Darwin, Humanism and Science - A C Grayling

thank you very much thank you very much indeed well when one comes at the end of a long and absolutely fascinating day one feels very much like the Hungarian MP who stood up in the diet in Budapest during the course of an extremely long debate there and he said well everything has been said but not everybody has said it yet so that's my road here sir because the the phrase humanism and science is actually very broad one it implies a lot of different things that might be said both about humanism itself about science and about their relation and I would like just to pick out a couple of threads if that relationship which I think is important I should begin of course what one is always advised to do so on the basis of the philosophical training to define one's turn so I'm actually going to define these terms and just say a little bit about what I take humanism to be and then a bit about what science can do for an understanding of the sensual humanist concerns of course the term humanism debate denotes a family of views about the good life and about our world and about the place of humanity in it and what humanity owes itself I take it that something very central to humanism is the idea that in thinking about our ethics and by that I mean something they brought an inclusive something much more merely than just morality but the question about what kind of people we should be in what kind of society we should have with the aim of trying to identify all the many different kinds of good lives there can be given that there are as many of those as there are people to live them granting that we all have different talents and interests and views and how we can construct with societies to make good individual life as possible within them so I take it that in thinking about those concerns a humanists is somebody who starts from the idea that our best understanding of human nature and our most sympathetic insights into the human condition provide us with our starting point those are the materials in which we try to construct an ethical outlook and on the basis of which we try to organize and live our lives now that view doesn't entail anything about what politics or what more particular individual detailed ethical principles we might adopt indeed it leaves a great deal of latch for a conversation about these things now one thing about humanism is that it does invite a conversation about the good life and about the sorts of principles that we should run both individually and in society and that I think is is a good thing given again the variety and the diversity of individual sort of interests and needs and desires that there are in our world so starting with the idea that humanism premises the thought that we must have a try to get a good understanding of human nature and a sympathetic understanding of the human condition we immediately see how a science might speak to that because we might expect that the sciences the Natural Sciences and the social sciences of psychology and sociology might help us to get a good insight into questions about humanity its history its needs its interests about human nature itself but we might also expect too that if we were going to be very responsible reasoner's responsible thinkers if we were going to try to apply reason to the business of living that our best bet is to take the best of our epistle oddities and that is science the scientist the scientific method of scientific methodology as applied to the problems of life both individually and collectively this is something that distinguishes the Enlightenment period of the 18th century lating century was not quite as greater a century of scientific advance and discovery some historians might think as the 17th century but it was very distinctive from the point of view of the efforts made by people to apply scientific canons of reasoning scientific rationality the use of evidence that the sense that what one's thinking about society and individual life should be should be constrained by by evidence and by reason there was an attempt to apply these protocols of scientific thinking to thinking about society and ethics and a number of other considerations and that of course had immediate implications for thinking about other things too because it immediately implied but you don't begin your thinking on the of authority or ancient texts or what a self-selected group of individuals say a priesthood tells you is right and is true and those implications are tremendously important ones because if one begins from observation and if one applies one's reasoning powers to them if one consults the accumulated empirical experience of mankind and attempts to apply them sympathetically to an understanding of individual life and society then of course the chances are that one's insights into things are going to be much richer and more important so let me say a little bit then about why this year of all years 2009 which is a year of many anniversaries not just the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning his telescope on the heavens not just the 200th anniversary of the Darwin's birth or 150th anniversary of publication of the Origin of Species but it's the 50th anniversary of a lecture given in Cambridge the Reid lecture by the scientist civil servant and novelist CPS no the lecture later published as the two cultures because this bears directly on our problem today and on our prospects as well for thinking today as humanists about our world and about the future orbit a snow said in that lecture you were probably all just reading it in the bath last night so you're very familiar with his his views in there but but he said two things he said firstly the problems that face the world and one of them that worried him particularly was the problem of feeding the multitude that everybody at that time thought would overwhelm the productive capacity of the world who very worried about the future demographic future of the world and the possibility of mass starvation and he thought that it was just science that we would have to turn to try to solve that problem and indeed to science that we would have to turn to solve other problems as well science at that time of course was creating some problems because if you'd German produced nuclear weapons and they were a very major concern in the late 1950s as you know today remain today but it was also a belief among those who knew a bit about science and repose some confidence it's capacities and in scientists themselves that science could help to solve difficulties and so they said that if science is going to solve difficulties in the future then it's important that there should be scientists that is that people should be educated in science and that other people who are not themselves experts in one or another field of natural science should nevertheless be scientifically literate so that they could be informed observers of what was happening in science and it's applications via technology to the world and that they should be informed participants in the conversation that a society has about what we do with our science and how science can be put to work for us in positive ways and yet he said if one looks at the situation in the contemporary world contemporary to 1959 what we see is a widening gulf between on the one hand a science and that those who know something about science and on the other hand the arts and humanities and the problem about this gulf is a very acute one he said because most of the people in Parliament and in government and governments around the world most of the people who make decisions about the funding of science in the direction of scientific research and it's applications are not scientists there are students of the humanities where people have got Arts degrees from universities they're become politicians and who then in government and they make these decisions and they are not themselves intimately acquainted with the sciences and don't really have a good grasp of the possibilities the limitations the capacities promised by science and indeed at the time the snow wrote of course it was very much the case still the case then I think less the case today despite the fact that the Gulf identified by snow has widened since his time just because of advances in science and the greater specialization required to understand those advances but in in his day the attitude was this that science remember at school was about stinks and bangs you may remember people with dirty fingernails did it and the more intelligent cultivated and sophisticated individuals went on to the classic side of school went to Oxford and read PP or grates or something like that and of course became a governess and made these decisions so the the division was one which was cultural as well as merely a matter of knowledge that the more gifted the more intelligent the more cultivated and civilized people read ancient Greek and the less civilized and cultivated people read chemistry well it's a very interesting and and really rather paradoxical fact that less than a century before snows famous two cultures lecture that there was a battle between I mean it was civilized in a friendly battle but a battle nevertheless of ideas between Huxley th Huxley and Matthew Arnold and it happened because a man called Serge as I Mason had founded a college in berming which subsequently became Birmingham University for the training of scientists and technologists he had himself made his money out of industry and out of engineering and he believed that it was of the very first importance to the economy into the future of this country that there should be more scientists or more technicians and he made it explicit in the Articles of foundation of his college that philosophy and ancient Greek and Latin should not be taught nor should literature that this was going to be austerely a scientific and technological face of Education and he invited Huxley to come and give the inaugural lecture and Huxley meditated on this requirement that Mason had laid down for his new college and in response to and of course accepting that there was a very important point in what Mason had done the important point about the need for a widening of the of scientific culture that is education in science that more people should know about it more people to be able to do it and that the scientific ways of thinking should permeate into the general culture much more and Huxley agreed with this and he promoted the view that that Mason and had laid down so Arnold in the we'd lecture at Cambridge in 1872 answered this speech of Huxley's and tried to say that in if you took seriously the idea of general culture which was water a university education in the nineteenth century attempt to impart and if you saw that education as being introducing people to has Arnold himself put it the best that has been fortune said in the world on all subjects then surely among the best and most important things that have been said are the scientific things and so he agreed by that indirect route with Huxley that science should be part of the conversation but he defended at the same time the study of the classics of literature and of history I think rightly also I think they were both waiter in this argument in effect they were both agreeing but by indirection that there shouldn't be two cultures there should only be one and I think this was more or less what CP snow was trying to say fifty years ago this year but here we are when we're snows gap has widened and I think it's part of the widening of this gap that we've seen in the last couple of decades at any rate a recrudescence a we surgeons not I think it numbers but a volume of claims of pushing forward pushing x' forward of people on the religious side of the discussion in our contemporary society a question of volume because what we've seen I think in the last perhaps nearly nearly a century is that people in Islamic parts of the world have felt considerably under pressure as a result of increasing and increasingly rapid globalization it's very easy to recognize with some sympathy the dilemma of somebody in a traditional society who is confronted with such Western things as alcohol and film films with perhaps some girls running about in bikinis and he's worried about his own daughters and what their attitude to life might be this be very concerning thing for somebody in a traditional Muslim society for example and that pressure of globalization against some more traditional and more religiously dominated societies has caused friction and anxiety and in fact when we look back across the landscape in the 20th century we now see very big straws in the wind way back to the Islamist movement in the Derrida in the ruin of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and 30s the revolutionary movements in parts of the Middle East in the 1950s 60s 70s for example not all of them Islamist admittedly now in the case of Iraq but remember that there was an attack on the World Trade Center in the early 90s that there was the Salman Rushdie affair before that that there was an Iranian Revolution in 1979 a lot of things were going on in there in the Muslim world which only really began to impinge on us much I think during the 90s and especially at the beginning of this decade with the 9/11 events and that was a kind of trigger moment when we became conscious of the fact that a much more assertive for more aggressive in some respects movement among members of one religious community have begun to inspire members of other religious communities to become more assertive and vocal themselves so in this country for example we've seen Sikhs closing down a play in Birmingham the diversity we've seen evangelical Christians trying to stop the BBC from screening certain things like Jerry Springer the Opera we've seen with an accommodating government wanting to be for good reasons inclusive and to increase social cohesion being extremely friendly to different religious communities and funding faith-based schools more and more we've seen all sorts of things happen which is permitted the religious voice in our societies to be amplified we know it isn't a question of numbers because if you look at the pew polling results from the United States of America we see in the last decade or two the fact that religious observance is declining even in the United States the number of people that the portions of people who self-described as agnostic or atheist is increasing and increasing even though from us from a small starting point really quite dramatically so in some senses the trends are positive there and there is a disconnect in a way between the the volume matter and the numbers matter but the reason why those voices can be heard as they are and can be given the amplification that they get in our societies is because the general population I think has become even more distanced from the scientific outlook and the basis of scientific knowledge even than in snows own day in other words it is the widening of that gap between science and the arts and the humanities the widening of the gap in science education from genuine science education into what sometimes happens in schools now as you know history of science courses or science and society courses the widening of the gap the lessening of information and awareness on the part of the general population and the fact therefore that alternative stories can be told alternative claims made for authority about our lives in our world can be taken seriously and that is a very worrying trend so one one thing that as humanists we should remain alert to and this is scarcely necessary for me to to say it but it always bears iteration is that a way of thinking about things the scientific way of thinking about things and I want to say just tiny bit more about that in a moment it's something that we have to keep asserting the importance of we have to keep saying that this mindset this attitude which is basically at the scientific mindset or attitude is of the greatest importance right throughout our education system right throughout the social conversation right throughout all our efforts made to construct a society which is good for all of us so let's dwell a little bit on on what what we mean by a scientific attitude and the importance that it might have for us as humanists engaged in this discussion this argument that is in some respects such a bad-tempered one at the moment society now to pick up on a particular point which is very familiar to all of us the point about knowledge and proof and certainty you know does science give us knowledge does it give us proofs of things does it give us a certainty about things what we're all familiar that it doesn't do any of those things you may remember heard and they interesting anecdote about the late Sir John Maddox he was some editor of nature the magazine just recently he was asked what science you know did we have the final answer in quantum mechanics we have the final answer in cosmology we have the final answer in biology and so on and he said no he said we don't don't have the final answers there at all in fact what we really know is very little indeed perhaps what we really know is is nothing and but this is the exciting thing about science that it is always prepared to go further fact he was asked what would you say you had published in Nature magazine that was absolutely right and he said not one single article this is because science is always in progress and we're going to find out that we didn't get it quite right and we got to learn more as time goes by and it is a very very crucial feature of the scientific mentality that it can live with open-endedness with uncertainty with not knowing everything accepting that when we sometimes do find solutions to things that more problems are generated thereby more intellectual problems or more problems for research and it is this open endedness this uncertainty or doubt which is in fact verifying and refreshing and encouraging stimulating stimulates research and inquiring which is a very important feature of that outset and it contrasts tremendously of course with the mindset that wants a neat finished story which has a beginning and an end explains a purpose can be told you in a rather short amount of time ten minutes I think for Christianity maybe and that's very much contrasted with how long it takes to understand even the basics of physics so that there is a very very big difference between the two mindsets in question and whereas you might say of science of the Natural Science in their range and variety but they can't they consist of accumulating bodies of information and understanding about our world and we can also say of them that they are intrinsically defeasible that is that we might always find out that new evidence countervailing evidence might come along and we would have to refine and improve our understanding that there is always work to be done and so when we talk about scientific knowledge we mean an open-ended accreting sometimes adjusted sometimes refuted in parts body of inquiry but we also mean when we talk about it that mindset that commitment to rationality by which I mean ratio analogy though the the ratio of your commitment to the evidence that you have for making that commitment the proportioning of evidence to theory and that is absolutely key and it is key because when you talk to people who are full of certainty about things they know the truth about the universe because there is somebody wrote it down between five thousand years ago press didn't write it down because most of these things as you know come from the Luke abrasions of illiterate goatherds so it with somebody forty two and a half thousand it exists so it's absolutely certainly true that the contrast could not be greater there that there is a quite different methodology at work the methodology of accepting Authority of accepting closure in your thinking about things not this open-minded quest which tries to find the ratio the proportion between the evidence that you have and the thing that you think the other key thing that science does to is it tries to understand things in in a context a context of what else we understand and know and of what makes sense of what we're enquiring into I'll give you an example of a non-scientific example of how bringing other considerations to bear helps one to make sense of something at once inquiring into for example we know enough about the history of religion to be able to say that something like the following story might be true of the evolution of religions that religions were once not religions at all but were science and technology there were explanations of natural phenomena and they provided means for influencing or controlling those natural phenomena so the Thunder the wind the lightning the flood the tides were all explained in a very natural way by projection from our own felt capacity as agents people thought that there were agencies involved puffing up their cheeks and blowing that was the wind walking on the clouds that was the Thunder it was very easy and natural to invoke the idea of agency as the cause of these things and and then the technology that was the science and the technology was you've sacrificed a virgin or pray or not step on the cracks in the pavement if there was one and these were ways of influencing or propitiating these agencies so that they would act in our best interests that was science and technology was nothing Supernatural about it these agencies were part of nature they inhabited the rivers and the streams and that they were present amongst us in the world even though we couldn't always to see them we would often hear them and feel them then as time went by and as people began to draw certain distinctions I mean for example we might think of the very early Egyptians being fully conscious of the existence of their great God because they could see him every day and they could feel his power because he was rather some when observation and reason had operated for some centuries and Ron never did anything different other than rise in the east and settled in the West they began to think well maybe he's not not much of a God maybe the God involved here is somewhat more remote a little bit more abstract in fact you can see a kind of geographical progression in the history of religion because the gods left the trees and the rivers and they went to the mountaintops and you know all the gods of the Greeks lived on Mount Olympus the god of Judaism began as a volcano god of burning bush and a mountaintop and a pillar of smoke by day and then the gods left the mountain tops when people began to climb hodgins and went off into the sky and became sky gods Tom so they've upped they've abstracted themselves and been more and more invisible more and more remote which is why Babu's photographs were not quite as good as they might have been and yet it is it is part of the tragedy if you would like of humanity that nothing ever believed nothing ever thought is lost to us they're part of the sort of geological strata of our minds that thinking in terms of agent causation as explanations of natural phenomena is a very natural thing for children to do for example and of course it's a great evolutionary advantage to children that they should be credulous and should believe absolutely anything that they're adults in their environment tell them and then it's because you know Brian Babbage and I intend they cease to believe in the tooth fairy and father Christmas but continue to believe in the deity or deities that we see how the social institutionalization of these ancient beliefs can affect people people continue to believe in God because that belief is reinforced by society whereas the father Christmas and tooth fairy belief is not I should mention to you by the way that my daughter my youngest daughter has said to me said dad I don't believe in God but I do believe in the Tooth Fairy and I said well that's very why is actually it was much better empirical evidence for the tooth fairy there was also more to be gained from that video so that they you you you you can see how I'm using this example of how you draw together different considerations their considerations from history and explanations of why people held certain beliefs to abuse of the world in order to contextualize your understanding of a phenomenon which is the existence of of religions and religious organizations practices and beliefs in in all human societies and you can make it more detailed you can say here is a story God makes immortal made pregnant and she gives birth to an egregious figure who has all sorts of adventures does all sorts of things go step down the underworld comes out again eventually goes up to join his father somewhere in the case of Hercules you remember who's Zeus made his mother of meanie pregnant Zeus had a taste for mortal maids and was energetic he was after all a god and he produced many sons of our sons who did egregious things and many of them went down the world came out again and indeed this story of the God who makes the model marry pregnant is a very common one in mythology of the Middle East and indeed elsewhere it's to be found in ancient Egyptian religion for example and of course it is the story of Christianity too now when you take all these considerations together and you put Christianity into the context of them you begin to ask questions you begin to say well why is it that this one is so special why is it that this one is true but the others are just stories so it's the contextualization it's trying to connect things to make sense of them which is another aspect of the scientific outlook so you have rationality they rational proportioning of evidence to the claims that you make or the places you're going to rest your confidence on for the time being until other evidence comes along and it's the contextualization of that inquiry that helps you to make sense of this world and when you apply those two things rationality and contextualization to any of the claims of any of the religions of antiquity you come to an understanding of why is that there were so few religions left most of the Galt's that have ever been believed in throughout history and there have met many thousands of them have all of them vaporized in the light of increasing knowledge and and reason around the world and the numbers left a few they're noisy they're sometimes dangerous they're a problem we see from what we've heard today how much little problem they can be but the overall trend in my opinion this may be wishful thinking which is late in the day after all but it seems to me that the overall trend is an optimistic one well this is the this is something an example of how the use of of scientific styles of thought not science itself particular but scientific styles of thought has happened in the Enlightenment and we are still I think in the as it were the phenotype of the 18th century enlightenment we are it but these ways of thinking about things help us in our thinking about the problems of society and of how to construct the individual good lives in society and it helps us sort it also to explain why increasing numbers of us are no longer content to accept or even indeed to respect the existence of worldviews which are neither rational nor contextualized the other thing and I conclude on this point now is the way that science might help us to understand those two concerns of ours which constitute the premises of our humanistic outlook our understanding of human nature and our understanding of the human condition on the question of human nature well I mean you'll be familiar with the fact of course that there is a controversial debate in the Natural Sciences and Social Sciences over the degree to which evolutionary theory can inform us about human nature in the form of evolutionary psychology and how much we can hope to learn about ourselves from sociobiology these are controversial areas of debate a perhaps less controversial area is the neurosciences a very great deal is being learned about the neural makeup of the brain of human beings and and of other animals where understanding a great deal about the influence of structures in the central nervous system on behavior and on attitudes and emotions a great deal of experimental work is now beginning to throw up some insights into aspects of human nature and I think we're all more or less familiar with some of this work you may have come across perhaps the work of Patricia Churchland a philosopher interested in the philosophy of mind who has become tremendously excited by a certain kind of vole which exists in two varieties in the United States of America one in the desert and one upper mountain and one of them has more oxytocin present in its brain than the other one does and the one with more oxytocin in its brain tends to bond for life and the one was less oxytocin in its brain tends to be rather promiscuous well by the way this is a footnote remark and that the fact that oxytocin is a substance that creates trust between people and bonds between people suggested to me a solution for the banking crisis recently which was since the bankers wouldn't trust one another why not just squirt some oxytocin up their noses now I cite the example of the vowels and their levels of oxidation of respective levels of oxidation and what inferences might be drawn from this not in order to support the theory that the complex and subtle and tremendously important emotional makeup of our human individual comes down in the end just to dust to hormones just to the neuro chemistry of the central nervous system although obviously we know obviously that there is a very definite connection between the two and understanding it is tremendously important this is one way in which scientific advances indeed get you through a great illumination onto our understanding of human nature I don't think however that that kind of understanding is ever going to achieve what some people fear that it will which is the kind of reduction of the form that says that the pearl is nothing but the disease of the oyster just because you understand the emotional complex emotional makeup of human individuals at least an important part in terms of the neuro chemistry of a human body it doesn't follow from that that there is anything less significant or important about the emotional nature of humankind in fact you can approach system a quite different point of view you can look at the work empirical work done in psychology and cognitive studies by people like Antonio Damasio and others who point out that our emotions are vital to cognitive abilities that we couldn't be good reasons unless we were good feel is you know mr. Spock in Star Trek would have probably had been absolutely hopeless and useless to everybody because in ad the absence of emotion his cold logic would probably have gone off in all sorts of wrong directions we know for example that is distinctive of psychopathology that people can start from absolutely wrong premises and by the most rigorous logic arrive at even worse conclusions and this has happened too often in human history for us to be ignorant of it so there is nothing reductive about the idea that science the sciences including neuroscience can tell us something about human nature which would be important for our development of an ethical theory not at all our emotions our interests as human beings response to beauty our need for love and companionship the fact that we are essentially social creatures all these effects about us that will remain integral to very central to the project of creating good lives and as the next step of creating the good society which is the context for a good life so I'm suggesting here that science the relation of science to humanism and there can be a number of them but has at least these two threads so I've just been saying the sciences can throw a great deal of light on us as human beings on our human nature and on the world that we occupy but also silence is the most successful the greatest achievement of humankind for so it is and I say that as a great admirer of Renaissance art and music that of all the other tremendous achievements of humankind I think that the Natural Sciences are the greatest collective achievement of humanity in its history so far and also think by the way they were right at the very beginning of this great achievement but we can learn something deeply important from it and that is how to think better about all aspects of our lives recognizing that doing so is not a reductive Enterprise it's not going to take away from us all that matters to us in the way of aesthetics of our ethics and of our personality not at all but we will expect if we were to think in those terms and to use that very powerful epistemology offered us by science that we have a better chance of progress than religious history ever gave us hope for thank you very much you

Channel: Humanists UK

Views: 44,229

Rating: 4.8797593 out of 5

Keywords: BHA, atheist, atheism

Id: HbeY9_NErCs

Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2009