Reforming Science

Brian Ridley is emeritus professor of physics in the University of Essex, and this well-written book is a breath of fresh air expounding a bracing argument excoriating the tendency in some areas of science to mutate into a form of religious authority, specifically 19^th-century mechanistic materialism and what he calls mathematical theology. He is worried about the fact that 'science has developed a public image of unchallengeable authority… of sense of establishment and infallibility…guarded reputations… of the dangers of heresy.' The basic reform that he would like to see is expressed in the subtitle Beyond Belief, and he challenges the notion that there is no truth but scientific truth and the belief that what isn't science isn't knowledge. He advocates a new openness where 'anything goes, provided that ideas are rationally advocated with suggestions for realistic experiments' – and he points out that there are plenty of rationally advocated theories without experimental evidence, some of which have turned into dogmas, as also argued by Rupert Sheldrake.

The author sets out his own views in the introduction, lamenting a regrettable closed-mindedness exhibited by many scientists and arguing that heresies - 'ideas rationally expressed that offend received wisdom' – are a good thing. He develops a panpsychic neutral monism based on matter and force going back to the philosophy of Spinoza and, interestingly, draws sympathetically on Bergson's notion of elan vital where 'Life is force, a creative one that animates matter.' For him, the soul is immediately real as a 'shorthand expression for the organic holistic individuality of the living being', although in this form there is 'no question of survival after death'- here there is nothing in the book or bibliography indicating that the author is familiar with the evidence available. The chapters that follow give an excellent summary of the history of western philosophy and science from the Greeks onwards, with a sympathetic account of Hermeticism and how this was opposed by the church along with the emerging new science. He also explains how deterministic ideas were developed and embedded in scientific thinking while reminding readers that much science was and still is geared towards the good of humanity.

The author reminds readers that God and soul fall outside the scientific remit, as Schroedinger also noted, and observes that the scientific method, while outstandingly successful with respect to matter, 'is ill-adapted to the study of mind' partly because it cannot study the unique and is hampered by a deterministic legacy that eliminates free will. The author discusses the principal 18^th-century philosophers and gives a detailed and fascinating account of the work of Gustav Fechner on psychophysics, comparing his outlook with that of Schroedinger, and then going on to discuss William James, William McDougall, Sir Charles Sherrington and AN Whitehead ('the last of the Cambridge Platonists'). The book continues with an extensive discussion of mind-body interaction, again drawing on a wide range of sources, including de Broglie, Bohm, Popper and Eccles, Davidson, Putnam, Searle, JR Lucas, Nagel and Galen Strawson, bringing in Bergson's insight that 'what really exists is not things, but things in the making.' This theme could have been more extensively developed by bringing in process philosophy and relating this historically to Goethe. As one would expect, the discussion of 20^th century physics and cosmology is comprehensive though critical, for instance of the status of the big bang and 'meta-cosmology', where prudence and caution are in order. The final chapter comes back to the ethos of science and its 'dangerous trend towards an absolute dogmatism as regards its theories, [and its] scorn for the concepts of mind and soul and the religious impulse in man' – as manifest in the hubris of scientism. Although we cannot live without beliefs, 'they must serve, not dominate' and be held provisionally. One can only applaud that these points are being articulated by a senior scientist with a vigorous independence of mind.