Private Doubt, Public Dilemma

Private Doubt, Public Dilemma – Religion and Science since Jefferson and Darwin, is the title of Keith Thomson’s book based on his 2012 Terry Lectures. Thomson is an emeritus professor of natural history at the University of Oxford. He has written a number of books that delve into the history of Charles Darwin and the formulation of the theory of evolution. Since I’m participating in a college-sponsored living learning community on Faith and Reason, I have been reading a number of books that address the relationship between science and religion.

Given my interest in history, I enjoyed Thomson’s approach to the topic. In ten short and very readable chapters, he covers the social milieu, both scientific and religious in the nineteenth century where various upheavals were taking place – in geology, biology, philosophy and theology. Thomson weaves a story spanning the U.S. and the U.K., starting with Thomas Jefferson but concentrating mainly on Darwin. The Aggasiz-Gray and Wilberforce-Hooker-Huxley debates in both countries are described with historical quotes and letters of the day.

The crux of Thomson’s argument comes in the ninth chapter “The Decline of Authority”. Starting with a personal experience of flip-flop instruction he received on Alfred Wegener’s continental drift, and following up with the discovery (and initial discounting) of Sherwood Roland’s connection between CFCs and the ozone hole, Thomson argues for the importance of context of what else was changing in the pivotal years close to 1860. (As an aside, the Karlsruhe conference that same year was pivotal for chemistry! For the historically-inclined, here's a translation of the session accounts.)

Thomson writes: “… with each [change in authority], new doubts arose as well as new certainties. Whatever conflicts may have risen or been acerbated between elements of science and religion in, say, 1860, they were part of a much wider picture of change. And in the process of change, leaders of both religion and science have had to think seriously about what their new roles should be. Perhaps not enough.”

He goes on: “Individual opinion always changes before authority. It is in the nature of authority to change slowly; society would be unstable otherwise. And religious authority may change slowest of all. The dilemma comes when change can no longer be put off.” Thomson thinks that the way forward is in areas where both science and religion have “joint ownership” and can benefit from cooperation for the public good. He provides one example: environmental stewardship. One wonders if there are more. Thomson also points out the weaknesses of the conflict avoidance approach by separating religion and science into two non-overlapping spheres of influence. The problem, he says, is that the “claims of authority of science and religion, do in fact, overlap, intersect, and compete with each other.” Therein lies the crux of the public dilemma – the issue of authority, when politics and power come into play, which has become to some extent farcical in the U.S.

In my first day of class on atomic theory, we discuss the issue of where we gain knowledge and the role of trustworthy authority when we cannot “check certain things with our own physical senses”. While there isn’t much about chemistry in Thomson’s book, I enjoyed a small section in one of his early chapters about atomic theory. He quotes the Greek atomist Democritus: “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” In class we discuss how this might sound crazy from the sensory perspective, but I didn’t have time to discuss why, as Thomson puts it, “such a philosophy was dangerous; atoms, chance, and necessity neither explained nor required free will.”

There’s a great Cicero quote (who probably drew from Aristotle), prescient of today’s monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare probability argument, against the atomists: “Must I not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade himself that there are certain solid and indivisible particles of matter borne along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of these particles produces this elaborate and beautiful world? I cannot understand why he who considers it possible for this to have occurred should not also think that, if a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were thrown together in some receptacle and then shaken out on to the ground, it would be possible that they should produce the Annales of Ennius. I doubt whether they could possibly succeed in producing a single verse.”

It’s worth quoting from the Bible book of Ecclesiastes (1:9): “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”