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Science in the Dock

Science in the Dock

Discussion with Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Krauss & Sean M. Carroll
Science & Technology News, March 1, 2006

Science & Theology News asked three leading scientists Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Krauss
and Sean M. Carroll to comment on topics in scienceandreligion as well as in popular
culture. What follows are their answers.
ON WESTERN INTELLECTUALS
CHOMSKY: People that are called intellectuals, their record is primarily service to power. It
starts off in our earliest historical records, in the Bible for example. If you look at what the
prophets were doing, they were what we would call dissident intellectuals. They were giving
geopolitical critique, they were warning that the [Hebrew] kings were going to destroy the
country. They were calling for support for suffering people, widows and orphans and so on.
So they were what we call dissident intellectuals.
Jesus himself, and most of the message of the Gospels, is a message of service to the poor, a
critique of the rich and the powerful, and a pacifist doctrine. And it remained that way,
thats what Christianity was up until Constantine. Constantine shifted it so the cross, which
was the symbol of persecution of somebody working for the poor, was put on the shield of the
Roman Empire. It became the symbol for violence and oppression, and thats pretty much
what the church has been until the present. In fact, its quite striking in recent years,
elements of the church in particular the Latin American bishops, but not only them tried
to go back to the Gospels.
The people who we call intellectuals are no different from anyone else, except that they
have particular privilege. Theyre mostly welloff, they have training, they have resources. As
privilege increases, responsibility increases. And if somebodys working 50 hours a day to put
food on the table and never got through high school and so on, their opportunities are less
than the people who are called intellectuals. That doesnt mean that theyre any less
intellectual. In fact, some of the best educated people I have known never got past fourth
grade. But they have fewer opportunities, and opportunity confers responsibility.
KRAUSS: I too have found that some of the brightest and most accomplished individuals I have
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known are those without significant academic training. Indeed, for individuals who have a
particular intellectual talent, academia may be the safest and least demanding route to
choose for a career. One is surrounded by likeminded people, and the most intense
academic debate often revolves around issues that have little significance outside of the
confines of academe.
Nevertheless, the freedom conferred by an academic position can embolden certain
individuals to take the responsibility of an intellectual seriously, which is one of the many
reasons I support the institution of tenure. I have met many academics who are committed to
addressing societies needs, and are willing to speak out against those in power.
I was particularly encouraged for example, to be a part of a recent initiative of the Union of
Concerned Scientists that involved a letter signed by 60 scientists, including 20 Nobel
Laureates, 19 National Medal of Science Winners, that explicitly and clearly laid out the
devastating campaign of the Bush administration against free scientific inquiry and the open
access to information.
CARROLL: The primary role of intellectuals should be to promote the truth, whatever it may
turn out to be. Its natural to expect that the truth can be in conflict with the interests of
entrenched power. The Bible, however, is hard to read as a history of intellectuals; its a
complicated set of books, and the prophets were serving the kings as often as warning against
their excesses.
ON SCIENCE
CHOMSKY: Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As
soon as things become too complex, science cant deal with them. The reason why physics
can achieve such depth is that it restricts itself to extremely simple things, abstracted from
the complexity of the world. As soon as an atom gets too complicated, maybe helium, they
hand it over to chemists. When problems become too complicated for chemists, they hand it
over to biologists. Biologists often hand it over to the sociologists, and they hand it over to
the historians, and so on. But its a complicated matter: Science studies whats at the edge
of understanding, and whats at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it
rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated. In fact even
understanding insects is an extremely complicated problem in the sciences. So the actual
sciences tell us virtually nothing about human affairs.

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KRAUSS: It is absolutely true that science relies on extreme simplifications in order to be

effective. The more basic the science, the easier it is to isolate the key questions and
investigate them. I have often said that I chose to be a physicist because biology was way too
complicated.
As a result, as one moves from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to social science, the ability
to isolate questions, and provide definitive answers becomes progressively more difficult. But
I think I would say that science is based on being able to address difficult questions and find
simple answers.
Moreover, I disagree that whenever one is at the edge of understanding, things appear far
from simple. They are only simple after one understands them. It may be true understanding
that human affairs may be yet far more complicated than, say, quantum gravity, but that
doesnt change the fact that the edge of understanding in science is always confusing until a
good theory has been developed.
CARROLL: When Galileo first realized that he could understand motion by considering
idealized situations without friction or air resistance, he set modern science in motion. The
real world is a complicated, messy place, and there are many interesting questions about
which contemporary science has little to say. However, anyone who has watched a television
or gone to a hospital should know that science has nevertheless managed to have a
substantial impact on our lives.
ON A HOLISTIC VIEW OF THE WORLD
CHOMSKY: What each of us has is direct experience. So does every other animal, they have
some kind of experience. A bee sees the world differently than we do because it is a
different organism. And other organisms just try to work their way around the world of their
experience. Humans, as far as we know, are unique in the animal world in that theyre
reflective creatures. That is, they try to make some sense out of their experience.
There are all kinds of ways of doing this: some are called myth, some are called magic, some
are called religion. Science is a particular one its a particular form of trying to gain some
understanding of our experiences, organize them. It relies on evidence, coherent argument,
principles that have some explanatory depth, if possible. And that mode of inquiry, which has
been, particularly in the last couple hundred years, extremely successful, has its scope and
its limits. What the limits are we dont really know.
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In fact, if you look at the history of science seriously, in the seventeenth century there was a
major challenge to the existing scientific approach. I mean, it was assumed by Galileo and
Descartes and classical scientists that the world would be intelligible to us, that all we had to
do was think about it and it would be intelligible.
Newton disproved them. He showed that the world is not intelligible to us. Newton
demonstrated that there are no machines, that theres nothing mechanical in the sense in
which it was assumed that the world was mechanical. He didnt believe it in fact he felt his
work was an absurdity but he proved it, and he spent the rest of his life trying to disprove
it. And other scientists did later on. I mean, its often said that Newton got rid of the ghost in
the machine, but its quite the opposite. Newton exorcised the machine. He left the ghost.
And by the time that sank in, which was quite some time, it just changed the conception of
science. Instead of trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, we recognized that its
not intelligible to us. But we just say, Well, you know, unfortunately thats the way it works.
I cant understand it but thats the way it works. And then the aim of science is reduced
from trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, which it is not, to trying to show that
there are theories of the world which are intelligible to us. Thats what science is: Its the
study of intelligible theories which give an explanation of some aspect of reality.
Scientists typically dont study the phenomenal world. Thats why they do experiments. Our
phenomenal world is way too complex. If you took videotapes of whats happening outside
your window, the physicists and chemists and biologists couldnt do anything with it. So what
you try to do is try to find extremely simple cases thats called experiments in which you
try to get rid of a lot of things that you guess are probably not relevant to finding the main
principles. And then you see how far you can go from there the fact is, not very far.
When people talk about what science tells you about human affairs, its mostly a joke.
Incidentally, I dont think religion tells you very much either. So its not that science is
displacing religion, theres nothing to displace.
KRAUSS: It is absolutely true that science is just one way that humans have of making sense
of the world. It happens to be an incredibly successful way, in that it allows predictions to be
made that allow unprecedented control over our environment. But I disagree that Newton
showed that the world was not intelligible.
It is true that Newton uttered the famous qualifier, I do not frame hypotheses, but his
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universal law of gravity actually suggested to many that the world was in fact mechanistic,
that the same laws that governed falling apples governed the motion of the planets around
the sun. It has been claimed, for example, that the development of Newtons Laws was in
part responsible for the ending of the burning of witches, in that it demonstrated that natural
effects could have understandable natural causes.
It is absolutely true that Newtons theories, and all scientific theories since, are
approximations that give an explanation of only some aspects of nature. But I think most
physical scientists at least would argue that by doing so they capture the key operational
aspects of the real world of phenomena.
CARROLL: Newton showed that we could construct formal scientific models that are both
perfectly intelligible and in good agreement with what we know about the world Im not
sure what else it would mean to say that the world is intelligible to us. Of course, it is true
that science remains silent on questions of meaning and morality and aesthetics, as it aims
simply to describe the world as it is. The understanding that meaning and morality and
aesthetics are constructed by human beings, rather than being located in the external world,
is one of the most profound lessons of the Enlightenment, one we are still struggling to come
to terms with.
ON RELIGION
CHOMSKY: When we talk about religion, we mean a particular form of religion, the form that
ended up dominating Western society. But if you take a look at other societies in the world,
their religious beliefs are very different.
People have a right to believe whatever they like, including irrational beliefs. In fact, we all
have irrational beliefs, in a certain sense. We have to. If I walk out the door, I have an
irrational belief that the floor is there. Can I prove it? You know if Im paying attention to it I
see that its there, but I cant prove it. In fact, if youre a scientist, you dont prove
anything. The sciences dont have proofs, what they have is surmises. Theres a lot of
nonsense these days about evolution being just a theory. Everythings just a theory, including
classical physics! If you want proofs you go to arithmetic; in arithmetic you can prove things.
But you stipulate the axioms. But in the sciences youre trying to discover things, and the
notion of proof doesnt exist.
KRAUSS: Science certainly cannot prove anything to be true, in the sense that mathematics
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might appear to do. However, what science does extremely well, indeed it is the heart of
science, is to prove things to be false. Namely, any proposed explanation that disagrees with
the result of experiment is false. Period. It is by eliminating the false theories that we make
progress. Falsification is the key.
CARROLL: Science indeed doesnt operate in terms of proofs, but rather in terms of
theories that have been tested beyond reasonable suspicion. The crucial part of the process
is approaching the world with an open mind; no matter how elegant or compelling an idea
may seem, it cant be accepted if it doesnt agree with the data.
ON ATHEISM
CHOMSKY: You could be an intellectually respectable atheist in the 17th century, or in the
fifth century. In fact, I dont even know what an atheist is. When people ask me if Im an
atheist, I have to ask them what they mean. What is it that Im supposed to not believe in?
Until you can answer that question I cant tell you whether Im an atheist, and the question
doesnt arise.
I dont see anything logical in being agnostic about the Greek gods. Theres no agnosticism
about ectoplasm [in the nonbiological sense]. I dont see how one can be an agnostic when
one doesnt know what it is that one is supposed to believe in, or reject. There are plenty of
things that are unknown, but are assumed reasonably to exist, even in the most basic
sciences. Maybe 90 percent of the massenergy in the universe is called dark, because
nobody knows what it is.
Science is an exploration of very hard questions. Not to underrate the theory of evolution,
thats a terrific intellectual advance, but it tells you nothing about whether theres whatever
people believe in when they talk about God. It doesnt even talk about that topic. It talks
about how organisms evolve.
KRAUSS: Many fundamentalists see scientists are rabid atheists, but in fact, as Steve
Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, says, most of them havent thought enough about God
to responsibly address the issue of belief. God simply doesnt come up in scientific
considerations, so questions of belief or nonbelief essentially never arise.
Evolution, as a scientific theory, says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God. It
doesnt yet address the origin of life either, but instead deals with the mechanics of how the
present diversity of species on earth evolved.
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At some point I expect we will understand how the first life forms originated via natural
physical mechanisms, but even when we do this, it will not confirm or refute the existence of
God. This is the key mistake that fundamentalists who insist that evolution must be wrong
make. They assume that because science doesnt explicitly incorporate God, it must
somehow be immoral. But in fact science simply doesnt deal with issues of purpose or design
to the universe. It deals with how the universe works.
And I believe that the ethos of science full disclosure, honesty, antiauthoritarianism
would, if more generally applied, help produce a more ethical world. Now, this does not
mean that there is no tension between religion and science. As Steve Weinberg, a Nobel
Laureate in Physics, again put it, Science does not make it impossible to believe in God, but
it does make it possible to not believe in God.
Without science, everything is miraculous. Science alone allows for the rational possibility
that there is no divine intelligence. But it does not require it, and that is the important
point. Arguing that evolution must be incorrect because it appears to conflict with ones a
priori ideas about design in nature is not just bad science, it is bad theology.
CARROLL: Atheism is not merely the view that God does not exist, but the positive statement
that the world operates according to immutable laws of nature. As with any other belief
system, it has open questions; we dont know what all of those laws are, and in some cases
we dont even know what they might look like. When Darwin explained how complex
organisms could naturally evolve from simpler forms, he provided a compelling answer to one
of the most profound open questions of the materialist worldview.
ON STEVEN JAY GOULD AND NONOVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA
CHOMSKY: Steve Gould [was] a friend. But I dont quite agree with him [that scienceand
religion are NonOverlapping Magisteria]. Science and religion are just incommensurable. I
mean, religion tells you, Heres what you ought to believe. Judaisms a little different,
because its not really a religion of belief, its a religion of practice. If Id asked my
grandfather, who was an ultraorthodox Jew from Eastern Europe. Do you believe in God?
he would have looked at me with a blank stare, wouldnt know what Im talking about. And
what you do is you carry out the practices. Of course, you say I believe in this and that, but
thats not the core of the religion. The core of the religion is just the practices you carry out.
And yes, there is a system of belief behind it somewhere, but its not intended to be a
picture of the world. Its just a framework in which you carry out practices that are supposed
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to be appropriate.
KRAUSS: Science and religion are incommensurate, and religion is largely about practice
rather than explanation. But religion is different than theology, and as the Catholic Church
has learned over the years, any sensible theology must be in accord with the results of
science.
CARROLL: Nonoverlapping magisteria might be the worst idea Stephen Jay Gould ever had.
Its certainly a surprising claim at first glance: religion has many different aspects to it, but
one of them is indisputably a set of statements about how the universe works at a deep level,
typically featuring the existence of a powerful supernatural Creator. How the universe
works is something squarely in the domain of science. There is, therefore, quite a bit of
overlap: science is quite capable of making judgments about whether our world follows a
rigid set of laws or is occasionally influenced by supernatural forces. Goulds idea only makes
sense because what he really means by religion is moral philosophy. While thats an
important aspect of religion, its not the only one; I would argue that the warrant for
religions ethical claims are based on its view of the universe, without which we wouldnt
recognize it as religion.

CHOMSKY.INFO

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