Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Notes 249
turbing, these attitudes have not changed, and the lessons of the past are being
obliterated in a willful act of mass denial.
Chapter 7. The Marriage of Science and Religion
1. Kuhn has been done a great disservice by the postmodern critics who have
misinterpreted his ideas to support their own brand of extreme epistemological relativism.
The irrationality of these self-declared “Kuhnians” has led scientists to denounce
Kuhn himself. Even those scientific critics who recognize that Kuhn did not
support and in fact vehemently attacked such misuse of his ideas insist that he was
wrong about the degree of irrationality in the scientific enterprise. Sokal and
Bricmont, for example, say there are “two Kuhns”: one moderate and acceptable, the
other immoderate and wrong. Kuhn is acceptable when he says that there are irrational
factors in science and that the strength of the evidence supporting scientific
theories is often weaker than is supposed; he is wrong to say that irrational attachment
to the “paradigms” ever outweighs reason and the evidence. They offer two
arguments. They say that Kuhn’s theory is self-refuting because if attachment to the
paradigm always took precedence over the evidence the paradigm could never be
changed (Fashionable Nonsense, 77). But Kuhn does not say that. The paradigm, he
claims, does indeed accrue authority through reason and evidence, but once accepted
it becomes increasingly like religious dogma so that when reason and evidence tend
to refute it, the disciples defend it with a fervor akin to that which greets religious or
political heresy. There is then a conflict between the scientists’ emotional attachment
to the paradigm and their emotional attachment to reason and evidence (and
their own self-image as apostles of rationality). Revolutions in science come about as
a way to resolve that conflict. The other argument is simply a flat denial that scientists
ever put theory over observed fact (75–76). Unfortunately, the history of science
is filled with easily “observed” instances that contradict this assertion, so the
assertion that Kuhn is wrong is ironically an example demonstrating that he is right.
Bertrand Russell famously observed that Aristotle held views about the nature of
women that would have been refuted had he bothered to ask his wife. More germane
to our inquiry is the way Darwinism and mechanistic theories of the mind are defended
in denial of the most obvious facts of experience. Scientific denial of reason
and fact in those areas are the subject of the remainder of this chapter.
2. Denton’s book is excellent but relatively technical. Wesson is somewhat easier
for those with limited knowledge of biology. More popular books presenting basically
the same point of view are Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial (Washington,
D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), and Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Great Evolution
Mystery (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). A standard on the challenges made to
Darwinism by mathematicians is Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian
Interpretation of Evolution, edited by Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan
(Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967). A more recent and highly readable book
is Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996).