Two Public Lectures – no.’s 11 and 12 in the series “Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times”
Delivered, Trades Hall, Carlton, June 8 and 15, 2009
***Lecture No.11***
In which are set out more and more far-reaching considerations about modern society’s faith in science. The grim actualities of the relationship between science and politics summarised.
***Lecture No.12***
In which further grim climate change realities are painted in vivid chiaroscuro.
(To be followed shortly by:
***Lecture No.13***
In which the manifold possibilities for change in Australian society’s response to climate change and in the relationship between science and politics are canvassed.)
There were, you’ll remember, to be two parts to the penultimate section of the course dealing with climate change contrarians, the first revolving around the issue of knowledge and authority, the second revolving around the whole issue of faith in science – whether it’s right to say there is an element of quasi-religious faith involved in doing science, whether, as many of the contrarians say, climate science is particularly faith-based and whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It’s that last aspect of the problem I want to turn to begin with today – whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It brings us back to the very start of the course, to the man who, I said right at the beginning, sets out the problems of science and politics as they relate to global warming in a wide-ranging and incisive way, John Lanchester. Here he is again, you’ve already heard this and probably you’ve read the article it comes from in the meantime:
“When we come to sum up how we got to this point, there is one other factor to add to the politicisation of science and the reporting of science. It is a deeper, murkier consideration, and it bears on the way our society is in thrall to science and at the same time only partly understands it. Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of sc-fi fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc.) Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and tv, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us.
Our faith-based contentment with science has been challenged before, most particularly by the invention of nuclear weapons. But with global warming, science is bringing us catastrophic news, and is doing so, moreover, on the basis of predictions. . . about the future which demand urgent and radical action in the present. It’s not like being told about some scientific breakthrough, waiting a few years, and then having the breakthrough manifest itself in the form of a technology that gradually becomes more useful over time. The issue of global warming is the opposite of that: we are required to act on the basis of the faith in science which is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our society, but the faith has never been made quite so explicit before, and the need to act radically, urgently and expensively on the basis of scientific models is testing that faith to the full and beyond." J. Lanchester, “Warmer, Warmer” London Review of Books, March 22, 2007
There are several very simple points in there which are useful in seeing how contrarians get the wrong end of the stick when talking about global warming as the source of a new religious dogmatism, as well as a point about how the specialised, theory-bound, rarefied world of science relates to the wider social world. The first point is that the attitude you might take towards the content of climate science (or any science) – the amount of faith involved in your attitude to it – will differ markedly depending on whether you’re a climate scientist or not, and probably it will differ depending on whether you’re a scientifically educated or a non-scientifically educated member of the general public. The further you get from the field itself, the greater the element of faith involved. Nor is the faith of the non-scientifically educated members of the general public unwarranted: it’s a consequence of the fact that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced society which has a certain division of labour, between scientific experts and non-experts. Unless we want to junk the idea of scientifically and technologically advanced society and unless we want to take the trouble to educate everyone to the point where they have a robust scientifically-independent mind of their own, then faith in the deliverances of science is going to be a cultural given. That’s a point that Lanchester is making in this passage and in the article at large. But there’s an equally great point relating particularly to climate science – the point that the faith we as a society are implicitly being asked to show in its deliverances is not something separate from the belief (amounting sometimes to no more than passive acceptance, sometimes to active appreciation) that we manifest in our everyday dealings with the ensembles of equipment. The faith we as a society of non-experts are being implicitly asked to show in the deliverances of climate science is, Lanchester is saying, the darker side of a quite ordinary everyday faith.
Can we get a bit further with this issue of faith in science? Let me at least say something briefly about the issue of faith in science among scientists – the issue of whether scientists themselves, or “the scientific enterprise” as you might loosely call it, requires any noteworthy manifestation of faith. Rather than saying something myself, I let Oreskes, who in a way has been another of the heroes of this course, say something, and I’ll see what I can get out of it:
“No scientific conclusion can ever be proven, and new evidence may lead scientists to change their views, but it is no more a ‘belief’ to say that earth is heating up than to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information, and that HIV causes AIDS. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.” - Oreskes, “How do we know we’re not wrong?"
The first thing she says there may seem rather surprising: “No scientific conclusion can ever be proven.” Isn’t the hallmark of scientific conclusions that they’re proven – you might ask. Or that they’re backed up with rigorous experimental evidence? Perhaps Oreskes would be better off saying “no scientific conclusion can ever be definitively proven.” Let’s take it that that’s what she means. Why can’t scientific conclusions be definitively proven? Because of what she says next – because new evidence could be discovered or new theories developed which put the old theories in the shade or put old evidence in a new broader context. All of you who are versed in the history of science will know that that’s how paradigm shifts in the sciences often occur – by re-contextualising old theories and old evidence. Classically that’s what happened in the twentieth century in the switchover from classical to post-classical physics, from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. The old Newtonian laws weren’t abandoned, abrogated or declared invalid. Instead they were recognised as limit cases of more general laws, applicable to some – a very large number but not all – the phenomena of physical reality.
Why is it important for us that scientific conclusions can’t ever be definitively proven? Because it means that there is an element of something that might, with qualification, be described as faith in science that’s native to the enterprise itself. And it means that the contrarian argument that “climate science is based on quasi-religious faith” contains a grain of truth, unfortunately just not the truth the contrarians think it contains. All science, I’m saying, contains an element of faith, so naturally climate science does too – though it would be putting it far too strongly to say all science is based on faith. The question then becomes what this element of faith is? And answering that question clearly is important or else the contrarians can get away with the argument that the element of faith in operation in climate science because it’s a science like any other is actually a sign that’s it’s a corrupt science or a pseudo-science that’s been hijacked by political agitators who believe religiously that Western Civilisation is evil. (Even more generally, answering the question what the element of faith is is important because without a clear answer Christian naifs the world over are going to be able to argue that, if what they believe on faith is essentially the same as what people believe on a scientific basis, then there’s no difference between taking the Bible literally and taking the facts of Nature literally. (In fact the Christian naifs I’m thinking of usually go further than that. Having purportedly established that the scientific evaluative standpoint is just as faith-based as their own evaluative standpoint, they assert the superiority of what they believe on faith, because their faith-based belief system gives the world a coherent and striking metaphysical and ethical meaning, which other purportedly faith-based belief systems like the sciences can’t generate and which they in general don’t see it as their job to generate.)
I ask the question again: What is this element of faith that becomes manifest in the fact that scientific conclusions can never be definitively proven? A large part of it is the faith that science is usable, precisely faith in science’s application to practical situations in spite of its non-definitive nature – the faith namely that our assessment of the scientific facts is not going to be completely overthrown any time soon and that our assessment says enough about the way the world is in reality to enable us to act in the world.
