Defending science

Thinks... again.

A few pages later (pp. 228 – 229) David Lodge passionately states the opposite point of view, defending science. And I simply love it: clear, rhetorical, cutting, without any faux pas.

Don’t forget: he is a literate man, a man of letters. In his main character, Helen, one can see that he implicitly mourns the decay of the novel and of the classic (19th century) literary style.

However, from the way he puts words in the mouth of his other main character Ralph, it is clear that Lodge strongly believes in the explanatory power of science. He clears the brackets on “true”. That’s his ideological statement.

And, incidentally, mine too. In fact, that’s why I took the pain to copy all these long convoluted lines. Ain’t it, my dear religious and postmodern friends?

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‘Oh, I can’t stand those people,’ he said, ‘postmodernists, or poststructuralists, or whatever they call themselves. They’ve infiltrated Con-Con lately, caused no end of trouble’.

I was surprised he was so hostile, and asked him why.

‘Because they’re essentially hostile to science. They’ve picked up some modern scientific ideas without really understanding them and flash them about like a three-card trick. They think that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat and Gödel’s Theorem license them to say that there is no such thing as scientific proof and that science is only one interpretation of the world among others equally valid.’

‘Well, isn’t it?’ I said, just to be provocative.

‘Certainly not’, he said. ‘Its explanatory power is of a quite different order from, for example, animism or Zoroastrianism or astrology.’

‘Well, I grant you that,’ I said, ‘but those examples are rather extreme.’

‘Choose your own examples’, he said, with a challenging lift of his chin. I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head.

‘Since the Enlightenment,’ he said, slipping into lecture mode, ‘science has established itself as the only true form of knowledge. This has created a problem for rival forms – they’ve had to either take it on beard, try to make themselves scientific, and run the risk of discovering that there’s no foundation to their conceptual world – like serious theology, for instance – or put their heads in the sand and pretend science never happened – like fundamentalist religion.

These postmodernists are mounting a last-ditch defence of their disciplines by saying that everybody is in the same boat, including scientists – that there are no foundations, and no sand. But it’s not true. Science is for real. It has made more changes to the conditions of human life than all the preceding millennia of our history put together.

Just think of medicine. Two hundred years ago doctors were still bleeding people for every ailment under the sun. If you had cancer, would you consult a postmodern oncologist who thought reflexology and aromatherapy were on a par with surgery and chemotherapy?’