Science & Textbook Pedagogy

by Asa Boxer

Dec 20, 2023

The Story-teller. By children’s book illustrator **Arthur Rackham** (1867-1939).

None of what I’m proposing about Science telling stories and inventing myths about itself is new or even especially controversial. Thomas Kuhn pointed to this trouble back in 1962 in his now famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The problem originates in the didactic practices of science—what we might call pedagogy and curriculum. Kuhn places the onus on textbook pedagogy:

To fulfill their function [i.e. the function of textbooks] they need not provide authentic information about the way in which those bases were first recognized and then embraced by the profession. In the case of textbooks, at least, there are even good reasons why, in these matters, they should be systematically misleading.1

In what sense misleading?

Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. . . .Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed.2

In other words science textbooks engage in fictions. Why? Because it is considered more pedagogically expedient. “The result,” Kuhn explains, “is a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research.”3 So that’s the main underlying fiction that science tells about itself: science is a progressive, linear and cumulative process. Toward what exactly? Toward a teleological reality: that is, an already articulate reality for which we can provide a singular matching articulation. I’m using “teleological” in a special sense here to emphasise the notion that science reveals the design and purpose of phenomena, even while rejecting the idea that the universe has any purpose. This conception is generally referred to as “correspondence”—the idea that theories and formulations (whether scientific or theological) correspond to an articulate reality. And this reality itself is a fiction demanding faith. In fact it’s a fiction as fraught as God—to put it in terms a committed atheist will understand best. For what else is a teleological reality other than an omniscient being awaiting us in the wings and revealing itself when our formulations match its divine formulations? In short science most definitely does tell fictions about itself very similar to those religions tell about themselves, and for the very same reasons: pedagogical expediency. Here’s Kuhn again:

As pedagogy this technique of presentation is unexceptionable. But when combined with the generally unhistorical air of science writing and with the occasional systemic misconstructions discussed above, one strong impression is overwhelmingly likely to follow: science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modern body of technical knowledge.4

In other words science’s misconceptions and misrepresentations of itself are not a result of purposeful manipulation. No scientist is consciously trying to mislead the public or his students. No. The uptake of fictions begins with the curriculum and proceeds implicitly to distort the scientist’s conception of his practice and his place both in history and the world at large.

So why does Kuhn think this technique “unexceptionable”? He seems to have seen it in terms of any trade. One doesn’t need to learn the history of machining, say, or carpentry, or electrical installation to go out and earn a living in the trade. As Kuhn puts it:

Why, after all, should the student of physics, for example, read the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, or Schrodinger, when everything he needs to know about these works is recapitulated in a far briefer, more precise, and more systematic form in a number of up-to-date textbooks?5

Therefore science has no classics, no historical sense, and no real sense of textuality. Worse, it is disconnected from the very forces that have given rise to its own productivity, which are hardly linear, barely cumulative, and questionable where progress is concerned. And, by the way, like Kuhn I am a lover of science, and have no intention by these clarifications to imply that the sciences are just a bunch of lies. What I am saying is that our conceptions of science being concerned with fact and all other disciplines with fiction is a false model and the wrong way to be looking at the situation. As Kuhn put it: we require a “paradigm shift” to see the situation more clearly.

Kuhn answers his question as to why students of “physics, for example” ought to read the historical works of science by addressing the advantages enjoyed by the humanities in this regard:

As a result, the student in any one of these disciplines [in the humanities] is constantly made aware of the immense variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the course of time, attempted to solve. Even more important, he has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself.6

In contrast, scientific textbook training “is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology.”7 And this of course gets to one of my most fundamental points. Science is an outgrowth of and in some ways a continuation of the same project that gave rise to religion—i.e. the pursuit of Truth. It wasn’t the sciences that brought us out of the confines of bad religion: it was instead humanism, something evidenced in the power of that movement to bring about cooperation across the Catholic-Protestant schism even during the brutal Thirty-Years War (1618-1648). And indeed it was humanism that brought to term the transformation of consciousness that yielded the secular, pluralistic scientific spirit.

Had Kuhn gone back further in his survey, he might well have concluded that science was in fact a paradigm shift from the religious perspective, and the catalyst for that shift was humanism. Keeping in mind my article “Educating the Analogical Mind” what brought about the opening for a new perception of our approach to knowledge, understanding and truth, was a proliferation of stories when the humanist project brought attention to the forgotten texts of Classical antiquity, creating the conditions in the cultural mind of an early Greece, to use Ted Hughes’s language. Instead, the sciences have pursued an avenue that has led directly to dogmatism and intolerance.

In an informative and fascinating interview for Uncommon Knowledge—a video series produced by the Hoover Institute and hosted by Peter Robinson, entitled “Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer and Douglas Murray” (aired January 10, 2023)—Tom Holland (a distinguished medieval historian) quickly reviewed a pattern in Christian history in which the heroes in the search for Truth criticise and overturn an old order and establish a new one until authoritarianism and sclerosis set in, at which point a new set of heroes in pursuit of Truth step up, and the same process begins again.

Holland informs us that the early Church, since the time of Saint Augustine (354-430) established two guiding notions: (a) religio (a redeeming force capable of connecting humanity to things eternal) to counteract (b) the saeculum (the flux of time upon which we are born and that sweeps us toward oblivion). Those original Christian rebels who established the new order with the promise of salvation through religio, felt that they were smashing the heathen idols and rejecting the superstitions of the Classical period (ancient Greece and Rome), i.e. the saeculum. The rebels of this age, however, became the oppressive elites of a new orthodoxy that engendered a new revulsion, a new reformation. By this time we’re a thousand years on and talking about Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564), credited with launching the Protestant Reformation (1517), which demonised and denounced the Catholic Church and Papism, and went about “the tearing down of idolatry, the banishing of superstition, only now it is the Roman Church that is seen as something to be torn down. That is a kind of a binding Christian impulse.”8 Holland explains further:

Moving into the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, you see exactly these same instincts, only now it’s not just the Roman Church that is the target of this repudiation, it’s the whole fabric of Christianity. But the instinct… the paradox, say, of the French Revolution is that when the revolutionaries are tearing down the privileges and the fabric of the Churches [he’s interrupted here briefly by the interviewer]. . .they’re doing it for deeply, deeply Christian reasons. That’s why (I said at the beginning of this) I think there’s a kind of inherent trend within Christianity that moves towards atheism. Because, you know, even before Christianity, the impulse of the Hebrew prophets is to condemn the gods of the Egyptians or the Babylonians as so much stock or stone and tell people that there is no divine manifest in springs or on the top of hills. The reformers are doing that in the Reformation. Umm, materialist scientists now are doing that. The process of banishing the supersti…, of desacralizing the world is an incredibly Christian one.9

X Club historian Ruth Barton would likely agree. Here’s how she puts it:

Huxley sometimes interpreted these intellectual changes as the working out of the principles of the Protestant Reformation. The “act which commenced with the Reformation is nearly played out” he told the students at Aberdeen in 1874, a “wider and deeper change. . .a revolution in thought” is coming. Reformation metaphors were popular in radical literary circles. New understandings of religion were presented as continuous with the principles of the Reformation. . . .
. . .
Contemporary Christian beliefs were summed up as heathen ignorance and superstition, and the X-men and their allies were the forces of truth and righteousness. Moreover, they would win, they were on the side of history and, metaphorically, of God.10

Barton also discusses the establishment of Sunday lecture societies and the X Club’s collaboration with “Unitarians, secularists, positivists, Christian socialists, leading liberal and radical politicians, and reforming lawyers” to counter Sabbatarianism (Christian advocates of observation of the Sabbath day). These lectures were often dubbed Lay Sermons and were billed as part of the self-improvement movement and as better alternatives to the pubs, and therefore morally upstanding by reducing Sunday drunkenness. A critic of the movement “satirizing the scientific authority of [one of] Huxley’s lecture[s]” wrote:

The object of it seems to be to tell that if there is a God, which is at least doubtful, nature is the entity in question, and physical science is its prophet. . .that “scepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin”;. . .and that when he [the man of science] has once fairly learnt to “break in pieces the idols built up of books (Bibles, for instance) and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs,” he will be able to “cherish the most human of man’s emotions by worship. . .at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable”—a very scientific prospect.11

Indeed the defensiveness of science adherents today is generally fanatical, religious in flavour, and often savage—exposing the penchant among the putatively rational, reason-centred, level-headed leaders of Science of losing their minds, suffering meltdowns and embarking on censorship campaigns when confronted with anything that might bring reasonable doubt to bear upon the practices of TheScience™ and its conclusions. (For an immediate example, see “Pseudoscience and the Lysenko Affair.”)

Analogy readers will recall Max Perutz’s reaction to Princeton science historian Gerald Geison’s revelations of fraud in the work of Louis Pasteur in his 1995 book The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, as told by Horace Freeland Judson in his indispensable The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. Captured in Judson’s title is the sense of dismay felt by those like me who were brought up to believe in TheScience™ only to discover when applying the Royal Society’s motto, nullius in verba (nothing at the word of another), that we’ve been misled, lied to and defrauded. Judson tells us that “Geison wrote, and said to me as well, that he had felt consternation as he realized what the notebooks told.”12 The historian too engages in a form of scientific research, and he has a moral obligation to present the facts as they are, even if they seem to undermine the mythologies and heroes of the prevailing cultural narrative.

What emerges from Judson’s research is a deep seated culture of fraud among the sciences and especially emanating from the medical sciences. We guffaw at the risk of our own health, the health of our loved ones and public health—as we saw in “Scientism Subverts Secular Society: A Case Study.”

Part of the culture of book cooking in Science is the attitude “that misconduct underlying your immediate publications can be justified if later research, your own or others’, proves your faked or fudged results were right.” When one’s intuition is found to have no grounds and one feels desperate for reasons that may include financial granting for continued research, it’s okay to manipulate the data. Judson continues:

The assertion that present fraud, even if it leaves the supposed conclusions of a paper without foundation, can be excused post facto if those conclusions are later confirmed, has also appeared in controversy over recent cases. It is a seductive idea. It marks one of the deepest divides among practicing scientists today.13

In personal interactions with believers (of both religion and TheScience™) over the years I have encountered canned reactions, prepared in advance and delivered with smug satisfaction as though the exercise of argumentation had set parameters devised by collective practice, and the outcome is a mere shifting of pieces on a chessboard in a famous game already played a thousand times. The religionist will at some point bring up Pascal’s Wager, and the new atheist will undoubtedly ask you to provide your mathematical proofs and to account for the falsifiability of your claim. These are moves in a game meant to shut down discussion; they are made in bad faith because any response must work very hard to shift the linguistic field of play which requires a sophistication of argumentation beyond the conversational.

Should one find a way to communicate this much, one’s interlocutor will make one of three final moves which amount to much the same: either (a) he will dismissively scoff at your assertions and claim he has no time for such rubbish; (b) imply or state directly that the field of study in question is beyond your comprehension or expertise (are you a doctor? mathematician? or other equivalents to stay in your lane appeals to scholastic authority); or (c) raise his voice and tell you that you are engaging in very “dangerous” rhetoric. In all cases the final blow is ad hominem and meant to insult and even start a fight. If he gets a rise out of you, he’s won because you are proven to be irrational. In other words the strategy is to shift the grounds to the irrational because recourse to the rational has no footing.

Science & Textbook Pedagogy

by Asa Boxer

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