Peter Forbes’ review of What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Masssimo Piatelli-Palmarini

I like this from Steve Jones: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex’. Quoted in Peter Forbes’ interesting review.

I met Steve Jones at the Dartington Festival last year, and I have to say I was rather terrified that he’d come to my talk. He didn’t. At breakfast he couldn’t have been more delightful company, but still I was terrified. And now I see he would not approve my interest in things philosophical. It’s amazing how vituperative some scientists are about philosophy. There were a number of such comments in Susan Blackmore’s book of interviews with cognitive scientists. I think I’ll start a collection of them. There’s something important here. Richard Dawkins is critical too in his The God Delusion. I like scientists who just get on and do what they do, but there is room to pause and think about what it is that they do. In fact it has become critical that we do. Just as we are now asking whether economics has to be done differently (the answer may be that it can’t) we are also asking whether scientific progress has to happen differently (maybe it can’t). Both methodologies require growth, and we now realise with a start that the earth is a limited resource.

Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. Atheists, there is nothing other than evolution of stuff. Theists, God created and continues to interfere in his creation. Deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins talks of the attraction of Deism, and tells us how close he came to such a view himself. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions. God simply has nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only question is whether one believes or not that a scientific description is all that there is. I never hear such materialists ever come out and actually declare that they don’t believe in anything other than the scientific method but this must be their belief. What I sometimes hear is an argument that science isn’t about belief, but then that begins to sound suspiciously philosophical.

By the way, I feel I don’t have to have a view either way. I feel that makes me truly agnostic, and also makes me a creature on whom Dawkins pours the greatest scorn. Not that that matters, I like what he’s doing and as far as Biblical literalism goes, it is blown out of the water. Their own side ought to have been able to deal with it though. Ironic the job should have been left to a scientist. If I was part of some organised religion I would be open-jawed at anyone who claimed it was possible to take the Bible literally. Christ spoke in parables for God’s sake.