In a Christmas edition of The Spectator Richard Dawkins makes an impassioned plea for the defence of scientific truth.

What is profoundly troubling, however, is any wanton attack on truth itself: the value of truth, the very existence of truth. This is what concerns me here.

And living as we do in a time where conspiracy theories are running wild, it’s hard to disagree. Then Mr Dawkins seems to have discovered post-modernity and he does not like it one bit.

A more insidious threat to truth comes from certain schools of academic philosophy. There is no objective truth, they say, no natural reality, only social constructs. Extreme exponents attack logic and reason themselves, as tools of manipulation or ‘patriarchal’ weapons of domination.

Well, again, Christians have been doing apologetics against the demise of ‘objective truth’ for decades, so welcome to the fight Professor. Although as all your illustrations and anecdotes are from the late 90s you may want to catch up a bit. And as your first potshot was at ‘Women’s studies’ you might want to choose your targets better.

This first sentence will have some Christians pausing but what follows should also make them praising.

For, whether we like it or not, it is a true fact that we are cousins of kangaroos, that we share an ancestor with starfish, and that we and the starfish and kangaroo share a more remote ancestor with jellyfish. The DNA code is a digital code, differing from computer codes only in being quaternary instead of binary. We know the precise details of the intermediate stages by which the code is read in our cells, and its four-letter alphabet translated, by molecular assembly-line machines called ribosomes, into a 20-letter alphabet of amino acids, the building blocks of protein chains and so of bodies.

For there is a conclusion here that some will not like but there is also a description here that we should all marvel at. Then as he takes a dive into quantum physics there is again a conclusion we may differ from but a description we should (mostly) agree with.

If I can’t get my head around the weirdness of a theory which is validated by such predictions, that’s just too bad. There’s no law that says truths about nature have to be comprehensible by the human brain. We have to live with the limitations of a brain that was built by Darwinian natural selection of hunter-gatherer ancestors on the African savanna, where medium-sized things like antelopes and potential mates moved at medium speeds. It’s actually remarkable that human brains — even if only a minority of them — are capable of doing modern physics at all. It is an open question whether there remain deep truths about the universe which human brains not only don’t yet understand but can never understand. I find that open question immensely exciting, whatever the answer to it may be.

It is indeed a marvel that we can ask and seek answers to the deep questions of life and a recognition that there are some things we may never be able to grasp. Some things are beyond us. Too marvellous for words perhaps.

At this point, Professor Dawkins seems to realise he might be giving some ammunition to us religious types, and he’s never been known for wanting to do that, so he seeks to head that off at the pass.

Theologians love their ‘mysteries’, such as the ‘mystery of the Trinity’ (how can God be both three and one at the same time?) and the ‘mystery of transubstantiation’ (how can the contents of a chalice be simultaneously wine and blood?). When challenged to defend such stuff, they may retort that scientists too have their mysteries. Quantum theory is mysterious to the point of being downright perverse. What’s the difference? I’ll tell you the difference and it’s a big one. Quantum theory is validated by predictions fulfilled to so many decimal places that it’s been compared to predicting the width of North America to within one hairsbreadth. Theological theories make no predictions at all, let alone testable ones.

Ah, now we’re talking. Predictions & testable theories – for theology to be true it must do physics. Physics is the ultimate arbiter of reality. To which, if you’ve ever read, some of their speculations, we should all reply, ‘Lord, have mercy’.

Yet why must theology be like maths & physics for it to be true? His next paragraph says his own discipline of biology can’t hope to match the precision of physics. But if you want testable theories then the Bible has more than a few of them. Proverbs is a whole book of testable theories. Here’s one that Professor Dawkins would surely agree with:

Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

Proverbs 12:1

Or how about one from Jesus that we should surely be able to test in the age of social media.

Judge not, that you not be judged. For with the judgement you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.

Matthew 7:1

Professor Dawkins closes his essay with this (emphasis added)

Some of what I have claimed here about scientific truth may come across as arrogant. So might my disparagement of certain schools of philosophy. Science really does know a lot about what is true, and we do have methods in place for finding out a lot more. We should not be reticent about that. But science is also humble. We may know what we know, but we also know what we don’t know. Scientists love not knowing because they can go to work on it. The history of science’s increasing knowledge, especially during the past four centuries, is a spectacular cascade of truths following one on the other. We may choose to call it a cumulative increase in the number of truths that we know. Or we can tip our hat to (a better class of) philosophers and talk of successive approximations towards yet-to-be-falsified provisional truths. Either way, science can properly claim to be the gold standard of truth.

And it’s here that Professor exposes the inadequacy of the claim that science is the gold standard. It is indeed for a certain type of knowledge but certainly not everything that matters in life. And as a Christian I don’t need to put myself in opposition to the discoveries of science but neither should I think it is everything in life. As Ross Douthat shows, science does not, cannot answer every question and this from a previous generation argues that a world run by scientists would not necessarily be one we would want to live in.

For example what exactly does it mean to say that ‘science is humble’? What experiment has he performed to demonstrate that thesis? What measurement of humility does science have and where is he on that scale? What does humility consist of and how does it work? Is humility sequenced in our DNA or can it be found in the quantum realm?

The reality is that science is not humble (it not being a property that ‘science’ can have) and nor, likely, is Professor Dawkins (I’m basing that, as the Professor would surely wish me to, on the available evidence). Yet like Professor Dawkins when I get on a plane I’m happy to trust ‘Newton’s laws and Bernoulli’s principle’ that the plane will fly but I also will trust the pilots who fly it and the mechanics who serviced it and neither Newton or Bernoulli help me there.

In fact Bernoulli’s own life is illustrative.

In the same year his entry for the Grand Prize of the Paris Academy – a work on the inclinations of the planets’ orbits – finished joint-first. This turned out to be not entirely good news. The trouble was that he shared the prize with his father, who was outraged that anyone could judge his son to be his equal in mathematics. From that time on, father refused to speak to son.

Daniel Bernoulli

It should be noted that his father, Johann Bernoulli, was a professor of mathematics¹.²

1. And possibly a Calvinist [↩]
2. For a more bombastic response read David Robertson’s reply to the same article. [↩]