Evolution as a religion: strange hopes and stranger fears by Mary Midgley

Author:Mary Midgley [Midgley, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, Evolution, Religion and science, Science, Religion & Science, Life Sciences, Religion, Religious
ISBN: 9780415278324
Publisher: London : Routledge, 2002.
Published: 2002-03-29T10:12:32.906000+00:00

11

SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION AND HUMAN TRANSIENCE

The candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes.

John Locke

LIVING WITH A CRIPPLED INTELLECT

It is not surprising, however, that Monod’s story has had so much success, especially among scientists. In its lively, existentially coloured package, it offers a way of combining the general scepticism and acceptance of confusion about moral questions which is widely professed today with a firm, saving exception for confidence in the value of science. This fits the world-picture acquired by very many people in the course of a scientific education, an education which trains them in scientific thinking, and greatly exaggerates the precision possible to it, while doing very little to teach them the ways of thinking which they will need for other purposes – personal, political, psychological, historical, metaphysical and all the rest.

Since these purposes are central to life and call for a great deal of thought, especially in changing times, those whose intellect has been cramped by this kind of foot-binding process into a specialized use experience a very painful sense of confusion when other issues come before them. The discrepancy between their confident use of highly trained intelligence in their work and their helplessness on other issues threatens to tear them apart and attacks the roots of their selfrespect. (Scholars in general are of course to some extent subject to this trouble, but the physical sciences tend to have a method and a subject-matter even more remote from everyday problems than the rest.)

In this emergency, Monod appears with the balm of a metaphysical proof that their plight is inescapable. He declares that science is indeed the only field where thought is possible. Everything else must be left to choice: not reasonable choice, but choice in the Existentialist sense of a blind, inarticulate act of will. For those who may still hesitate, he stands ready with a bracing draught of dogmatic puritan morality to enforce this mortification of the intellect:

Cold and austere, proposing no explanation but imposing an ascetic renunciation of all other spiritual fare, this idea could not allay anxiety; it aggravated it instead. It claimed to sweep away at a stroke the tradition of a hundred thousand years.... With nothing to recommend it but a certain puritan arrogance, how could such an idea be accepted? It was not; it still is not.1

Nevertheless, he insists, it ought to be; heroes should take their cold bath without flinching. Only bad habits and the weakness of our flesh stand in the way. Flattered and impressed, his public is naturally inclined to think that its duty has now become clear. The pangs felt by an intellect bound down and distorted from its full natural use must be borne and disregarded as merely accidents of our mortal condition. Thought must be abstained from except in the only place where it can be performed with perfect success and purity: the laboratory. To carry them through this ordeal, scientists will always have that strong though not very nutritious stimulant,

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