taken the Copernican side in the discourse…striving by every artifice to represent it as superior to supposing the earth motionless.

So, was this just artifice, some form of rhetorical and intellectual sport? Was he, for the sheer thrill of it, ‘taking side’ in something that he did not himself believe? He would portray it as such, for in testimony under oath in April 30, 1633 he confirmed that

I freely confess that…a reader, unaware of my intention, would have had reason to form the opinion that the arguments for the false side [N.B. Galileo here means Copernicanism]…were so stated as to be capable of convincing because of their strength. In particular, two arguments, one based on sunspots and the other on the tides, are presented favourably to the reader as being strong and powerful…I inwardly and truly did and do hold them to be inconclusive and refutable…I resorted to that natural gratification everyone feels for his own subtleties and for showing himself to be cleverer than the average man, by finding ingenious and apparent considerations of probability even in favour of false propositions…My error then was – and I confess it – one of vain ambition, sheer ignorance, and culpable negligence.

So, did a heliocentric model better than Copernicus’ attract him? Did he have any better ideas for a world system? Apparently not, for he categorically states:

I still hold Ptolemy’s opinion as actually true and certain, namely the immovability of the earth and the motion of the sun.

In regard to my writing of the Dialogue now published, I did not write thus because I held Copernicus’s opinion to be true…I do not hold the opinion of Copernicus, and I have not held it. (June 21, 1633)

What could be clearer, especially since these are not extracts from some supposed ‘recantation’? They are not a form a words that he was forced to sign, but are his own testimony, under oath, and in his own words. And why mention old Ptolemy at all? Either Galileo was a troublemaking heliocentrist who committed perjury on multiple occasions, thus compounding his offensive behaviour (as most historians maintain, as did the Roman Catholic church) or he was a troublemaking crypto-geocentrist and no worthy champion of heliocentrism at all. Let the reader decide. But a martyr for science and free speech he was not. Further demonstration of Galileo’s disingenuousness and duplicity, and the false legends of history about him, will have to await another post, but suffice to say that Galileo was a persistent troublemaker and plagiarist who could have spared himself and others a good deal of bother had he been able to tame his impetuous folly and unbridled arrogance. As Rodney Stark has pointed out, his insufferable arrogance and recklessness ‘placed the whole scientific enterprise itself in jeopardy’.

[Read Part I and Part II for background]

Stephen Hawking is doubtless a very intelligent man, but in his most recent book The Grand Design (surely a title that is supposed to be ironic) he has shown that even the most intelligent of scientists can write like a fool, and this monograph will become a classic for that very reason. He followed up his inanities in an interview on Larry King Live on September 10, 2010. It is now evident to all (if anyone was hitherto in any doubt) that Hawking’s brilliance is in a very narrow field indeed, apart from which he gropes and stumbles like a drunken man. Early in his book he announces

Philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

As William Lane Craig has remarked, such a verdict is

not merely condescending, but also…outrageously naïve. The man who claims to have no need of philosophy is the one most apt to be fooled by it.

Indeed, Hawking and his sidekick Mlodinow proceed to show just how ignorant they are of philosophy, theology, the philosophy of science, the history of philosophy, the history of science, and general science itself. In the Larry King Live show Hawking was asked who his hero was, and why, to which he responded:

Galileo, the first modern scientist who realized the importance of observation.

Well, you can have who you like as your hero, of course, but the historical claim about Galileo is utter rot. He couldn’t hold a candle to the likes of Kepler, for one. Galileo was a second-rate scientist in the main, who continued to his dying day to deny gravitational force as constraining bodies to rotate around the sun, clinging to an Aristotelian idea that celestial bodies ‘naturally’ moved in ‘perfect’ circles because they were not acted upon by a centripetal force, and he refused to accept Kepler’s careful observations and tabulated data that planets were subject to gravitational pull and moved in ellipses. He likewise refused to believe that the sun and moon caused the tides, as Kepler showed, because he denied extraterrestrial gravity. Apart from his last work, under house arrest, on mechanics, the myth of Galileo’s supposed greatness is the deliberate invention of atheists, communists and other anti-Christians, who have cunningly warped history since the nineteenth century to promote a ‘conflict thesis’. Mighty interesting that Hawking, who has built his reputation on pushing cosmic gravity into the absurd, without observational corroboration, should have as his hero one who denied extraterrestrial gravity and who often espoused dogma over meticulous observation.

But if philosophy is dead, it is dead only in the mind of Stephen Hawking, where it was delivered stillborn, or smothered at birth. As someone has said, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if ‘scientific’ conjecture is all Hawking has by way of explanation, it does the crudest of jobs, riding roughshod over and mangling all understanding, rationality and logic, so that he ends up making puerile statements unworthy of an intelligent man. Just as, by definition, ‘Intelligent Design’ is not a scientific hypothesis because it deals with causes outside the realm on natural science, likewise a physical explanation cannot be an explanation for a metaphysical problem.

For example, Hawking states

Spontaneous creation is the reason [why] there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

What an utterly crass statement. There are effectively three deep questions here:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why does this universe exist?

Why does mankind exist?

Note that these are ‘why’ questions, which can only be answered by invoking purpose (as in theology, and Intelligent Design) or at the very least function. There is no sloppy mistake here – on the Larry King Live show King attempts some clarification between the ‘how’ and the ‘why’:

One of your colleagues out of Cambridge says that science provides us with a narrative as to how existence may happen [the 'how'], but theology addresses the meaning of the narrative [the 'why']. How do you respond to that?

Hawking responded:

The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.

That’s clear, then. Hawking really is claiming to answer the ‘why’ questions. In his previous book, A Brief History of Time, he had mentioned these ultimate ‘why’ questions and concluded the work with the words

Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.

All very tongue-in-cheek: there was a cynical reason for including the reference to God, as he later admitted:

In the proof stage I nearly cut the last sentence in the book… Had I done so, the sales might have been halved.

Prof. Jacob Bekenstein, a leading theoretical physicist, whose work on black hole thermodynamics influenced Hawking, declared

He is a known atheist, from the time I first met him in the 1970s…His care is very expensive, so he lives from his books and other projects. It’s not hard for him to get attention and publish.

Now he is just playing to the atheist gallery to keep the revenue stream flowing, as Richard Dawkins did with The God Delusion.

But, having explicitly eliminated God and theology from his purview to please his atheist constituency, Hawking’s answer to all three questions is just another ‘miserable refuge’ – spontaneous creation. An uncaused cause. And that is supposed to be the ‘ultimate triumph of human reason’?!! Creation, of course, implies a creator, and the uncaused cause has traditionally been identified with deity, but Hawking will have none of that. As a native English writer, he could have chosen the more neutral term ‘spontaneous generation’; but as an atheist he delights in purloining words from the vocabulary of theists, such as ‘creation’. Not only is this creation spontaneous, but the universe creates itself – it is its own creator, self-creating, self-organizing. Its purpose and function and meaning is to create itself.

Hawking thus denies the necessity for primary causation:

It is not necessary to invoke God to…set the universe going

No, the universe brought itself into existence because that’s the sort of thing universes do all the time. Stuck for a physical and scientific explanation for a finite universe with a defined stating point in time (as Hawking holds), then the universe has to be the cause of itself. This brings us back to where we started in Part I. If you insist on a scientific explanation for an event that is caused by primary causation, or for which a scientific explanation cannot be found, then you will end up with a very silly one, as Hawking’s hypothesis exemplifies. He would have done better to keep his inanities to himself, but he makes himself a laughingstock by parading this nonsense so publicly. Richard Dawkins thinks that just as he himself pretends to have eliminated God from biology, so Hawking has delivered the coup de grace and eliminated God from physics as well. Indeed not, though – all he has done is make the atheist position look ever more ridiculous and untenable.

So, let’s try to apply a How question, which should be more amenable to science – how could the universe possibly create itself ex nihilo?

Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.

Gravity and quantum theory cause universes to be created spontaneously out of nothing [Larry King Live show]

Note carefully: the universe does not come into existence contingently, but it necessarily and infallibly comes into existence ex nihilo because of the ‘law of gravity’. Quantum theory ’causes’ universes to be created spontaneously. Note also that Hawking appears to be saying that it is gravity itself that causes the spontaneous generation, for which gravity would have to be a property of pre-existent material, which by definition cannot exist. Charitably, we must surely take it that he means the ‘theory’ or ‘law’ of gravity itself, but who knows? What an amazing ‘Just So’, Porquoi story. All part and parcel of atheist mythology, as we’ve come to expect.

Asked by Larry King

You write that because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Will you tell me how that law came into existence?

Hawking answers

Gravity is a consequence of “M” theory, which is the only possible unified theory.

To assert that gravity, a property, is a consequence of a theory is plain nutty. And don’t fail to spot the ultimate unscientific hubris: that M-theory, a speculative unfalsifiable and untestable string theory is ‘the only possible unified theory’. History is littered with such stupid claims by scientists to have attained the ultimate and only possible theory. M-Theory is nothing more than a candidate for a unified theory, and these string theories are in a state of flux all the time.

There are breathtaking logical fallacies here. Firstly, Hawking is effectively saying that the law of gravity applies when there is ‘nothing’; that X creates X; and that ‘nothing’ becomes something. But a physical law is not a physical thing, it is merely a description of properties and behaviours of something that already exists. Laws have no power over anything, they do not control, regulate, create, explain or cause. They produce no events, they merely describe patterns to which events conform; they have no causative or sustaining power. No snooker balls ever moved on green baize because of Newton’s laws of motion or as a consequence of any theories, their motion has only ever been described in accordance with Newton’s laws and physical theories. And for causation one would have to look elsewhere.

But there can be no laws of motion without motion, no laws of gravity without gravity etc because the laws are merely the descriptions of the properties of the things themselves. ‘Laws of nature’ do not have any real and independent existence apart from the properties and phenomena they describe – except in the mind of God, which Hawking now disavows.

Now, a law describing a property that is uninstantiated (i.e. no examples found) is known as a vacuous law, and we can all make up any number of them covering the properties of things that do not exist, and never be able to prove whether such laws do or don’t apply because there are no examples to examine. Quite apart from the fact that you can’t have physical laws if you have ‘nothing’, physical laws don’t and can’t do anything with ‘something’, never mind with ‘nothing’. Hawking has the whole thing round the wrong way: physical laws don’t make things happen, or ensure that things happen, or prevent things from happening: they are merely abstract descriptions of the things that actually do happen.

But Hawking thinks that there exist not only this universe of ours, which appears to be designed, and which is in fact extremely fine-tuned, but many other universes as well:

Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that…is tailor-made to support us…That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way… The discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer….That is not the answer of modern science…our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws.

Oh, here we go again, just as with Richard Dawkins, that tired old despicable ‘multiverse’ argument and the anthropic principle get trotted out, that miserable refuge that if there are trillions upon trillions of universes with all sorts of different laws, surely one of them is going to come up trumps as a good one, like the one we are in. That atheistic admixture of Micawberism and the best of all possible worlds of Dr Pangloss. As Hawking stated on Larry King Live:

Our presence selects out from this vast array only these universes that are compatible with our existence.

‘Our presence’ selects some universes fitted to our existence! But as theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne has noted:

Let us recognise these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us.

There’s not a shred of evidence for such a multiverse, anyway, so when Hawkins says that our universe ‘seems to be one of many’ he is, of course, lying. And how does he suppose these multiple universes come into existence?

“M” theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing…multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.

Oh yes, of course, I forgot, they are spontaneously created from ‘physical law’. They just pop into existence by spontaneous creation all the time because that’s what universes do. So, it’s worth asking the question, what is this almighty ‘physical law’ that genders these imagined quadrillions of universes? Is it a physical thing? No, it is not, it is an entirely abstract concept about the physical: it is not matter or energy, you cannot measure it, contain it, or transport it, it exerts no force; it creates nothing, sustains nothing, determines nothing; you can’t increase it or decrease it, have more of it or less or it. It is not an entity that can be studied (no branch of science studies entities called ‘laws’; ‘laws’ are the convenient fictions we construct to describe patterns of behaviour of the physical things that we do actually study). ‘Physical law’ is not a physical thing at all, any more than environmental law is an environment, or property law is a property, and therefore it cannot be invoked as a scientific explanation.

Hawking foolishly believes that there are well nigh an infinite number of universes that have arisen ‘naturally’ from this abstraction he calls ‘physical law’. This is a huge category error – it is like saying that the law of marriage naturally begets children, or Gresham’s Law of economics naturally produces money. To invoke a ‘law of nature’, some kind of eternal and unchangeable non-corporeal and non-physical entity, as an explanation for the existence of the universe is not a scientific hypothesis. It is, to quote Adelard of Bath “an example of a miserable refuge from a real philosophic explanation”. Sure, it is a fanciful hypothesis, an atheist myth, but there is a better known name for an eternal and unchangeable non-corporeal and non-physical entity which created the whole universe from nothing:

I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me…I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things…Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?…I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded…For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.

Given the hypothesis that Almighty God created the universe ex nihilo with a purpose, or the alternative hypothesis that something abstract, impersonal, immaterial, and impotent, which cannot control or regulate, and which has no causative or sustaining power is the reason for the emergence of the universe ex nihilo as some kind of cosmic accident or necessity, I don’t think there’s much competition. Hawking is now firmly in the camp of those for whom it is said that they

became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools

We should cease being in awe of this increasingly silly man. If Hawking is so deluded as to think that scientists are now the torchbearers in the discovery of truth, then as a supposed exemplar of modern science we can see that he has certainly soon stumbled and dropped the torch he snatched, and, with this latest publication, torched his own reputation to boot.

Woman teaching geometry, from Adelard's translation of Euclid

[See Part I for introduction]
Adelard of Bath (or Athelhard, AD 1080-1160) is sometimes known as the first English scientist. In his classic work Natural Questions he states:

I will detract nothing from God; for whatever is, is from him and by him; yet not even this is said vaguely and without due care, as we must listen to the very limits of human knowledge: only where this utterly breaks down, should we refer things to God.

In common with Christians down through the ages, Adelard sought natural answers to natural questions as far as such studies could be taken. Natural Questions is a dialogue between Adelard and his nephew in which he asks, ‘Why is there a rainbow in the heavens?’ His nephew replies that it is a sign of God’s promise not to flood the entire earth again. Adelard says

Of course that’s what God said and of course God put the rainbow there, but that doesn’t explain the rainbow. That is an example of a miserable refuge from a real philosophic explanation…I know God did it! But that’s not natural philosophy [i.e. science], that’s theology.

Although Adelard makes an important distinction, he is rather too hard on his nephew. After all, he didn’t ask how (i.e. by what means) there is a rainbow in the heavens, which would have elicited the naturalistic physical explanation he is evidently looking for, but why (i.e. for what purpose), which implies motive and design. There is the greatest of difference between a ‘how’ and a ‘why’ question, for example ‘how’ and ‘why’ a person was murdered. At its simplest, the joke ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ has a very different answer from the question ‘How did the chicken cross the road?’ Or, we might ask how Joseph became prime minister in Egypt, and rehearse all the steps in that process (all in the providence of God, if we wish to add such). But if we ask why Joseph became prime minister in Egypt we have a ready answer that relates to purpose in Genesis:

And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.

But we commonly use the concept of law to explain things and answer ‘why’ questions, thus investing the concept of law with a power that it does not have. This is rather disingenuous, and itself a miserable refuge from a proper explanation. We lazily invoke the concept of law to describe the behaviour of physical bodies: but that is all it is, a description, not an explanation. We talk about laws ‘governing’ and entities ‘obeying’ them and being ‘subject’ to them, but this is just so much anthropomorphic talk. We can’t properly use a description of behaviour or inherent properties of matter in a way that has explanatory power or purpose. As an example, if we ask how (by what means) two massive bodies gravitationally attract there is still no accepted answer in physics of the underlying mechanism at the present time. If we ask why two bodies attract we are inclined to answer in the context of law: there is a universal law of gravitation that defines the attraction between massive bodies at a certain separation; these separated bodies have mass and so are subject to this law; therefore they will attract by such and such amount. But this ‘law’ is merely a description of what we have observed for other bodies, so we impose it universally by a process of induction. It does not properly answer the Why question but supplies a fig leaf to pretend to cover the nakedness of our lack of knowledge.

If we ask the question ‘How does this jet engine work?’, we can give a very detailed explanation of all the parts of the engine and the physics. But if we ask ‘Why does this jet engine work?’ we must answer in terms of apparent or real design, for example ‘because fuel and air are introduced in the right proportion for combustion, and ignited in a chamber that allows for the emergence of the hot gasses of combustion in one direction only’. Or I could invent and invoke a law of jet engines, a ‘Whittle’s Law of Jet Engines’ that ‘all machines that conform to this, that and the other of Whittle’s design principles will perform as a jet engine’. This machine conforms to Whittle’s Law, so this machine will work as a jet engine. From this example we can see that invoking Whittle’s Law as an explanation of why this particular machine operates as a jet engine is not a proper answer to the question ‘Why does this jet engine work?’ It is, in fact, another one of those ‘miserable refuges’ that Adelard spoke about.

Science can answer why questions only in a limited capacity at the microscopic level by inferring function. So, for example, if a working jet engine had mysteriously dropped out of the sky in the 1920s (before the jet engine was invented), science could have attempted an answer to the question ‘Why is this pipe on this engine?’ The answer would be one of function or design, e.g. to carry fuel to the injection nozzles. And the question ‘How is this jet engine built’ could be answered through disassembly and making meticulous drawings and plans. Medical science has been doing the same with another ‘given’, the human body, for thousands of years, and has still not exhausted the questions – what is this organ for? Or nowadays, what is this gene for? And increasingly it can answer the question ‘how is the human body built?’ But science can never answer questions such as ‘Why was this jet engine built?’ or ‘Why does the human body appear in its present form?’

Isaac Newton was criticized in his lifetime because he sought to formulate general ‘physical laws’ whilst being unable to explain what was causing the phenomena to which he applied the laws. The idea that there could be attraction between bodies millions of miles apart and separated by empty space was considered to be rather ‘occult’ in his day, especially as he could proffer no physical explanation. Even in our day we do not understand what causes gravity. Likewise, in Fourier’s day there was a conflict concerning the nature of heat – whether it due to a substance called caloric, or due to motion of atoms. Fourier said that it was irrelevant – he was able to develop an excellent mathematical description/model of heat flow without knowing what heat was. All this goes to show that science, engineering and mathematics can make progress instrumentally even when there is gross uncertainty, and a total absence of explanatory power, about underlying reality. So-called ‘natural laws’, or mathematical concepts and models, should never, ever be confused with the underlying reality of the fabric of this universe. This seems to be a confusion made by Stephen Hawking, who we learn was early in life bored of actually studying the natural world, and spent the rest of his life dreaming about mathematical models which might or might not have anything to do with reality at all.

Let Adelard have the last word:

If we turn our backs on the amazing rational beauty of the universe we live in, we should indeed deserve to be driven therefrom, like a guest unappreciative of the house into which he has been received.

Stephen Hawking 'speaks' once again 'ex cathedra'

We consider the 2010 book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (screenwriter for Star Trek: the Next Generation), but first we must lay some groundwork. For ease of digestion this post is split into three parts, the first two parts being introductory.

Intelligent Design and the limits of science

To start with, here’s an old chestnut: is ‘Intelligent Design’ a scientific hypothesis? Well, it is a hypothesis, and a most intelligent hypothesis, held by the brightest of minds for thousands of years, that something with the appearance of design (which even atheists admit) is actually designed. Whether or not it is true, it cannot be denied except by the most churlish that the inference is a reasonable one. However, if we deliberately limit the term ‘scientific’ to natural science, wherein scientific hypotheses have natural explanations exclusively in terms of natural phenomena from within the natural world itself – a closed system where there is no external causation, or where at the very least external causation is beyond the scope of scientific explanation – then according to this definition intelligent design cannot be a scientific hypothesis.

But so what? All this means is that science is deliberately limited in explanation, and deliberately so limited by definition. Primary causation is not only outside but also incomprehensible to scientific enquiry, so primary causation, even if true, cannot offer a ‘scientific’ explanation. Without access to the designer’s original plan, as it were, where could the hypothesis of intelligent design take us from a ‘scientific’ perspective? It has no explanatory power, no predictive capability, no falsifiability within the self-defined and self-limiting ‘scientific’ realm. As an example, if I tell you in all truth that the jet engine was designed by Frank Whittle, what does that fact tell you about the jet engine other than that it was designed by Frank Whittle?

This really is no big deal. It’s no different in principle from saying that ‘internal mail’ is post that travels exclusively within a company, or ‘inland mail’ is post that travels exclusively within a country. None of these concepts and definitions precludes the possibility that mail can come into a company or a country from outside. Just as the term internal/inland comports a limiting definition when applied to mail, so the term ‘scientific’ comports a limiting definition when qualifying a hypothesis.

Of course, it would be wholly illogical to suggest that because invoking a divine creator is not a ‘scientific’ explanation then there is no creator and no primary causation. That would be a fundamental fallacy, like saying that because invoking the concept of international mail is beyond the scope of inland mail then there can’t be mail from other countries or mail systems in other countries, so you can’t have international mail. A divine creative act is by definition not a scientific explanation, nor should a ‘scientific’ explanation be sought (or accepted) if we know (or believe) that creation was by primary causation – any scientific explanation proffered will by definition be wrong. To use the analogy again, if we know or have reason to believe that some mail is international it will be wrong to insist and define that all mail in circulation within a country must be inland mail. A creative act of bringing the universe into being is by definition a cause from outside the universe that is beyond the reach of scientific enquiry and the methods of natural science. But philosophy and theology can go further than science, into the realm of metaphysics. Science chooses to shut itself inside its closed box.

There was quite a splash in the media in May concerning Craig Venter’s claims to have made a synthetic cell.

However, the media have not elucidated exactly what this ‘synthetic’ means, and Venter himself, in a blaze of self-promotion, used blatantly misleading language. He spoke of his ‘creation’ as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”, and of its genome having been synthesized “by a machine” entirely from “four bottles of chemicals” and its being “booted up” in a host organism.

Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania was impressed and thought this one of the most important scientific achievements ever:

All…deeply entrenched metaphysical views are cast into doubt by the demonstration that life can be created from non-living parts, albeit those harvested from a cell. Venter’s achievement would seem to extinguish the argument that life requires a special force or power to exist. In my view, this makes it one of the most important scientific achievements in the history of mankind.

And Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, would like to nominate Venter as the Demiurge:

Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny. He is not merely copying life artificially…or modifying it radically by genetic engineering. He is going towards the role of a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally.

As we will see, these ethicists have clearly misunderstood what Venter has achieved. More sane soundings have come from those who are expert in bioengineering, for example Jim Collins, Professor of biomedical engineering, Boston University:

Relax — media reports hyping this as a significant, alarming step forward in the creation of artificial forms of life can be discounted. The work reported by Venter and his colleagues is an important advance in our ability to re-engineer organisms; it does not represent the making of new life from scratch. The microorganism reported by the Venter team is synthetic in the sense that its DNA is synthesized, not in that a new life form has been created. Its genome is a stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature, with a few small tweaks thrown in…Frankly, scientists do not know enough about biology to create life…Although some of us in synthetic biology may have delusions of grandeur, our goals are much more modest.

We will investigate what Venter has done, but we must be clear that although what he has done was technologically advanced, it amounts to no more than tinkering with existing life.

Perhaps a couple of analogies will help.

Let’s say I don’t know where to start to write an effective dramatic play. So I take an old printed copy of an old classic, The Merchant of Venice, and, putting the leaves through a digital scanner with optical character recognition, I obtain a digital copy of the text on my computer. I do some very minor editing – removing the odd sentence that seems redundant and adding a few footnotes – and print out the resulting play using the four bottles of chemicals in my printer, being very careful to get all the pages in order, and bind it into new covers with the title Shylock in Venice. Can I be said to have created a synthetic play? After all, I’ve used a lot of technology, and there is none of the original paper and ink in the new volume.

Or, let’s say I don’t know how to design a motor car, so I take the engine out of a green Ford Focus, strip it down, and measure all the parts. I then produce CAD drawings of all the constituent parts and assemblies, and send the CAD files to machinists to reproduce all the pieceparts. I don’t bother to send out the files for a couple of brackets that I know are redundant on that model, and I make sure that I order a plate with a different engine number so that I can identify it as my own. Having received all the pieceparts, I assemble the parts into an engine, take the engine out of a red Ford Focus and fit in my new engine instead. I’ve used a lot of technology, and none of the materials of the original green car are now in the red car. Can I be said to have created a synthetic car?

Now consider what Craig Venter did. He measured the DNA sequence (genome) of an existing living bacterium to produce a full listing on a computer. He then edited out some of the sequence that he knew was redundant, and added in some markers of his own that did not affect the overall functionality. He then divided up DNA sequence into short blocks and had these fragments physically built to order by a commercial chemical synthesizing company. Using 100 billion yeast cells, Venter recombined all these fragments to form a DNA sequence that matched the sequence on his computer. He then took another living cell, removed its DNA, and transplanted the re-assembled DNA into this cell, having inactivated an enzyme in the recipient cell to prevent rejection of the donor DNA. Can he be said to have created a synthetic cell?

The DNA sequence was taken from a living organism, living organisms were used to combine synthesized DNA fragments, and the recombined DNA was introduced into another living cell. Venter needed to know the exact order to combine the fragments to make the DNA sequence: one transcription error, one missing ‘letter’ in over a million base pairs could be fatal, and indeed was, as Venter reports in his Science paper Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome

Initially, an error-containing 811-820 clone was used to produce a synthetic genome that did not transplant. This was expected since the error was a single base pair deletion that creates a frameshift in dnaA, an essential gene for chromosomal replication.

So Venter had to slavishly copy what was known to work in real life. He had no hope of being able to re-assemble all the base pairs without an original blueprint to copy.

Jim Collins, Professor of biomedical engineering, Boston University makes this clear:

Although [genome sequencing] has expanded the parts list for cells, there is no instruction manual for putting them together to produce a living cell. It is like trying to assemble an operational jumbo jet from its parts list — impossible.

And George Church, Geneticist, Harvard Medical School:

But has [Venter’s institute] created ‘new life’ and tested vitalism? Not really. The semi-synthetic mycobacterium is not changed from the wild state in any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the same as understanding the language. We already had confidence in our ability to make synthetic DNA and get it to function in cells. The grand challenge remains understanding the parts of cells that help the DNA to function.

So, what was new in what Venter did? Not copying a complete DNA sequence, for sure: Arthur Kornberg and colleagues copied the DNA of the phiX174 virus in 1967, though not by synthesizing it from basic fragments as the DNA sequence was not deciphered for another 11 years.

Nor introducing a full DNA sequence into another living cell, or in removing or replacing little fragments of DNA – this is done all the time with genetic modification, using naturally occurring DNA or short synthesized fragments. No, Venter’s achievement was in building up the whole DNA sequence from individual tiny fragments. To use the motor analogy: previous operators had replaced whole engines into existing cars or made modifications to existing engines – substituted improved sparkplugs or camshafts, for instance – but no-one had gone the whole hog and built an engine entirely from copied parts.

The DNA fragments that Venter put out to a commercial synthesis company, Blue Heron (Bothell, Washington), were short sequences of nucleotides (i.e. oligonucleotides). Nucleotides are the ‘bases’ that pair up on the double helix of DNA: adenine (A) with thiamine (T), and guanine (G) with cytosine (C). These bases A, T, G and C or their derivatives or precursors, are the “four different bottles of chemicals” referred to by Ventor, from which Blue Heron built his oligonucleotides to specification. For example, a short sequence of 18 base pairs (‘letters’) could be

ATCGATTGAGCTCTAGCG
TAGCTAACTCGAGATCGC

Effectively, this is information, just as are the sequence of letters to make up the words of a play, or the sequence of ‘1’ and ‘0’ in computer files. The code for operation of one of the simplest living cells, as used by Venter, is just over a million base pairs long. It is three billion base pairs long for humans.

Venter and Gibson describe their procedure:

The entire sequence of DNA letters was then partitioned into 1,100 pieces, and each was synthesized using four different bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. These DNA fragments were designed such that adjacent pieces contained an 80-letter overlap, which facilitated the assembly process by providing unique regions where the synthetic pieces could join.
The synthetic Mycoplasma mycoides genome was assembled by adding the overlapping DNA fragments to yeast. Once inside a yeast cell, the yeast machinery recognized that two DNA fragments had the same sequence and assembled them at this overlapping region. The genome was not assembled from all 1,100 pieces at once but rather in three stages: 1,000 letters to 10,000 letters, 10,000 letters to 100,000 letters, and finally 100,000 letters to complete the 1.08 million letter genome. This assembled genome is the largest chemically defined structure ever synthesized in the laboratory.

Certainly this is an impressive technological feat: it took 15-20 years’ work and $40 million of investment. The feat is the assembling from contituent base pairs, themselves synthesized, of a complete DNA sequence of a living organism (with a tiny bit of genetic modification as ‘tags’ or ‘markers’).

Kornberg was able to make a straight ‘carbon copy’ in 1967, but he was though unable to read the genome, and thus built it up from scratch. In the 1970s, biologists ‘cut and pasted’ single genes, using what was naturally available. Then in the 1980s, biotechnology moved to the stage of being able to synthesize genes that were not naturally occurring, e.g. genes of 300 base pairs (K.P. Nambiar et al, 1984). Venter and Gibson say

Kornberg did not create life in a test tube, nor did we create life from scratch. We transformed existing life into new life. We also did not design and build a new chromosome from nothing. Rather, using only digitized information, we synthesized a modified version of the naturally occurring Mycoplasma mycoides genome. The result is not an “artificial” life form.

Venter’s synthesis was limited to the genome, the DNA sequence, as is indeed claimed in the Science paper, Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome, which states

We report the design, synthesis and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information…

Rather unhelpfully, Venter translates the ‘synthetic’ terminology into the cell itself, for he says in the Wall Street Journal article How We Created the First Synthetic Cell

We refer to the cell we have created as being a “synthetic” cell because it is controlled only by a synthetic genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA. Even though the cytoplasm of the recipient cell is not synthetic…

Well, that’s all down to definitions. Jim Collins, Professor of biomedical engineering, Boston University, takes issue with this concept:

Imagine if bioengineers could program genes and cells to grow into a functioning “synthetic” heart that saved a patient in need of a transplant. The recovered patient would not be considered a synthetic organism or a form of artificial life; he or she would be viewed as a lucky individual with a synthesized heart. Venter’s microorganism is analogous to the recovered patient, albeit with a transplanted, synthesized genome.

The following statement by Venter thus appears to be grossly misleading:

This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer.

Of course, the cell itself that Venter ended up with when he introduced the synthesized genome wasn’t ‘totally derived’ from a synthetic chromosome. He has gone from the cell’s being ‘controlled only by a synthetic genome’ to being ‘totally derived from a synthetic chromosome’. Venter’s get-out and sleight of hand for this is to point to the progeny of the recipient cell, where

The properties of the cells controlled by the assembled genome are expected to be the same as if the whole cell had been produced synthetically.

So, Venter is essentially claiming that progeny cells are ‘totally derived’ from the synthesized DNA because they should have the same properties as one in which he had been able to synthesize its cytoplasm as well.

And from there it is just a short step to the nonsense claims of ‘synthetic life’ reported in the media. Thus the Financial Times report Scientists create a living organism

Scientists have turned inanimate chemicals into a living organism in an experiment that raises profound questions about the essence of life.

And the Daily Telegraph report Scientist Craig Venter creates life for first time in laboratory sparking debate about ‘playing god’

Artificial life has been created in a laboratory for the first time by a maverick scientist. Dr Craig Venter, a multi-millionaire pioneer in genetics, and his team have managed to make a completely new “synthetic” life form from a mix of chemicals.

Needless to say, such newspaper reports are ignorant and sensationalist hogwash.

There has been a torrent of books by the so-called New Atheists in recent years, diatribes from the pens of biologist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007), writer Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) and their ilk. Whatever their expertise in their specialisms, they have arrogantly marched forth into the fields of their own incompetence, and thereby done us all a great favour in showing that the New Atheism spawns intellectual pygmies of the philosophy of religion. As philosopher David B. Hart has remarked,

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

Their writings have drawn back the curtain to reveal the clanking machinery, the hollowness and the intellectual bankruptcy of the New Atheism. For this we are forever grateful, and when their other ideas have been discarded and relegated to footnotes, historians will surely point to their feet of clay displayed by their poor judgment, their bias, nastiness, ignorance and inability to structure logical argument in their writings on religion. As Hart confirms:

The best that we can now hope for [from New Atheists] are arguments pursued at only the most vulgar of intellectual levels, couched in an infantile and carpingly pompous tone, and lacking all but the meagerest traces of historical erudition or syllogistic rigour: Richard Dawkins triumphantly adducing “philosophical” arguments that a college freshman midway through his first logic course could dismantle in a trice…

The author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker can never again be taken seriously as a clear thinker: he has well and truly shot his bolt and missed his target.

Not that he is unaware of his crass ignorance. When challenged by biophysicist and theologian Alister McGrath about his ignorance of Christian theology, as displayed in The God Delusion that was aimed mainly as an attack on the God of Abraham, Dawkins replied

Yes, I have, of course, met this point before. It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content

A puerile and unworthy answer. And how absurdly self-refuting. One cannot expect to be taken seriously writing a lengthy diatribe attacking Christian theology and not hold the presupposition that Christian theology is a subject that has content, and that it is therefore something that one can be ignorant about. Otherwise, Dawkins is a presbyopic old fool tilting at windmills. Dawkins is free to believe that there is no God, but he is self-evidently a fool to pretend that theology has no content when he is spending so much time attacking it. And if theology has content, what a fool to attack it without understanding it.

We begin our analysis by noting that those who attack religion have long had a penchant for the illogical and the self-refuting. One wonders whether their inability to spot self-referential gibberish and the fallacies within their own thoughts are the very causes of their atheism. We marvel how the manuscript of the sceptical eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ever made it to his publishers when within its pages he had declared

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning methods of fact and existence? No. Commit it to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion!

From its own content, Hume’s essay should have joined the great conflagration since he could not have failed to notice that the answer was ‘No’ to both questions concerning itself.

Moving to the following century, we had the mathematician W.K. Clifford declaring in his 1877 essay The Ethics of Belief that

it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Doubtless Clifford believed his own maxim, but as he could not provide sufficient evidence for the truth of this moral and ethical statement, he was, by his own definition, always wrong to believe it, and, of course, even more blameworthy to propagate a wrong belief.

In the twentieth century we had the so-called logical positivists, and their great champion and atheist A.J. Ayer, with his Language, Truth and Logic (1936), who, like Dawkins, taught that all religious discourse was meaningless. Ayer set out the central tenet of logical positivism that a sentence can only be meaningful if it has verifiable empirical import. However, that statement is itself empirically unverifiable, and so the central tenet of logical positivism is, by its own definition, meaningless.

The same degree of inconsistency and self-referential meaninglessness infects the writings of the twenty-first century New Atheists. If existence is defined as limited to what is natural, and what is natural is defined in terms of what natural science can reveal, then the definition of existence is self-limiting, and the supernatural is eliminated, not in reality, but by definition. If the supernatural is defined as an effect or entity that violates the inviolable, then we would all agree that there can be no supernatural according to that definition. Theists are not so stupid as not to understand language, truth and logic. They have, after all, a couple of thousand years’ head start over the New Atheists. And some rather bigger hitters.

Science itself does not refute the existence of God, but definitions can be drawn as narrowly as one likes to exclude entities and events – in language and in logic, but not necessarily in reality. If atheists want to draw up definitions that exclude God, so be it: but they cannot from a narrow definition infer the non-existence of an entity in reality that was deliberately excluded from their contrived narrow definition. But this is, essentially, what they do. If I define that there is no copper in the universe, I cannot influence the reality of whether copper really exists in the universe ‘out there’, only that there is none in the universe of my own linguistic convention. The New Atheists seem to be infected with postmodernist, Kuhnian and constructivist ideas that reality is what I (or my group) think it to be. In postmodernism and Kuhnian science, reality is constructed not found. This is a far cry from the traditional demarcation that fiction is whatever I care to believe irrespective of reality, whereas fact is what is real, irrespective of what I believe. The constructivist approach of New Atheism is the classic philosophical fallacy of confusing methods, presuppositions and descriptions of reality with reality itself. So when atheists speak about the universe, they are speaking about the universe limited to their own definition, a concept of their own creation. When theists talk about the universe they are talking about the universe of God’s creation, as defined by the revelation they accept. And they are not the same universe. And the real universe can be something different again. C.F Wiezsacker in The Relevance of Science notes that

It is not by its conclusions, but by its methodological starting point, that modern science excludes direct creation. Our methodology would not be honest if this fact were denied…Such is the faith in the science of our time…

As the mathematician David Berlinski has remarked

The attack on traditional religious thought marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion. From cosmology to biology, its narratives have become the narratives.

Atheists are usually prepared to admit that the universe has the appearance of design, an honest observation that they are quick to couple with the assertion that a mere appearance of design does not automatically infer a designer because it could all be an illusion. Quite so. But the plausibility that something with the appearance of design might have that appearance because it is actually designed is ruled out by atheists not by evidence and conclusions but by presuppositions and prejudice.

So, for example, the geneticist Richard Lewontin will accept the atheist scientific mythological narrative

in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories.

Why? Because he “cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door”. Fine. Thanks for the honesty. At least Lewontin’s prejudice is there for all to see. See more about atheist mythology.

Richard Dawkins loves straw man arguments. Hart warns that he is severely challenged in even the most elementary of logic and that he has a

philosophically illiterate inability to distinguish between…theoretical claims about material causality and logical claims about the mystery of existence

Dawkins argues that there are two competing explanations for the apparent design in the universe from which we must choose:

1. A hypothesis involving a designer, that is, a complex being to account for the complexity that we see.
2. A hypothesis, with supporting theories, that explains how, from simple origins and principles, something more complex can emerge.

He does not inform his readers (is he even aware of it himself?) that the first hypothesis is not one that Christian theists have ever held. He has invented the concept of a ‘complex being’, which cannot be the Christian God since their God is always held to be simple. So, by not actually stating the Christian hypothesis, and introducing a hypothesis held by no-one, Dawkins sets up an argument that is a mere illusion to reach a conclusion that is a mere deception. As we noted earlier, and as Hart confirms,

Numerous attempts have been made…to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.

Then there is his ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit’. Dawkins was not at all amused when atheist cosmologist Fred Hoyle, who held that life must have come from an extraterrestrial source because of its improbability originating here, stated that

the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.

Not wanting to let a good argument get the better of him, Dawkins recycled the argument to turn it against theism: if any cause is inadequate to bring life into existence because life is improbable, then God is inadequate for the same reason. Any theist will instantly recognize the fallacy of such a position: life is indeed exceedingly improbable if it is brought about by raw, undirected, unintelligent and random causes, but there is no such improbability if it is brought about by a designer. As Hoyle had rightly stated: it is utterly improbable that a hurricane can assemble a aircraft from scrapyard junk, yet there is nothing improbable about an aircraft emerging from Boeing’s Seattle factory – it happens all the time. Random outcomes can be exceedingly improbable: intelligently designed outcomes need not be.

With regard to the appearance of design (which Dawkins describes as a mere ‘illusion’), Fred Hoyle had also stated that

The universe looks like a put-up job

and the physicist Paul Davies remarked that

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks surprisingly like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves…change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal.

It is entirely reasonable to ask the question why things are as they are when they seem to be anything but arbitrary. Only after proper inquiry and exhausting all answers could we possibly conclude that such a question is meaningless – not at the start of the inquiry as does theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, another demi-god in the atheist cult’s pantheon. [Update: Hawking in his 2010 book The Grand Design and his appearance on Larry King Live in September 2010 now ascribes it all to the law of gravity, natural law and M-Theory; but laws are merely descriptions of properties and behaviours, so they are a circular argument, and M-Theory is highly speculative and suffers from the same circularity.]

The obvious answer to the question is the one that theists have always offered – the universe looks like a fix and a put-up job because it is a fix and a put-up job. That’s not a proof, of course. But neither is it reasonable to think the answer false because it is obvious – it is a most reasonable working hypothesis until falsified. To suggest that it is not a reasonable working hypothesis until falsified is to betray prejudice, emotion and ulterior motives. As Berlinski notes

It is emotionally unacceptable because a universe that looks like a put-up job puts off a great many physicists. They have thus made every effort to find an alternative. Did you imagine that science was a disinterested pursuit of truth? Well, you were wrong.

The contrived mechanism that Richard Dawkins has borrowed from these physicists is the idea of the multiverse: if there are an infinite number of universes, there must be the possibility, however improbable, that at least one of them has the physical laws and conditions just right to permit human existence, and obviously we’re in such a one. This chimes with his argument for evolution – given enough universes any universe is possible, including this one; given enough time in this universe, anything is possible, including the emergence of Richard Dawkins.

But of course, this is just a metaphysical argument and not a scientific one according to Dawkins’ own definitions of what would constitute science. Quite why belief in a plurality of universes with no creators is superior to a belief in a single universe with a single Creator is given by Dawkins as follows

The key difference between the radically extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability.

Note that it’s all down to statistics and probability. Quite apart from the word games that Dawkins is using, begging the question by using terms such as ‘radically extravagant’ and ‘apparently extravagant’, the idea that one can apply the laws of statistical probability to the existence of God and other universes is breathtakingly stupid. Yet this nonsense becomes the centrepiece for his argument in The God Delusion against the existence of God. Dawkins’ argument in Chapter 4, Why there is almost certainly no God, can be summed up as follows

1. “The universe is improbable”
2. “The temptation [to explain the appearance of the universe by an appeal to a designer] is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.”

Firstly, we do not concede to Dawkins the benefit of the first premise, so his argument doesn’t get out of the starting blocks. ‘The universe is improbable’ is a starting point for an argument where this is a given, not necessarily what pertains in the present universe. It is an atheistic premise. The universe is only improbable if there is no God, so to start with the improbability of the universe is to assume the proposition to be proved in the premises, a logical fallacy known as begging the question, petitio principii, more of which below. So the argument starts out as a hopeless fallacy, but as we see, Dawkins soldiers on with his argument that if the universe is improbable,

It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable

Such as a Creator. Well, given a premise that is begging the question, Dawkins manages to wade even deeper into the quagmire of the fallacious argument. Why an improbable universe would demand an improbable creator, never mind a more improbable creator, Dawkins declines to say. So we shall allow him to sink without throwing him a lifeline. Atheist arguments such as this are fallacious in attempting to force a dilemma where none can exist. This is cheeky rhetoric, smoke and mirrors, not the standard we expect from those who according to New Atheist Peter Atkins, colleague of Dawkins at Oxford, are “beacons of rationality, and intellectually honest”.

Dawkins confuses tendencies and categories that are incompatible and incommensurable. When theories are incommensurable, there is no way in which they can be compared with each other to determine which better explains the observable data. Probabilities belong to the world in which things happen because they might; creation belongs to the world in which things happen because they must. There is nothing contingent or chancy about divine creation; there is everything contingent and chancy about emergence of intelligent life and complexity from randomness. Creation is explained by reference to creators; chance events are explained by appealing to chance.

Theories of probability assign numbers to events. Quite apart from the fact that the eternal being of God, as understood by Christians, is not an ‘event’, the hypothetical emergence of some improbable Creator would have to be an improbable event in virtue of the process that controls the probability of such an event. Just which processes are in operation designed to yield a Deity as a possible outcome, by which Dawkins can determine the probability of such event, Dawkins does not say, nor can he. Having failed to know and establish the laws, conditions and circumstances by which the Deity’s probability is assigned, Dawkins also neglects to tell us how long the conditions have been in operation. Taking a leaf out of Dawkins’ writings on the probability of the improbable, we would have to admit that, after all, the Creator probably has all the time in the world. In truth, Dawkins can say nothing about the probability or improbability of God, and the very concept, the cornerstone of his argument, turns out to be an absurdity.

In formal logic, ‘All ravens are black’ is equivalent to ‘all non-black entities are not ravens’. One cannot rationally hold the one without the other. On his own admission, Dawkins holds the view that there are improbable events, and since he also denies God he must believe that ‘All improbable events are not God-caused events’ – this, at least, is what he is at pains to prove with regard to the appearance of life and the universe. But that logically also means that ‘All God-caused events are not improbable events’. So, the universe need not be improbable. Indeed, IF God exists, the appearance of the universe would NOT be improbable. To know whether the universe is improbable, one would first need to know whether God exists.

To say ‘If God created the universe, then the universe is not improbable’, would thus seem to be uncontroversial (except, it seems, to Dawkins). One does not have to accept that God DID create the world – there’s a big ‘IF’ in there as a get-out. But IF there is a God who actually made the world, THEN there can be nothing contingent or improbable about its existence. Again, this can be stated two ways that are logically identical:

If God created the universe, then the universe is not improbable.
If the universe is improbable, then God did not create the universe.

Thus, if the universe is improbable (Dawkins’ “begging the question” premise) then we will all agree that God did not create it. Big deal: Dawkins’ conclusion is nothing other that what he logically sneaks into the premise ‘the universe is improbable’, i.e. that God did not create the world. The sleight of hand is obvious, and it’s all the more amateurish because Dawkins cannot hope to establish the proposition that the universe is improbable. The most that one might say without begging the question is that a universe such as ours would be improbable had it not been created by God. A starting point with some intellectual integrity would be: If God does not exist, then the emergence of the universe would be improbable. We can perhaps all agree on that, theists, creationists, agnostics, evolutionists and atheists alike. But by quietly ignoring the ‘if’ part of the foundation on which we all agree, and making the ‘then’ part his starting proposition, his premise, i.e. ‘the universe is improbable’, Dawkins is just trying to pull a fast one. No rational thinker worth his salt should let him get away with that sleight of hand: that is not a logical deduction or inference from the position on which we all can agree.

This, then, is the atheist delusion.

(Apologies to Stahler)

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is stinking like a dead fish, rotting from the head down. In what has been dubbed ‘Glaciergate’, the IPCC has been exposed as conspiring to present a tissue of lies about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, claiming with greater than 90% confidence that they would disappear by 2035 or sooner. There was never any scientific basis whatsoever for such claims, and the ‘source’ quoted was WWF, an avowed advocacy group. Both the IPCC and WWF have recently admitted that the claims were false, long after these claims have become embedded in countless papers, books and presentations and caused alarmism about the fate of hundreds of millions of people who rely on the rivers that run from the Himalayas. But the damage this has done goes very deep: not only were the claims in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report (AR4) based on lies, but the lies have for years been peddled by the head of the IPCC himself, who sought to belittle those who drew attention to the problem.

This post deals briefly with the extraordinarily arrogant, unprofessional and dishonest nature of Rajendra K Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, but goes on to show in detail that the UN and the scientific community were well aware from 2004, as demonstrated in a work by a Himalayan expert, which was described in 2006 by the editor of the peer-reviewed Himalayan Journal of Sciences (HJS) as “probably the single most influential monograph ever published on Himalayan environmental issues”, and from an article that appeared in the HJS in 2005, that the claim of the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 or within 40 years was a lie propagated by advocacy groups and vested interests, and yet the IPCC deliberately incorporated the lie into the AR4 report in 2007. We show how the falsehood was embroidered stage by stage by advocacy groups, politicians and bent ‘scientists’ to appear as one of the most outrageous scientific claims in modern times.

The passage in question reads as follows in AR4

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

We will show that such claims as these were known to be arrant nonsense as far back in 2004. But first we fast forward to the end of 2009 when the Indian Government Ministry for Environment and Forests (MoEF) put out a discussion paper written by V.K. Raina, former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, looking at 150 years’ worth of data gathered from the Geological Survey from 25 glaciers. Entitled Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change, the report described the claims made by the IPCC as “imaginative”, and gave a comprehensive picture of what was actually occurring with the Himalayan glaciers.

R.K. Pachauri blasted the report, saying it was “extremely arrogant”, “schoolboy science”, “totally unsubstantiated” and “Voodoo science”. Such outbursts betray the desperate notes of someone who has something to hide – an agenda that is starting to unravel. As it now turns out, all these epithets look much more appropriate for the IPCC AR4 report, except for the “schoolboy science” remark, since even a schoolboy wouldn’t make as many foolish errors as the IPCC report has.

Of course, this was all very inconvenient for the IPCC, coming as it was shortly before the Copenhagen summit, and, as we shall see, when Pachauri was trying to secure huge amounts of cash for TERI, his research institute, based on these false claims. Other academics started to weigh in, saying that the IPCC report was grossly erroneous on the Himalayan glaciers, and brought this to the attention of Pachauri. For example, even the BBC correspondent, Pallava Bagla in Delhi, reported on December 5, 2009 before the summit:

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says…When asked how this “error” could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

In other words, no comment. Eventually, the IPCC had to back down and admit that the claims were untrue, but not before Pachauri had added his own dissembling (exposed as a lie in the quote above) about when he first heard of the problem. The London Times reported on January 23:

Dr Pachauri also said he did not learn about the mistakes until they were reported in the media about 10 days ago, at which time he contacted other IPCC members. He denied keeping quiet about the errors to avoid disrupting the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen, or discouraging funding for TERI’s own glacier programme.

We will see later that he must have known about it long before Copenhagen, and the previous day he had adopted the grossly unscientific and very silly position reported in the Hindu, New Delhi, January 22, 2010

Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on Friday said the chances of the U.N. panel having made more errors in its benchmark 2007 report were “minimal if not non-existent”, while again admitting the “regrettable error” that has raised questions about its credibility.

Several other egregious ‘errors’ were then pointed out, and the following day it was reported in the London Times

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel’s assessment of Himalayan glaciers.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.
But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

The deception about the glacial melt was very useful in securing US$500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation and the lion’s share of around US$4million of EU funds into Dr Pachauri’s Energy Research Institute (TERI), to which he had appointed Syed Hasnain a Distinguished Fellow, whom we will see below was the one cited as the source of the nonsense about the imminent disappearance of the glaciers, and who (by his own subsequent admission) knew that what was in the AR4 report was fraudulent. From TERI’s own press release of January 15, where they acknowledge getting their hands on the cash, even though by then the scientific community knew the claims were untrue, and Pachauri and Hasnain had known long before, we read (emphasis added)

…changes in weather patterns and the climate are bound to cause profound changes in the Himalaya. Of particular consequence will be changes of the glaciers. According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades. This, in turn, will have implications for the entire water system of the sub-continent, with immediate effect on soil, water management, and the possibilities of food production…
Present on the occasion was… Dr R K Pachauri, Director-General TERI…and the TERI Glaciology team, headed by Prof Syed Iqbal Hasnain…
Elaborating on the collaboration, Dr R K Pachauri, said, “…Scientific data assimilated by IPCC is very robust and it is universally acknowledged that glaciers are melting because of climate change.”

Predictions of scientific merit…very robust…universally acknowledged, my foot. Pachauri knew enough then to know that those statements were untrue. Let us see how the web of lies in IPCC AR4 was spun. I will emphasize certain text in italics.

The UNESCO report of the International Hydrological Programme of 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the past and at present on a Global and Regional Scale, was the source of some of the numbers, perhaps correctly stated, but as we shall see, misquoted and manipulated for nefarious ends. In this report, the paper by V. M. Kotlyakov, The Future of Glaciers under the Expected Climate Warming, stated

With the further progress of warming or stabilization of the present climate…The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff (see Table 11 ). This period will last from 200 to 300 years. The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates—its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350. Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature [temperate?] latitudes.

Note that 500, 000 km² is the total area of ALL extrapolar glaciers throughout the world. With unabated global warming, shrinkage to 100,000 km² takes place by 2350 (not 2035), and even then glaciers will survive in the Himalayas.

By 2005, this had been grossly manipulated by WWF to read something completely different in its report An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China:

In 1999, a report by the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI) stated: “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood [sic] of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high”.

Further embellishment and alarmism beyond even the ridiculous WWF remarks leads to the absurd statements in the UN IPCC report:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its [sic] total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

In the IPCC report, a likelihood of “very high” is defined as greater than 90% confidence. It is here that Syed Hasnain, the Indian scientist comes into the picture. He is said to have suggested that the Himalayan glaciers could be gone within 40 years – quoted by Fred Pearce of New Scientist in 1999. Even WWF picked up on that:

The prediction that “glaciers in the region will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming” and that the flow of Himalayan rivers will “eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages” (New Scientist 1999; 1999, 2003) is equally disturbing.

It was reported that Syed Hasnain had also said something in 2003 to the effect of the Himalayan glaciers vanishing within 40 years, and affirming that they would be gone by 2035, though this claim is never found in any published work by Hasnain. As reported in the peer-reviewed Himalayan Journal of Sciences in 2005:

The Times of London (21 July 2003), reporting on an international meeting held at the University of Birmingham, noted that ‘Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 40 years because of global warming . . . 500 million people in countries like India could also be at increased risk of drought and starvation.’ Syed Hasnain is quoted as affirming that ‘the glaciers of the region [Central Indian Himalaya] could be gone by 2035’.

However, most interestingly, the above quote comes from a withering attack and exposure by Professor Jack D. Ives of the false claims attributed to Hasnain about the Himalayan glaciers.

Who is Jack Ives? Jack Ives is a foremost expert on mountains, especially the Himalayas. As Professor Emeritus, Environmental Science, University of California and Davis Honorary Research Professor, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ives is no obscure scientist, but a towering figure in the field. No-one researching Himalayan mountains could fail to know of Jack Ives, his extensive research, and exceptional achievements. Here are a few details to fill in the picture.

Ives has over 180 publications, scientific papers, and books to his credit, and was Founder and Editor (1968-1980) of Arctic and Alpine Research journal, and Founder and Editor (1980-2000) of Mountain Research and Development journal. Very many photos of the Himalayas in the literature trace their origin to Jack Ives.

Jack Ives’ earliest interests involved glaciology and the physical aspects of mountains and the Arctic. In 1973, UNESCO invited him under the Man and the Biosphere programme to work with an international team of academics. In 1978, he was appointed coordinator of United Nations University’s mountain research project.

In 2002, Ives was awarded the King Albert I Memorial Foundation Award, an award “to honor persons or institutions that have distinguished themselves through exceptional and lasting achievements in the Mountain World.” In 2006, he was awarded the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his mountain and arctic research, extensive publishing, teaching, and especially “for his role internationally in establishing the global importance of mountain regions.”

Ives worked with several international organizations, including the United Nations University (UNU), UNESCO, and the International Geographical Union. His 30-year work with UNU was regarded as of particular importance as it played a critical role in the designation of 2002 as The International Year of Mountains by the United Nations Organization. As Mountain Research and Development noted:

Jack Ives’ numerous scholarly papers and books, in particular his founding editorship of the journal Mountain Research and Development (1981–2000) reveal his impressive expertise and tireless efforts to enhance the knowledge and vision of students, scientists, and political leaders. The book Mountains of the World: A Global Priority, edited by Bruno Messerli and Jack Ives and intended for the eyes of the UN General Assembly, met with world-wide approval. Jack Ives notes that his award is virtually identical to that received by Bruno Messerli—a reflection of their 25-year collaboration as codirectors of the United Nations University’s Mountain Programme, and of their contribution to the initiation of Mountain Agenda and Chapter 13 of Agenda 21 at the Rio Earth Summit.

Then in 2004, Ives authored a seminal work entitled Himalayan perceptions: environmental change and the well-being of mountain peoples, which inter alia exposed the myths being propounded about the Himalayan glaciers. In the preface to the second edition (2006) Ives himself wrote:

…During the last five years the news media have begun to propagate this catastrophic scenario, aided by the United Nations Environment Programme and several other vested interests…even this narrative is already being superseded with the posited threat that, after all the glaciers have melted and the floods have done their worst, the Ganges will be reduced to a trickle and hundreds of millions will die of thirst…

The work Himalayan Perceptions was described by Kumar Mainali, Editor of the Himalayan Journal of Sciences, as “probably the single most influential monograph ever published on Himalayan environmental issues” (INASP Newsletter, Spring 2006). The section in both editions entitled Some current myths on a Himalayan scale was largely reproduced in the paper published in the peer-reviewed Himalayan Journal of Sciences 2005, and because of its relevance will be quoted at length below.

The title of the paper is Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts? Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies.

This whole paper is well worth a read. It is a devastating exposure.

Some current myths on a Himalayan scale

…the following examples are offered because the degree of misinformation appears to be both extensive, widespread, and continuing…Reporting on global warming, the world economy, international terrorism, or almost any disaster has become comparable to the campaign speeches politicians tend to make at election time. It has also been understood for several decades now that ‘green’ movements have felt compelled to exaggerate in order to compete for attention with the possible bias of well-financed campaigns of big business and industry. Regardless, the examples of ‘latter-day myths’ are set forth because their pervasiveness tends to clutter the sustainable development landscape and perpetuate the Himalayan scale of uncertainty…

…The Times of London (21 July 2003), reporting on an international meeting held at the University of Birmingham, noted that ‘Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 40 years because of global warming . . . 500 million people in countries like India could also be at increased risk of drought and starvation.’ Syed Hasnain is quoted as affirming that ‘the glaciers of the region [Central Indian Himalaya] could be gone by 2035’.

According to Barry (1992: 45) the average temperature decrease with height (environmental lapse rate) is about 6ºC/km in the free atmosphere. The dry adiabatic lapse rate (DALR) is 9.8ºC/km. If it is assumed that the equilibrium line altitude (comparable with the ‘snow line’) in the Central Himalaya is about 5,000 masl and it will need to rise above 7,000 m if all the glaciers are to be eliminated, then the mean temperature increase needed to effect this change would be about 12–18ºC. Given that degree of global warming, summers in Calcutta would be a little uncomfortable.

As indicated earlier, myths tend to be self-perpetuating. In practice their longevity is often encouraged by vested interests of one form or another.

This, by one of the most well-known experts in the field, is a direct attack on the lies being propagated, and the prostitution and corruption of science in “the service of media, politics and the development agencies”. It is simply not possible after 2004 to suggest that the UN and those studying the Himalayas were unaware of the exposure of the myth and scam by such a prominent person as Jack Ives. Moreover, WWF were fully cognizant of Ives and his works – after all, in 2005 they quoted from four of his works in their paper: Ives, J. and Barry, R.(eds.), Arctic and Alpine Environments; Ives, J. D. (1986). Glacial lake outburst floods and risk engineering in the Himalaya; Ives, J. D., and Messerli, B. (1989). “The Himalayan Dilemma” and Messerli, B. and Ives, J.D. (Eds.), (1997). Mountains of the World – A Global Priority. A contribution to Chapter 13 of Agenda 21.

Jack Ives, in a comment to the author of this post, added:

The silliness of writing that all the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 should be self-evident: it would likely cause an undergraduate in physical geography or geology to laugh.

Additionally, the foreword to his 2004 book was written by none other than Prof. Dr. Hans J.A. van Ginkel, Rector of the United Nations University (a UN agency and think tank for the UN), whom Jack Ives represented at UN headquarters in New York in November 2001 when the International Year of Mountains (2002) was announced:

In writing this book, Jack Ives has…succeeded in laying to rest, once and for all, the regrettable misrepresentations that have been made about the Himalayan environmental situation…This volume is of immense value in bringing light to a long-standing area of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Its findings will contribute to a rethinking of the policies and approaches of decision-makers and government agencies concerned with the Himalayan region…

Well, that was 2004. It was to be expected, of course, that exposure of the lies and myths would scotch them, except perhaps among advocacy groups. In spite of Ives’ superb work, he and the United Nations University could not have expected that any respectable scientific body would deliberately perpetuate and embellish the myths he had slain and foist them onto an unsuspecting, and generally trusting public. In embodying these lies, the IPCC has behaved in a disgracefully cynical and evil manner with a public who could reasonably expect better.

But of course, Ives pointed out how the longevity of myths “is often encouraged by vested interests”, and that brings us right back to Rajendra Pachauri. It was none other than R.K. Pachauri who continued to spread the lies after their exposure by Ives, as reported in Hindustan Times (New Delhi), 22 July 2006

R.K. Pachauri, who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “In the next 25 years half of Himalayan glaciers will be lost to warming, affecting adversely crops and people of the region.”

So there you have it. This dead fish rotting from the head ensured that the lie was propagated and cemented into AR4 in 2007, years after it had been exposed in the relevant peer-reviewed literature as a lie.

[Note: the following was written on October 31 and updated November 3, before the 'Climategate' CRU email scandal broke, and it is all the more pertinent in the light of those disclosures. The CRU emails show how science has been perverted into a political movement, and how scientists conspired to serve a 'post-normal' agenda where truth is trampled - exactly as the proponents of 'post-normal' science had anticipated. With the association between 'post-normal' science developed by Ravetz and its application in climate science by Hulme now widely exposed by this present post, Ravetz and Hulme jointly authored an article, published by the BBC on December 1, entitled 'Show Your Working': What 'ClimateGate' means in which they sought to promote post-normal science further by capitalizing on the public disgust at the corruption of 'normal' science. This is cynical because normal science was corrupted by covertly introducing post-normal activities in the first place.]

What has become of science? We thought that science was about the pursuit of truth. Then we became perplexed at how quickly scientists have prostituted themselves in the service of political agendas. We have seen the unedifying spectacle of scientists refusing to share their data, fiddling their results, and resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who have exposed their work to be fraudulent. We have seen the Royal Society becoming a shamelessly crude advocacy society. We have seen President Obama choosing notorious climate alarmists and liars to be his personal advisors. We have seen the peer review process and journal editors colluding to prevent publication of results that do not serve the politically-correct agenda, and scientists refusing to consider results that demolish their pet theories. What is going on here?

What is going on is that science is no longer what we thought it was. It is now a tool in the hands of socialists, and the smart money is flowing into the pockets of ‘scientists’ who will serve their agenda. Follow the money. Whilst traditional physics and chemistry departments are closing in British universities, and there is a shortage of science teachers, there is an abundance of cash being poured into departments that will serve socialist ends, and no shortage of acolytes desirous to use this as a route to power. Once there was modern science, which was hard work; now we have postmodern science, where the quest for real, absolute truth is outdated, and ‘science’ is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction to underpin the latest lying narrative in the pursuit of power. Except they didn’t call it ‘postmodern’ science because then we might smell a rat. They called it PNS (post-normal science) and hoped we wouldn’t notice. It was thus named and explicated by Silvio O. Funtowicz and philosopher Jerome R. Ravetz, who in 1991 wrote the paper A New Scientific Methodology for Global Environmental Issues, followed in 1992 by The good, the true and the postmodern, and in 1993 by Science for the post-normal age, where they promoted the idea that

…a new type of science – ‘post-normal’ – is emerging…in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy…Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity.

The ‘response’ wasn’t to be a reaction against postmodernism, but an embracing of it, and going beyond it. And it has sinister ramifications.

We had already been warned about Ravetz in the 1987 work Changing Boundaries of the Political, which stated

From the perspective of Anglo-American liberalism it seems easy enough to…point out that the old predictions of the British Marxist J.D. Bernal about the triumph of basic research under socialism have proved hopelessly wrong, and that the demands of J.R. Ravetz of the University of Leeds that science be made instrumental and moral will destroy the enterprise whatever its short-term benefits.

Ravetz, who described himself as a peacenik intellectual, was a political radical who drew on neo-Marxism, and was a stalwart in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), anti-nuclear lobbies, and the Anti-Concorde Project. He is well known for arguing that the pursuit of truth in science is an obsolete and dangerous concept. He declared

…the puzzle-solving approach of ‘normal science’ is obsolete. This is a drastic cultural change for science, which many scientists will find difficult to accept. But there is no turning back; we can understand post-normal science as the extension of democracy appropriate to the conditions of our age.

For us, quality is a replacement for truth in our methodology. We argue that this is quite enough for doing science, and that truth is a category with symbolic importance, which itself is historically and culturally conditioned.

To pursue truth is to make a category mistake, so pursue the nebulous concept of ‘quality’ instead. So much for facts: scientists need to learn how to serve the craft of rhetoric. Even though it was concealed from those who constructed the models, the purpose of climate models was to provide the power of metaphor to political rhetoric:

…climate change models are a form of “seduction”…advocates of the models…recruit possible supporters, and then keep them on board when the inadequacy of the models becomes apparent. This is what is understood as “seduction”; but it should be observed that the process may well be directed even more to the modelers themselves, to maintain their own sense of worth in the face of disillusioning experience.

…but if they are not predictors, then what on earth are they? The models can be rescued only by being explained as having a metaphorical function, designed to teach us about ourselves and our perspectives under the guise of describing or predicting the future states of the planet…A general recognition of models as metaphors will not come easily. As metaphors, computer models are too subtle…for easy detection. And those who created them may well have been prevented…from being aware of their essential character.

In 1990 Ravetz published The Merger of Knowledge with Power, then in 2002 a paper The Challenge beyond Orthodox Science. Of the book by E.F. Pecci, Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness, a book about parapsychology, psychokinesis and extrasensory perception, he says it “creates a bridge between modern physics and the realm of subtle energies…it opens the way to an expansion of our scientific conceptions to include those other energies that are increasingly important for our comprehension of the world around us.” In 2007, Ravetz, then at the University of Oxford, published a paper Post-Normal Science and the complexity of transitions towards sustainability saying that post-normal science needed to be taken to the next stage.

The theory of Post-Normal Science…needs to be renewed and enriched…The time is not ripe for a modification of PNS, and so the best move forward is to raise the issue of Sustainability. For that I sketch a theory of complex systems, with special attention to pathologies and failures. That provides the foundation for a use of ‘contradiction’ as a problem incapable of resolution in its own terms, and also of ‘characteristic contradiction’ that drives a system to a crisis. With those materials it is possible to state the characteristic contradiction of our modern industrial civilisation, and provide a diagram with heuristic power.

Heuristic power is the power to explain ‘factual novelties’. ‘Contradiction’ and ‘characteristic contradiction’ are Marxist speak. Heard about ‘sustainability’ recently? You bet! Ravetz gives the Greens the tools they need to do their dirty work. He gives them the philosophical blueprint to attack modern industrial civilization. Now, let’s be clear: post-normal science is one of the manipulative arts that Machiavelli would have been proud of.

We will take as classic examples and exponents of post-normal science the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and Mike Hulme, the founding director of this Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Hulme makes it clear that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is well and truly in the bag. Stuart Blackman interviewed Hulme back in May, 2009, and described him as “one of the UK’s most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists” and the Tyndall Centre as “an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement”. The Tyndall Centre is deeply infiltrated by those serving the Green agenda, and produces work for advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the IPCC. It is funded by the British taxpayer, receiving grants from the three Research Councils NERC, EPSRC and ESRC. We read today on their website

Situations Vacant: Three Lecturers in Climate Change at Tyndall UEA
These new academic staff appointments at UEA have been created as a result of substantial new investments in the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The posts offer excellent opportunities for continuing, or developing, internationally outstanding research careers.

Notice that these are not lecturers in climate science, but climate change. We will see below what these lecturers will be expected to espouse and teach. The fig leaf that this might have been science has now been dropped. As Mike Hulme has said

[The] chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently urged the media to focus on the “scientific rationale for action” rather than the political aspects of climate…I disagree…In the end, politics will always trump science…we need better politics, not better science.

So what actually is ‘Post-Normal Science’? Dr John Turnpenny of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, in his paper What is post-normal science? A critical review of its development, definitions and usages (“Post Normal Science – perspectives & prospects” June 26/27, 2009 at Oxford), had this to say:

The concept of post-normal science (PNS) has been developed as a potential approach to addressing wicked issues…As such, the ‘science’ in PNS is not limited to a conventional understanding of the word…

So let’s stop calling it science. For a fuller description of post-normal science we turn to the essay by Eva Kunseler, Towards a new paradigm of Science in scientific policy advising (headings and italics added):

Normal science
[Normal] Science is a logic inductive process leading to theory formulation, while all the way put through critical tests that have been deductively derived from the theory; Popper’s critical rationalist concept of science is an objective progression toward the truth…The term normal science refers to the routine work of scientists within a paradigm; slowly accumulating knowledge in accord with established theoretical assumptions…The paradigm is enlarged and frontiers of knowledge and techniques pushed forward.

The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of the Mertonian CUDOS norms of science. They include:
(C)ommunalism – the common ownership of scientific discoveries, according to which scientists give up intellectual property rights in exchange for recognition and esteem;
(U)niversalism – according to which claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal or value-free criteria;
(D)isinterestedness – according to which scientists are rewarded for acting in ways that appear to be selfless;
(O)rganized (S)kepticism – all ideas must be tested and are subject to structured community scrutiny.

Post-normal science
A new concept of science was introduced by Funtowicz and Ravetz during the 1990s…The concept of post-normal science goes beyond the traditional assumptions that science is both certain and value-free…The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of goal orientation where scientific goals are controlled by political or societal actors…Scientists’ integrity lies not in disinterestedness but in their behaviour as stakeholders. Normal science made the world believe that scientists should and could provide certain, objective factual information…The guiding principle of normal science – the goal of achievement of factual knowledge - must be modified to fit the post-normal principle…For this purpose, post-normal scientists should be capable of establishing extended peer communities and allow for ‘extended facts’ from non-scientific experts…In post-normal science, the maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than the establishment of factual knowledge, is the key task of scientists… Involved social actors must agree on the definition of perceptions, narratives, interpretation of models, data and indicators…scientists have to contribute to society by learning as quickly as possible about different perceptions…instead of seeking deep ultimate knowledge.

So this is not science as we know it. Science has to re-invent itself as a political tool, just as it was under Hitler and Stalin. Scientists must learn ‘as quickly as possible’ what will please the political elite, and serve it up. As one Richard Fernandez has written:

All in all, the notion of “post-normal science” seems like a complete contradiction in terms or a perversion of the standard definition of science as commonly understood. It appears to be an elaborate and dishonest attempt to pass off the preferences of a single group as some kind of pseudo-science. There’s a much simpler term for this dishonest phrase: politics. Post-normal science is nothing but a cheap and lying term for a political diktat; for the rule of the self-appointed over everyone else. Whatever truth “Global Warming” may contain it has surely been damaged by its association with this disreputable and vile concept which brazenly casts aside the need for any factual basis and declares in the most unambiguous terms that whatever values it chooses to promote constitutes a truth unimpeachable by reality and a set of values that none dare challenge.

Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios, and reviewer for UKCP09), the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC, and was co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters. Hulme has been a champion and exponent of post-normal science for some years to serve his own socialist agenda, and this is what he has to say about post-normal science (some italics added):

Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs…where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken.

It has been labelled “post-normal” science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.

Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.

The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen…I attended the Conference, chaired a session…[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team…contained…a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee…interpreting it for a political audience…And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.

…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.

Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…

The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.

There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.

Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one…It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.

Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves…mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition…

The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.

…climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences…climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes…climate change has become “the mother of all issues”, the key narrative within which all environmental politics – from global to local – is now framed…Rather than asking “how do we solve climate change?” we need to turn the question around and ask: “how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations…?”

We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit…As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways…it can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future….We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.

We always said that Climate Change was a belief system, and there you have it. It has abandoned the pretence of objective science. As Hulme reveals, it is a postmodern narrative and the IPCC is a “classic example of a post-normal scientific activity”. This is leading to ridiculous situations. In early November 2009, a certain Tim Nicholson was granted permission to take his former employer Grainger to a tribunal. Commenting on this, his lawyer states:

Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.

Nicholson said he had tried to set up a carbon management system for the company, but was unable to work out its carbon footprint because staff had refused to give him the necessary data. He accused the chief executive, Rupert Dickinson, of showing “contempt” for his beliefs by not minimizing carbon emissions. Commenting on this issue in The Guardian, Andrew Brown, clearly in favour of coercion, writes in an article entitled We’re doomed without a green religion:

The justification for burning heretics was perfectly simple: dissent threatened the survival of society…not to coerce, itself becomes immoral…Compulsion will be needed but compulsion alone won’t do it…They need to believe in what they are forced to do…and that will also mean its dark side: the pressure of conformism, the force of self-righteousness, huge moral weight attached to practically useless gestures like unplugging phone chargers. They need, in fact, something that does look a lot like religion…Should that happen, the denialists, who claim that it is all a religion, will for once be telling the truth…

Mike Hulme has recently published a book entitled Why We Disagree About Climate Change from which some of his quotes above are taken. I can do no better than quote extracts of the book review by Joseph Bast in American Thinker:

More than a few people will be tempted to buy this book based on the promise, implicit in its title, that it offers an examination of the ideas and motives of both sides in the global warming debate. But that is not what this book is about. Rather, it is the musings of a British socialist about how to use the global warming issue as a means of persuading “the masses” to give up their economic liberties. The fact that the author, Mike Hulme, is a scientist who helped write the influential reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many other influential government agencies makes this book more disturbing than informative.

…socialists like Hulme can frame the global warming issue in such as way as to achieve seemingly unrelated goals such as sustainable development, income redistribution, population control, social justice, and many other items on the liberal/socialist wish-list.

It is troubling to read a prominent scientist who has so clearly lost sight of his cardinal duty — to be skeptical of all theories and always open to new data. It is particularly troubling when this same scientist endorses lying by others to advance his personal political agenda.

Read this book if you want insight into the mind of a scientist who has surrendered all moral authority to speak truthfully about global warming. Avoid it if you are looking for a book that explains why we disagree about climate change.

From what Hulme has admitted, the climate change debate is not about truth and physical reality, but a way of making it the “mother of all issues” in order to achieve socialist and Marxist aims, including de-capitalizing the West, and bringing about global governance by an elite. Hulme is delighted to be in the vanguard, and it is paying him handsomely. Critical to this is capture of the scientific institutions. Hulme says, we are all actors “in the unfolding story…alongside the personal gods of the heavens”. Climate change is a new lying narrative serving an agenda as old as the hills. Here is an account of the very first post-normal science experiment, pitting against ultimate truth a lying agenda and narrative with an ‘extended peer community’ and ‘extended facts’ in the pursuit of power:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

[For further development of these thoughts by a reader 'berniel' (comments below), see his posts 'Post-normal science and the corruption of climate science' and 'Revolutionary Science: Post-Normal Climate Science and neo-Marxism' ]