Scolding the Scientists
By C. E. ONE can respect a sturdy materialism which refuses to spiritualize the universe for our assurance and consolation. The universe is, it is obvious, a very large place about which we know very little. How little, we are only just beginning to realize. If we think of human knowledge as a tiny lighted circle set in a vast environing darkness, then, as the circle spreads, so does its consciousness of • the darkness. The more, in fact, we enlarge the area of what is known, the more also do we enlarge its area of contact with what is unknown. Dismayed by the vastness and impersonality of the universe revealed to their increasing knowledge, scientists have begun to insist that what dismays them cannot be real, or that, if real, it cannot be all; Something akin, they hold, must underlie so much that is alien ; something spiritual be at the heart of what appears to be brutal. Nor have they hesitated to impound science to support their insistences. Thus has been staged the celebrated modern reconciliation between science and religion, and the physicist and the priest are popularly represented as travelling by different roads to a common goal.
Now this precisely is the kind of thing which, to adopt his own chaste diction, gets Professor Bell's goat. Indignantly he observes the scientists venturing with the slenderest equip- ment across the gulf which separates laboratory experiment from cosmic speculation, a gulf which Professor Bell, with a for him regrettably unscientific lack of precision, pictures as " a bottomless abyss swirling from brim to brim with the dun- coloured clouds of metaphysics, outmoded theology, and woolly mysticism."
The data, he insists, are insufficient to permit of cosmic construction, while the human race is both able and apt to find perfectly good reasons for thinking that the cosmos is what- ever it happens. to want it to be. Professor Bell proceeds to illustrate by examples. It has been asserted on the basis of modern physics that the universe is expanding like a soap bubble, that it is alternately contracting and expanding like a jellyfish, and that it will disappear " in one transcendent blaze of annihilation." In fact, however, the available evidence supports any one of the " three theories equally well."
But more important as a source of error than the lack of conclusive evidence are, he thinks, the ungovernable flights of the deductive reason. For example, from the hypothesis that the universe is expanding it is deduced that it was once concentrated, all the nebulae being at one time packed together in " one gigantic atom of an intensely radio-active element." The universe, then; according to Sir James Jeans, must have been created at a definite point in time by somebody who concentrated the energy ti the original nebulae. `Myth- making on the basis of inadequate data,' cries Professor Bell, and proceeds t6 scold. - 7 • "
The culprit, he .thinks,- is, the, deductive reason, whose divagations and extravagances, beginning, with the Greeks whose laws of logic " forged chains with which the human reason was bound for 2,600- yeara,'! are followed throughout the course of the book, until _they culminate in the speculations of the myth-making seientists,:of today. The general con- clusion is that " a blind belief in the absolute superhuman truth' of results reached by so-called cold reason has bred,
and continues to breed, superstitions as pernicious as any that ever cursed our credulous race."
• Professor Bell seems to me to :be partly right and partly wrong. I think that he is wrong in his wholesale condemna- tion of deductive reasoning as: an instrument for reaching truth, and in his contempt for truth. For example, he makes what seems to me a simple blunder over Aristotle's laws of The Search for Truth. By Erie Temple Bell. (Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.) logic. He paraphrases the second' of these laws as follows : " No statement is both true and false," and proceeds to ridicule it on the ground that it " is definitely-unusable in vast regions of modern mathematics where its use, if attempted, produces flagrant contradictions." Possibly,- possibly not. I have no knowledge of mathematics, and there may be some sense of the words " true " and " false " as applied to mathematical state- ments in which what Professor Bell says is true. But, if it is, it must really be true, completely and absolutely. , Statements made in the course of doing mathematics are one thing, and they may be such a very odd sort of thing that they can-be-both true and false. But statements made about mathematics, as for example, the one just quoted from Professor Bell's book, are either true or false: Nor does Professor Bell ever say anything to - suggest- that he thinks that his own statements are other than true. Admittedly he thinks the question ` Is a particular theory true ? ' to be meaningless and incapable of answer." But if he really believes that there is no sense at all in which the views expressed in his book are true, it is difficult to see why he should have gone to the trouble of writing it. ,"- - This leads to a further point, namely, that the methods of obtaining information about the different departments of the universe may themselves be different. Professor Bell rightly castigates the use of the deductive reason as a means of discovering what the physical universe is really like, and justly pOints out that it was not until' deduction was superseded by experiment that our knowledge 'of- the physical universe advanced. But it does not therefore follow that the whole of what exists is accessible by ex-peri- mental methods, or that in regard to those parts which are not accessible, deductive reason, and even faculties such as " intuition," which Professor Bell can never bring himself to mention without letting off a perfect fusillade of derisive witticisms, may not be appropriately employed. The -belief that all knowledge is achievable by the method of experiment involves the tacit assumption that the physical universe is all that exists. I can see no reason for this- assumption. ..Cer- tainly none is produced' by Professor Bell. If• there in -no ground for so arbitrarily limiting the nature of what exists, Professor Bell's case against the use of any methods other than those adopted by experimental science falls to the ground:- If, for example, it is a fact that there is beauty in the universe, or God, I am unable to see how the fact is to be established- by
experiment, or even by induction. .
I think that Professor Bell is right in his insistence that scientists should stick to their job and not presume to construct world pictures from inadequate material. He quotes with approval Lord Rayleigh'a dictum, "scientific men should not rush to conclusions, but keep their minds open for such time as may be necessary," an approval which all philosophers would heartily endorse. I think that he is right, too, in attributing the growth of superstition and credulity in the modern world to the tendency of scientists to invoke mystery, when they should be content to profess agnosticism. The fact that what has been found out by the methods of experi- mental science turns out to be surprisingly small compared with what remains is no reason for abandoning those methods, although it is a reason for refusing to acknowledge them as the only methods. For this reason, although I find his manner unhappily facetious, and his attitude somewhat defiantly hard-boiled, I think that the matter of Professor Bell's book is 'important and its general effect is salutary. Moreover, it is brightly, at times all too brightly, written ;
it is eccentric, opinionated; idiosyncratic, never platitudinous and never dull. I suspect Professor Bell of being a bit of
" character:" • -
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