From Neil Messer, David Bard, Richard C. Jennings and Douglas Darcy, University of Cambridge
As a molecular biologist and a Christian clergyman, I share John Postgate’s admiration for the scientific virtues of honesty, openness and willingness to face the truth (Forum, 8 April). Curiously, he does not seem to realise that these virtues are also highly prized by religion. They have been characteristic, for example, of all the great Christian mystics.
I have less time for Postgate’s surprisingly muddle-headed polemic against religion. He clumsily contradicts himself when he claims simultaneously that “Science is (morally) neutral” and that “Science imposes a stern, austere morality upon its adherents”. This contradiction pervades in his argument: we find him at one moment claiming that religion is the cause of many horrors because, “unlike science, it is not (morally) neutral”, and at the next, asserting that “Science’s morality is wholly incompatible with such murderous imperatives”. Is science morally neutral or sternly, austerely moral? It cannot be both.
And it is disappointing that he should descend to the old, less-than-respectable polemicist’s trick of comparing the very best of one’s own tradition with the very worst of one’s opponent’s. He cheerfully dismisses scientific fraud and concealment as minor lapses, while mulishly insisting that the command, “Kill the infidell” represents the mainstream of religious tradition. He could with equal logic have compared the religion of a Ghandi or a Martin Luther King with the science of eugenics, which was both popular and academically respectable in the first half of this century, and which underpinned the “euthanasia programme in Nazi Germany.
Postgate’s moralising fails to take into account the way in which science is actually done. In the real world, the way in which knowledge progresses has more to do with the decisions of funding committees, personal prestige, intellectual fashion and laboratory politics than a dispassionate search for truth.
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It also fails to acknowledge that, where science appears to refute the mythologies of traditional religions, the new “scientific” explanation will itself take on the status of myth. Fixed this way in the popular consciousness, an ostensibly scientific world-view can become as irrational as that which it seeks to replace.
Scientists, like other professionals, are simply human beings trying to do a worthwhile job to the best of their abilities. Pretentious claims to uniqueness of morality or vision simply play into the hands of those who caricature science as an alternative pseudo-religion and make scientists look ridiculous.
Postgate contrasts the intellectual structures of science, which are morally neutral, with the applications of science, which are as good, or as evil, as people make them. In religion, too, we can distinguish the intellectual structures of the scriptures from the uses of the religion. The commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, and its analogues in other scriptures, is part of the intellectual structure of religion. I am aware of no religion in whose intellectual structure (scripture) we find the commandment “Kill the infidel!”
If we are going to contrast the intellectual structures of science and religion, we compare “Thou shalt not kill” with “Thou shalt not fabricate data”. If we are going to contrast the uses of science and religion we have a surfeit of wars and atrocities, both for science and religion, from which to choose. My suggestion is that students of science need to be made more aware of the moral implications of science and not trained into moral blindness by misguided reassurances of the moral neutrality of science.
Certainly, Postgate is right in holding that to be a good scientist one has to be completely honest and sharing. He says that these virtues spill over into the rest of the scientist’s life. Well, maybe.
But are these two virtues, which together comprise integrity, the whole of morality? Does scientific integrity offer a complete code of moral behaviour? What about sexual morality? Does the scientific code forbid adultery? Does it forbid being a traitor to one’s country? Or murder? Does it, indeed, forbid using science for immoral purposes?
A more serious deficiency is that science has nothing to say about love as a guiding principle, which is the basis of Christian morality. Science is admirable in its persistent search for truth, but it is truth in a limited sphere – the material world – which can never be ultimately satisfying. It cannot infringe on the sphere of philosophy which takes a wider view of reality. Scientific morality is a cold, stoical, limited belief system which can hardly be expected to appeal to any other than the elite.
It is a great mistake to see a conflict between science and religion. Some of the greatest scientists – for example, Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur – have been ardent, practising Christians. These men saw no conflict between their science and their religion.
