Science in an Age of Unreason

John Staddon

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781684513239
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Science is undergoing an identity crisis! A renown psychologist and biologist diagnoses our age of wishful, magical thinking and blasts out a clarion call for a return to reason and the search for objective knowledge and truth. Fans of Matt Ridley and Nicholas Wade will adore this trenchant meditation and call to action. Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to 'health and safety'—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. These foregone conclusions may be comforting, but each capitulation to modernity's whims threatens the integrity of scientific inquiry. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed? In Science in an Age of Unreason, legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today's scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Staddon answers pressing questions, including:

• Is science, especially the science of evolution, a religion?
• Can ethics be derived from science at all?
• How sound is social science, particularly surrounding today's most controversial topics?
• How can passions be separated from facts?

Informed by decades of expertise, Science in an Age of Unreason is a clarion call to rebirth academia as a beacon of reason and truth in a society demanding its unconditional submission.

PART 1 Evolution

CHAPTER 1 Has Secular Humanism Made Science a Religion?

What Is Religion?

Is secular humanism a religion? In 1995 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit examined the issue and concluded, rightly, that science, in the form of the theory of evolution, is not a religion.¹ On the other hand, in 2006, the BBC aired an excellent program called The Trouble with Atheism which argued that atheists are religious and made the point via a series of interviews with prominent atheists who claimed their beliefs were “proved” by science.² The presenter, feisty journalist Rod Liddle, concluded that Darwinism is in effect a religion.

Liddle may be correct as far as atheist scientists are concerned: many of them do indeed speak with religious fervor about their beliefs.³ But he is wrong about science itself. As eighteenth century philosopher David Hume showed many years ago, science consists of facts, but facts alone do not motivate. Without motive, a fact points to no action. Liddle was right, however, in this: both religion and secular humanism do provide motives, explicit in one case, but covert in the other.

The Elements of Religion

All religions have three elements, although the relative emphasis differs from one religion to another.⁴

The first is a belief in invisible or hidden beings, worlds, and processes—like God, angels, heaven, miracles, reincarnation, and the soul. All are unseen and unseeable, except by mystics under special and generally unrepeatable conditions. All are unverifiable by the methods of science. Hence, from a scientific point of view, these features of religion are neither true nor false, but simply unprovable. They have no implications for action. Since we don’t as yet have laws restricting thought, these beliefs should have no bearing on legal matters.

The second element is claims about the real world. Every religion, especially in its primordial version, makes claims that are essentially scientific—assertions of fact that are potentially verifiable. These claims are of two kinds. The first we might call timeless: for example, claims about physical nature—the geocentric solar system, the Hindu turtle that supports the world, properties of foods, the doctrine of literal transubstantiation. The second are claims about history: Noah’s flood, the age of the earth, the resurrection—all “myths of origin.” Some of these claims are unverifiable; as for the rest, there is a consensus that science usually wins—in law and elsewhere. In any case, few of these claims have any bearing on action. Like the first category, they are ideas and not commands.

The third property of a religion is its rules for action, its morality. All religions have a code, a set of moral and behavioral prescriptions, matters of belief—usually, but not necessarily, said to flow from God—that provide guides to action in a wide range of situations: the Ten Commandments, the principles of Sharia, the Five Precepts of Buddhism and Jainism, et cetera.

Neo-Christian

Secular humanism denies the supernatural and defers matters of fact to science. But it is as rich in moral rules, in dogma, as any religion.⁵

Its rules come neither from God nor from reason, but from texts like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and from the works of philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Peter Singer, Dan Dennett, and John Rawls, psychologists such as B. F. Skinner and Sigmund Freud, and public intellectuals like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Where these folk got their not-always-consistent morals is a matter of dispute, but Judeo-Christian teaching is not uninvolved: consider “the last shall be first and the first last” (Matthew 20:16) and those favored “marginalized groups,” for example. (Jesus’s next line, “For many are called but few are chosen,” which seems to recognize the inevitability of inequality, has been dropped, apparently.) In terms of moral rules, secular humanism is indistinguishable from a religion.

It has escaped the kind of attacks directed at Christianity and other up-front religions for two reasons: its name states that it is not religious, and its principles cannot be tracked down to a canonical text. They exist but are not formally defined by any “holy book.” But it is only the morality of a religion, not its supernatural or historical beliefs, that has any implications for action, for politics and law. Secular humanism makes moral claims as strong as any other faith. It is therefore as much religion as any other. But because it is not seen as religious, the beliefs of secular humanists increasingly influence U.S. law.

The covert nature of these principles is a disadvantage in some ways, but a great advantage in the political/legal context. Because secular-humanist morals cannot be easily identified, they cannot be easily attacked. A secular judgeship candidate can claim to be unbiased, not because she has no religious principles, but because her principles are not obvious. Yet belief in the innocence of abortion or the value of homosexuality, the “normality” of the LGBTQ+ community, or the essential sameness of men and women, may be no less passionate, no less based on faith—no less unprovable—than the opposite beliefs of many frankly religious people.

Secular Morals: Three Examples

Paradoxically, as the marriage rate declined and the rate of cohabitation increased, the legalization of same-sex marriage became a hot topic. It was once a minority position among American citizens and their elected representatives,⁶ but dwindling opposition led to swift legalization of gay marriage in 2015.⁷

This bouleversement changed the meaning of the word marriage and introduced unnecessary uncertainty into both social and sexual intercourse.⁸ Why did this happen, given the declining importance of marriage itself, the availability of civil-partnership contracts, and the historical opposition of all major religions? We cannot be certain, but two things seem to be important. The first is a secular-humanist commandment as powerful as any of the familiar ten: the primacy of personal passions, loosely justified by John Stuart Mill’s harm principle—you can do whatever you want so long as you don’t harm others.⁹ The second, alluded to earlier, is a mutation of Christian morals: the “last-shall-be-first” principle. The last-shall-be-first principle demands that all inequality be rectified. The different status of same- and different-sex liaisons, and the social awkwardness of the new meaning of the word marriage, is dwarfed by these principles, to which secular elites now seem committed.

Secular humanists also have blasphemy rules. Dressing in blackface as a teenager or saying the N-word,¹⁰ even in an educational context, can lead to severe retribution.¹¹ The speaker’s intention is essentially irrelevant, a violation of the mens rea principle in law. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was urged to resign over a decades-old blackface incident. But Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal survived what many would consider a more serious sin: exaggerating his military experience.¹² Young Northam committed a single instance of racist blasphemy, while Blumenthal persisted in a lie.

The blasphemy of the N-word is related to the hegemony of individualism through the definition of harm. Harm is defined by the “victim,” not by the intent of the speaker. Hence “microaggressions,” often innocent comments and questions,¹³ are minor blasphemies because they upset a hearer in a “marginalized group.” The “microaggression” charge also allows the marginalized “victim” to silence the speaker, in accordance with the last-shall-be-first principle.

A final example is the forty-foot-tall Bladensburg (Maryland) cross,¹⁴ erected in 1925 with private money but on public land to commemorate soldiers who died in World War I. Fred Edwords, a former official of the American Humanist Association, was one of the plaintiffs who sought to get the cross declared illegal. “This cross sends a message of Christian favoritism and exclusion of all others,” says Mr. Edwords¹⁵—not that anyone else is excluded from erecting their own monument. Evidently toleration is not one of the secular humanist commandments, but Christianity as anathema is. It seems to be the faith of a competitor that Fred objects to.

Religiously affiliated candidates for public office are often quizzed about their religious beliefs.¹⁶ This is both unfair and largely irrelevant. Whether a candidate believes in transubstantiation or the divinity of Allah has no bearing at all on how he or she will judge the rights of litigants. Beliefs about religious stories and transcendental matters do not guide action.

What matters is the person’s moral beliefs—whatever their source—and the person’s willingness to disregard them if they conflict with the constitution. Secular candidates have just as many “unprovable beliefs” as religious candidates. The only difference is that secular morality is not written down in a single identifiable source. It is not easily accessible.

Candidates, both religious and nonreligious, should all be subject to the same range of questions—questions not about their religion but about what might be called their “action rules.” What should be prohibited? What should be encouraged? In short, what are their “goods” and “bads” and how would they act if their beliefs are in conflict with settled law?

The point is to understand the moral beliefs of the candidate and how he or she is prepared to reconcile them with the law, not his or her adherence to a recognized faith. As it is, many passionate, “religious” beliefs of secular candidates go undetected and unquestioned. Thus, they become law by stealth.¹⁷

And yet, the central issue remains undebated. Can we deduce morality from science? Secular humanists, by insisting that they are not adherents to a religion, claim the mantle of science to justify their moral beliefs. But the separation between science and faith is long-settled philosophy. Today, given the dominance of covert morality masquerading as science, we need reminding that science is a map not a destination. It tells us what is, not what ought to be.

CHAPTER 2 Science and Faith: Can Morality Be Deduced from the Facts of Science?

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions…”

—David Hume

Science occasionally evokes an almost religious allegiance. As we saw in the previous chapter, a few scientists believe that science can provide us with rules for living, with a morality. Here is another example from the wonderful ant biologist and chronicler of sociobiology, the late E. O. Wilson:

If the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified.¹

In a 2009 interview, Wilson added:

One by one, the great questions of philosophy, including “Who are we?” and “Where did we come from?” are being answered to different degrees of solidity. So gradually, science is simply taking over the big questions created by philosophy. Philosophy consists largely of the history of failed models of the brain.²

Morality, indeed, everything worth believing, can be deduced from science, according to Ed Wilson. Yet this is a claim that flatly contradicts a compelling conclusion of Enlightenment philosophy.

Scientific Imperialism

Wilson is not alone; his confidence in the omnipotence of science, his belief in scientific imperialism,³ is shared by vocal members of the (now not-so-new) New Atheists.⁴ Richard Dawkins, a splendid science writer who has nevertheless become a convert to his own nonreligion, says that belief in anything that cannot be scientifically proved, that is, faith, “is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”⁵ But the New Atheists are not themselves lacking in faith. Indeed, they have a zealous and deeply held faith of their own.

Dawkins deems faith “evil precisely because it requires no justi...