Dateline: May 03, 2000
"SCIENCE, RELIGION & RUSSELL" > Page 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Conclusions
Unlike Peter Singer, Bertrand Russell never got his appointment to City College. Fortunately, he did get a position with another institution, because at the time he was facing destitution and perhaps an inability to feed his family. But it should be noted that religion won against Russell and science.
Throughout the controversy, the principle opposition came from religious leaders like Bishop Manning. Behind the scenes others, like the ever politically minded Catholic Archbishop Francis J. Spellman, also worked to keep Russell from teaching in the city. For these people, academic freedom was irrelevant, at least is it commonly understood.
They did believe in a "modified" idea of academic freedom: according to them, real freedom meant the freedom to spread True Ideas. As Spellman said two months after the Russell case was over:
Catholic education, believing in the objectivity of truth, challenges the wisdom of subsidizing the dissemination of falsehood under the guise of liberty. Falsehood, whatever its sphere has no more legitimate claim to be freely disseminated than have the germs of disease a right to formal cultivation in the blood stream of the individual.
There you have it - the Wrong Ideas which are contrary to traditional religious wisdom are little more than a disease. It is for this reason that traditional, revealed religion stands in stark opposition not only to science, but also democracy. As Thom Weidlich explains (quoting Karl Popper), an open and free society must treat every supposed source of knowledge and factual claim as open to criticism - none may be immune.
It is not coincidental that this idea was expressed by Karl Popper, a philosopher of science. This position - that claims and ideas cannot be immune from critique - is fundamental not just to a free, open democracy but also to science. Russell explained what he thought the "scientific attitude" was in his earlier book Religion and Science:
The scientific temper of mind is cautious, tentative, and piecemeal; it does not imagine that it knows the whole truth, or that even its best knowledge is wholly true. It knows that every doctrine needs emendation sooner or later, and that the necesary emendation requires freedom of investigation and freedom of discussion.
Religious revelation and religious claims are not, however, left open to criticism. They are not generally tentative an dpiecemeal. Religious claims, particularly those made by fundamentalists, tend to be an all-or-nothing affair and they do imagine that they are the whole truth.
Religionists claim not only to have a unique access to the grounds of truth (i.e., the ultimate reality of their god), but also to particular truths established by those grounds. This position is incompatible with science and it is incompatible with the principles necessary for an open society. This is the conflict which the controversy around Bertrand Russell's appointment to City College played out. That is why this conflict was, in so many ways, one between religion and science even though Bertrand Russell was not strictly speaking a scientist.
Thom Weidlich explores many more issues in his book Appointment Denied: The Inquisition of Bertrand Russell. As important as the science/religion conflict is, Russell's case also dealt with important questions as to the role of education in a free society and the nature of truth - none of which I have really had time to explore here.
I expected Weidlich's book to be interesting, because I am interested in Bertrand Russell - but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it dealt with so much more. Not only is it a fascinating portrait of the people and the times - reading like a novel rather than dry history - but it is also an intriguing exploration of the meaning of science, academic freedom, education, truth and more in societies such as ours. I can, without reservation, recommend Weidlich's book to anyone interested in any of those issues.
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