From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 14, 3 April 1950, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
This is about an article on science in the current issue of Life magazine. It is by all odds one of the stupidest pieces you can avoid reading this year. That is exactly what makes it worth a column of attention given the fact that it will be read by about 26 million persons (Life’s estimate of its readership).
It is entitled Science Can Be Silly, by Anthony Standen, who lists himself as a member of three scientific societies. Life introduces it as “fun-making,” “with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole,” but the disclaimer is more obviously made with tongue in cheek than the article itself, which is not funny. Its purpose is obviously serious enough.
Maybe the stuff ought to be exhibited first. Here's a faithful sample:
“The easiest way to introduce pseudo-science is to call any investigation ‘the testing of a hypothesis.’ If a social scientist wants to find out whether rich people are more likely to vote Republican than poor people, he first ‘frames the hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between income and Republicanism’ and then goes out and ‘tests the hypothesis.’ This can always be done, and it makes anything at all sound wonderfully scientific. A biologist, if he wishes to know how many toes a cat has, does not ‘frame the hypothesis that the number of feline digital extremities is four, or five, or six,’ he simply gets a cat and counts.”
This is about on the level of “Darwin teaches that men come from monkeys,” and if Standen does not spring that one, his own paragraph on the theory of evolution comes close. Omitting any demonstration of its positive ignorance, it illustrates the very serious point of the article and the source of Standen’s beef against the scientific method. The trouble with some scientists’ discussions of evolution is that they don’t leave room for God.
Before the portals of the Deity, Standen warns science: Stand back! Now this has been done seriously by serious scientific thinkers and it can be discussed seriously. It makes somewhat heavy reading, however, for customers used to glancing at Life’s pictures while waiting for the barber. None of that for Luce! Why bother to go through the twists and turns necessary to reconcile the scientific method with the Catholic Church when it’s so much simpler to “prove” that science really can tell us next to nothing about our world – and that in any case the famed scientific method is more often than not a hoax?
Here’s Standen’s demonstration of what’s “very often” wrong with scientists’ methods: “Thus they will offer an argument that, in principle, runs like this: a man gets drunk on Monday on rye and soda water; he gets drunk on Tuesday on Scotch and soda water, and on Wednesday he gets drunk on gin and soda water. What caused his drunkenness? Obviously, the common factor: the soda water.”
One can see perhaps why Standen has to make a dishonest living as a Luce hack instead of a decent livelihood as a scientist. Doesn’t he really know what the next step in a scientific method would be? – namely, to. “test the hypothesis about soda water, the common factor, to see whether the man will get drunk on Thursday on it alone. But, as we saw, our anti-silly-scientist got positively hilarious over the idea of scientists’ framing and testing hypotheses. A scientist is there to count the cat’s toes.
But as we said, Standen’s stupidity has an end in view. A key example will illustrate it. It begins this way:
“Can science disprove ghosts? The average science-ridden citizen assumes that, of course, it can.” We interrupt the quotation only to point out that the average scientist makes no such claim, for the same reason that none would claim to be able to “disprove” the existence of a bat-winged brownie named Archibald on the planet Mars. The rest of the quotation from Standen illustrates the point.
“And yet, is that true? Suppose (just for the sake of amiable argument) that ghosts can occasionally appear when the psychological conditions are just right, and suppose – as might quite well be true – that one necessary condition for the appearance of a ghost is the absence of a scientist. Then ‘science’ would go on investigating, ghost after ghost, and would ‘disprove’ every one of them while they kept on appearing whenever the scientists were not looking.”
Standen (and Luce) is not worried about the scientists’ ability to disprove the existence of ghosts. It is the existence of God that he has in mind behind the tomfoolery. His method is indicative of the last bastions of theology in an age of science.
The commonest excuse of the spiritualistic medium for failing or refusing to produce a sure-’nuff spook before a scientific investigator is notoriously the same as Standen’s: the spook won’t show if there is an unbeliever around to queer the atmosphere. It will appear only before – the gullible. The routine is as convenient for Standen as for the trance-faker. And as long as science can’t prove that the batwinged brownie does not exist, why be so cocksure? Science can’t tell us everything, can it now? ...
Science will never be able to tell us everything, no doubt, but it has pushed the darkness of ignorance further and further away. It abolished Jupiter as the wielder of the thunderbolt and dispensed with the giant turtle on whose back the earth rests. It pushed the godhead out of Mt. Olympus, out of the totem-pole, out of the sun’s disk, out of the graven image with eight arms, out of one embodiment after the other – but it will never be able to push it out of the land where the bat-winged brownie lives.
For that land is always just on the other side of the ever-increasing circle of light, it is always there just inside the shadows, and wherever the light of science has not yet reached, there is plenty of room for anyone who insists on supernatural beings. Theology finds its elbow room in the nooks and crannies of men’s ignorance. The less we know, the more room.
How else explain an attack in the largest-circulation magazine in America on the very foundations of science?
Last updated on 7 January 2024