Tuesday 4 December 2012

Being a Christian in Research

Wrote the following leaflet for Christians in Science:

http://www.cis.org.uk/upload/Resources/Students/Being_A_Christian_In_Research_Online_Version.pdf

..and issue 88 - "How can I be happy?"

The magazine "Philosophy Now" has a question of the month. The following was my published answer to the question "How can I be happy?"

Ducks. Well, more precisely, according to my two-year-old son, “feeding duckies.” Okay, so complications can still arise, such as being so hungry that you eat the duck’s bread yourself, or arriving at the duck pond so late in the day that the ducks have already been stuffed by the offerings from the other neighbourhood toddlers. But generally, feeding ducks is happiness.
Watching my son’s reaction to this mundane activity suggests that happiness is not linked to cognitive ability. Indeed, this is not exactly a new observation, and it’s humorously pointed out in an excellent episode of The Simpsons, where Homer is turned into a genius by the discovery and subsequent removal of a crayon that had become lodged in his brain as a child. Although Homer’s relationship with Lisa is transformed, he soon re-inserts the crayon, maintaining that he was much happier when he was stupid. More seriously, this point about happiness being easier the less complicated your thinking is, was driven home to me during a recent visit to a developmental centre in the US that’s home to a community of extremely-low-IQ individuals – people who cannot function in normal society. Credit must go to the staff of that unit as I have never been in a happier place. Granted, work activities included folding paper and sorting paper clips, but the residents seemed so happy, and were enthusiastic about welcoming visitors.
One thing that my two-year-old son and the developmental home residents seem to have in common is little understanding of the future. They very much live in the moment, and if their activity is currently satisfying, they are happy. Those of us who have ‘grown-up’, or (even worse) have philosophical tendencies, can never escape the discovery that actions have consequences – that we are responsible for obtaining life’s provisions, and that, ultimately, we face a step into the unknown, through death. We can do our best to try and live in the moment, to temporarily forget these things. However, the uncertainties in life remain the main barriers to happiness. The more we worry about life, the less happy we are, implying that happiness is closely linked to being satisfied in the moment, and indeed, finding the time to enjoy feeding the ducks.

Issue 87 - a follow up letter from issue 85

Another letter published in Philosophy Now:

Dear Editor: I particularly enjoyed Carl Murray’s ‘The Dead German Philosopher’s Club’ in your last issue, especially as it reminded me of Wittgenstein’s claim that the “philosophical problems that exercise us are examples of language going on holiday.” On reading it I realised exactly what had been worrying me about the second half of an earlier piece in the same issue by John Holroyd, where he was discussing the question ‘Is religious faith a matter of blind faith?’ Thanks to my online subscription, I copied the text of this article into a word processor and used the search and replace function to change all the occurrences of the word ‘faith’ into the word ‘belief’. As I had suspected, the meaning of the argument did not seem to change, confirming my suspicion that the author is guilty of an equivocation. As I argued in Issue 85 Letters, the word ‘faith’ is notoriously misused. Although I am sympathetic to the general thrust of John Holroyd’s argument – and acknowledge that he does discuss Terry Eagleton’s more sophisticated definition of faith – the article does a poor job of distinguishing between faith proper and the rhetorical characterisation of faith as ‘a belief I do not agree with’. In fact, rather than being a type of belief, faith is the jump from argument to conviction based upon ‘good enough’ evidence. Faith is therefore not the belief in itself, but rather the process of settling on – or becoming convinced by – a certain belief. As such, ‘blind faith’ is an example of an epistemological error, not a metaphysical one. For this reason although I remain sympathetic to John Holroyd’s overall contention that many people’s religious faith is an example of ‘blind faith’, at the same time I maintain that no matter how common this may be, any argument that uses this observation to dispute the existence of God is merely an ad hominem attack on believers. John Holroyd is not the first to get himself tied in a knot over this issue.

Issue 86 of Philosophy Now - "What is Truth?"

The magazine "Philosophy Now" has a question of the month. The following was my published answer to the question "What is Truth":

I dilute my solution, place it into a cuvette, and take a reading with the spectrophotometer: 0.8. I repeat the procedure once more and get 0.7; and once again to get 0.9. From this I get the average of 0.8 that I write in my lab-book. The variation is probably based upon tiny inconsistencies in how I am handling the equipment, so three readings should be sufficient for my purposes. Have I discovered the truth? Well yes – I have a measurement that seems roughly consistent, and should, assuming that my notes are complete and my spectrophotometer has been calibrated, be repeatable in many other labs around the world. However, this ‘truth’ is meaningless without some understanding of what I am trying to achieve. The spectrophotometer is set at 280nm, which – so I have been taught – is the wavelength used to measure protein concentration. I know I have made up my solution from a bottle labelled ‘albumin’, which – again, as I have been taught – is a protein. So my experiment has determined the truth of how much protein is in the cuvette. But again, a wider context is needed. What is a protein, how do spectrophotometers work, what is albumin, why do I want to know the concentration in the first place? Observations are great, but really rather pointless without a reason to make them, and without the theoretical knowledge for how to interpret them. Truth, even in science, is therefore highly contextual. What truth is varies not so much with different people, but rather with the narrative they are living by. Two people with a similar narrative will probably agree on how to treat certain observations, and might agree on a conclusion they call the truth, but as narratives diverge so too does agreement on what ‘truth’ might be. In the end, even in an entirely materialistic world, truth is just the word we use to describe an observation that we think fits into our narrative.

Letter in issue 85 of the magazine "Philosophy Now"


The following letter seems to have been picked up by quite a few people around the web. Interestingly people assume I am an atheist!!

Scientific Faith

Dear Editor: As a mere biochemist, I am often amazed, enlightened and humbled by the clear thinking and ruthless logic demonstrated by many authors in your excellent magazine. However despite this excellence, I’ve noticed a curious blind spot that seems to occur time and again whenever the word ‘faith’ is mentioned. In the last issue Tim Wilkinson became the latest in a long line of offenders when he defined ‘faith’ as “belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence”. I find such a definition really rather curious, because I cannot imagine how such a belief could possibly exist. Even the wackiest conspiracy theory or most bizarre superstition is still based on at least a small amount of evidence and logical connections. Granted, you or I might think that such beliefs are based upon bad evidence and logic. However this does not mean there is no evidence or logic (however weak). Too often, rather than using the word ‘faith’ to actually mean something useful, it seems that many authors use it to mean ‘a belief that I do not agree with’. To me such a pejorative and rhetorical use of the word shows a far better example of people “temporarily misplacing their dictionaries whilst simultaneously taking leave of their senses” – to quote Tim again.

Like your columnist Massimo Pigliucci, I also “tend not to believe in anything that isn’t made of either matter or energy”. However, I am also comfortable with the word ‘faith’ even in a scientific context. When putting together a scientific argument, it is essential to pull together as many different types of experimental observations to form the basis of the argument. However it is fascinating how many other scientists, trying to be equally rational, can look at the same experimental evidence and draw very different conclusions. So faith, in this context, is having enough confidence to turn your results into a published conclusion that you are happy for others to try and challenge. It is taking the leap from tentatively believing a theory, to using that theory as a working principle. It is not belief in the absence of logic or evidence; it is a belief based upon ‘good enough’ evidence. Such a definition seems far more useful than the impossible definition of ‘ a belief without evidence’, or the rhetorical use as ‘a belief I do not agree with’.