UPDATE: Eric MacDonald has posted a longer piece on Stannard’s column at his own site, Choice in Dying.

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It always sickens me to hear theologians, or other religious folk, say that we scientists need more humility. As if we aren’t already humble—at least compared to the faithful!

While scientists worry about problems in the faster-than-light neutrino experiment, try to find ways to test string theory, puzzle over dark matter, and argue about why animals reproduce sexually rather than asexually (a big problem for evolutionists!), theologians claim that they know not only that God exists but also know some things about his nature: he’s infinite, loving, omniscient, omnipresent, has always existed, is present as a single entity rather than as multiple deities, and so on. They know that Jesus was resurrected, that the path to heaven demands accepting him as a personal saviour, or that the Qur’an was dictated by Allah. And they know there’s a soul, and that we live on in some form after death. There is of course no evidence for any of this, but we don’t hear much doubt about it. Which Imam says, “There is no God but Allah—I think“?

So who are the humble ones, and who are arrogant? Who admits that they don’t know for sure, and that their truths are provisional, and who claims inerrancy and possession of the absolute truth?

Russell Stannard is a nuclear physicist in the UK who has published a piece in HuffPo called “Science: A call for humility.” A call from a scientist for other scientists to be humble immediately sets off alarm bells. And, indeed, looking up his bio, one finds this:

He is a Licensed Lay Minister in the Episcopal Church, and has spent a year at the Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton. He has carried out research at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, and at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley. Among his numerous awards he has received the Bragg Medal from the UK’s Institute of Physics, the UK Project Trust Award of the John Templeton Foundation, and has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by The Queen, and a Fellow of University College London.

Oh, and Wikipedia adds this important bit of information:

In 1986, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for ‘significant contributions to the field of spiritual values; in particular for contributions to greater understanding of science and religion’.

In other words, brace yourself for a homily on how science doesn’t know everything, that we can’t truly understand the world because it’s filtered through our imperfect senses, and so on. Although Stannard doesn’t say it explictly, I suspect he claims that there are other ways of knowing that help us understand the things that science can’t. Guess what, given the bio above, those other ways of knowing might be?

It doesn’t take long for Stannard to bring up the s-word (my emphasis):

According to [Stephen Hawking}, scientists will in time be able to explain everything and there is no need for other kinds of thinking (which, it should be noted is in itself an expression of the philosophical position known as scientism). Hawking, in particular, claims to have solved the age-old problem: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” His answer? M-theory. M-theory spontaneously created the universe out of nothing. It created this universe and countless others. He concludes that M-theory is “a candidate for the ultimate theory of everything… the only candidate.”

Stannard argues that the M-theory isn’t formalized, and at any rate doesn’t qualify as a question-ender:

But even if the M-theory hypothesis is correct, does it in fact answer the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It would certainly account for the existence of the world. But would it not raise a fresh question: “Where did M-theory come from? What is responsible for its existence?”

Edward Witten in 1995. That’s where it came from. A theory is a model of nature produced by a human brain. I know! I know! M-theory (an extension of string theory) was suggested byin 1995. That’s where it came from. A theory is a model of nature produced by a human brain.

Of course Witten isn’t really asking that; he’s asking why nature conforms to models. One could also ask why nature conforms to models that can be expressed in mathematics—why, for example, the force of gravity between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

The proper answer to this question is two-fold. The main one is that “we don’t know, and may never know.” (Physicist Sean Carroll has written a lot on this.) As to why there are laws, my answer is that without them we wouldn’t be here. Imagine if the chemical physics of our body changed from moment to moment. I suspect that any kind of universe that could produce life would obey laws that could be expressed mathematically. But we don’t know why the laws are like they are, though there are plenty of hypotheses

Then, of course, like all good Templeton-prize winners, Stannard emphasizes the limits of science. Here’s a common one:

This brings us up against what one suspects is a fundamental limitation of the scientific enterprise. The job of science is to describe the world we find ourselves in — what it consists of, and how it operates. But it appears to fall short of explaining why we are presented with this kind of world rather than some other — or why there should be a world at all.

If there turn out to be multiverses, and that in only some of them would the evolution of sentient life be possible, then that would answer Stannard’s question. (The Big Bang tells us “why there should be a world at all.”) Or maybe we won’t know. But physicists are trying. I’ll tell you an answer that is a science-stopper, though—and probably Stannerd’s answer—”God did it.”

He goes on with a common “anti-scientism” trope:

Indeed, there is cause to wonder whether science even gets as far as describing the world. For instance, what is the world made of? One might answer in terms of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up atoms. But what are electrons, protons and neutrons? Quantum physics shows how they are observed to behave like waves as they move about. But on reaching their destination and giving up their energy and momentum they behave like tiny particles. But how can something be both a spread out wave with humps and troughs, and at the same time be a tiny localized particle? This is the famous wave/particle paradox. It afflicts everything, including light. . . . We said earlier that the job of science is to describe the world. In order to do this, we have to observe it to find out what kind of world it is. But having made the observations (done the experiments) what we write down in our physics textbooks is a description of the world itself, regardless of whether one happens to be observing it. Bohr, and other adherents to his so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, claimed that this was not so. What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. — they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.

Of course our understanding of the world is filtered through our senses, but it’s a damn good assumption that there’s a world out there that really can be described, and that our senses, refined via science, can give us a good description of it. We know our descriptions are good because they make testable predictions: they enable us to fly to the Moon, to cure smallpox, and to measure the speed of light. That’s good enough for me. If the world is an illusion, it’s an illusion that we can really understand in meaningful ways.

Religion, in contrast, helps us understand nothing about the universe. Different religions give different descriptions of the exterior “reality” (and yes, both theologians and the garden-variety faithful often describe religious claims as “realities”), so which one is right? We can’t do tests to see if the claims of Christianity are better than those of Islam. And anyway, the predictions drawn from religion are either false (“if God is omnipotent and beneficent, there would not be evil”), or unfalsifiable, and hence can be ignored.

And here’s a base canard from Stannard:

. . . Finally we ask whether the scientific enterprise, even in this more limited domain of describing only interactions with the world rather than the world itself, might one day achieve complete knowledge. I think not. After all, what do we do our science with? Our brain. But how come we have a brain? It is something that evolved in response to the need of our ancestors to find food, shelter, and avoid predators. It enabled them to survive to the point where they could mate and pass on their genes. The brain was part of their survival kit. Why therefore should anyone think that such an imperfect instrument should be capable of mastering all knowledge regardless of whether it has any relevance to survival?

This is straight out of Alvin Plantinga: we have a brain evolved for survival, not for truth, so why should we rely on it to find truth? (Plantinga’s answer is that God gave us a truth-finding sense, and it’s this sense we use to perceive His Divine Wonderfulness).

The scientific answer is that we could survive only by perceiving the truth about the world. Are there predators around? Where can I find gazelles, or roots? Is it likely to rain? Does that hominin over there intend to hurt me? It is that complex, evolved neurology that we can co-opt through science to study things our savannah-dwelling ancestors never dreamed of.

And yes, our “common senses” are sometimes fooled, which is why we develop scientific instruments to refine and extend them. And the existence, and success, of quantum mechanics shows that we’re perfectly capable of wrapping our brain around things that are counterintuitive and would have been completely alien to our ancestors.

There is no scientist I know who thinks that we’ll be able to answer all the questions about the universe. Some answers require knowledge that simply isn’t available to us (this is common in evolution, since many questions demand knowledge about the past that we don’t have); others simply might elude our limited brain (as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose). To be a scientist is to know that you’ll forever live in doubt.

But that’s okay, because the doubt diminishes in proportion to how much stuff we find out, and we’re always finding out stuff. Yet there will always be unanswered questions and, as string theory shows, answers that we might not be able to verify.

But none of this justifies “other ways of knowing”—most especially religion. If science has its limits, and it might, religion doesn’t even get off the starting blocks. Since there’s no evidence for a divine being, there’s no reason to pay attention to any of it.

So scientists are humble. If you read Feyman, for instance, you’ll hear over and over again the refrain, “I don’t know.” Same with Carl Sagan. And we continue to live in ignorance: what is all that dark matter, for instance? We have no problem living with doubt or admitting ignorance, but our goal is to dispel them.

Scientists’ humility is the admission, “We don’t know—maybe that’s just the way things are. But we’ll try to find out why.” Religion’s arrogance is to claim that “This ignorance is evidence for God.”

Do note that Stannard’s piece appears in the HuffPo Science section.