“We have to have Costa coffee,” says Ian Angell, bustling me across the road from his office in the London School of Economics. “It’s the only coffee. The best coffee. Why does anyone go to Starbucks? That’s what I’d like to know”. It was almost a surprise to hear LSE’s Professor of Information Systems professing such certainty about any aspect of the world. His new book, Science’s First Mistake: Delusions in Pursuit of Theory (co-authored with Dionysios Demetis), is a full frontal attack upon all forms of certainty, upon the failure of scientific categories to do justice to the complexity of the world, upon science’s philosophically untenable use of cause and causality, its megalomaniacal claims to have discovered “truths”.

As I quickly learned when I talked to him, this onslaught had been prompted by his sudden recognition that management science, the subject he’d been teaching and researching for over 40 years was, in his own words, nothing but “self-evident nonsense”. What had led him to such a startling and self-destructive conclusion?

“When I started writing the book and looked at management theories, I suddenly realised that what you had was sophisticated mathematics stuck on top of a very simplistic model. And the world is too complicated to be described by numbers. All that nonsense about measuring work satisfaction on a scale of one to ten, all that nonsense about measuring happiness. When I wake up in the morning each day is different. Does that give me a 5 or a 6 or a 7 on the happiness scale? I know miserable people who revel in their misery. Revel in it. Does that mean they are a 2 or an 8?”

But presumably he’d kept quiet about such doubts when he’d been asked to present some objective-sounding indices to managers or to his management students?

“I am a total cynic. If you can bullshit the other guy into paying you, then give him numbers. I’ve got no problem as long as you don’t believe them yourself. If you are in business and the other guy believes this stuff, then by all means give him numbers. But don’t believe it yourself.”

How did his colleagues react to this new-found cynicism?

“They think I’m crazy. Well, some of them do. Do I care? No. I wrote the book because I wanted to write a serious academic book before I retired. It’s something that I needed to do. It was a catharsis, basically. Realising after 40 years in this game that I was dissatisfied with what I can only call bollocks, with the rubbish notion that somehow you can categorise and scientifically manage the complexity of human existence.”

During our interview, Angell gives all the appearance of a man who has found a new mission in life. While outside, in the smooth modern architecture of the new LSE building, serious-looking students go about their studies, he stands proudly in an office crowded with the scores of small gifts donated by his former graduates and propounds his newly found philosophy with a rumbustious Welsh loquacity that I can’t help but reflect would not be altogether out of place in a hellfire chapel pulpit.

I rather relish his strictures on management science. Much of it has always struck me as a form of mystification that allows managers to do much as they want to with their employees under the camouflage of scientific objectivity. Neither is it difficult not to sympathise with the book’s abhorrence of “scientism”, the tendency for some scientists to talk about their findings as certain or truthful when they should rather be stressing the provisional nature of their discoveries. But what seemed much more contentious was the book’s claim that science was nothing more “than a collection of delusions in pursuit of a theory”. And one of the principal delusions, science’s first mistake as the title proclaims, was its assumption that our world operates according to causal laws. In what ways, I wondered, was this a delusion?

Angell is unapologetic about the term. “It’s a delusion to believe that causality is built into the fabric of the world and that science is uncovering the laws of causality by empirical observation. Causality is not in the world. It is constructed in the head of the observer.”

Again I’m happy to go along with the contention that causality is a habit of mind, a mental predisposition to connect disparate events, which can often lead us towards irrational conclusions. But I wonder if he isn’t overstating his case. Surely there were plenty of occasions when it made sense to use the notion of a cause? Wasn’t it reasonable, for example, to talk about a causal relationship as having been established between smoking and the development of lung cancer?

“I wouldn’t say cause. I would say it’s a high correlation.”

But isn’t it still legitimate for all practical purposes to talk about such a high correlation as causal? There might be other elements that contributed to the cancer: air pollution, genetic predisposition, gender, nutrition and even other factors that are still to be discovered. But didn’t we know enough now about the dominant element in the list to talk of smoking as a cause?

“As long as that’s all you’re saying that’s fine. The problem arises when you assume that the world itself is operating causally. And in any case the fact is that some people who smoke all their lives never develop lung cancer. And there are people with lung cancer who have never smoked.”

This interview isn’t the first occasion on which I’ve talked to Professor Angell about his book. A couple of weeks before we met at the LSE I’d interviewed him on my regular Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed. On that occasion listeners had been particularly aroused and even incensed by his readiness to talk about science as deluded, in particular his readiness in instancing the mistakes of science, to describe Newton as “wrong”. These correspondents had rushed to say that Newton’s findings were not so much “wrong” as partial. Calculations based on his work had after all allowed us to make a successful landing on the moon.

This is what Angell characterises as the argument from utility. History, he insists, is full of examples of things that have worked, but that does not in any way guarantee their truth. And Newton is a perfect example. Einstein proved that he was wrong in much the same way that another scientist will shortly appear and prove that Einstein was wrong. In Angell’s view the only way to keep this perspective to the forefront and thereby undermine the imperialism and the self-righteousness of scientists was to pay attention to the hugely significant statement made by Nobel Prize winner and physicist Richard Feynman. He quotes from memory: “It was a shocking discovery that Newton’s laws are wrong. ... but nevertheless, we now have a much more humble point of view of our physical laws – everything can be wrong!”

But surely what had really exercised his listeners was the implication in his remarks about Newton that he had not made any advance in our understanding of the way in which the world worked. Wouldn’t he at least agree that science was progressive, that Einstein’s ideas represented an improvement upon those developed by Newton?

“Well, it’s change. Things don’t get better though. They get more complex.”

But wasn’t that another way of saying that our understanding was growing? His negativity about scientific progress seemed to lead to some odd conclusions. What, for example, did he mean when he described the current particle-accelerator experiments at CERN as “nonsense”?

“These are very expensive toys being used in the search for truth. A third of the particles involved in the research are hypothetical anyway. They’re brought into existence because if they weren’t then the models wouldn’t work. All you do is get to the next model. The point of diminishing returns. How many times do you do this? And how can they say that what they are doing isn’t dangerous? They can’t possibly know it’s not dangerous. They can’t possibly know what forces they’re dealing with. And what do they arrive at in the end? They haven’t actually solved anything. Because they end up with another model. And you have to say, well, if this is the model, where did the model come from? Are they going to say, ‘Oh, God did it’? And in any case physics is based on a non-science. All of science is based on mathematics which is a non-science. Because it’s not observational. And so we’ve got this epistemological peculiarity, something at bottom which cannot be proved through observation. Mathematics is simply a consistent self-referential description. Scientists constantly talk about their work as observational and empirical but there’s absolutely no way, for example, in which they could ever test their latest ideas about there being multiple universes. Show me a multiple universe. Show me one.”

At this point in the interview I was struck by an odd sense of déjà vu. Where I had heard this multiple universe argument before? It was difficult to concentrate while Professor Angell bore down on me with more objections to the certainties of science, but slowly another face formed in my mind, the face of philosopher and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, who I’d interviewed on radio and in the press following the publication of Absence of Mind, her attack upon those like Richard Dawkins who wished to assert the superiority of scientific reasoning.

Robinson’s whole style of argument was very different in tone to that adopted by Angell: gentle and suggestive rather than angry and assertive. But she had certainly employed the multi-universe idea as a way of drawing attention to the limits of contemporary science. Even postulating the existence of entirely other universes was, she argued, a way of “drawing attention to the givenness, the arbitrariness, one might even say the narrowness of the protocols that govern our reality”. The notion that intelligent life might occur in these other realities surely suggested that our own notion of intelligence might be “parochial”.

What Robinson was seeking to do with this argument was to restore some sense of wonderment to a world which she believed was being robbed of such an attribute by over-confident, over-rational scientists. Did Angell subscribe to this view?

“Absolutely. We don’t even know if the world out there is even accessible to our senses. There may be other things in the world that can only be understood through senses that we don’t even have.”

But didn’t this, as some critics of Robinson had argued, open the door to the re-entry of all types of fanciful ideas, to superstition, to mysticism?

“So?”

That doesn’t concern you?

“Not at all. What gives scientists the right to deny people mysticism if that’s what they want? How dare they? Who the hell do they think they are? If it works for you, then why not?”

But surely there were limits to this happy pragmatism. Might he not wish to intervene on the side of science if, for example, a close friend were diagnosed with cancer and chose to treat it with prayers and meditation rather than medical intervention. Weren’t there limits to his tolerance of other people’s non-scientific notions?

“I’m not convinced by the empirical evidence. There are all sorts of self-selecting processes going on here. In three weeks from now another scientists might come up with another cure which you can’t have because of the medication you’ve just taken. My brother-in-law was in this position. Should he have his liver removed or just make the most of the rest of his life? And he had three months of hospitalisation after which he died anyway whereas without treatment he could probably have had a couple of months of reasonable time where he could have gone and seen other things than a hospital wall. How do you measure those differences? You can’t. The way the question is framed is designed to get the answer you want.”

Angell’s book is a fascinating read, a clever, insightful, philosophically persuasive account of the limitations of science. But this wasn’t the first time in the interview when I felt he’d been so outraged by scientific arrogance that he was prepared to employ some dubious logic in order to pursue his case. I wondered if it was his fury about the manner in which science had robbed the world of enchantment that led him into another strange assertion, the declaration that the world was safe from science because it was, in his word, “magical”.

“It is magical. It is wonderful. Don’t you wake up in the morning and think this is incredible? You know, since I stopped being scientific, nothing is drab or predictable. It’s totally astounding that every day is different and you never know what will happen. Science is drab. It’s not a humanist way of looking at the world. To me humanists have to believe in magic. Because life is magic. It is magic that we can actually operate at all. The fact that we can categorise is magic. All thought is sympathetic magic. And it is wonderful. Every day is a bonus. If tomorrow’s going to be the same as today, then why bother?”

This new-found enthusiasm for life was almost alarmingly evident as he led me across Kingsway to his beloved Costa coffee house. He greeted the baristas behind the glassed cakes as though they were old friends. When I insisted on paying he cheekily demanded an extra stamp on his own loyalty card and noticed as he did that the card was now complete. “Free coffee tomorrow!”, he cheerily boomed as we carried our lattes to a table.

Science's First Mistake: Delusions in Pursuit of Theory by Ian Angell and Dionysios Demetis is published by Bloomsbury Academic