(This is Post 3 in a series of 3. See also the first post and second post.).

In response to the Michael Reiss affair, Harold Kroto has claimed that his sacking was necessary since Reiss (along with all religious people) show their lack of intellectual honesty by claiming religious knowledge.

Is religious knowledge possible? Surely, it is in principle. If an all-powerful God exists, there must be something that he could do to demonstrate to a reasonable person that he exists. If, before our eyes, all the stars in the heavens collected above Richard Dawkins house and spelled out: “That’s enough, Richard”  …

With this in mind, how can Kroto claim that the science / religion interface is characterised by “fundamentally unresolvable conflict”? Suppose, for a moment, that the following scenario is true. There is a God, roughly Judeo-Christian. He is a necessary being, who can exist without the universe. He freely decides to create a world. He decides that “the ordinary course of nature in the whole of creation [will have] certain natural laws … determining for each thing what it can do or not do” (St Augustine, 408 A.D.). These laws will be chosen to allow for the development of intelligent beings. The universe is “set off” with certain initial conditions. The intelligent beings, in turn, use their intellect to study the natural universe, and through empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning, discover the laws of nature. They call the enterprise, “science”.

In such a universe, it is clear that science would have ultimate, unchallenged authority in investigating the physical world. There would not be a necessary conflict between science and at least some religions. Religion would ask questions like:

• Why does science work?
• Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective in describing our physical world?
• How is it that we can, with exquisite accuracy, predict the behaviour of the physical world by writing things on a sheet of paper?
• What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? (S.Hawking)
• Why are there the same scientific laws today as yesterday?
• Why are there scientific laws at all?
• Why does the universe exist at all?
• Why are the laws of nature, constants of nature and initial conditions of the universe fine-tuned for intelligent life?
• What are mathematical truths, and why do they preside over all possible universes?
• What are the laws of logic, and why do they preside over all meaningful truths?”

These are not scientific questions, but they are undoubtedly meaningful. And, in such a universe, their answer would be found in God. Science, in such a universe would (in the words of C.S.Lewis) “explain everything except what we should call everything. The only thing they omit is – the whole universe”. Atheists in such a universe would simply be mistaken in any attempt to argue that these questions are meaningless, and even the lesser claim that God is not a good answer to these questions would be false. An intelligent being in such a universe who considered these questions meaningful would rightly be lead to infer the existence of an entity who deserved the name “God”. Such a belief would certainly not be an “unfound dogma” or “irrational” or “unsubstantiated”. In such a universe, some kind of religion (but not all imaginable religions, obviously) would not only be allowed but correct, all the while being outside the legitimate realm of the methods of science. Further, the existence of a “plethora of more-or-less incompatible religious concepts that mankind has invented” (including creationism) would do nothing to undermine correct religious beliefs.

Thus, Kroto is in a bind. If he is to establish his claim that religious belief is necessarily irrational, that there is an unresolvable conflict between science and religion, he must show that the scenario I imagined above is impossible, that our universe cannot be like that. Further, if he still accepts his “lemma”, he must do this using the methods of science. He must propose an experiment, an observation, a way of producing data to support this assertion. This data must somehow show that the “religious questions” we asked above are meaningless – not just that we do not now know the answer but that they are non-questions, cleverly disguised gobbledigook.

Kroto thinks he can resolve the science / religion debate by taking some construction paper, redrawing the boundaries of knowledge to place all his opponents on the outside, and then pointing and shouting “LIAR!”. Such a blatant smear campaign against all scientists who are believers is frankly inexcusable from a man who claims to put such a high price on “integrity”. The sacking of Michael Reiss remains a disgrace.

(This is Post 2 in a series of 3. The first post can be found here.).

In response to the Michael Reiss affair, Harold Kroto has claimed that his sacking was necessary since Reiss (along with all religious people) show their lack of intellectual honesty by claiming to know anything that cannot be subjected to scientific testing. Let’s look closely at Kroto’s “lemma” (I’ll paraphrase slightly): only those statements that can be subjected to scientific examination may be significant, or valid.

This is a textbook definition of the school of philosophy known as verificationism, or logical positivism. This school had its heyday in the 1st half of the 20th century, championed by Ayer and Bertrand Russell, among others. It has been almost universal abandoned by philosophers of science for two reasons. Firstly, it rules out all metaphysical, aesthetic and ethical knowledge. The impossibility of ethical knowledge in particular means that Kroto’s accusations of a lack of honesty and intellectual integrity, as well has his noble “struggle to save the democratic freedoms of The Enlightenment for our grandchildren” are, in fact, meaningless as they cannot be substantiated by the scientific method.

Secondly,  is it is self-refuting. Consider this question: is Kroto’s lemma subjectable to scientific examination? Well … no. What experimental confirmation of the lemma is possible? To put it more succinctly, the claim “all truths are scientific truths” is not itself a scientific truth. The claim “there is no such thing as metaphysics” is itself a metaphysical claim. The statement “only empirically supportable claims are meaningful” is not empirically supportable. The statement “there are no ways of knowing other than science” cannot be known through science.

This is no mere technicality. Kroto is attempting to define the boundaries of what is knowable in such a way that excludes all religious knowledge. He sees religious believers outside the boundary and accuses them all of dishonesty. But if he looks a bit harder he will also see his own definition lying outside its own boundary. If you claim that only the scientific method can lead us to the truth, then do not be surprised when all you know is facts about the physical universe. You cannot claim that the boundaries of science are  the boundaries of knowledge without contradicting yourself.

All of this leaves open the question of whether religious knowledge is, in fact, possible. I’ll look at this in my next post.

(This is Post 1 in a series of 3).

It’s been a while since I posted about the Michael Reiss affair, but I only just found a response to the controversy in the Guardian by Sir Harold Kroto. He is a Nobel Laureate in chemistry for discovering new kinds of carbon. I’ll respond to Kroto in three posts.

His central argument can be summarised as follows:

• Science is based solely on disinterested examination of the physical world.
• To be a scientist, we must accept nothing whatsoever for which there is no evidence as having any fundamental validity.
• All religious people have sacrificed their intellectual integrity by accepting “irrational unsubstantiated claims [that have] no fundamental validity”.
• Thus, Reiss cannot tackle the “fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface.” He was in the wrong job.

There are a number of points that need to be made in response to this. The most obvious is the accusation that all scientists who are believers are dishonest and irrational. This is an amazing claim. Was Newton dishonest? Boyle? Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the scientific revolution? Johannes Kepler? Nicolaus Copernicus? Blaise Pascal? Sir William Herschel? Michael Faraday? James Prescott Joule? James Clerk Maxwell? Louis Pasteur? In more modern times, was Arthur Eddington dishonest? Max Planck? Is George Ellis dishonest? John Polkinghorne? Nobel Laureate Arthur Schawlow? Alan Sandage? Don Page? Chris Isham? The computer science legend that is Donald Knuth? Owen Gingerich? Human genone project leader Francis Collins? Neuroscientist Bill Newsome? Geneticist R. J. Berry? Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris?

Now they could all be wrong, and I’m not claiming that believers comprise a majority of scientists. My point is the breathtaking claim that all of these scientists are dishonest, that they have no intellectual integrity.

Surely we would see evidence of this deficiency in their scientific work. If these are the sort of people who would deceitfully harbour unscientific beliefs, then we should see these beliefs creep into their research. Has Kroto discovered fabrications in Polkinghorne’s work with quarks? Are Alan Sandage’s observations to measure the Hubble constant strewn with lies? Is the man who created Tex (Knuth be praised!), “dangerous” and “hell-bent on dragging us back to the dark ages”? Where is Kroto’s evidence for such a claim?

Believers, it seems, are perfectly capable of applying the scientific method.

Ah yes, Kroto would say, but they disqualify themselves by claiming to know anything that cannot be subjected to scientific testing. We’ll look more closely at that claim in my next post.

I handed in my PhD thesis at the start of October and successfully defended it at the start of November. So now I’ve taken up a postdoctoral research position at ETH, Zurich. The Swiss, as you would expect from the owners and operators of the LHC, have demonstrated a remarkable ability in their study of particle physics.

I mean, quarks are incredibly difficult even to detect, so to be able to mass produce a dessert …

Expect news of ground-breaking research soon.

John Quiggin links to a veritable open sandwich of reports and articles on scientific methodology, particularly in the context of climate change. One document in particular, by Ken Baldwin and entitled When is science valid?, is very much worth reading (it’s only three pages; as they say in the ads in Britain: go on, you deserve it). What it does well is give careful answers to questions that, while very simple, seem to require spelling out to some. For example,

Does a media debate between two scientists contribute to this process? Not really.

The reason is twofold. First, a debate does not allow the full scrutiny required of evidence-based expert examination. Second, the majority view of expert scientists cannot be reflected by a debate. In a debate, one adversary is pitted against another. This does not tell us if the majority of the scientific community are sitting on one side or the other.

Nice one. I suppose that talk of civilization going backward has its genesis in the observation that careful statements like this didn’t use to be necessary—that it was understood how a institution fostering dialogue between parties both claiming to be scientific, but asymmetrically committed to the scruples that entails, is making heat rather than light. Except I wouldn’t agree that this true statement was understood before—that we are having to make it so now is the result of the great changes in the opportunity and reward system for those making comment about social, political and scientific matters; changes that have only occured in the last few years.

For that reason, it’s important that the ideas Baldwin advances here be evaluated and understood by as wide a segment of the population as possible.

Peter Coles has just written a post on what he terms the ‘academic journal racket’, and rather than add a lengthy comment, I’ll write something here.

The rational argument for electronic editing and publishing is certainly made very strongly in his post. I would like to hear a scientist at a later stage of their career than me expound a little more on how the inertia of our current system should be overcome. The arXiv++ path, though undoubtedly fraught with complications, certainly seems to have a lot of potential—but how could the community of scientists be galvanised around it? Would Peter consider discussing this with the arXiv administrators directly? At least one cosmology blogger has participated in the shaping of the arXiv previously. Online petitions are very twee, but if there is a earnest desire for change among those making decisions about journal subscriptions, perhaps a concensus can be quickly reached acknowledged.

Two further comments: the arXiv would need to be further decentralised for these ideas to be tenable—if it became the Hauptbahnhopf for astrophysics papers, Cornell University Library would feel obliged to ask for contributions to the maintainence costs, putting everyone roughly back where we started. The merit of Universities having their own preprint servers, which Peter correctly derides as being pointless compartmentalisation, is that there is no mechanism for some party to feel agrieved over the burden they bear. In this vein, I contend that: a cheap, effective and rigorous publication process for astrophysics papers can be achieved with a highly distributed network of continually updating arXiv mirrors, all acting as entry points for papers that are then directed to editors on the basis of subject, assigned to referees, and revised and updated through much the same process that exists at present.

Achieving this would require senior academics to stop their departments’ current academic journal subscriptions, to wrest some control of the arXiv from Cornell and to design and implement a functional editorial system. I don’t have much more to say about the lattermost here, though I don’t believe that blog-style comments or wiki-style modification are senisble at the present time—it’s too easy to act in a rash and unrestrained manner through those media.

Lastly, and quite topically for Luke and myself, acknowledging that we can get by just with electronic copies of papers should lead some universities to acknowledge that the archaic ritual of thesis binding can be done away with. The cost is high and are often borne entirely by the student. Having a bound copy of the work for oneself is ‘nice’, though it amounts to vanity publishing (not that this bothers me)—but university libraries can get along just fine with electronic copies; distributing them through the arXiv is an increasingly common practice.

A week ago, ESA initiated a call for applicants to participate in a simulated round-trip mission to the Red Planet, which will involve being inside a sealed facility for more than 500 days performing what I presume are relatively uncreative tasks that require plenty of concentration. Some further descriptive content has appeared on their website today, full of delicious tidbits:

…an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission.

…

The crew will follow a programme designed to simulate a 250-day journey to Mars, a 30-day surface exploration phase and 240 days travelling back to Earth.

Certainly not my cup of tea, but it does tickle the imagination! The Call for Candidates and related documents are available here. Completed and signed application forms should be sent to Mars500@esa.int. The deadline for applications is 5 November 2009, however only citizens of nations participating in the ESA ELIPS programme are eligible.

A quick post to celebrate Duncan’s forging outward: his new blog is Well-bred Insolence, covering extrasolar planets, astrobiology and I expect some politics too, because frankly you can’t keep the Scots out of it. The amusing byline is ‘Forming Planets… and Opinions,’ and the blog is sure to attract a good readership before long—so get over there!

Because I spend insufficiently little time feeling as though I’m still an undergraduate, may I politely agitate for others to follow the advice of Chris Bertram:

Those of you working in higher education in the UK already know about the barbarous proposal to make future support for research depend on a government assessment of its “impact” – in other worlds whether there’s a tangible payoff in terms of economic growth or social policy.

My colleague James Ladyman has launched a petition on the No.10 website to tell Gordon Brown what we think of the idea. If you’re British, even if you don’t live in the UK any more, pop over and sign it.

Something similar has been mentioned by Andy, just in reference to the UK’s main science council. To pass broader comment, I am uncertain of the efficacy of these petitions. I hypothesise that the UK government acts only on those that are i) highly supported; and ii) of purely symbolic value. For instance, the recent public apology issued posthumously to Alan Turing is both terrifically sensible and completely uncourageous. I am unaware of an initiative requiring the expenditure of political captial that has seen fruition through these petitions, but I acknowledge that, if my hypothesis stems from cynicism, it could be that I have selectively ignored counterexamples. On the one hand, I hope that’s wrong, but on the other, it would be nice if it were true.

I must admit that smartphones have impacted my consciousness quite severely in the last few weeks.  Things came to a head when a friend shared the link to this wonderful new phone on Facebook…check it out before the jump…

Didn’t you want that phone to be real? Be honest, how long did it take you to work out that this was a hoax?

The Pomegranate is an expertly executed example of exploiting Man’s intrinsic need for one-upmanship.  Your friend’s phone might have Google Maps, but can it make coffee (or transform into a harmonica?).  On a more serious note, the New Scientist ran this article recently hailing the smartphone as

effectively [become] an appendage to our body and mind that plays a role in everything from our social interactions to emotions.

Justified? Probably.  It’s quite true that everyone has a friend who would rather fumble with their iPhone than consult a handy, low-tech, paper-based map when trying to get places.  The word “app” has moved out of Silicon Valley (and away from other participants of Buzzword Bingo) into everyday life.  After all, how can you split a bill in a restaurant without an app that tells you how?

The cynical will cast an eye on my previous attempts to split the bill, and watch as I reach for my (simpleton-)phone to surreptitiously use the calculator.  I will remain defiant: I am not a Luddite, and calculators are very useful pieces of equipment.  However, to use a calculator requires supplementary knowledge: a grounding in arithmetic.  After all, if you don’t understand the concept of division, how can you use a calculator?  A smartphone removes that requirement, which is what I guess worries me most.  There’s a classic story by Isaac Asimov about a world so dependent on technology that they have forgotten mathematics completely, and are forced to rediscover it to survive (their somewhat anachronistic obsession with slide rules is quite cute).  Could smartphones turn us into such a bunch of cretins?

Actually, that’s not what worries me most.  What worries me most is that I want one: marketing consultants have honed their craft over the last five decades, and despite my attempts to be worldly and cognisant of the fact, they have successfully convinced the testosterone-fuelled gadget-obsessed part of me to crave their shiny newness.  Damn you, Apple! I’m doomed to spongification…

Perhaps I’m just caught up in media hyperbole: ten years ago, newspapers were pushing plenty of copy about how our half-brick phones (having recently evolved from full-brick phones) were becoming our newest limb, and people were developing SIM separation anxiety.  Then a few years ago Blackberries, with their magnificent qwertyfied countenance and email on tap, were causing much consternation about burned-out City Workers (they probably wouldn’t have received quite so much sympathy from the tabloids today!).  This is probably just the newest “thing to worry about” that Fleet Street is blowing out of proportion.

Still – when I do succumb, don’t let me download iSplit…for the sake of my mental health…