Jerry Coyne, then and now

By Massimo Pigliucci

This seems to me a very reasonable philosophical position about the epistemic domain of science: “Science simply doesn't deal with hypotheses about a guiding intelligence, or supernatural phenomena like miracles, because science is the search for rational explanations of natural phenomena. We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world.”

This one, on the other hand, is philosophically very naive and pretentious: “Anybody doing any kind of science should abandon his or her faith if they wish to become a philosophically consistent scientist.”

The funny thing is that these two quotes come from the same person, and were written only three years apart. The first one can be found in an article published online at Edge.org in 2007, the second one is from a blog entry posted in May of this year. The author is evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. What is going on?

First, some context. In the Edge article Jerry was commenting on the sad showing at a Republican Presidential debate where three candidates — may their names forever be cast in shame: Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo — raised their hand in response to the question “does anyone here not believe in evolution?” Coyne focuses mostly on Brownback’s follow up editorial in the New York Times, correctly lambasting it for its bad logic and even worse grasp of science. (Here is my own take on Brownback’s editorial.)

The blog entry is from Jerry’s own outlet, Why Evolution is True (the title of his book), and is a harsh — and from what I can see, largely well deserved — criticism of Karl Giberson, who previously had chided Coyne and other New Atheists (do they or don’t they like that label? Coyne seems to use it without trouble).

My point, of course, is that Coyne’s philosophy of science has gotten significantly worse in the past three years, ever since he has discovered activist atheism. I have commented on this topic before, using the standard distinction between philosophical and methodological naturalism, and explaining why — to use Coyne’s own example — even the appearance of a 900-ft Jesus in the streets of London would not convince him (or me) that there isn’t a natural explanation for the phenomenon (see A.C. Clarke’s famous third law and of course this classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation). Here I am going to take a different approach and propose two more reasons why Coyne-2007 was right and Coyne-2010 is wrong.

The first reason to stick with science as an epistemic activity aimed at discovering empirical truths about the natural world is that gods are not hypotheses, to use Dawkins’ famous phrase in his book. Coyne and other scientists often dig up falsificationism from their limited inventory of philosophical knowledge and claim that the god hypothesis is falsifiable. Besides the fact that philosophers of science have moved well beyond falsificationism (to begin with, because of something known as the Duhem-Quine thesis), even for falsification to work one has to have a reasonably well defined hypothesis.

Karl Popper, the guy who invented falsificationism, famously thought that Einstein’s theory of relativity is an excellent example of science because it is eminently falsifiable. But he also rejected both Marxist theories of history and Freudian psychoanalysis as non-scientific because they were much too flexible: any historical event could somehow be interpreted as the result of class struggles, just as pretty much any human behavior can be “explained” through one type or another of sexual repression.

Conceptions of gods are infinitely more flexible (or vacuous, if you prefer) than either Marxist or Freudian theories, and they are thus simply not falsifiable. This is often (naively) mistaken to imply that no specific claim made by these theories can be rejected on empirical grounds. That’s as manifestly not true as it is besides the point: of course modern science can firmly reject the empirical claim that the earth is a few thousand years old; but since “the god hypothesis” doesn’t behave as a hypothesis at all from the epistemological standpoint, it doesn’t matter. In the cases we are discussing there is no science-like connection between theoretical constructs and empirically verifiable facts, so to “falsify” the latter is equivalent to shooting into a cloud of gas. It unnecessarily flatters and elevates religious belief to treat it as science.

The second point I wish to make is broader. Whenever I get into these discussions, Jerry and others who think along similar lines seem to conclude that I therefore do not have reasons to reject religious belief as the nonsense on stilts that it truly is. That is because they seem to equate science with reason, yet another position that is abysmally simplistic from a philosophical perspective. Science is conducted through the application of reason to a particular type of problems and in particular ways. But reason can be applied to other problems in other ways. Philosophy, of course, is an example, as it makes progress through the analysis and dissection of concepts, not via empirical discoveries. Logic and mathematics are additional obvious examples: mathematical theorems are neither discovered nor proved by using scientific methods at all. Unless one wishes to conclude that math is not a rational enterprise, then one is forced to admit that science = reason is a bad equation.

Indeed, even science itself is far from being an activity rooted in reason alone. A standard distinction in philosophy of science is made between the context of discovery and the context of justification. The first one deals with how scientists come up with new theories or ideas, the second one on how they proceed to empirically test or establish them. The notion is that the context of justification is where science works in a rational way, by logically connecting hypotheses and empirical facts. But discoveries are often haphazard and non-rational in nature, with scientists themselves being unable to account for how exactly they came up with a particular idea (often this happens during a walk, while taking a shower, while dreaming, or while on drugs — none of which are classical laboratory settings where people sit down and rationally work through the problem).

Things get even worse, as more recent suggestions, for instance that of Thomas Kuhn (whose notion of paradigm shifts is arguably the only other piece of philosophy of science of which most scientists are dimly aware) when he questioned the sharpness of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. This questioning would make Coyne and colleagues even more unhappy, because it goes in the direction of further reducing the relevance of reason to the scientific enterprise.

The two points I made here amount to claiming that many scientists do not understand the nature of science as well as philosophers do, and are hence prone to make exaggerated claims about how science works and what it can do. This should not surprise anybody, since the business of scientists is to do science, not to spend time thinking about its history and methods. That is why philosophy (and history) of science are scholarly activities that are legitimately distinct from science itself.

But when it comes to writing for the general public, I suggest that scientists stick to what they know best, unless they are willing to engage the literature of the field(s) that they wish to comment upon. When Coyne makes statements of the type “anybody doing any kind of science should abandon his or her faith if they wish to become a philosophically consistent scientist”, he literally does not know what he is talking about because he does not have a grasp of what it means to be “philosophically consistent” in this context. He has of course no obligation to study philosophy, but then he should refrain from writing about it as a matter of intellectual honesty toward his readers.

P.S.: it may be a little while before I'm able to answer your (surely numerous and critical) comments, since I’ll be on vacation in Iceland when this runs...