Debating science and religion with Sam Harris

Since publishing my online Muse column in Nature News about the Reason Project (you’ll find all the links below), I have been having an exchange of views with the project’s founder Sam Harris. The results are below. I have added a final comment here that is not on the Reason Project site, but Sam knows about it and may or may not respond. I’ll say no more – judge for yourselves.

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5/21/09

Dear Phil --

Well, we seem to have a tempest in a teapot brewing. You were good enough to notice the birth of my foundation, The Reason Project, in your column in Nature (How much reason do you want?, Nature News 14 May 2009), and I repaid this kindness by hurling you into the Reason Project Hall of Shame for perceived indiscretions of rational thought. You then responded to your confinement on your blog ("“Whatever you do, don’t call them militant" 19 May 2009)--and life on earth has not been the same since.

I wonder whether you would like to have a direct exchange on these issues. I'm not entirely sure where our respective misunderstandings leave off and our genuine differences of opinion begin, but it might be interesting for readers to watch us struggle to sort things out.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Best,

Sam

Sam Harris
Co-Founder and CEO
The Reason Project




5/23/09

Dear Sam,

Thanks for this message. A tempest in a teapot seems an apt way to express it. I do suspect that most of our disagreement hinges on misunderstandings rather than genuine differences, although of course there’s no harm in the latter.

I can appreciate that you wouldn’t welcome the mildly skeptical tone of my Nature article, but I’m still puzzled about why you found it sufficiently objectionable to (as you say) hurl it into your Hall of Shame. (I assume this particular pit is not intended for all critics, but only for those whose message you find especially abhorrent or misguided.) At this point, I’m forced to guess that perhaps you share the views of those who have commented unfavourably about the piece on your site. The primary objections there seem predicated on two notions:

1. That I have said religion and science are compatible.
2. That I am parading Francis Collins and others who seek a conciliatory position as the good guys.

I sincerely believe that you will find neither of these points of view actually stated in my piece, and for the simple reason that I don't believe them. Perhaps my blog post made it a little clearer. My points are that:

1. There seems little point in making religion per se the ‘enemy of reason’. That creates a big and, frankly, invincible foe. And it's a foe that doesn't need to be vanquished. Plenty of religious people – certainly, just about all those I know – are perfectly happy to accept the tenets of science that the fundamentalists find so distasteful, which are mostly connected with questions of origin. That there are logical inconsistencies in that position really doesn't seem to me to be a big deal – we live with all kinds of contradictions, and often because we don’t feel any compulsion to chart our all beliefs with philosophical rigour until we discover where they clash. For many Christians (the religious community I am most familiar with), the Virgin Birth, the biblical miracles, as well as angels, saints and, goodness knows, even heaven and hell aren’t notions they particularly cling to or think about very much at all. They simply find that religion addresses some of their needs. I’m not even sure that I would consider this use of religion irrational – merely woolly.
This is what I meant when I referred to a ‘false dichotomy’ – the fact that I think science and religion can in principle coexist (as they always have done, even if not always comfortably) does not mean that I think they are logically compatible. I know some will say that this is a complacent view, because religion is (outside Western Europe) growing both in its strength and in its intolerance. That is absolutely a cause for concern. But it doesn’t pit religion per se against science per se. It’s a primarily political issue.

2. Religion is not a delusion to be corrected with a little hard science. A lot of the current ‘rationalist’ criticism of religion reminds me of the old deficit model that used to motivate the Public Understanding of Science movement: just give people the right facts, and then they’ll agree with us. This is not just deluded, but lazy. It’s trivial to take religious texts and show how, literally interpreted, they are utter nonsense. But we have to engage with (and sometimes do battle with, it is true) religion as it exists in the world. This is more challenging. On the longer version of my Nature article posted on my blog, I cite the example of Galileo. If we choose to believe that the Catholic Church condemned his heliocentrism because it conflicted with scripture, we have an unassailable case against superstitious dogma. If we recognize that the issue was at least as much about maintaining the Church’s authority, we have to concede some (Machiavellian) rationality in the papal position, however repugnant the motives. (And incidentally, let’s please not hear any more about Giordano Bruno being martyred for his heliocentrism. That’s the kind of contempt for history that polarized positions encourage.)

I claim that religion needs to be seen as a social construct, with all kinds of social functions. Some of the most thoughtful commentators on theology, such as Karen Armstrong, recognise the value and perhaps even necessity of the kind of myth that religion embodies. Many are now happy to accept that aspects of the Bible, and other religious texts, should be read in this allegorical way. We can't meaningfully engage in religion without recognizing this social and cultural aspect - it often functions as a component of how people construct their cultural identity. It seemed to me that this was really what the Royal Society’s former director of education Michael Reiss was trying to say when he suggested that it was best to understand religiously motivated delusions such as creationism as world views rather than as mere ignorance. Reiss’s remarks incited such outrage among a few vocal, prominent scientists that he was of course forced to resign. It troubles me when scientists (and others) get such horrors about religion that they seem no longer able to entertain or even notice any nuance of opinion in these matters. It all starts to sound disturbingly like George W. Bush’s comment that you’re either for us or against us.

The comments on your blog left me dismayed that the initiative you have started might tend to attract those whose views on religion are instead of the most simplistic and reductive sort ('But it's just wrong!'). But I also realise, on reflection, that it is unfair to judge an organization by its web feedback. Nature would not fare at all well if that were applied to them.

I am in favour of any movement that campaigns to kick out of schools the invidious misinformation of creationism, intelligent design and the rest of the shoddy fundamentalist agenda. I am very much in favour of a movement that aims to denounce religious intolerance and that attacks the kind of harmful and ignorant nonsense that seems increasingly to be coming from the Vatican. On my blog, I reacted to your actions and to the comments on your site with a mixture of amusement and irritation, neither of which is terribly constructive, because I have to choose words carefully within the incredibly constrained format that a Nature Muse allows and so am frustrated when they aren't read carefully. But it is possible too that I did not choose them carefully enough. And certainly, I would not want to misrepresent what you are trying to achieve, which I am sure includes much that I would support.

Best wishes,
Phil



5/24/09


Dear Phil --

Thank you for a favorable and very substantive response to my invitation. I appreciate your willingness to have this exchange in a public forum. First, I should say that while I can't necessarily endorse every comment that appears beneath your article on the Reason Project website (in fact, there may be many I haven’t read), I suspect there is not much daylight between me and some of the more vociferous critics you encountered there. As evidence of this fact, here is the Letter to the Editor I wrote in response to your column. While I am its principal author, many members of my advisory board have read it, offered minor suggestions, and generally approve its contents. I have told your Editor in Chief, Philip Campbell, that he can print it with multiple signatories, or not, whichever is more attractive to him.


Sir--

In his column, "How much reason do you want?" (Nature News 14 May 2009) Philip Ball, a consultant editor at this journal, takes members of The Reason Project to task for being too critical of religion. While he accepts the value of "knowledge", "learning," and "intellectualism," he argues that these virtues need not, in principle, undermine the religious commitments of law-abiding men and women in the 21st century. Mr. Ball assures us that while the "abuse" of religion "to justify suppression of human rights, maltreatment and murder is abhorrent," there is no deeper contradiction to be found between scientific rationality and religious faith. As evidence of this underlying harmony, we are asked to contemplate the existence of The BioLogos Foundation, whose purpose (in the words of its mission statement) is to demonstrate "the compatibility of the Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life."

To give you a sense of how bizarre Mr. Ball's opinions will appear to rational people everywhere, imagine reading a column in Nature that criticized scientists for taking too adversarial a stance with respect to witchcraft—even in Africa, where a belief in the efficacy of magic spells, invisible spirits, and the occasional human sacrifice remains widespread. If the analogy between religion and witchcraft seems hyperbolic, please take a moment to review the actual tenets of the world's major religions.

For instance, a reconciliation between science and Christianity (the explicit goal of The BioLogos Foundation) would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions. In its most generic and well-subscribed form, Christianity amounts to the following claims: Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven” -- where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and sceptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother's knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will (probably) be consigned to a fiery hell for all eternity.

On Mr. Ball's account, there is nothing in the scientific worldview, or in the intellectual rigor and self-criticism that gave rise to it, that casts such convictions in an unfavorable light. This learned opinion is, frankly, amazing to me and to the other members of The Reason Project. One would have thought it might also amaze Mr. Ball's fellow editors at Nature.

Sam Harris
Co-Founder and CEO
The Reason Project
www.reasonproject.org



I suspect that you find this response indicative of the some of the misunderstandings and militancy you refer to in your blog post. I'm sorry to say, however, that your subsequent writings—both on your blog and in this exchange—only dig the hole I perceive you to be in deeper still.

On your blog you say the following:

But what depresses me is that the Reason Project and many of its supporters are so sure of the battle-lines that they have lost the ability of basic English comprehension. It is this that has earned me the delightful honour of a place in the Reason Project’s Hall of Shame, no less – because it has decided that I am placing the irenic BioLogos Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, and other apologists, on a pedestal, making them the nice, friendly good guys who only want us all to get along. Does my article say that? No, it simply quotes from the BioLogos mission statement (just as it quotes from the Reason Project mission statement). That this is taken as registering approval is a bit disturbing. The fact that I suggest the Reason Project in some respects ‘should be applauded’, and say no such thing about the BioLogos Foundation, doesn’t seem to be noticed. (The fact is that I’m utterly indifferent to the BioLogos Foundation. I find its aims uninspiring and its current statements about the relation of science and religion somewhat shallow.)


While you clearly expect a paragraph like this to fully acquit you, there is, even here, much to offend the sensibilities of reasonable people who are sensitive to the problem of religion. Please consider how your choice of words strikes a reader who desperately wants to believe that you, a scientist and an editor at the most prestigious scientific journal on earth, has his head on straight:

1. To call the BioLogos Foundation "irenic" is far too charitable. It is, rather, obscurantist and phatasmagorically stupid. If you took a moment to examine what its founder, Francis Collins, actually believes, as well as the means by which he came to believe it, you will see that he is engaged in an obscene re-branding of otherworldly hope and craving as a legitimate arm of science. I'm sorry to say that your charity toward Collins is part of a pattern at Nature, which I have pointed out previously in the pages of the journal. According to Nature, Collins’ atrocious book, The Language of God, represented a “moving” and “laudible” [sic] exercise of building “a bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands.” And here is Collins, hard at work on that bridge:

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted….

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.

Half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; our president has just used his first veto to block federal funding for the most promising medical research in all of biology on religious grounds; and one of the foremost scientists in the land had that to say. Stranger still, the most influential scientific publication on earth couldn’t find a nit to pick here. Collins’ scientific reputation has been undiminished by these ejaculations—indeed, he seems destined to be President Obama’s choice to run the National Institutes of Health—and yet his thinking here, as elsewhere, is a quite a bit worse than “woolly,” as you put it: it constitutes a perfect repudiation of scientific principles and intellectual honesty.

2. The way in which you paired The Reason Project and The BioLogos Foundation in your Nature column conveyed the sense—quite common in journalism—that the truth must lie somewhere between the two extremes on offer: On the one hand we have some extreme rationalists (who think that most basic standards of intellectual integrity should not be traduced at the highest levels of our discourse out of deference to the uneducated opinions of first century scribes); on the other, we have a man who is convinced that Jesus Christ is the risen Lord and eternal saviour of the earth because he happened to come upon a frozen waterfall while hiking and found it inexplicably beautiful. These two frames of mind are not equally scientific. I think you owe it to yourself, and to your readers, to clearly distinguish them.

There was much else in your column, blog post, and first volley here, that I have not addressed—of particular interest to me is the claim that religion is both an “invincible” and unnecessary foe. Perhaps we’ll touch on that subject later on.

Best,
Sam


Dear Sam,
I’m a little clearer now about what I’m being accused of, but no more so about why. Your letter to Nature repeats the claim that I say there is no contradiction between scientific rationality and religious faith, and repeats the failure to state where I say that. In fact, I state in my previous response that there are contradictions. Can we accept at least that this charge should be substantiated or dropped? That seems to me to be the rational way to proceed.

Your account of Christianity’s ‘most generic and well subscribed’ form is the scriptural literalist one. It is probably close to the medieval view, but I’d want more evidence that it is the generic view today. It is not the view of the head of the Church of England, which I suspect should count for something. But in any event, my point is, and always was, not that we need accept religious (and in your portrait, undoubtedly nonsensical) views as compatible with science but that you are not going to get very far by simply insisting to people who hold them that they are irrational and therefore should be abandoned forthwith. Rather, you need to consider the sociological questions of why people have a range of religious faiths, why religions as social institutions are so widespread, and why fundamentalism seems to be becoming a powerful political force in some religions in some parts of the world. (I don’t believe there is a universal answer to the last one – look at the resurgence of Hinduism in India, for example.)

To call the Biologos Foundation irenic is to use the word in its literal sense – they seek reconciliation of science and religion. It is simply a description, not a judgement. It may well be that no such reconciliation is logically possible – that doesn’t mean the Biologos Foundation cannot seek it, however misguidedly. There is not the slightest reason why one cannot be irenic for phantasmagorically stupid reasons. And then you’re off again, making criticisms of positions that simply don’t appear in my article. Criticize Nature’s other statements on Collins by all means – they are nothing to do with me or my views.

You end with a further supposition – that by describing two polar positions, I am suggesting that the truth lies in between. That’s your interpretation, and based on nothing I said. My view (and it’s not hard to see this, I think, from the strapline of my article) is that a more productive way to approach the issues lies elsewhere.

Sam, you’re calling yourselves the Reason Project and repeatedly stressing your scientific perspective. Science proceeds by inspecting the evidence objectively, not by prejudging what it means. The evidence here are the words I wrote, but they don’t seem to have been terribly germane to your comments so far.

Best wishes,
Phil



Dear Phil –

You still appear to be missing the point: the point is not that there is some legalistic parsing of your Nature column that allows for an (almost) exculpatory reading; the point is that everything you have written on this subject represents a basic failure to acknowledge (1) just how contradictory religious faith and scientific rationality are as modes of thought, (2) the actual profundity and scope of humankind’s religious bewilderment in the year 2009, and (3) the real world effects of (1)&(2). The most charitable interpretation I can find of what you have written is this: such truths could well be acknowledged, if we thought it wise—but it is not wise. If one wants to slay the Dragon of Ignorance, one shouldn’t first wake the Dragon, offend it, and then challenge it to fight to the death; one must be more cunning than this, or the whole project is doomed from the start. If THIS is what you intend to say, then fine, we can debate questions of secular/scientific strategy and marketing (and perhaps your own writing is an attempt to implement such a subtle strategy). But much of what you’ve written suggests that, whether or not you are chiefly concerned about such practical matters, you are also confused about points 1-3.

First off, the generic form of Christianity I described in my Letter to the Editor is not merely “the scriptural literalist one.” Without question, the beliefs I’ve highlighted summarize the majority view of Christianity. You seem to be, frankly, unaware of what most Christians (and perhaps religious people generally) claim to believe. Even your reference to the Church of England (which, I will grant, is more liberal than many) seems to ignore its actual doctrine. The C of E wears the resurrection of Jesus and other hocus pocus right on its sleeve. More generally, I could cite any number of opinion poll results and the doctrinal statements of the largest churches—all would conduce to the general boredom our readers, but would establish, beyond peradventure, that Christianity without a belief in miracles and magic books is not Christianity. And for everything that I would say about Christianity, there is worse to be said about Islam at this moment in history, as you surely must know.

As for your actual words, here is a quotation from your Nature piece, with some trivial modifications. I wonder if you see anything wrong with it:

In other words, this is not a matter of science versus faith [in witchcraft], but of the rejection of scientific ideas that challenge power structures... That’s not to minimize the problem, but recognizing it for what it is will avoid false dichotomies, and perhaps make it easier to find solutions.

So there is little to be gained from trying to topple the temple [of Magic] — it’s the false priests who are the menace. If we can recognize that [witchcraft], like any ideology, is a social construct — with benefits, dangers, arbitrary inventions and, most of all, roots in human nature – then we might forgo a lot of empty argument and get back to the worldly wonders of the lab bench.


Wouldn’t it be a tad strange to read this in the pages of Nature? Doesn’t it matter what people believe about the nature of reality? Doesn’t the nature of reality itself matter? If the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to spiritual modification as to render the whole enterprise ridiculous. If the basic claims of religion are false, most people are living in a state of abject confusion, beset by absurd hopes and fears, and tending to waste their time and attention—often with tragic results. Is this really a “false dichotomy”?

Best,
Sam



Dear Sam,
You accuse me of “a basic failure to acknowledge just how contradictory religious faith and scientific rationality are as modes of thought”. Given what I have said previously, I must now interpret this as your way of saying “you acknowledge that religious faith and scientific rationality are contradictory, but fail to say that loudly enough”. (We needn’t argue further about whether my original Nature article said otherwise; my words can speak for themselves.)

So it seems that my sin, perhaps more venial than mortal, is not that of defending religion but of failing to attack it with sufficient vigour. This, you say, is a position that “will appear bizarre to rational people everywhere”. I will trust rational people everywhere to be the judge of that. You seem very keen to construct statements that Nature readers will find bizarre, but I think most will not find at all bizarre the notion that it is not science’s duty to eradicate all traces of religion in the world. This is not in any degree a weird or fringe position and it seems a pointless game to find ways of making it appear such.

From what you say, I suspect that what you object to most is my suggestion that the contradictions between science and faith need not in themselves be a big deal. By this I mean that I see no need to be so desperately worried about them when religious leaders and believers are moderates rather than are not scriptural literalists. I see no great threat to science from the kind of Anglicanism advocated by its current leader, or from the liberal forms of Islam that are held by thinkers such as Ziauddin Sardar. There are plenty of people, including many scientists, who are quite able to live with (or open to exploring) the contradictions and feel no need to rewrite or deny the mainstream scientific consensus. And these people are, in my experience, not at all “living in a state of abject confusion, beset by absurd hopes and fears”. It hardly needs to be said that science can thrive in societies in which religion is present (perhaps even strong) – it has done so throughout all of history.

That is why I don't feel a need to cast this in terms of science versus faith. It seems to me that our difference here is that you feel unwilling to live in a world where the contradictions between science and faith are tolerated, whereas I am not.

So I see no dragon that needs slaying, either by might or by stealth. If you accept that anthropology is anything of a science, this monolithic view of religion is in any event unscientific. Are you really saying that Christian fundamentalism, Indonesian Buddhism, African tribal beliefs and Chinese state-sponsored Confucianism are all part of the same beast, with the same causes and the same vulnerabilities? All, I agree, entail irrationality to some degree or another, and all are (as I’ve said) social constructs. But the reasons why, let’s say, fundamentalist Islam is in the ascendant in some parts of the world, and Hindu nationalism in others, are social, cultural and political. You might say that, regardless of the causes, the kinds of problems that ensue would be removed by simply eradicating all religion everywhere. But I don’t think you’d be so naïve.

I find your approach of highlighting and ridiculing all the most absurd and irrational aspects of these belief systems too easy. I too find the things you list as irrational (albeit perhaps not always as offensive) as you do. But the problems that religions can cause will be addressed only by engaging with them as social and cultural institutions, not as a string of silly ideas.

I did not say (sorry, this again) that the C of E shares none of the views you listed in your sketch of Christian belief. I said that its position is not that which you sketched, particularly in terms of the part that I suspect we both (and most other non-believers) find most objectionable: “Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will (probably) be consigned to a fiery hell for all eternity.” Neither this nor a creationist viewpoint is an essential or inevitable component of Christianity today. If those beliefs are nevertheless on the rise (I simply don’t know if they are – creationism has always been strong in the US), then that is a problem with societal causes and needs to be seen and tackled as such.

Your minor rephrasing of my Nature article makes for interesting reading. To begin with, I’d challenge your implication that all religion is witchcraft – but before you leap down my throat, I do so because I would say instead that it is more accurate and more productive to say that religions and witchcraft are both examples of social constructs based on beliefs and ideologies that cannot be demonstrated and that, among other things, formalize social structures and hierarchies. Like it or not, it seems to be part of human nature to create such constructs. And they are not always expressed as religion.

With that in mind, I see nothing at all objectionable in the second paragraph. Benefits of witchcraft? There are very probably social benefits for the societies that practise it. They don’t necessarily outweigh the problems, and they don’t in any way justify witchcraft. But they help explain it, and we won’t understand these superstitious systems unless we recognize them.

I think that actually the meaning of my first paragraph remains pretty much unscathed too. The point here is that all kinds of irrational belief systems will accept a great deal of science, but some selectively reject those aspects that conflict with their power base. So all I am saying is that, strategically speaking, it seems to make sense to recognize a distinction between ideologies that systematically deny all of science (I’m not in fact sure if there are any such) and ones that exclude only the inconvenient truths. It seems to me that those two positions are likely to have different origins, and thus warrant different solutions.

Best wishes,
Phil


Dear Phil –

I trust that many of our readers will share my frustration at this point, as well as my sense that we have failed to get at the heart of the matter. As is so often the case in debates of this kind, more points get raised in each volley than can be addressed in the next—so permit me to ignore what seem like peripheral issues in an attempt to make some sense.

I will say one thing in passing, however, by way of addressing several specific points (your use of the term “irenic”, etc.): you frequently complain that I have either misrepresented what you have written or have drawn the wrong implications from it. While it is tempting to argue otherwise, it is too tiresome to rebut each specific charge. There is another principle at work that I think you should notice: our disagreement draws at least as much energy from what you have not said. To use an admittedly crude example: if the only thing a person can think to say about the morality of Adolph Hitler is that he was a “committed vegetarian,” this would say rather more by way of omission. In your Nature column, and in this exchange, what you haven’t said matters more than you seem to realize.

I am not suggesting that it is “science’s duty to eradicate all traces of religion in the world.” Nor am I denying that science can be practiced alongside religion (in most forms), or that religious people can become scientists, or that smart scientists can sometimes harbor incredible religious beliefs, or that religious imbeciles can hanker after the products of science. Clearly, a juxtaposition between bad ideas/methods and good ones is possible—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture, etc. And as far as science itself is concerned, it has become all too obvious that many scientists practice their discipline like a trade, without ever attempting to form a truly consilient, or even consistent, view of the world.

But the fact that such things are possible does not in the least suggest that they are optimal—or, indeed, that they do not come at a terrible price. I think it would be very difficult to find instances where incoherence, wishful thinking, and dogmatism have aided scientific progress—or, in fact, progress of any kind. The argument that there is no deep conflict between scientific rationality and religious faith because some scientists are religious, and all religious people value some science, is a false one—and it has become a stultifying shibboleth. Is there generally no conflict between marriage and adultery simply because the two are so often found together? Would it matter if the BioLechery Foundation produced adulterers who could attest, without blinking, to their clarity of conscience? The analogy isn’t perfect, but perhaps you see my point. The cuckold, incidentally, is not merely science itself, but everyone everywhere, and those yet unborn. Who knows how much better our world would be if we had birthed a culture of genuine intellectual honesty in the year 1200 (or 2000)?

So the fact that you find yourself surrounded by scientists and other smart people who may be a little “woolly” on the subject of God is evidence of absolutely nothing worth discussing (on my account), apart from the fact that it seems to have led you to miss the bigger picture and to speak and write in such a way as to give shelter to the deeply religious, powerfully irrational, and shockingly retrograde convictions of entire cultures and subcultures. This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine.

Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this “life begins at the moment of conception” business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of “religious faith.” In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature.

Your frequent claim that we must understand religious belief as a “social construct,” produced by “societal causes,” dependent upon “social and cultural institutions,” admitting of “sociological questions,” and the like, while it will warm the hearts of most anthropologists, is either trivially true or obscurantist. It is part and parcel of the double standard that so worries me—the demolition of which is the explicit aim of The Reason Project.

Epidemiology is also “social construct” with “societal causes,” etc.—but this doesn’t mean that the germ theory of disease isn’t true or that any rival “construct”—like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS—isn’t a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a “social institution” hasn’t been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven’t laughed this belief off the face of the earth.

We did not lose a decade of progress on stem-cell research in the United States because of religion as a “social construct”; we lost it because of the behavioural and emotional consequences of a specific belief. If there were a line in the book of Genesis that read – “The soul enters the womb on the hundredth day (you idiots)” – we wouldn’t have lost a step on stem-cell research, and there would not be a Christian or Jew anywhere who would worry about souls in Petri dishes suffering the torments of the damned. The beliefs currently rattling around in the heads of human beings are some of the most potent forces on earth; some of the craziest and most divisive of these are “religious,” and so-dubbed they are treated with absurd deference, even in the halls of science; this is a very bad combination—that is my point.

For the purposes of this discussion, the only “social construct” that I am worried about is the one which convinces a journal like Nature that its paramount duty is to be polite in the face of Iron Age delusions. If ever there were a place to call a spade a “spade,” it is in the pages of the world’s most authoritative scientific publication. Let me remind you that the physiologist Rupert Sheldrake had his scientific career neatly decapitated, in a single stroke, by a Nature editorial. Did his vaguely “woolly” thesis about “morphogenetic fields” deserve at least a ride in a tumbrel? Perhaps. Was his book, A New Science of Life, as flagrantly unscientific as Francis Collins’, The Language of God? Not by a long shot. As I have pointed out, the journal’s treatment of Collin’s risible theology has been abject. You’ve also cited Ziauddin Sardar with admiration—but his whitewash of Islam in the pages of Nature was a travesty. Here again is the “social construct” and the double standard that you fail to acknowledge. Religion is probably the most consequential and divisive species of ignorance at work in the world today, and yet it is systematically shielded from criticism, even where it explicitly conflicts with science, and even in the world’s most important scientific journal. Amazing.

Of course, all that you have written is of a piece with the inertia felt in the rest of the scientific community: most scientists are simply out of touch with the religious infatuations that rule the better part of humanity; when in touch, they can’t be bothered to take them seriously. I have met anthropologists who will say, with a straight face, that no one in the Muslim world actually believes in martyrdom, and no jihadist has ever blown himself up with an expectation of entering paradise: it’s all politics and terrestrial grievances and “social constructs” and “societal causes” as far as the eye can see. A quip by Steven Weinberg comes to mind (said in reference, I think, to post-modern critiques of science): “You have to be very learned to be that wrong.” Indeed, one does—and many are. If there is anything good that can be said about the Bible-thumpers in my country, it is that they understand that the Muslim world is ablaze with old-time religion. Needless to say, devout Muslims return the favor. It is the scientists, secularists, and religious moderates—still licking their spoons of Karen Armstrong’s latest pabulum—who are so often confused, mistaking even their confusion itself for wisdom.

Best,
Sam



Dear Sam,

From what you say, it seems that my article tapped into a reservoir of ill will towards Nature on this issue. Perhaps that explains some of the vehemence of your response. But I am not in any sense speaking ‘for’ Nature, and any views the journal has published on these matters in the past were not mine.

In any case, I think we are (this may surprise you) agreed on the nature of the problem in some respects. That’s to say, I share your view that many of the alleged ‘facts’ that comprise most religious belief – the existence of a deity (or deities), that deity’s capacity to intervene in the world in supernatural ways, the whole paraphernalia of miracles, afterlife, saints, sin, absolution, virgin births, resurrections – are not just outside of science but fundamentally incompatible with a scientific view of the world. And while some agnostics might insist that we cannot ‘know’ that a god does not exist, this does not compel us to give the ‘for’ and ‘against’ possibilities equal weight. We shouldn’t imagine things into being without good reason to do so.

Where we part company is largely (though not entirely) over the practical question of what is the appropriate response to all this. If I have understood it correctly, your view is that, while science need not embark on a crusade to wipe out religion, scientists should at every opportunity criticize religious belief for being a groundless fantasy that encumbers people with false hopes and obstructive (even destructive) dogma. My view is that science need not feel so threatened by religion. Clearly, science sometimes has been and is explicitly threatened and hindered by religion – the stem-cell issue is one such. But I don’t regard this as inevitable (after all, by no means all Christians were opposed to stem-cell research). When scientific advance is blocked because of superstitious beliefs, we should be unequivocal in condemning that (and elsewhere I have done so). However, I believe that sometimes resistance to new technologies and research has come from religious quarters for ethical reasons that one might also hold as an atheist, and which are defensible even if I don’t agree with them. So we need to consider those distinctions carefully.

You say it would be very difficult to find instances where ‘incoherence, wishful thinking, and dogmatism have aided scientific progress—or, in fact, progress of any kind.’ I’m not sure whether you mean to include all manifestations of religious faith as part of this ‘incoherence, wishful thinking, and dogmatism’, but one can certainly make a case that religion has sometimes played a role in promoting a scientific outlook. Since the time of William of Conches in the twelfth century, some people have considered it a religious duty to explore and understand ‘God’s creation’. It seems quite likely that one’s objectivity in doing that is likely to be ultimately compromised if one insists on continuing to see it as God’s creation; but as it happened, this exploration, initiated as a religious imperative, in the end found ever less use for God. Similarly, the value accorded to scientific learning in the Muslim world in the eighth to the twelfth centuries drew some impetus from the interpretation of Islam then in favour.

You might say ‘But wouldn’t have it been even better if people had studied science without reference to God at all?’ But this, as well as your suggestion that we might have ‘birthed a culture of genuine intellectual honesty in the year 1200’, seems to me ahistorical. I can think of no plausible route from the embers of the Roman Empire to the Enlightenment that would not have been centred in Christianity (unless the Muslims had conquered Europe, perhaps – but that was never really their wish). I’m not wishing to make religion the champion of free thought here (God forbid), but only to suggest that the issues are more complex than you seem to want to allow.

Moreover, there is plenty of non-religious dogma that has hindered science too – think of Lysenkoism and the Nazis’ criticisms of ‘Jewish science’. I realise that of course you will deplore these too – but my point is that if, by some bizarre circumstance, Europe had ditched religion in 1200, I’m not sure we could necessarily expect the state of knowledge to be any better today than it is. Some other social construct seems likely to have come along and foiled the Baconian utopia. That, sadly, is what we humans do.

I think we also differ in that you are more of an idealist – perhaps more of an optimist – and I am more of a realist. I think that religion, or ideologies that are mostly indistinguishable from it, are a part of human society. I feel that science needs to find ways of working with that. And I say this not as a defeatist statement of resignation, but just as a recognition of the nature of humanity. I happen to feel – in fact, I am fully confident of it – that religion has made positive contributions to the human condition, as well as unambiguously negative ones. You might again argue that those things, such as charity, can and do exist without religion, and this is surely true. But to my mind, religion is for many people an expression of the very human impulses that allow us to be (for example) charitable. In any event, I suspect that we can no more expect to eliminate religion (or something like it) from society than we can eliminate music.

If that is the case, I feel that science does need to find some way of working alongside religion rather than pouring scorn on it at every opportunity. The relationship doesn’t have to be cosy and convivial, and indeed I think in general it will be, and probably should be, a tense one. But I believe it can be good enough to prevent us from having to tilt at windmills. I agree with you that there should be no reason to handle religion with kid gloves for fear of offending. But neither do I see a need to thrash it like a furious parent, vilify it as though it were a loathsome criminal, or deride it as idiotic. I think we can afford to treat some aspects of religion in a forthright yet adult-to-adult fashion.

Perhaps the crux of the matter is your statement that, although the coexistence of science and religion in societies and in individuals is of course possible, it ‘does not in the least suggest that they are optimal—or, indeed, that they do not come at a terrible price.’ There is a great deal of distance between those two possibilities. If it is simply ‘not optimal’, it doesn’t seem a big deal. If it comes at a terrible price, we should worry. I suspect that both of those things, and all others in between, have applied at different times and places.

Incidentally, your ‘Hitler’ analogy sounds rather compelling until you consider that what you’re saying seems more like the following: rather than say ‘Hitler was German chancellor from 1933 to 1945’, one is always obliged to say ‘Hitler (in my opinion a vile and deranged antisemite) was chancellor from 1933 to 1945’. What is not said doesn’t always imply a particular point of view.

Best wishes,
Phil


Dear Phil –

I think we may be seeing the first rays of daylight. As I suspected, our dispute seems to be mostly about practical issues—When should we be scrupulously honest? How can science be best communicated given the state of popular opinion? Etc.—with regard to which intelligent people can have differences of opinion, while sharing the same a worldview. This is not to say that our differences of opinion are inconsequential. I happen to think that that the approach you advocate generally splits the baby and is currently doing much harm to the integrity of science. Perhaps I should mention in this context that I have just heard back from your employer regarding my letter to the editor. It was declined (with a form letter). While I don’t want to read too much into this, let me tell you why Nature’s behavior amazes me (and should amaze our readers) and how it exemplifies many of the problems we have been discussing:

1. Philip Campbell (Nature’s Editor in Chief) contacted me personally in response to your article’s inclusion in The Reason Project Hall of Shame. He wrote to say that, as your views did not represent those of the journal, we appeared to be condemning Nature for printing “individual points of view.” This complaint struck me as something less than a masterpiece of candor, given Nature’s repeated coddling of religion and the fact that you are not just any scientist; rather, you are a "consultant editor for Nature" (and had been a physical sciences editor there for over a decade). But okay, I thought, perhaps I was wrong to assume that your column might in some way reflect the current position of the journal. Needless to say, I told Mr. Campbell that I was overjoyed that he published “individual points view.” Perhaps, he would consider printing another—and then I appended my letter to the editor.

2. In submitting this letter to Campbell, I made it clear that some of the most prominent scientists on the Reason Project advisory board had contributed to it and were eager to sign it as co-authors, if this would make it more attractive to him from a publishing point of view. I didn’t name names, but I more or less gave him his pick of a dozen 800 lb gorillas. Campbell told me that the journal would be back in touch soon.

3. Weeks passed. You were kind enough to check on the letter’s fate and learned that there was some speculation on Nature’s part about whether our debate-in-progress might make such a letter “redundant.” Nevertheless, you heard that it might still be published, perhaps with a few edits.

4. This morning, some nameless correspondence editor or intern (email address = correspondence@nature.com) sent me a form letter regretting that my letter could not be published due to “limited space.” There was no offer of publication on Nature’s website.

So, here is where we stand: Nature's editors have just rejected a strongly worded letter written, as far as they know, by any possible combination of RP advisors. Again I don’t want to read too much into this, but given that we are talking about some of the most influential scientists and public intellectuals around, I find this a pretty remarkable editorial decision. Needless to say, “limited space” is euphemism—especially given the possibility of publication on the Internet.

It seems to me that there is still something that you (and Campbell) haven’t quite absorbed about the problem with, as you say, “working alongside religion.” By remaining politely silent and hoping to just get on with its work, the culture of science has enabled religious delusions of all kinds—because whenever it opens its mouth, all (real) religion claims to describe reality as it is. Silence in the face of these assertions is generally indistinguishable from assent. Of course, intellectual apathy on the part of individual scientists and their leading journals would be a bad thing all on its own, but add to this the advocacy of organizations like the Templeton Foundation, which uses its 1.5 billion dollar endowment to carefully blur the line between reason and faith, and the effect is an almost a total ceding of the argument in favor of religion.

Here is an example of “working alongside religion” in practice. You may remember that Nature recently published an editorial that read like a press release for the Templeton Foundation. While it included a few mumbled lines about the difference between science and religion, the piece amounted to an almost giddy endorsement of John Templeton and the work of his foundation. Indeed, the greatest sin attributed to the Templeton foundation was that it sometimes supports areas of research deemed “marginal” by some scientists. And the examples Nature chose to highlight — positive psychology and cosmological theories that posit multiple universes — are, it seems to me, perfectly respectable fields of inquiry. The editorial included several unctuous and embarrassing assertions about John Templeton being “deeply spiritual” and inspired by “his love of science and his God”—as though statements of this kind begged no questions at all from the point of view of science. In its effort to keep “working alongside religion” (again, your phrase), Nature counselled “strict atheists” (who, by implication, must be outliers in the scientific community) to just “happily ignore” Templeton. The journal concluded that “critics' total opposition to the Templeton Foundation's unusual mix of science and spirituality is unwarranted.” While I can imagine Campbell felt he had struck a deft balance here, all things considered, this editorial constituted as forthright an act of fellatio as Templeton could have ever hoped to receive from the world’s leading scientific journal.

The Templeton Foundation’s work is quite a bit more insidious (and clever) than funding marginal research, or even obscenely silly projects like Collins’ BioLogos Foundation. Two examples of their work should suffice [1. here and 2. here].

Templeton’s recent advertisement about evolution (1. above), which appeared in almost every major newspaper and magazine in the United States, represents a very clever manipulation of scientific opinion. When faced with the question “Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?” even I would have said something like "Not entirely." Of course, Templeton knows that most people will only read the titles of these essays. The general effect of the page is to communicate the inadequacy of evolutionary theory and the perpetual incompleteness of science—and to encourage readers to draw the further the inference that one needs religion/faith to get all the way home to the Truth. It is an especially nice touch that the one unequivocal "Yes" comes from the journalist Robert Wright, who has become a committed apologist for religion. (Leave it to Francis Collins to deliver the eminently reasonable, "Not entirely.") Thus, whichever door one opens in this fun house of obfuscation, one finds a message that is comforting to religion. An earlier ad entitled “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” played the same game with a carefully picked sample of respondents. Out of 12 responses, only two were direct answers of “No.” Glancing at the ad, one could only conclude that atheism must be a minority opinion in science. These ads amount to religious propaganda, pure and simple. And the Templeton foundation has spent millions of dollars on them (Full disclosure: I was asked to participate in an earlier series of ads, where I was told that the entire campaign would consist of one page of my heresy set against one page written by Francis Collins, to be placed in every major newspaper and magazine in the land. I declined.)

The d'Espagnat citation (2. above) produces a similar effect, at nauseating length. I’m not in a position to quibble with d’Espagnat’s science, nor do I intend to impugn him as a recipient of the Templeton Prize. But this citation represents another instance of religious propaganda. Reading it, one is given to understand that d’Espagnat would throw the full weight of his scientific reputation behind the following assertions: there is a hidden reality; science can't quite glimpse it; religion offers a glimpse of its own; thus, religion and science are complimentary--but religion is likely the deeper of the two. Of course, the juxtaposition of a brilliant scientist and the “world's largest annual award given to an individual” makes the Templeton Foundation appear both very important and intellectually credible. Whereas, in reality, all they are is a great pot of money surrounded by some very “woolly” ideas.

How is it possible that Campbell doesn’t see the problem with all this? Why wouldn’t Nature feel that it was editorially bound to draw the CLEAREST POSSIBLE distinction between real science and ancient delusions? After all, Nature fancies that it can distinguish groundbreaking science from merely pedestrian science—publishing the only former. Why can’t it see that there is a distinction of much greater consequence to society, and to the future of science, that it should also make: there is a difference, after all, between having good reasons for what one believes and having bad ones. Incidentally, this is the only distinction one needs to become a “strict” atheist.

All of this runs to the larger issue of intellectual honesty. Perhaps we can define “intellectual honesty” as the ratio between what a person has good reason to believe and what he will assert to be true. In the ideal case, this number would equal 1, and in science it approaches as near to 1 as it does anywhere in human discourse. It seems to me that most religions subsist, and even thrive, on values that can be brought arbitrarily close to zero for centuries on end—and, indeed, grow smaller the longer any religious authority speaks about content of the faith. This disparity between what counts for honesty in serious discourse, depending on the topic, is as strange as it is consequential. Is it really so “idealistic” to think that a journal like Nature might object to it?

Best,
Sam


Dear Sam,
I’m glad that you see ‘some rays of daylight’, by which I take you to mean, if not convergence then at least understanding of our positions. I’d like to feel that it should always be possible to be scrupulously honest in these matters, as well as polite as far as is warranted – I’m not sure there should ever be reason to hold back from saying to a religious believer ‘I feel there is no credible evidence for what you believe’ (so long as they don’t have a gun in their hand). But neither do I feel an obligation to say that at every opportunity, or to think that the debate ends there.

Incidentally, I note that I will no doubt be seen as one of those atheists who Richard Dawkins laments under the rubric ‘I’m an atheist but…’. But I’m not bowled over by Richard’s responses to the five variants he lists. For example, in suggesting that religion is a social construct I might be construed as a Type 1: “I’m an atheist, but religion is here to stay. You think you can get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You want to get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!’ That is (I hope this is clear by now) not at all how I’d put it, and frankly I don’t know whether it is ‘here to stay’ or not (who could?). I simply observe that since time immemorial human societies have organized themselves into hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets, of which religions are a prominent example. That’s what we’re dealing with. I think this is probably a more productive way to regard the situation than to think that humans are ritualistically inculcated into stupidity for which a dose of cold reason is the cure. (It’s a shame, incidentally, that Richard doesn’t really address this position, but just caricatures it.)

And let’s not forget that, however much you might disagree with my position, it makes me closer to your own than Darwin was. (There is no tenable defence of the idea that he called himself an ‘agnostic’ rather than an atheist merely to spare people’s feelings.) But I don’t figure on seeing Darwin in your Hall of Shame any time soon…

It’s a pity that Nature rejected your letter, not least because that issue clearly preoccupied you in your last response. The problem is that I am not Nature, nor a spokesperson for Nature, nor in any way disposed to defend its decisions. The matters you cite had nothing to do with me. And while it is true that both Phil Campbell and I feel there is something to be said for ‘working alongside religion’, I don’t intend this to mean ‘remaining politely silent and hoping to just get on with its work’. I simply feel we need to choose our battles. And while you suggest that the distinction between science and religion is that of ‘having good reasons for what one believes and having bad ones’, I would disagree. By ‘good reasons’, you presumably mean ones that can be logically defended on the basis of objective evidence. I know plenty of religious people who believe because it helps them in life and makes them feel better. That seems a pretty good reason to me, even if I don’t share the view. (I hope it’s clear that, if ‘good reasons’ like that lead people to deny evolution or refuse blood transfusions, my magnanimity soon evaporates. I guess that makes me one of those British empiricists.)

I’ll say this about the Nature decision, however. I’m not a fan of form letters, although I worked long enough as an editor to understand the occasional need for them. My problem is that, as you say, they are euphemistic and often give little clue to the real reasons for a decision. I simply don’t know what the reason was in this case – it may really have been ‘limited space’, for all I know (for indeed space is limited). But I wish that had been made more explicit. However, bear in mind that it is almost unheard of for a letter about an opinion piece published only online to be given even a moment’s consideration for the print journal – normally the position is that the online-only content is completely separate from the print content, and so the latter does not carry comment on the former. Bear in mind also that you do not need permission to comment on the website – the feedback facility is open to all. (I suspect, however, that you were thinking in terms of something more than that.) There is also the consideration that the editors knew you intend to put some form of our dialogue online, and may feel that this will address the matter more adequately and comprehensively than a letter might have.

I was happy to help discover what Nature intended to do with your letter, but otherwise had no role in the decision (nor would it have been proper that I did, of course). I confess, however, to being a little surprised that you wanted to press on with having it published in the light of this exchange, which I feel has shown that your criticisms fall on a somewhat different target to the one the appears in your letter. I had hoped to assiduously avoid revisiting the issue, but the fact is that you have never refuted my argument that the letter misrepresents and misinterprets what I said, however much you continue to feel that I let religion too lightly off the hook. I’d be interested to know if any of ‘the most influential scientists and public intellectuals around’ would be inclined to defend putting their names to the letter in the light of this. I have deep respect for the scientists on your board, and would consider myself to be on warm terms with several of them – but even the most weighty of thinkers have to justify their positions.

All the best,
Phil


Dear Phil –

Perhaps I was wrong about that daylight…

In any case, I think our debate has run its course. I’ve participated in enough of these exchanges to no longer be surprised when a proper meeting of the minds fails to occur. But I must say that my feelings of futility and boredom are always compounded, in a way that I fear will be shared by many of our readers, whenever I find myself grappling with the vapors of “I’m an atheist but…” The problem with this view—which I agree, well summarizes your own—is that it so often takes the form of simply missing the point. In fact, “I’m an atheist but…” generally represents a commitment to missing the point—as it derives most of its content from simply not seeing what all the fuss is about. Such obliviousness can always be given a positive spin (“we need to choose our battles”), but there is no escaping the fact that yours is the perspective of one who does not quite see the depth and scope of the problem. This position is easy enough to maintain: all one need do is avert one’s eyes. Indeed, the “I’m an atheist but…” school generally believes that ignoring the problem of religion is the wisest course of action (some call this “realism”). I hope it does not seem ad hominem when I say that your view of these matters strikes me as intellectually lazy—but it is lazy in the extreme. There is a certain genius in laziness, however, as it can never be proven wrong. Or, rather, it can never be made to notice when it has been, again and again.

While I have little hope of getting through to you at this late hour, I should address a few points in closing: First, you seem to view my focus on Nature’s accommodation of religion as some kind of personal obsession and a distraction from the subject of our exchange. Here you have, I’m afraid, missed the point of our exchange (or at least missed my point in initiating it). In my view, your article was remarkable and worth debating for two reasons: (1) it appeared in Nature, and (2) it represented a further instance of Nature’s blinkered appeasement of religion. The point I have made repeatedly, and will now make one final time, is that it really matters that the world’s most influential scientific journal seems both deluded about religion and committed to remaining so. Had your article appeared in the Guardian, there would have been no reason for us to have this debate. (While I find it depressing, I actually expect a newspaper like the Guardian to pander to religion.)

Secondly, the fact that you can unselfconsciously assert that people believe in one or another religious doctrine “because it helps them in life and makes them feel better” and then say that this “seems a pretty good reason” to you indicates how little you have thought about the conflict between religion and science. If I told you that I believed that the H5N1 virus will never become a pandemic, or that string theory will be fully vindicated in the near future, or that complex life first developed on Mars and was later transferred to earth, and I gave as my reason for holding these beliefs that each “makes me feel better,” I am confident that your response would not be this “seems a pretty good reason to me.” Don’t you see how bizarre it is to accept such shoddy thinking with respect to the existence of a personal God or the divine origin of a specific book? A person cannot (or least should not be able to) believe something because it “makes him feel better.” The fact that people occasionally do manage such contortions is what renders phrases like “self-deception,” “wishful thinking,” “experimenter bias,” etc., so important to keep on hand. Please notice that these phrases describe how it looks from the outside when people believe a proposition because “it makes them feel better.” Please also notice that this frame of mind represents a failure of cognition and reasoning that all sane people decry in every area of serious discourse but one.

A world in which people believe propositions merely because these propositions “make them feel better” is a world gone utterly mad. It is a world of private and irreconcilable epistemologies. It is a world where communication, even on the most important issues—perhaps especially on the most important issues—is guaranteed to fail. Of course, you have tried arrest your slide into the abyss in your parenthetical remark about evolution and blood transfusions—but one can draw no such boundary unless one draws it based on some deeper principle. You cannot say that a person’s reason for believing in the virgin birth is “good” just so long as this belief has no negative consequences on his behavior. Whether a belief is well founded or not has nothing to do with its consequences.

Generally speaking, for a belief to be justified, our acceptance of it must be dependent upon its actually being true (and not be dependent upon how its being true would make us feel). Needless to say, the preceding sentence does not suffice as full account of epistemology: uniting both science and commonsense and reconciling their frequent disagreements. But there can be no doubt about the difference between a belief that is overtly motivated by emotional bias (and other non-epistemic factors) and a belief that is comparatively free of such bias. I wonder if we will live to see the day when scientists and their leading journals might be counted upon to recognize this difference without having to be pilloried by “strict” atheists.

Your blithe acceptance that belief can be something other than epistemic—something other than an effort to reliably map reality in our thoughts—makes it impossible to differentiate belief from mere hope. I’m sure many people you know hope that there is a God; they hope that they will see their friends and loved ones after death; they hope that their lives are aligned with some larger cosmic purpose; and they are disposed to make much of this hope—to celebrate it, and to gather with others who hope for these same things. Your friends might say that this hope has enriched their lives or has in some way become indispensable to their functioning in the world. But if these friends of yours are really religious—that is, really conforming to the doctrine of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.—they will have taken a further step toward delusion and mistaken this hope for a form of knowledge. They may have yanked their bootstraps this way: “How could I find this hope so consoling if it were not, in fact, well founded? Perhaps this feeling of hopefulness itself attests to the truth of thing hoped for… Praise be to God!” Of course there are many other ways to chase one’s tail under the aegis of religion. Such “woolly” thinking is enabled by the fact that it almost never meets resistance, even from scientists (who, as we know, must “choose their battles”). It should be abundantly clear, however, that mere hope does not constitute knowledge, no matter how lovingly one tends it and props it up in the wind.

In your last email you summarize the situation as follows:

“I simply observe that since time immemorial human societies have organized themselves into hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets, of which religions are a prominent example. That’s what we’re dealing with. I think this is probably a more productive way to regard the situation than to think that humans are ritualistically inculcated into stupidity for which a dose of cold reason is the cure.”

It is amazing that you can advance this as a serious position. First off, it is undeniable that most humans are “ritualistically inculcated into stupidity” from birth onwards by their religious parents. Second, it is a perverse (and highly condescending) article of faith among secular academics that people can never be reasoned out of their religious convictions. I have heard from literally thousands of people who used to belief in the God of Abraham—indeed, many used to be scriptural literalists—who were stripped of their faith after a proper collision with Reason. It is quite possible for people to notice how “woolly” their thinking has been, how they were part of a culture grown incandescent with lies, how their parents and elders raised them in a near total vacuum of critical thinking and in complete ignorance of the scientific worldview. Indeed, I once had the pleasure of having dinner with a woman could pinpoint the very moment she lost her faith, as it had been purged from her mind that morning while reading one of my books. Her overwhelming feeling was of regret for all the time she had wasted over the course of her life. No doubt such a terrific sense of sunk cost keeps many people stuck to a pew. Perhaps not everyone can be reasoned out of his or her faith—but the problem is that we don’t know how fully people’s minds could change because we haven’t really tried (please don’t feel tempted to make yet another tendentious excursion into history and bring up the French Revolution or the gulag). You’d do well to notice how easily children can be reasoned out of their belief in Santa Claus. The all enter school as devout believers, and they all exit as perfect sceptics. How is this dialectical miracle accomplished? Quite simply: there is no cultural support for a belief in Santa past a certain age, and no one likes to be laughed at. Do we replace Santa Claus with anything? No. We just oblige people to grow up.

In any case, the problem isn’t that human societies are organized in “hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets” (can you really be serious? It is rare to find such a crystalline example of academic cant. I think you’d be wise to remove the letters H-I-E-R-A from your keyboard for a while). The problem is that intellectual honesty is still a very scarce commodity in our world; we are rather bad at producing it, and it is taboo to even try once the conversation turns to the subject of God.

I realize that my tone of chastisement has probably grown very tedious and could be mistaken for hostility. But I can’t help but feel that there is a great asymmetry between our points of view – both in how fully they have been thought out and in their degree of the moral seriousness. I see the perpetuation of ancient tribalism and ignorance (read “religion”) to be a grave problem, and the source of much unnecessary suffering in the world; you claim that the problem is either not very serious or that it is unavoidable—in either case there is not much to be done. You do not seem to see what an astonishing number of the world’s conflicts and missed opportunities arise from people’s false knowledge about God, and when specific instances are pointed out to you, you deem them to be inevitable (if it’s not religion it would be something else), or you defensively say, well of course I object to that instance of religious stupidity: parents shouldn’t withhold blood transfusions from their children!... But the truth is, a comprehensive response to the problem of religious ignorance is possible, and a piecemeal response is totally unprincipled and bound to seem so. Our world has be shattered, and is reliably shattered anew with each subsequent generation, by irreconcilable claims about God and his magic books. Until we stop enabling these competing delusions—by our silence and by our silly attempts to change the subject—we will have no one to blame but ourselves when medieval ideas come crashing into public life—as they do, and will, to our great detriment.

But enough… As I said at the outset, I sincerely appreciate your willingness to debate these issues at length. I remain hopeful that exchanges like this are useful (for someone, somewhere, sometime), whether or not the participants themselves budge an inch.

Thanks for your time, Phil. I wish you all the best,

Sam


Dear Sam,
One somewhat frustrating aspect of this exchange for me has been that you seem to insist that any disagreement with your point of view is not genuine disagreement as such but is missing the point. My sense is that you cannot conceive how any sane, rational person can hold a point of view different from your own, so that if they insist on doing so, they are obviously being either obtuse or stupid. Your first long paragraph is all rhetoric along those lines. I’d add here that, while I won’t accuse you of intellectual laziness, I do feel that your absolutism is, like most absolutisms, the easy way out. There is then always a right answer, and your convictions supply it ready-made. I understand everything you say about religion being generally filled with irrational beliefs, and it would be very easy for me too to say that ‘people should not believe anything for bad or invalid or flaky reasons, and therefore we must strive to ensure that they never do.’ I suspect that philosophers might find that an epistemologically dodgy position to take, but I can see that it makes life easy. I don’t find it either attractive or useful, however.

In your second paragraph, I fear that – dare I say – you have yourself missed the point in regard to Nature. Had I written a column saying that thank goodness the Reason Project has finally appeared to blast away Francis Collins and all apologists of that ilk, Nature would have published it. It is a matter of indifference to me whether you will scoff at this statement; I simply know it to be true. I can see that as it stood, my column fed into your disenchantment with what Nature has said before. But it is utterly independent of that, and to think otherwise is to become a conspiracy theorist.

But to the meat of your argument. I stated in my original article that at least your position can claim some philosophical rigour. I think this is the one aspect of the piece I might now have to withdraw. You say:
“If I told you that I believed that the H5N1 virus will never become a pandemic, or that string theory will be fully vindicated in the near future, or that complex life first developed on Mars and was later transferred to earth, and I gave as my reason for holding these beliefs that each “makes me feel better,” I am confident that your response would not be this “seems a pretty good reason to me.” Don’t you see how bizarre it is to accept such shoddy thinking with respect to the existence of a personal God or the divine origin of a specific book? A person cannot (or least should not be able to) believe something because it “makes him feel better.””

There are two answers to this. One is at the human level. Let’s imagine a person, say a well educated doctor, who has thought deeply about the religious faith he feels, and concludes that it is something he cherishes and finds meaningful and doesn’t interfere with his trust in science. His faith in God is valuable to him. Now, you will say he is deluded and hasn’t thought deeply enough about all the contradictions this creates. I believe that he holds an incorrect belief about the world. But do I think that it is intolerable that he should continue to find solace in his belief? No, I think that the fact that he finds solace in it makes it perfectly rational on one level for him to maintain that belief, even if it is irrational in other respects. It is rational to do what makes us feel good. That doesn’t always make it right for us to do so, but that’s another matter. Your charge is that the problem comes because this chap considers he has a form of knowledge – he thinks he knows there is a God. Yes, often this is what happens for people who are superficially religious, and many, many are. And here they are plain wrong, I don’t dispute that. If my chap thinks this way, he is mistaken. Hold the front page: ‘Man is mistaken’. But if he knows his theology, he knows why religion – and in honesty I only really know about Christianity here – emphasizes faith, not knowledge.

Let me add that it strikes me that we have different imaginary ‘believers’ in sight. I agree with you that it would be condescending to think that no believer could ever be dissuaded from their belief by logical argument. Indeed, if they’ve been insulated from any logical thinking, they might very well be susceptible to that approach. But it is equally condescending to think that believers only believe because they’ve never thought seriously about the issues. I suspect that the ‘convert’ you mention had never had the opportunity or means to do so. Not all believers are like her.

Here is my other answer to your passage above. If you told me you believed those things about bird flu and string theory and life on Mars because they make you feel better, I’d say, well, we’ll find out won’t we? We’ll some day have objective evidence that proves or disproves your belief. If you told me that you believed in God because this gives your life meaning, am I going to say the same thing? Not if I know the first thing about philosophy. Despite what Richard Dawkins has asserted, the existence of God is not amenable to scientific testing. Or rather, we could come across evidence that God exists, but not that he doesn’t. But that’s the problem, you say! Yes, that is the problem. That is why belief in God holds no meaning for me. But it also means that your comparison here is utterly bogus.

A better analogy might be with someone who believes the universe will last forever ‘because it makes me feel better’. (I’m not totally sure that this isn’t scientifically falsifiable, but it’s hard to see how it might be given the present state of play.) That doesn’t sound so objectionable, does it? It sounds rather meaningless to me, but I’m not sure it need incite our outrage.

You might reasonably say that what is objectionable is if this person expects others to take his belief seriously and treat it with respect, and even to create academic departments and organizations devoted to exploring it. To put it another way (which you might recognize), we would not rush to create faculties of leprechology just because someone chose to believe in leprechauns. This is fair enough. But I believe it is disingenuous to compare the major religions with a belief in leprechauns, or even with a belief in the eternity of the universe. The major religions have an ethical code, a rich tradition of art, they are woven into social and cultural fabrics. (All of it based on a false premise, you might say, or rather, on a premise that is unfalsifiable and for which there is not a shred of evidence.) But my view is that, at its best, religions can provide ways to think about the human condition. I don’t believe it is fair to simply dismiss them as childish. I would like to think, as I suspect you do, that everything that is positive about religion could also be attained without a belief in God, let alone miracles and saints and all the rest. (I do suspect that ritual is less dispensable.) But it seems unfair to deny that religion has any of these good aspects, as well as undoubtedly becoming encumbered with a great deal of dogmatism, delusion and claptrap (much of which does not necessarily accord with good theology).

Onward. I’m not clear why you object to the notion that human societies tend to be organized ‘in hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets’, because here again you use rhetoric in place of debate. I live in one; you live in one. Over a billion people in China live in one. Martin Luther lived in one. Your point is?

You say ‘You do not seem to see what an astonishing number of the world’s conflicts and missed opportunities arise from people’s false knowledge about God’. Which are you going to cite – Northern Ireland? Iraq? The Crusades? If only it wasn’t for that pesky God and his offspring, all these places would have lived in blissful peace! The Taliban? – why, they’d be lovely folks if they weren’t Muslim extremists! How wonderful, how simple and easy, to be able to blame all these things on a false belief in gods! Gosh, this counterfactual history is easier than I ever imagined!

Sorry, facetiousness is no help. I am afraid that I fall into it here as a substitute for real anger, because I find it maddening to see the suggestion that sectarian violence in Belfast, tribal conflict in Iraq, Hindu-Muslim violence in India, and goodness knows how much else suffering in the world could be solved if we could just persuade people to give up their ridiculous faiths. I fully accept that it is no good either to simply say, as I know some do, ‘Oh, it’s only human nature, and religion is just the excuse.’ No, the truth is, sadly, much more complicated. And that is why I think the answers are too. But I have been left from our exchange with the feeling that ‘complicated’ is for you just a cop-out. I guess maybe that is where we fundamentally disagree. You seem to feel that any attempt to introduce into the debate considerations about culture, history, society and politics are unwelcome and even wilfully deceitful diversions from the main business of demolishing religions for believing in things for which there is no evidence. That seems to be your ‘point’ – I’m afraid I simply can’t accept it.

Thank you for engaging in this debate. It has helped to focus my own thinking, and I hope you have seen some value in it too.
Best wishes,
Phil

The Dan Brown trail

Here is my latest Lab Report column for Prospect. I have realised with a degree of unease that I have just done the Dan Brown tour of Europe – first CERN, then Chartres Cathedral. I was giving a talk at CERN, while at Chartres I was taking part in a Nova documentary. I’m still not sure entirely what the thrust of it will be – something to do with how science and religion interacted in the Gothic era, and they have been filming at Amiens (and I think Beauvais) as well as Chartres. We’ll see. But it took me to parts of the cathedral I’d not had access to before, including the roof (scary) and the gallery in front of the rose window in the north transept – amazing to see that glass close up. And I got a photo of the ‘transitional flying buttress’ between the nave and chevet, which is hidden away out of sight. I’ll put it on the web once I can get it off my mobile.

But it was striking that both CERN and Chartres are having to reach an accommodation with Dan Brown. At CERN they are quite explicit about embracing the connection – making the most of things, I guess. I’ve only seen a brief clip of Angels and Demons, which was enough to make it plain that the science is a bit of a joke. I imagine the Chartres business is even worse (I can see that I will be unable to postpone for much longer the day when I have to read those bloody books). The cathedral’s representative was eager to ensure that I made no mention of Dan Brown-style ‘mysteries’, numerology, Templars and so forth. The curious thing was that this very congenial chap was apparently at first horrified that Nova were hoping to film me at the cathedral, saying that they’d been getting all kinds of crazy pagan visitors wanting to dance in the labyrinth on the basis of Universe of Stone. I can only imagine that he’s got it mixed up with some other book, since a part of my book’s aim is to debunk all that tiresome nonsense. Anyway, he seemed to be reassured after having glanced through the book, and eventually trusted us enough to leave us to our own devices. not a word about sacred geometry passed my lips (and if it had, it would have been a rude one).

***************************************

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, is due to resume its search for the elusive Higgs particle in September. The Higgs, thought to be responsible for giving other fundamental particles their mass, is the last piece in the jigsaw of the Standard Model, the theoretical framework used to understand all known particles and forces. Finding the Higgs particle is one of the LHC’s key assignments. It is thought to be too massive to be made in any existing particle accelerator – the bigger this (still unknown) mass, the more energetic particle collisons have to be to spawn a Higgs. The mightiest previous accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, lacks the necessary oomph.

The LHC’s much heralded opening last September ended in tears just nine days later. An electrical short circuit caused a leak of the liquid helium coolant, which in turn ripped from its moorings one of the immense magnets used to accelerate particles through the 27-km circular tunnels, blasting a hole in the ring and contaminating it with debris. The clean-up and installation of new safeguards have been going on ever since.

Engineering failure is hardly surprising in a project this complex, and of course the space programme has suffered far worse. But it was an illustration that, as physicist John Ellis put it when I visited CERN recently, no matter how much brain power lies behind the planning, it’s usually the ‘stupid things’ that go wrong. Yet the delay wasn’t entirely unwelcome – a physicist working on one of the LHC experiments admitted that they weren’t really ready for switch-on last September. He was talking about preparation for collecting data, not factors connected to the accident – but in any event, everyone seems confident that another such mishap is unlikely.

There’s optimism all round, especially since communications between the scientists and management improved when the new director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer took his post in January. But a year’s delay is a long time for graduate students waiting for data to study. To make up for lost time the LHC will run during the coming winter, when the higher cost of electricity, and holiday-season depletion of maintenance crews, usually compels a shut-down. That will hurt the budget – but with a cost of E6.6 million so far, who’s counting?

Meanwhile, the LHC’s venerable competitor the Tevatron faces an uncertain future. Despite its illustrious career – the bottom and top quarks were both discovered there – the Fermilab collider will soon switch off for good, having pretty much exhausted its potential. But it’s not yet agreed when that will happen; the accelerator has the go-ahead for 2010, and might run in 2011 too. Fermilab scientists dearly hope to glean more information about the Higgs first. They have already claimed to put a lower limit on the particle’s mass, although it’s debated how trustworthy the figure is (and not clear that more experiments can improve it much).

But the Higgs is not the whole story. Arguably a more exciting goal of the LHC is to seek new physics that the Standard Model cannot explain, especially a relationship called supersymmetry that might unite the known particle families. Supersymmetry implies that the particles in one superfamily, called bosons (including protons), have partners in the other superfamily, called fermions (such as electrons). The LHC hopes to find these supersymmetric particles, if they exist. An experiment at the Tevatron looking at the properties of particles called B mesons might just catch a glimpse of supersymmetry’s influence first. That will stretch Fermilab’s capability to the limit, but it would steal a big slice of the LHC’s thunder.

*****

CERN scientists were caught unawares when, in May, Austria’s science minister Johannes Hahn announced an intention to withdraw from the international collaboration. Austria contributes 16m euros to CERN, 2.2 percent of the funding provided by the 20 member states. That’s just 0.5 percent of Austria’s science budget, but Hahn decided that it swallowed too big a share of the pot assigned for international research. Austria has been a CERN member state since 1959, and has some of the most able physicists in Europe.

Hahn offered no explanation for why the investment was a poor one. Worse, he seems to have taken the decision unilaterally, consulting neither the scientists involved nor the Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann. That was too much. Hahn’s conservative People’s Party forms a tense coalition government with the centre-left Social Democrats led by Faymann, and Hahn’s decision smacks of political manoeuvring rather than considered judgement. To general jubilation, Faymann quickly stepped in to overrule him. With other new European states, such as Romania, queuing up to join CERN, Hahn was in any case clearly out of step with the mood of the times.

*****

Surprisingly prominent in the corridors of CERN are posters advertising ‘the science behind Angels and Demons’. The Dan Brown book, in which Robert Langdon foils a plot to obliterate the Vatican with a bomb made from antimatter manufactured at CERN, drew so many enquiries that the centre was compelled to set up a dedicated website, which immediately became the most visited page on its domain. Now the movie is stirring up interest afresh. Given the shaky physics on display there, it must seem something of a mixed blessing. But the PR team can be forgiven for seizing on both an educational opportunity and a diversion from the LHC’s travails.

Whatever you do, don’t call them militant

Blimey, it’s a lot worse than I thought. I had worried somewhat that I had unfairly prejudged the Reason Project in my Nature Muse, suggesting (mildly, I thought) that this might be the same old line of seeking out the worst in religion to expose the urgent need for its destruction and then imagining that this can be done by simply telling people the facts, so far as we currently know them, about the origins of humanity and the universe. But on current showing, that is precisely what it seems to be.

As a firm atheist, I don’t particularly object to that. I just find it a bit over-optimistic, and a tad intellectually lame. It reminds me of the old deficit model that used to motivate the Public Understanding of Science movement: just give people the right facts, and then they’ll agree with us. I am in favour of any movement that campaigns to kick out of schools the invidious misinformation of creationism, intelligent design and the rest of the shoddy fundamentalist agenda. I am very much in favour of a movement that aims to denounce religious intolerance and that attacks the kind of harmful and ignorant nonsense that seems increasingly to be coming from the Vatican. And I believe I said that in my article.

But what depresses me is that the Reason Project and many of its supporters are so sure of the battle-lines that they have lost the ability of basic English comprehension. It is this that has earned me the delightful honour of a place in the Reason Project’s Hall of Shame, no less – because it has decided that I am placing the irenic BioLogos Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, and other apologists, on a pedestal, making them the nice, friendly good guys who only want us all to get along. Does my article say that? No, it simply quotes from the BioLogos mission statement (just as it quotes from the Reason Project mission statement). That this is taken as registering approval is a bit disturbing. The fact that I suggest the Reason Project in some respects ‘should be applauded’, and say no such thing about the BioLogos Foundation, doesn’t seem to be noticed. (The fact is that I’m utterly indifferent to the BioLogos Foundation. I find its aims uninspiring and its current statements about the relation of science and religion somewhat shallow.)

Did I say (as most of the comments on the Reason Project page imply) that science and religion are compatible? No. They are systems of thought that seem to me to stem from quite different axioms, and are bound to run into logical contradictions. But humans seem remarkably good at living with contradictions. We all do it. It is not a particularly laudable attribute, but it is what we are like (most of us). Many people (not me) are apparently able to reconcile religious belief with a deep trust in science. I’m not sure how, but they do. I suspect they just take the bits they like and ignore the bits that clash. On current evidence, this seems to offend a lot of people associated with the Reason Project.

There doesn’t seem to be much to be gained from responding to the various comments on the Reason Project site, since they are so lamentable. (A sample: ‘It is sad to see that, in their desperation to recapitalize, a journal with the prestige of Nature is whoring around looking for some of that Tempelton prize money. Go write and editorialize for a religious newspaper or magazine if you want to espouse religious viewpoints.’ ‘Dr Ball essentially states that while religion, admittedly, wrongly picks on certain aspects of science, religion and science can coexist, and thus we should not eliminate religion.’ ‘I find it particularly disturbing that this article [sic] was in a science magazine. Once again we have a document declairing [sic] ignorance as a right of passage.’ ‘I found this part objectionable, “atheistic absolutism works as long as it ignores what people are like.” I feel it misses the point that people are not like anything. It is the memes that make people believe in sky fairies and all the other wishful thinking crap.’ ‘Philip Ball says it himself—“religion is a social construct.” Science is not. In defending faith without evidence, does he really not see the irony in this statement?!’ [Oh yes, the irony!] ‘Philip Ball presents Francis Collins as a happy peacemaker vs the “militant atheists.”’ Stop now, it’s too depressing.)

But hey, that’s the blogosphere for you. If I was Sam Harris, however, I’d be worried. And what truly depresses me is that this may actually reflect the level of comprehension and reflection found ‘at the top’ of the Reason Project. I think we haven’t heard the last of this yet.

Do we need another reason?

[This is the pre-edited version of my latest piece for Nature's online news. Do we really need more about science and religion? Probably not, although my excuse for this piece is the recent launch of two fairly high-profile projects pertaining to that topic. Richard Holmes puts the case much more succinctly in his splendid book The Age of Wonder: “The old, rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective.”]

The ‘war’ between science and religion is stuck in a rut. Can we change the record now?

The 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous ‘Two Cultures’ lecture has elicited mixed views. Some feel that the divide between the sciences and the humanities is as broad and uncomfortable as it was in 1959; others say the world has moved on. But perhaps we need instead to acknowledge that today’s divisions exist between two quite different cultures.

To my mind, the most problematic of these is the distinction between those who believe in the value of knowledge and learning, whether artists, scientists, historians or politicians, and those who reject, even denigrate, intellectualism in world affairs. Some have suggested that these poles are personified by the present and previous incumbents of the White House.

But others feel that the most serious disparity is now between those who trust in science and Enlightenment rationalism, and those guided by religious scripture. This feeling has apparently motivated the recent launch of the Reason Project, an initiative organized by neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, which boasts a stellar advisory board that includes Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Weinberg, Harry Kroto, Craig Venter and Steven Pinker, along with Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ian McEwan.

The project aims ‘to spread scientific knowledge and secular values in society’ and ‘to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.’ It is not hard, given the list of backers, to see what that means: doing battle with religion.

There are plenty of reasons why this may be necessary. They are well rehearsed, pertaining mostly to the conflict between scientific and fundamentalist ways of understanding human origins. And it’s perilously easy, to the east of the Atlantic, to get complacent about this: when a wealthy, treacle-voiced American said proudly to me recently ‘I’m a creationist’, I was reminded that there are places where this isn’t deemed tantamount to announcing ‘I’m impressionable and ignorant’.

Important though such issues are, the Reason Project’s supporters would probably agree that they pale in comparison with the use (or generally, abuse) of religious dogma to justify suppression of human rights, maltreatment and murder. To the extent that those are in the project’s sights, it should be applauded. But with Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) on board, one can’t help suspecting that the Almighty Himself is the prime target.

This debate now tends to cluster into two camps. One, exemplified by the Reason Project, insists that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible, and that the world ain’t big enough for the both of them.

The other side is exemplified by another recently launched project, the BioLogos Foundation, established by the former leader of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins. In this view, science and religion can and should make their peace: there is no reason why they cannot coexist. The mission statement of BioLogos speaks of ‘America’s escalating culture war between science and faith’, and explains that the Foundation ‘emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life.’
(There is, incidentally, a third camp too, which insists that religion must expunge heretical science such as Darwinism. Without denying that this is a dangerously widespread view, its vacuity disqualifies it from discussion here.)

BioLogos is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which likewise seeks to identify common ground between science and religion. To the militant atheists, this is sheer appeasement, if not indeed capitulation, in an insidious war of stealth where religion insinuates itself into the heartlands of science.

That is what evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a board member of the Reason Project, laments in an essay called ‘Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down.’ Coyne accuses the US National Academy of Sciences, and especially its National Center for Science Education, of irenic pandering to the religious masses.

What the Reason Project has in its favour is philosophical rigour. That may also be its failing, because it looks unlikely to venture beyond those walls. Like most utopian ideas, atheistic absolutism works so long as it ignores what people are like and remains in a cultural and historical vacuum. Logical neatness and self-consistency is, unfortunately, not enough.

Sadly, when that is pointed out – as for example when the Royal Society’s former director of education Michael Reiss suggested that it was best to understand religiously motivated delusions such as creationism as world views rather than as mere ignorance that the right information would set right – scientists tend to react badly. Reiss, a biologist and an ordained Christian clergyman, was forced to resign, I suspect because some scientists found a whiff of relativism in his remarks.

I’m glad people make it their business to expose bigotry and oppression. If some choose to focus on instances where those things are religiously motivated – well, why not? But it seems important to acknowledge that the supposed conflict between science and faith is actually not that big a deal. What is a big deal is the relatively recent strength of fundamentalist opposition to selected aspects of scientific thought, which has made the USA and Turkey the two Western countries with the lowest proportion of population who believe in evolution. Were it not for such developments, science and religion could continue their wary truce, with no compulsion to iron out the differences.

In other words, this is not a matter of science versus faith, but of the rejection of aspects of science that challenge power structures. (After all, fundamentalism rarely objects to technology per se, and indeed is often disturbingly keen to acquire it.) That’s not to minimize the problem, but recognizing it for what it is will avoid false dichotomies, and perhaps make it easier to find solutions. The over-exposed example of Galileo’s trial can still serve here to illustrate the point. If we choose to believe that the Catholic Church condemned Galileo’s heliocentrism because it conflicted with scripture, we have an unassailable case against superstitious dogma. If we recognize that the issue was at least as much about maintaining the Church’s authority, we have to concede some rationality in the papal position, however repugnant the motives.

So there is little to be gained from trying to topple the temple – it’s the false priests who are the menace. If we can recognize that religion, like any ideology, is a social construct – with benefits, dangers, arbitrary inventions and, most of all, roots in human nature – then we might forgo a lot of empty argument and get back to the worldly wonders of the lab bench. Given the ‘usual suspects’ feeling that attends both the Reason Project and most Templeton initiatives, I suspect many have come to that conclusion already.

What I’m reading

I have come across a diverting blog called Writers Read, which posts short pieces about, well, what writers are reading. Some might regard that as solipsistic, but personally I’m always intrigued by what other writers think about books. I was asked to contribute my own list, which right now makes me sound like a voluminous reader. The fact is, it takes me forever to finish a book when I’m not reading for professional purposes. I would add, hopefully without giving anything away, that I’m currently working through Richard Holmes’ much-praised The Age of Wonder, and it is truly spectacular. I feel dwarfed by his achievement. But in a good way.

Not so fantastic

I have reviewed Eugenie Samuel Reich’s new book Plastic Fantastic in the Sunday Times (here). The book tells the story of the fraud perpetrated by physicist Jan Hendrik Schön between around 1997 and 2002, during which time he fabricated data in a string of papers about organic microelectronics and nanoelectronics. It was something of an eye-opener to discover the details behind the affair, even though I thought I was fairly well aware of the basic facts. I missed, by the skin of my teeth, being implicated in the matter as a Nature editor, since I quit that job shortly around the time that Schön’s papers started to roll in.

For understandable reasons of space, the Sunday Times lopped off the final sentence in my review, which cited a quote from Cambridge physicist Peter Littlewood that, to my mind, captures the essence of what went on, as Reich makes clear: ‘For a long time I didn’t believe it could have been fraud, because I didn’t believe one person could make all that up. Then I realized, we all made it up.’

A circular argument?
[Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News. I have a book review of the stimulating reference 8 appearing shortly in Nature Physics.]

A new proposal for the signature of life on alien worlds resurrects an old idea linking light and life.

The difficulty of saying with scientific rigour what constitutes ‘life’ brings to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s famous description of pornography in 1964: it is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.

Yet do we really? Astrobiologists are haunted by the suspicion of terracentricity: we imagine that life on other planets will look like life here, and bias our searches for extraterrestrials accordingly.

Some of this community struggle nobly to free themselves from such prejudice, questioning for example the complacent conviction that life depends on water. Others seek very general signatures that make no assumptions about biochemical specifics.

One of the first such proposals, made by James Lovelock in the context of lander explorations of Mars [1], argued that sustained chemical disequilibrium in the planetary environment should be a telltale sign. This proposal had the virtue that it could rely on surveying a planet’s atmosphere alone. On Earth, the high proportion of oxygen, along with the presence of other trace gases, should be a giveaway, relying as it does on the operation of photosynthesis to prevent oxygen from getting locked into minerals.

One of the most ingenious ideas is that life affects the topography of a planet, for example by mediating chemical reactions that erode rock, by forming soil and protecting it from erosion, and by dictating climate. Geomorphologists William Dietrich and J. Taylor Perron have argued [2] that the types and distributions of landforms on Earth probably carry an imprint of life’s influence, and that a better understanding of their formation processes might lead to a clear distinction between the contours of planets with and without life.

In 1993, the idea of ‘remote sensing’ of the fingerprints of life from space was explored experimentally when Carl Sagan and coworkers used the data from a planned flyby of the Earth by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft to investigate our planet as though it were an unknown world [3]. From the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, images of the planetary surface, and detection of radio-wave emissions, the researchers inferred – somewhat reassuringly – that the presence of water-based life, probably of an intelligent kind, seems highly likely.

Now a new kind of fingerprint has been proposed by William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and his coworkers. They suggest we search for a characteristic signature of life in the light scattered from the surfaces of extrasolar planets [4]. They say that living organisms will be likely to make the light circularly polarized, meaning that the plane of its oscillating electromagnetic fields is not random but has a characteristic twist to it, either to the left or the right. This shouldn’t happen if the light simply bounces off inorganic surfaces.

Circular polarization is a feature of light scattered from organisms on Earth, where it has its origin in the ‘handedness’ or chirality of the building blocks of biological molecules. All natural proteins are made from amino acids that have a ‘left-handed’ molecular shape – the mirror-image right-handed amino acids can’t be used by cells to build proteins. And all nucleic acids use only ‘right-handed’ sugar molecules in their backbones. This molecular-scale twist means, for example, that light circularly polarized to the left or the right is absorbed to different degrees by the photosynthetic molecular apparatus of bacteria and plants, creating a net circular polarization in the scattered light.

It’s not obvious that this will be evident when the light is measured from afar, however, because the scattering process is complicated. Light rays that are scattered many times tend to have their polarization randomized, and scattering from reflective surfaces reverses the polarization. That’s why the researchers needed to check the light that bounces off cultures of marine photosynthetic bacteria, to make sure that the signature remains evident. It does – as indeed they found also for reflected light from a maple leaf. In contrast, light scattered from inorganic iron oxide shows no significant circular polarization.

Whether this method will work in real exoplanet searches is another matter. It depends on how much surface scattering would come from living organisms as opposed to inorganic substances, and on whether this light can be distinguished clearly enough from that of the parent star. Some of the planned astronomical instruments that might conduct planet searches could have sufficient resolution for this, however – probably not NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder (which is currently postponed indefinitely in any case), say Sparks and colleagues, but perhaps the ground-based European Extremely Large Telescope, which might begin operating around 2018. The Hubble Space Telescope has already revealed some of the chemical ingredients of an extrasolar planet [5,6]

But who says life must have a chiral molecular basis? do. ‘Homochirality’, say Sparks and colleagues, ‘is thought to be generic to all forms of biochemical life as a necessity for self-replication.’ This statement relies on the work of astrobiologist Radu Popa of Portland State University in Oregon [7]. But what Popa offers is a plausibility argument based on the idea that homochirality simplifies polymer structure in a way that promotes the efficiency of copying information. This doesn’t imply that homochirality is essential, but only that it might help. And we know that life does not always do things in the most efficient way.

However, the notion that sparks and colleagues are invoking actually goes back much further. An intimate association between life, chirality and light polarization was made in the nineteenth century, first by the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot and then by Louis Pasteur, who sought Biot’s advice on his seminal discovery of handedness in organic molecules. Biot, a pioneer in the study of optics and polarization, coined the term ‘optical activity’ to describe a substance that rotates the plane of polarized light, and it was no coincidence that this in itself suggested the operation of some vital, ‘active’ agent, rather than lifeless passive matter. Biot came to believe that optical activity was ‘the sole means in man’s possession of confronting the otherwise indefinable limit between life and nonlife on the molecular level’ [8]. Pasteur became a staunch advocate of this view, to the extent that (contrary to the popular view) he developed something of an anti-materialist, vitalist stance on what life is: he felt that optical rotation must result from ‘the play of vital forces’.

We now know, partly through Pasteur’s own work, that he and Biot were wrong. Sparks and colleagues are on sounder ground, but their idea could be seen to support the suspicion that life is everywhere built in our own image.

References

1. Lovelock, J. E. Nature 207, 568-570 (1965).
2. Dietrich, W. E. & Perron, J. T. Nature 439, 411-418 (2006).
3. Sagan, C. et al., Nature 365, 715-721 (1993).
4. Sparks, W. B. et al., Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073/pnas.0810215106 (2009).
5. Charbonneau, D. et al., Astrophys. J. 568, 377–384 (2002).
6. Vidal-Madjar, A. et al., Astrophys J. 604, L69–L72 )2004).
7. Popa, R. Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life (Springer, Berlin, 2004).
8. Levitt, T. The Shadow of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009).

You daren’t make it up

One of the things I’ve learnt from writing a novel is that it’s not a sufficient excuse to justify unconvincing aspects of a plot by saying that something like that happened in real life. It’s the job of the author to make the implausible sound, if not plausible, then at least not jarring or undermining to the narrative. I was repeatedly reminded of this when I received comments from editors, and later from readers and reviewers, on events and situations in The Sun and Moon Corrupted that I’d taken straight from life. But I would never have dared invent something apropos of the mysterious red mercury, on which parts of the plot hinge, that was as bizarre as this story, brought to my attention by Ivan Vince. Is nothing too strange to be associated with this stuff?

Physics by numbers

[This is the full version of my latest Muse for Nature News.]

A suggestion that the identification of physical laws can be automated raises questions about what it means to do science.

Two decades ago, computer scientist Kemal Ebcioglu at IBM described a computer program that wrote music like J. S. Bach. Now I know what you’re thinking: no one has ever written music like Bach. And Ebcioglu’s algorithm had a somewhat more modest goal: given the bare melody of a Bach chorale, it could fill in the rest (the harmony) in the style of the maestro. The results looked entirely respectable [1], although sadly no ‘blind tasting’ by music experts ever put them to the test.

Ebcioglu’s aim was not to rival Bach, but to explore whether the ‘laws’ governing his composition could be abstracted from the ‘data’. The goal was really no different from that attempted by scientists all the time: to deduce underlying principles from a mass of observations. Writing ‘Bach-like music’, however, highlights the constant dilemma in this approach. Even if the computerized chorales had fooled experts, there would be no guarantee that the algorithm’s rules bore any relation to the mental processes of Johann Sebastian Bach. To put it crudely, we couldn’t know if the model captured the physics of Bach.

That issue has become increasingly acute in recent years, especially in the hazily defined area of science labelled complexity. Computer models can now supply convincing mimics of all manner of complex behaviours, from the flocking of birds to traffic jams to the dynamics of economic markets. And the question repeatedly put to such claims is: do the rules of the model bear any relation to the real world, or are the resemblances coincidental?

This matter is raised by a recent paper in Science that reports on a technique to ‘automate’ the identification of ‘natural laws’ from experimental data [2]. As the authors Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson of Cornell University point out, this is much more than a question of data-fitting – it examines what it means to think like a physicist, and perhaps even interrogates the issue of what natural laws are.

The basic conundrum is that, as is well known, it’s always possible to find a mathematical equation that will fit any data set to arbitrary precision. But that’s often pointless, since the resulting equations may be capturing contingent noise as well as meaningful physical processes. What’s needed is a law that obeys Einstein’s famous dictum, being as simple as possible but not simpler.

‘Simpler’ means here that you don’t reduce the data to a trivial level. In complex systems, it has become common, even fashionable, to find power laws (y proportional to x**n) that link two variables [3]. But the very ubiquity of such laws in systems ranging from economics to linguistics is now leading to suspicions that power laws might in themselves lack much physical significance. And some alleged power-laws might in fact be different mathematical relationships that look similar over small ranges [4].

Ideally, the mathematical laws governing a process should reflect the physically meaningful invariants of that process. They might, for example, stem from conservation of energy or of momentum. But it can be terribly hard to distinguish true invariants from trivial patterns. A recent study showed that the similarity of various dimensionless parameters from the life histories of different species, such as the ratio of average life span to age at maturity, have no fundamental significance [5].

It’s not always easy to separate the trivial or coincidental from the profound. Isaac Newton showed that Kepler’s laws identifying mathematical regularities in the parameters of planetary orbits have a deep origin in the inverse-square law of gravity. But the notorious Titius-Bode ‘law’ that alleges a mathematical relationship between the semi-major axes and the ranking of planets in the solar system remains contentious and is dismissed by many astronomers as mere numerology.

As Schmidt and Lipson point out, some of the invariants embedded in natural laws aren’t at all intuitive because they don’t actually relate to observable quantities. Newtonian mechanics deals with quantities such as mass, velocity and acceleration, while its more fundamental formulation by Joseph-Louis Lagrange invokes the principle of minimal action – yet ‘action’ is an abstract mathematical quantity, an integral that can be calculated but not really ‘measured’ directly.

And many of the seemingly fundamental constructs of ‘natural law’ – the concept of force, say, or the Schrodinger equation in quantum theory – turn out to be unphysical conveniences or arbitrary (if well motivated) guesses that merely work well. The question of whether one ascribes any physical reality to such things, or just uses them as theoretical conveniences, is often still unresolved.

Schmidt and Lipson present a clever way to narrow down the list of candidate ‘laws’ describing a data set by using additional criteria, such as whether partial derivatives of the equations also fit those of the data. Their approach is Darwinian: the best candidates are selected, on such grounds, from a pool of trial functions, and refined by iteration with mutation until reaching some specified level of predictive ability. Then parsimony pulls out the preferred solution. This process often generates a sharp drop in predictive ability as the parsimony crosses some threshold, suggesting that the true physics of the problem disappears at that point.

The key point is that the method seems to work. When used to deduce mathematical laws describing the data from two experiments in mechanics – an oscillator made from two masses linked by springs, and a pendulum with two hinged arms – it came up with precisely the equations of motion that physicists would construct from first principles using Newton’s laws of motion and Lagrangian mechanics. In other words, the solutions encode not just the observed data but the underlying physics.

Their experience with this system leads Schmidt and Lipson to suggest ‘seeding’ the selection process by drawing on an ‘alphabet’ of physically motivated building blocks. For example, if the algorithm is sent fishing for equations incorporating kinetic energy, it should seek expressions involving the square of velocities (since kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared). In this way, the system would start to think increasingly like a physicist, giving results that we can interpret intuitively.

But perhaps the arena most in need of a tool like this is not physics but biology. Another paper in Science by researchers at Cambridge University reports a ‘robot scientist’ named Adam that can frame and experimentally test hypotheses about the genomics of yeast [6] (see here). By identifying connections between genes and enzymes, Adam could channel post-docs away from such donkey-work towards more creative endeavours. But the really deep questions, about which we remain largely ignorant, concern what one might call the physics of genomics: whether there are the equivalents of Newtonian and Lagrangian principles, and if so, what. Despite the current fads for banking vast swathes of biological data, theories of this sort are not going to simply fall out of the numbers. So we need all the help we can get – even from robots.

References

1. Ebcioglu, K. Comput. Music J. 12(3), 43-51 (1988).
2. Schmidt, M. & Lipson, H. Science 324, 81-85 (2009).
3. Newman, M. E. J. Contemp. Phys. 46, 323-351 (2005).
4. Clauset, A., Shalizi, C. R. & Newman, M. E. J. SIAM Rev. (in press).
5. Nee, S. et al., Science 309, 1236-1239 (2005).
6. King, R. D. et al., Science 324, 85-89 (2009).

Physics, ultimate reality, and an awful lot of money

[A dramatically truncated version of this comment appears in the Diary section of the latest issue of Prospect.]

If you’re a non-believer, it’s easy to mock or even despise efforts to bridge science and religion. But you don’t need to be Richard Dawkins to sense that there’s an imbalance in these often well-meaning initiatives: science has no need of religion in its quest to understand the universe (the relevance to scientific ethics might be more open to debate), whereas religion appears sometimes to crave the intellectual force of science’s rigour. And since it seems hard to imagine how science could ever supply supporting evidence for religion (as opposed to simply unearthing new mysteries), mustn’t any contribution it might make to the logical basis of belief be inevitably negative?

That doesn’t stop people from trying to build bridges, and nor should it. Yet overtures from the religious side are often seen as attempts to sneak doctrine into places where it has no business: witness the controversy over the Royal Society hosting talks and events sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Philosopher A. C. Grayling, recently denounced as scandalous the willingness of the Royal Society to offer a launching pad for a new book exploring the views of one of its Fellows, Christian minister and physicist John Polkinghorne, on the interactions of science and religion.

The US-based Templeton Foundation has been in the middle of some of the loudest recent controversies about religion and science. Created by ‘global investor and philanthropist’ Sir John Templeton, it professes to ‘serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.’ For some skeptics, this simply means promoting religion, particularly Christianity, from a seemingly bottomless funding barrel. Templeton himself, a relatively liberal Christian by US standards and a supporter of inter-faith initiatives, once claimed that ‘scientific revelations may be a gold mine for revitalizing religion in the 21st century’. That’s precisely what makes many scientists nervous.

The Templeton Foundation awards an annual prize of £1million to ‘outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to those aspects of human experience that, even in an age of astonishing scientific advance, remain beyond the reach of scientific explanation.’ This is the world’s largest annual award given to an individual – bigger than a Nobel. And scientists have been prominent among the recipients, especially in recent years: they include cosmologist John Barrow, physicist Freeman Dyson, physics Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes, physicist Paul Davies – and Polkinghorne. That helps to explain why the Royal Society has previously been ready to host the prize’s ceremonials.

I must declare an interest here, because I have taken part in a meeting funded by the Templeton Foundation. In 2005 it convened a gathering of scientists to consider the question of whether water seems ‘fine-tuned’ to support the existence of life. This was an offshoot of an earlier symposium that investigated the broader question of ‘fine tuning’ in the laws of physics, a topic now very much in vogue thanks to recent discoveries in cosmology. That first meeting considered how the basic constants of nature seem to be finely poised to an absurd degree: just a tiny change would seem to make the universe uninhabitable. (The discovery in the 1990s of the acceleration of the expanding universe, currently attributed to a mysterious dark energy, makes the cosmos seem even more improbable than before.) This is a genuine and deep mystery, and at present there is no convincing explanation for it. The issue of water is different, as we concluded at the 2005 meeting: there is no compelling argument for it being a unique solvent for life, or for it being especially fine-tuned even if it were. More pertinently here, this meeting had first-rate speakers and a sound scientific rationale, and even somewhat wary attendees like me detected no hidden agenda beyond an exploration of the issues. If Templeton money is to be used for events like that, I have no problem with that. And it was rather disturbing, even shameful, to find that at least one reputable university press subsequently shied away from publishing the meeting proceedings (soon now to be published by Taylor & Francis) not on any scientific grounds but because of worries about Templeton involvement.

So while I worry about the immodesty of the Templeton Prize, I don’t side with those who consider it basically a bribe to attract good scientists to a disreputable cause. All the same, there is something curious going on. Five of the seven most recent winners have been scientists, and all are listed in the Physics and Cosmology Group of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), affiliated to the Graduate Theological Union, an inter-faith centre in Berkeley, California. This includes the latest winner, announced on Monday: French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, ‘whose explorations of the philosophical implications of quantum physics have’ (according to the prize announcement) ‘cast new light on the definition of reality and the potential limits of knowable science.’ D’Espagnat has suggested ‘the possibility that the things we observe may be tentatively interpreted as signs providing us with some perhaps not entirely misleading glimpses of a higher reality and, therefore, that higher forms of spirituality are fully compatible with what seems to emerge from contemporary physics.’ (See more here and here.) Others might consider this an unnecessary addendum to modern quantum theory, not so far removed from the vague and post hoc analogies of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (which was very much a product of its time).

But why this preference for CTNS affiliates? Perhaps it simply means that the people interested in this stuff are a rather small group who are almost bound to get co-opted onto any body with similar interests. Or you might want to view it as an indication that the fastest way to make a million is to join the CTNS’s Physics and Cosmology group. More striking, though, is the fact that all these chaps (I’m afraid so) are physicists of some description. That, it appears, is pretty much the only branch of the natural sciences either willing or able to engage in matters of faith. Of course, American biologists have been given more than enough reason to flee any hint of religiosity; but that alone doesn’t quite seem sufficient to explain this skewed representation of the sciences. I have some ideas about that… but another time.

Nature’s Patterns

The first volume (Shapes) of my trilogy on pattern formation, Nature’s Patterns (OUP), is now out. Sort of. At any event, it should be in the shops soon. Nearly all the hiccups with the figures got ironed out in the end (thank you Chantal for your patience) – there are one or two things to put right in the reprints/paperback. Sorry, I tried my best. The second and third volumes (Flow and Branches) are not officially available until (I believe) July and September respectively. But if you talk to OUP sweetly enough, you might get lucky. Better still, they should be on sale at talks, such as the one I’m scheduled to give at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 4 June (8 pm). Maybe see you there.

The right honourable Nigel Lawson

At a university talk I gave recently, a member of the department suggested that I might look at Nigel Lawson’s book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Climate Change. It’s not that Lawson is necessarily right to be sceptical about climate change and the need to mitigate (rather than adapt to) it, he said. It’s simply that you have to admire the way he makes his case, with the tenacity and rhetorical flair characteristic of his lawyer’s training.

And as chance would have it, I soon thereafter came across some pages of Lawson’s 2006 essay from which the book sprang: ‘The Economics and Politics of Climate Change: An Appeal to Reason’, published by the right-wing think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies. (My daughter was drawing on the other side.) And I was reminded why I doubted that there was indeed very much to admire in Lawson’s methodology. There seems nothing admirable in a bunch of lies; anyone can make nonsense sound correct and reasonable if they are prepared to tell enough bare-faced fibs.

For example, Lawson quotes the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research:
“Although there is considerable year-to-year variability in annual-mean global temperature, an upward trend can be clearly seen; firstly over the period from about 1920-1940, with little change or a small cooling from 1940-1975, followed by a sustained rise over the last three decades since then.”

He goes on to say: “This last part is a trifle disingenuous, since what the graph actually shows is that the sustained rise took place entirely during the last quarter of the last century.” No. The quote from the Hadley Centre says it exactly as it is, and Lawson’s comment is totally consistent with that. There is nothing disingenuous. Indeed, Lawson goes on to say
“The Hadley Centre graph shows that, for the first phase, from 1920 to 1940, the increase was 0.4 degrees centigrade. From 1940 to 1975 there was a cooling of about 0.2 degrees… Finally, since 1975 there has been a further warming of about 0.5 degrees, making a total increase of some 0.7 degrees over the 20th century as a whole (from 1900 to 1920 there was no change).”
Right. And that is what they said. Lawson has cast aspersions on grounds that are transparently specious. Am I meant to admire this?

It gets worse, of course. Carbon dioxide, he tells us, is only the second most important greenhouse gas, after water vapour. Correct, if you don’t worry about how one technically defines ‘greenhouse gas’ (many scientists don’t usually regard water vapour that way). And your point is? My point is that we are not directly pumping water vapour into the atmosphere in a way that makes much difference to its atmospheric concentration (although anthropogenic warming will increase evaporation). We are doing that for carbon dioxide. What matters for climate change is not the amounts, but whether or not there’s a steady state. Who is being disingenuous?

“It is the published view of the Met Office that is it likely that more than half the warming of recent decades (say 0.3 degrees centigrade out of the overall 0.5 degrees increase between 1975 and 2000) is attributable to man-made sources of greenhouse gases – principally, although by no means exclusively, carbon dioxide”, says Lawson. “But this is highly uncertain, and reputable climate scientists differ sharply over the subject.”

What he means here is that a handful of climate scientists at professional institutions disagree with just about all the others everywhere in the world in maintaining that the warming is not anthropogenic. ‘Reputable’ scientists differ over almost everything – but when the difference is in the ratio of 1 to 1000, say, who would you trust?

And then: “the recent attempt of the Royal Society, of all bodies, to prevent the funding of climate scientists who do not share its alarmist view of the matter is truly shocking.” No, what is truly shocking is that Lawson is so unashamed at distorting the facts. The Royal Society asked asked ExxonMobil when it intended to honour its promise to stop funding lobby groups who promote disinformation about climate change. There was no suggestion of stopping any funds to scientists.

“Yet another uncertainty derives from the fact that, while the growth in manmade carbon dioxide emissions, and thus carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, continued relentlessly during the 20th century, the global mean surface temperature, as I have already remarked, increased in fits and starts, for which there us no adequate explanation.” Sounds pretty dodgy – until you hear that there is a perfectly adequate explanation in terms of the effects of sulphate aerosols. Perhaps Lawson doesn’t believe this – that’s his prerogative (although he’s then obliged to say why). But to pretend that this issue has just been swept under the carpet, and lacks any plausible explanation, is utterly dishonest.

But those mendacious climate scientists are denying that past warming such as the Medieval Warm Period ever happened, don’t you know: “A rather different account of the past was given by the so-called “hockey-stick” chart of global temperatures over the past millennium, which purported to show that the earth’s temperature was constant until the industrialisation of the 20th century. Reproduced in its 2001 Report by the supposedly authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up under the auspices of the United Nations to advise governments on what is clearly a global issue, the chart featured prominently in (among other publications) the present Government’s 2003 energy white paper. It has now been comprehensively discredited.” No. It has been largely supported (see here and here). And it was never the crux of any argument about whether 20th century climate warming is real. What’s more, it never showed that ‘the earth’s temperature was constant until the industrialization of the 20th century; the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are both there. As you said, Mr Lawson, we’re talking here about relatively small changes of fractions of a degree. That, indeed, is the whole point: even such apparently small changes are sufficient to make a difference between a ‘warm period’ and a ‘little ice age’.

Phew. I am now on page 3. Excuse me, but I don’t think I have the stamina to wade through a whole book of this stuff. One’s spirit can only withstand a certain amount of falsehood. Admirable? I don’t think so. Imagine if a politician was caught being as dishonest as this. No, hang on a minute, that can’t be right…

I’m moved to write some of this, however, because in the face of such disinformation it becomes crucial to get the facts straight. The situation is not helped, for example, when the Independent says, as it did last Saturday, “The melting of Arctic sea ice could cause global sea levels to rise by more than a metre by the end of the century.” Perhaps there’s some indirect effect here that I’m not aware of; but to my knowledge, melting sea ice has absolutely no effect on sea level. The ice merely displaces the equivalent volume of water. We need to get this stuff right.

There’s more to life than sequences

[This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News.]

Shape might be one of the key factors in the function of mysterious ‘non-coding’ DNA.

Everyone knows what DNA looks like. Its double helix decorates countless articles on genetics, has been celebrated in sculpture, and was even engraved on the Golden Record, our message to the cosmos on board the Voyager spacecraft.

The entwined strands, whose form was deduced in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, are admired as much for their beauty as for the light they shed on the mechanism of inheritance: the complementarity between juxtaposed chemical building blocks on the two strands, held together by weak ‘hydrogen’ bonds like a zipper, immediately suggested to Crick and Watson how information encoded in the sequence of blocks could be transmitted to a new strand assembled on the template of an existing one.

With the structure of DNA ‘solved’, genetics switched its focus to the sequence of the four constituent units (called nucleotide bases). By using biotechnological methods to deduce this sequence, they claimed to be ‘reading the book of life’, with the implication that all the information needed to build an organism was held within this abstract linear code.

But beauty has a tendency to inhibit critical thinking. There is now increasing evidence that the molecular structure of DNA is not a delightfully ordered epiphenomenon of its function as a digital data bank but a crucial – and mutable – aspect of the way genomes work. A new study in Science [1] underlines that notion by showing that the precise shape of some genomic DNA has been determined by evolution. In other words, genetics is not simply about sequence, but about structure too.

The standard view – indeed, part of biology’s ‘central dogma’ – is that in its sequence of the four fundamental building blocks (called nucleotide bases) DNA encodes corresponding sequences of amino-acid units that are strung together to make a protein enzyme, with the protein’s compact folded shape (and thus its function) being uniquely determined by that sequence.

This is basically true enough. Yet as the human genome was unpicked nucleotide base by base, it became clear that most of the DNA doesn’t ‘code for’ proteins at all. Fully 98 percent of the human genome is non-coding. So what does it do?

We don’t really know, except to say that it’s clearly not all ‘junk’, as was once suspected – the detritus of evolution, like obsolete files clogging up a computer. Much of the non-coding DNA evidently has a role in cell function, since mutations (changes in nucleotide sequence) in some of these regions have observable (phenotypic) consequences for the organism. We don’t know, however, how the former leads to the latter.

This is the question that Elliott Margulies of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Tom Tullius of Boston University, and their coworkers set out to investigate. According to the standard picture, the function of non-coding regions, whatever it is, should be determined by their sequence. Indeed, one way of identifying important non-coding regions is to look for ones that are sensitive to sequence, with the implication that the sequence has been finely tuned by evolution.

But Margulies and colleagues wondered if the shape of non-coding DNA might also be important. As they point out, DNA isn’t simply a uniform double helix: it can be bent or kinked, and may have a helical pitch of varying width, for example. These differences depend on the sequence, but not in any straightforward manner. Two near-identical sequences can adopt quite different shapes, or two very different sequences can have a similar shape.

The researchers used a chemical method to deduce the relationship between sequence and shape. They then searched for shape similarities between analogous non-coding regions in the genomes of 36 different species. Such similarity implies that the shapes have been selected and preserved by evolution – in other words, that shape, rather than sequence per se, is what is important. They found twice as many evolutionarily constrained (and thus functionally important) parts of the non-coding genome than were evident from trans-species correspondences using only sequence data.

So in these non-coding regions, at least, sequence appears to be important only insofar as it specifies a certain molecular shape and not because if its intrinsic information content – a different sequence with the same shape might do just as well.

That doesn’t answer why shape matters to DNA. But it suggests that we are wrong to imagine that the double helix is the beginning and end of the story.

There are plenty of other good reasons to suspect that is true. For example, DNA can adopt structures quite different from Watson and Crick’s helix, called the B-form. It can, under particular conditions of saltiness or temperature, switch to at least two other double-helical structures, called the A and Z forms. It may also from triple- and quadruple-stranded variants, linked by different types of hydrogen-bonding matches between nucleotides. One such is called Hoogsteen base-pairing.

Biochemist Naoki Sugimoto and colleagues at Konan University in Kobe, Japan, have recently shown that, when DNA in solution is surrounded by large polymer molecules, mimicking the crowded conditions of a real cell, Watson-Crick base pairing seems to be less stable than it is in pure, dilute solution, while Hoogsteen base-pairing, which favours the formation of triple and quadruple helices, becomes more stable [2-4].

The researchers think that this is linked to the way water molecules surround the DNA in a ‘hydration shell’. Hoogsteen pairing demands less water in this shell, and so is promoted when molecular crowding makes water scarce.

Changes to the hydration shell, for example induced by ions, may alter DNA shape in a sequence-dependent manner, perhaps being responsible for the sequence-structure relationships studied by Margulies and his colleagues. After all, says Tullius, the method they use to probe structure is a measure of “the local exposure of the surface of DNA to the solvent.”

The importance of DNA’s water sheath on its structure and function is also revealed in work that uses small synthetic molecules as drugs that bind to DNA and alter its behaviour, perhaps switching certain genes on or off. It is conventionally assumed that these molecules must fit snugly into the screw-like groove of the double helix. But some small molecules seem able to bind and show useful therapeutic activity even without such a fit, apparently because they can exploit water molecules in the hydration shell as ‘bridges’ to the DNA itself [5]. So here there is a subtle and irreducible interplay between sequence, shape and ‘environment’.

Then there are mechanical effects too. Some proteins bend and deform DNA significantly when they dock, making the molecule’s stiffness (and its dependence on sequence) a central factor in that process. And the shape and mechanics of DNA can influence gene function at larger scales. For example, the packaging of DNA and associated proteins into a compact form, called chromatin, in cells can affect whether particular genes are active or not. Special ‘chromatin-remodelling’ enzymes are needed to manipulate its structure and enable processes such as gene expression of DNA repair.

None of this is yet well understood. But it feels reminiscent of the way early work on protein structure in the 1930s and 40s grasped for dimly sensed principles before an understanding of the factors governing shape and function transformed our view of life’s molecular machinery. Are studies like these, then, a hint at some forthcoming insight that will reveal gene sequence to be just one element in the logic of life?

References

1. Parker, S. C. J. et al., Science Express doi:10.1126/science.1169050 (2009). Paper here.
2. Miyoshi, D., Karimata, H. & Sugimoto, N. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 128, 7957-7963 (2006). Paper here.
3. Nakano, S. et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 126, 14330-14331 (2004). Paper here.
4. Miyoshi, D. et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. doi:10.1021/ja805972a (2009). Paper here.
5. Nguyen, B., Neidle, S. & Wilson, W. D. Acc. Chem. Res. 42, 11-21 (2009). Paper here.

Who should bear the carbon cost of exports?

[This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse column for Nature News. (So far it seems only to have elicited outraged comment from some chap who rants against ‘Socialist warming alarmists’, which I suppose says it all.)]


China has become the world’s biggest carbon emitter partly because of its exports. So whose responsibility is that?

There was once a town with a toy factory. Everyone loved the toys, but hated the smell and noise of the factory. ‘That factory boss doesn’t care about us’, they grumbled. ‘He’s getting rich from our pockets, but he should be fined for all the muck he creates.’ Then one entrepreneur decided he could make the same toys without the pollution, using windmills and water filters and so forth. So he did; but they cost twice as much, and no one bought them.

Welcome to the world. Right now, our toy factory is in China. And according to an analysis by Dabo Guan of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues, these exports have helped to turn China into the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitting nation [1,2 – papers here and here].

That China now occupies this slot is no surprise; the nation tops the list for most national statistics, simply because it is so big. Per capita emissions of CO2 are still only about a quarter that of the USA, and gasoline consumption per person in 2005 was less than 5 percent that of Americans (but rising fast).

It’s no shocker either that China’s CO2 emissions have surged since it became an economic superpower. In 1981 it was responsible for 8 percent of the global total; in 2002 this reached 14 percent, and by 2007, 21 percent.

But what is most revealing in the new study is that about half of recent emissions increases from China can be attributed to the boom in exports. Their production now accounts for 6 percent of all global CO2 emissions. This invites the question: who is responsible?

Needless to say, China can hardly throw up its hands and say “Don’t blame us – we’re only giving you rich folks what you want.” After all, the revenues from exports are contributing to the remarkable rise in China’s prosperity.

But equally, it would be hypocritical for Western nations to condemn China for the pollution generated in supplying them with the cheap goods that they no longer care to make themselves. Let’s not forget, though, that China imports a lot too, thereby shifting those carbon costs of production somewhere else.

Part of the problem is that China continues to rely on coal for its energy, which provides 70 percent of the total. Nuclear and renewables supply only 7 percent, and while Chinese energy production has become somewhat more efficient, any gains there are vastly overwhelmed by increased demand.

One response to these figures is that they underline the potential value of a globally agreed carbon tax. In theory, this builds the global-warming cost of a product – whether a computer or an airplane flight – into its price. Worries that this enables producers simply to pass on that cost to the consumer might be valid for the production of essentials such as foods. But much of China’s export growth has been in consumer electronics (which have immense ‘embodied energy’) – exports of Chinese-built televisions increased from 21 million in 2002 to 86 million in 2005. Why shouldn’t consumers feel the environmental cost of luxury items? And won’t the hallowed laws of the marketplace ultimately cut sales and profits for manufacturers who simply raise their prices?

Some environmentalists are wary of carbon taxes because they fail to guarantee explicit emissions limits. But the main alternative, cap-and-trade, seems to have bigger problems. The idea here is that carbon emitters – nations, industrial sectors, even individual factories or plants – are given a carbon allocation but can exceed it by buying credits off others. That’s the scheme currently adopted in the European Union, and preferred by the Obama adminstration in the USA.

The major drawback is that it makes costs of emissions virtually impossible to predict, and susceptible to outside influences such as weather or other economic variables. The result would be a dangerously volatile carbon market, with prices that could soar or plummet (the latter a dream case for polluters). We hardly need any reminder now of the hazards of such market mechanisms.

Both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes arguably offer a ‘fair’ way of sharing the carbon cost of exports (although there may be no transparent way to set the cap levels in the latter). But surely the Chinese picture reinforces the need for a broader view too, in which there is rational self-interest in international collaboration on and sharing of technologies that reduce emissions and increase efficiency. The issue also brings some urgency to debates about the best reward mechanisms for stimulating innovation [3].

These figures also emphasize the underlying dilemma. As Laura Bodey puts it in Richard Powers’ 1998 novel Gain, when she declines with cancer possibly caused by proximity to a chemical plant that has given her all kinds of convenient domestic products: “People want everything. That’s their problem.”


References
1. Guan, D., Peters, G. P., Weber, C. L. & Hubacek, K. Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L04709 (2009).
2. Weber, C. L., Peters, G. P., Guan, D. & Hubacek, K. Energy Policy 36, 3572-3577 (2008).
3. Meloso, D., Copic, J. & Bossaerts, P. Science 323, 1335-1339 (2009).

What does it all mean?

[This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News.]

Science depends on clear terms and definitions – but the world doesn’t always oblige.

What’s wrong with this statement: ‘The acceleration of an object is proportional to the force acting on it.’ You might think no one could object to this expression of Newton’s second law. But Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek does. This law, he admits, ‘is the soul of classical mechanics.’ But he adds that, ‘like other souls, it is insubstantial’ [1].

Bertrand Russell went further. In 1925 he called for the abolition of the concept of force in physics, and claimed that if people learnt to do without it, this ‘would alter not only their physical imagination, but probably also their morals and politics.’ [2]

That seems an awfully heavy burden for a word that most scientists will use unquestioningly. Wilczek does not go as far as Russell, but he agrees that the concept of ‘force’ acquires meaning only through convention – through the culture of physics – and not because it refers to anything objective. He suspects that only ‘intellectual inertia’ accounts for its continued use.

It’s a disconcerting reminder that scientific terminology, supposed to be so precise and robust, is often much more mutable and ambiguous than we think – which makes it prone to misuse, abuse and confusion [3,4]. But why should that be so?

There are, broadly speaking, several potential problems with words in science. Let’s take each in turn.

Misuse
Some scientific words are simply misapplied, often because their definition is ignored in favour of something less precise. Can’t we just stamp out such transgressions? Not necessarily, for science can’t expect to evade the transformations that any language undergoes through changing conventions of usage. When misuse becomes endemic, we must sometimes accept that a word’s definition has changed de facto. ‘Fertility’ now often connotes birth rate, not just in general culture but among demographers. That is simply not its dictionary meaning, but is it now futile to argue against it? Similarly, it is now routine to speak of protein molecules undergoing phase transitions, which they cannot in the strict sense since phase transitions are only defined in systems that can be extrapolated to infinite size. Here, however, the implication is clear, and inventing a new term is arguably unhelpful.

Perhaps word misuse matters less when it simply alters or broadens meaning – the widespread use of ‘momentarily’ to indicate ‘in a moment’ is wrong and ugly, but it is scarcely disastrous to tolerate it. It’s more problematic when misuse threatens to traduce logic, as for example when the new meaning attached to ‘fertility’ allows the existence of fertile people who have zero fertility.

Everyday words used in science
In 1911 the geologist John W. Gregory, chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, warned of the dangers of appropriating everyday words into science [5]. Worms, elements, rocks – all, he suggested, run risks of securing ‘specious simplicity at the price of subsequent confusion.’ Interestingly, Gregory also worried about the differing uses of ‘metal’ in chemistry and geology; what would he have said, one wonders, about the redefinition later placed on the term by astronomers (any element heavier than helium) which, whatever the historical justification, shows a deplorable lack of self-discipline. Such Humpty Dumpty-style assertions that a familiar word can mean whatever one chooses are more characteristic of the excesses of postmodern philosophy that scientists often lament.

There are hazards in trying to assign new and precise meanings to old and imprecise terms. Experts in nonlinear dynamics can scarcely complain about misuses of ‘chaos’ when it already had several perfectly good meanings before they came along. On the other hand, by either refusing or failing to provide a definition of everyday words that they appropriate – ‘life’ being a prime victim here – scientists risk breeding confusion. In this regard, science can’t win.

Fuzzy boundaries
When scientific words become fashionable, haziness is an exploitable commodity. One begins to suspect there are few areas of science that cannot be portrayed as complexity or nanotechnology. It recently became popular to assert a fractal nature in almost any convoluted shape, until some researchers eventually began to balk at the term being awarded to structures (like ferns) whose self-similarity barely extends beyond a couple of levels of magnification [6].

Heuristic value
The reasons for Wilczek’s scepticism about force are too subtle to describe here, but they don’t leave him calling for its abolition. He points out that it holds meaning because it fits our intuitions – we feel forces and see their effects, even if we don’t strictly need them theoretically. In short, the concept of force is easy to work with: it has heuristic value.

Science is full of concepts that lack sharp definition or even logic but which help us understand the world. Genes are another. The way things are going, it is possible that one day the notion of a gene may create more confusion than enlightenment [7], but at present it doesn’t seem feasible to understand heredity or evolution without their aid – and there’s nothing better yet on offer.

Chemists have recently got themselves into a funk over the concept of oxidation state [8,9]. Some say it is a meaningless measure of an atom’s character; but the fact remains that oxidation states bring into focus a welter of chemical facts, from balancing equations to understanding chemical colour and crystal structure. One could argue that ‘wrong’ ideas that nonetheless systematize observations are harmful only when they refuse to give way to better ones (pace Aristotelian physics and phlogiston), while teaching science is a matter of finding useful (as opposed to ‘true’) hierarchies of knowledge that organize natural phenomena.

The world doesn’t fit into boxes
We’ve known that for a long time: race and species are terms guaranteed to make biologists groan. Now astronomers fare little better, as the furore over the meaning of ‘planet’ illustrated [10] – a classic example of the tension between word use sanctioned by definition or by convention.

The same applies to ‘meteorite’. According to one, perfectly logical, definition of a meteorite, it is not possible for a meteorite ever to strike the Earth (since it becomes one only after having done so). Certainly, the common rule of thumb that meteors are extraterrestrial bodies that enter the atmosphere but don’t hit the surface, while meteorites do, is not one that planetary scientists will endorse. There is no apparent consensus about what they will endorse, which seems to be a result of trying to define processes on the basis of the objects they involve.

All of this suggests some possible rules of thumb for anyone contemplating a scientific neologism. Don’t invent a new word without really good reason (for example, don’t use it to patch over ignorance). Don’t neglect to check if one exists already (we don’t want both amphiphilic and amphipathic). Don’t assume you can put an old word to new use. Make the definition transparent, and think carefully about its boundaries. Oh, and try to make it easy to pronounce - not just in Cambridge but in Tokyo too.

References
1. Wilczek, F. Physics Today 57(10), 11-12 (2004).
2. Russell, B. The ABC of Relativity, 5th edn, p.135 (Routledge, London, 1997).
3. Nature 455, 1023-1028 (2008).
4. Parsons, J. & Wand, Y., Nature 455, 1040-1041 (2008).
5. Gregory, J. W. Nature 87, 538-541 (1911).
6. Avnir, D., Biham, O., Lidar, D. & Malcar, O. Science 279, 39-40 (1998).
7. Pearson, H. Nature 441, 398-401 (2006).
8. Raebinger, H., Lany, S. & Zunger, A. Nature 453, 763 (2008).
9. Jansen, M. & Wedig, U. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. doi:10.1002/anie.200803605.
10. Giles, J. Nature 437, 456-457 (2005).

Catching up

The lack of activity here in the past month or so doesn’t reflect any on my part; rather, frantic preparations in respect of the previous item have left me not a moment free. I now know the East Midlands line and Platform 1b of Derby station rather better than I might have wished. I’m about to head back up that way with a bag full of powdered magnesium, but don’t tell the guard. If the village hall of Matlock Bath doesn’t vanish in a puff of smoke, Paracelsus and his strange world will emerge at the end of next week. There are more details here.

In the meantime, I have been writing some things. There is an article in New Scientist here on using carbon nanotubes for desalination. I used to be a bit sceptical when ‘desalination’ got thrown in as one of the putative applications of nanotechnology; now I’m persuaded that it is a real and exciting possibility.

If you can bear to hear another word about Darwin, my round-up of the crop of books on the great man (but mostly the magisterial new volume by Desmond and Moore), published in the Observer, is here.

Everyone seems to be talking about ‘science and Islam’ – BBC4 has done a series, the World Service is working on another, and I have reviewed two books on the subject in the Sunday Times here here. One is Ehsan Masood’s nice little history, which accompanies the BBC series and is as good a primer as one could wish for.

Then there is my monthly column for Prospect here, but you’ll need to be a subscriber to see it. Sorry, I usually post them up here before editing, but there’s no time this month…

There has been a smattering of reviews of my novel thanks to the release of the paperback. The Observer was a bit sniffy (here), but more troublingly, failed to understand the main themes (“the censoring effect of scientific orthodoxy [and] the questionable morals behind scientific research” – makes it sound like a crank’s manifesto). The Telegraph was nicer (here).

And I discovered a very interesting paper questioning the supposedly unique origin of silk technology in ancient China (here). As a committed Sinophile, I find this news arouses mixed feelings – but heck, China has enough innovations to its credit regardless.

Finally, I’m speaking on pattern formation at one or two places in the coming weeks: first at the Words by the Water literary festival in Keswick, Cumbria on 1 March (Patricia Fara, who is speaking before me that morning, has a very nice new history of science coming out soon), then at the Royal Institution on 10 March. This is in connection with my three books on the subject, which are due to start appearing at the start of March, published by OUP.