Prof. Richard Dawkins exhorts the children to whom he is lecturing thusly:
“Put your trust in the scientific method, put your faith in scientific method…There’s nothing wrong with having a faith in a proper scientific prediction.”
Having attempted to destroy the children’s beliefs in anything but absolute materialism, Prof. Richard Dawkins next asks for converts.What he does in order to demonstrate what he means by stating that “There’s nothing wrong with having a faith in a proper scientific prediction” is that he stands against a wall holding a small cannonball to his face, the ball is suspended by a rope from the middle of the ceiling. He lets it go and it swing across the room and back to within an inch of his face.
There you have it. Knowing something about gravity, momentum, etc. he had faith that the ball would not come swinging back to hit his face. Firstly, let us note that this is an accurate understanding of “faith” which is trust due to a logical inference.
Yet, this is a bit of a propagandist’s tactic. Merely stating that “science” is to be trusted is far too broad and generalized. The children should have been told that there is, for instance, hard and soft science. For example, engineering is a hard science yet, anthropology is notoriously soft. In the one case you make your calculations, draft your plans and build-the structure fails or succeeds. In the other case, you dig up bones and proceed to interpret them often according to schools of thought, professional rivalries, prestige, adherence to a certain theory, etc. (see here). There is “science” as theory, as experiment, as observation, as method, as a career, as lab work, etc. To simply state “trust in the scientific method, put your faith in scientific method” and seek to demonstrate it with a swinging ball is very narrow and manipulative of the children’s lack of knowledge and lack of discernment.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote,
“The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.”1
The editors of the journal American Scientist made the following comments about Hannes Alfven’s Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist:
“Alfven’s anecdotes remind us how personalities influence ideas, and his irreverent comments about peer review are as relevant today as they ever were.”
Following are some of Alfven’s comments:
“Contrary to almost all astrophysicists my education had taken place in a laboratory…Instead of treating hydromagnetic equations I prefer to sit and ride on each electron and ion and try to imagine what the world is like from its point of view and what forces push them to the left or to the right. This has been a great advantage because it gives me a possibility to approach the phenomena from another point than most astrophysicists do, and it is always fruitful to look at any phenomenon under two different points of view.On the other hand it has given me a serious disadvantage. When I describe the phenomena according to this formalism most [peer review] referees do not understand what I say and turn down my papers. With the referee system which rules US science today, this means that my papers rarely are accepted by the leading US journals. Europe, including the Soviet Union, and Japan are more tolerant of dissidents…What is more remarkable and regrettable is that it seems to be almost impossible to start a serious discussion between E [a very strong Establishment] and D [a small group of Dissidents]. As a dissident is in a very unpleasant situation, I am sure that D would be very glad to change their views as soon as E gives convincing arguments. But the argument ‘all knowledgeable people agree that…’
(with the tacit addition that by not agreeing you demonstrate that you are a crank) is not a valid argument in science. If scientific issues always were decided by Gallup polls and not by scientific arguments science will very soon be petrified forever.”2
But what was Alfven’s crime against science? Was he one of those crazy creation scientists? Was he one of those nutty Intelligent Design proponents? No, the issue was cosmic rays and whether they were a galactic phenomenon or subject to heliospheric confinement.
The bottom line may be that young, impressionable, inexperienced children are being told to put their trust and faith in scientific. Now, the results of doing science are promulgated by scientists. Thus, what scientists tell us must be that in which we are to put our trust and faith. And so if Prof. Richard Dawkins infers atheism from biology, biology must imply atheism. Many such examples may be envisaged as the result of making generic statements about whatever “science” may be according to any given definition.