Science Guide

[caption id="attachment_116" align="alignright" width="188" caption="What's not to love?"][/caption]

Thanks to Tony Sidaway for pointing out Nobel Prize-winner Harry Kroto's comment in the Guardian, in which he takes the opportunity to respond to the swinging pendulum of public opinion. The majority view now appears to be that Michael Reiss was unfairly (and even foolishly) pushed from his post as Director of Science Education at the Royal Society, a view with which Kroto takes issue. (I discussed my views on the original story previously: here, here and here.)

Kroto is defending, more or less, the statements he was quoted as making when the whole fiasco first broke; that is, that Michael Reiss was always an unsuitable choice for the Royal Society post, and that this issue must be vigourously defended as part of the struggle to save the Enlightenment from the forces of ignorance. I can't see that he's done much to further his cause.

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It seems to me that Kroto has made a couple of substantial errors of reasoning. First, the question of whether high school teachers can ever have any sort of conversation about creationism with students in class is not a scientific question. No one in this debacle has really been discussing or questioning the science, honestly or otherwise. (Maybe some would take issue with that claim, but to do so would be a big step beyond Kroto's current position.) This is despite the media's desire to paint it that way.

To my mind, and surely I'm not the only one, this is a pedagogical issue, on which teachers would be foolish not to consult both scientists (who can provide the most reliable science) and religious educators (who are better qualified to provide guidance on the views of the students in question). Science education has a number of roles to play in society, but the original question was not "What should we teach?", but "How should we teach?" I can't see that Kroto has offered much if anything of significance on that second question, regardless of his qualifications to comment on the former.

Kroto's second error, and the main thesis of the piece, is that religious views are somehow — dare I caricature it, magically — incompatible with "honest scientific discussion" simply because religious people "accept unfound [sic] dogma as having fundamental significance". His comment later that he does "not have a particularly big problem with scientists who may have some personal mystical beliefs" did not do much to shake my feeling that what he means to say in this piece is that religious scientists are not, in fact, scientists at all. I have difficulty imagining a reasoned view that is incompatible with the idea that a scientist is simply a person who does science, so it seems to me that Kroto is unreasoning in his condemnation of religious belief as incompatible with "honest scientific discussion".

That's my main objection to Kroto's arguments — that at best he's misunderstanding the problem, so his proffered solution is simply out of place. But a few of his comments make me feel that it's worse than that. First, he advances the view that "only those questions that can be ... subjected to detailed disinterested examination, and when so subjected reveal unequivocally and ubiquitously accepted data, [are] significant." It's not entirely clear here whether Kroto is advocating a logical positivist view of science, but it seems fair to characterise his statement as reflecting the attitude that if a question can't be tested, in principle, then it is unworthy of any consideration. I'd be surprised if Harry Kroto wants to be the one to explain this directly to high school students, particularly those who Michael Reiss was talking about: those who have been taught otherwise at home and might be trying to come to terms with the radically different point of view presented in science classes. I'm sure Kroto sees himself in a rather different role. But since we are talking about these high school students (or should be) I can't see the relevance of his comments to the problem at hand.

I was also struck by one of Kroto's asides, discussing the suitability of an ordained minister for such a position in the Royal Society as Michael Reiss held:

An ordained minister must have accepted that there was a creator (presumably more intelligent than he is?) thus many of us (maybe 90% of FRSs) cannot see how such a person can pontificate on how to tackle this fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface

Apart from the 90% statistic (curiously, lacking a citation in an otherwise well-referenced piece; presumably the editors added the other references?), I was amused by how much the first statement in parentheses sounds like an ontological argument for the existence of God — in reverse, naturally.

St Anselm supposed that since anything of which nothing greater could be conceived would not be itself if it did not exist, that thing, indeed God, must therefore exist. In the undertones of Kroto's little aside — that an ordained minister must accept the existence of a creator, "(presumably more intelligent than he is?)" — I can almost hear a stereotypically arrogant, ivory tower scientist attempting the Reverse St Anselm Manoeuvre: arguing that because he cannot conceive of anything more intelligent than himself, God cannot exist.

Except — and I mean this without irony — I don't believe in the existence of stereotypically arrogant, ivory tower scientists.

For another source of commentary try the Nature.com blog, The Great Beyond, which makes an excellent comment on the about-face of the newspapers on this issue.