Without reductionism we would have no intellectual life, reason, logic, mathematics, or science, and probably no grammar or literature. If we had not been able to discipline our thinking to focus upon the salient and the connected, and avoid being buried under a floodtide of competing demands upon our thought processes, the human race would have got nowhere. In various ways, philosophers down through 2,500 years have known this, and one might argue too that animals are reductionist by instinct, for how otherwise does a hungry lion decide which prey to leap upon when he sees a hundred tasty-looking gazelles grazing in a herd? Most likely, the easiest to catch.
Reductionism as a scientific method, however, really began at the start of the seventeenth century, when Sir Francis Bacon became the great promoter of the methods of inductive logic and experimentation as a way of advancing science. Of course, scientists had conducted experiments into optics, magnetism, and alchemy for centuries before Bacon was born, but Sir Francis – later Baron St Albans – gave it a new investigative power. Oddly enough, Bacon was not a scientist but a lawyer, who rose to the very top of his profession to become Lord Chancellor, but his The Advancement of Learning (1605) and other visionary works on the potential of science to transform the human condition are what gave him his enduring fame. It is my suspicion, indeed, that it was his undergraduate training in philosophy at Cambridge, followed by his education as an English Common Law barrister, that led to his profound insights. In cross-examination and legal cut-and-thrust he would have become acutely aware of what was central to a particular case and what was peripheral: what to focus upon, and what to ignore. In short, how to reduce an argument to its essentials, and then to hammer it home.
And when he came to publish his subsequent transformative works on science, such as Novum Organum (“New Method”) in 1620, he supplied rules (rather like legal case notes) by which one might focus upon particular aspects of natural phenomena, as a way of penetrating down to the truth of an experiment or phenomenon. Bacon’s reductive, specializing method would become enshrined in the science of the Royal Society after 1660 and would influence Continental European and American experimentalists, while his works would remain standard reading for British university undergraduates until after Charles Darwin’s time. To put it plainly, his influence was colossal.
Yet far from being an atheist, Bacon was a devout Christian, and famously stated that while a little knowledge might lead a man to atheism, much knowledge would make him a Christian again. Indeed, Bacon was to play a major unrealized posthumous role in framing the religious tenor of the Royal Society, by showing how the whole of nature could be seen as one coherent piece of divine handiwork.
How, therefore, did reductionism ever come to be the most favoured intellectual tool of the atheist trying to discredit religious belief?
I would suggest that it came, in part, out of the spectacular success of the experimental method as a way of discovering new physical facts. Between Bacon’s Novum Organum and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – a period of 250 years – the whole scope of knowledge about the natural world had changed profoundly. And that largely resulted from the growth of increasingly sophisticated techniques for studying matter, which was found to be marvellously law-like in its behaviour. This gave rise, especially in the time following the violent anti-Christianity of the French Revolutionary decade, to the idea that matter was the truth, and the whole truth. After all, ghosts, visions, angelic appearances, and answers to prayer seemed erratic in their occurrence, but Newton’s laws of physics were inflexible. Did this not confirm and prove that while matter was real and useful, religious phenomena were simple-minded delusions at best, and base priest-ridden charlatanry at worst?
Another proof that spiritual phenomena must be false derived from their refusal to play by the reductive rules of matter. After all, you could not examine a prophetic dream under the microscope, or rerun the resurrection so that 100 savants could make their individual observations and check each other’s findings afterwards. Science must therefore win, hands down. And as the accelerating speed of scientific power has shot through the ceiling in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one might even wonder whether the reductive atheists could have a point!
Yet just as we need to be sceptical when doubting, we must also exercise scepticism when considering the powers of the reductive method. No matter what wonders reductive, experimental science reveals in the physical world, it has repeatedly shown itself to be incapable of handling the “why” questions, and is utterly powerless to tell us why we are the sort of people that we are. Implicit in the reductive way of thinking is the orderliness and repeatability of nature. But if there is one thing that human beings are not, it is orderly and repeatable. Yes, I admit we are so in our biological needs for food, warmth, and shelter; but the one thing that strikes you when you study human beings in the context of their normal lives, both in the present and in the past, is their sheer, glorious cussedness. A trait, indeed, which has been the bane of life to parents, school teachers, government officials, and tidy-minded social theorists down the centuries. While we may borrow the reductive method and try to apply it to everything, from child psychology to political allegiances and on to susceptibility to religious belief, the predictions invariably unravel into chaos.
And if I may be so bold, I would suggest myself as a case in point. A Lancashire lad from a working-class background with no silver spoons to suck, pragmatic and practical to his fingertips, argumentative, quite un-mystical, innately sceptical about “high-flown” theories, a lifelong and passionate lover of science, instinctively reductive and experimental in his thinking, and with no time at all for “fluffy” notions. Indeed, someone tailor-made to become a rebel against tradition, a biological reductionist, an atheistic scoffer at religion, and a general pain in the nether regions to normal “decent” folk!
Yet here I am writing a book disentangling all the myths that people who think like me generate as a way of showing science and religion to be in conflict. Against all the rules of prediction, I am also a traditionalist, monarchist, and patriot, who places great stock on duty, good manners and courtesy, who has never had a problem with accepting divine transcendence, who has a lifelong fascination with miracles, visions, ghosts, and prophecies, and who accepts the existence of a spiritual and heavenly realm and of salvation, and the efficacy and power of prayer, and regards them as just as real as the periodic table of elements! Someone, in fact, who views an ongoing relationship with a supreme being as just as natural as drinking tea and enjoying a fish and chip supper!
Now, I am sure there is no shortage of secularist practitioners of “ologies” out there who would pin me down under a flood of theory as fast as I could say “Amen”, but I suspect that my hard-nosed scepticism would make me doubt their explanations!
So let us all be watchful of “seduction by reduction”, and not confuse our means with our ends, and our techniques with our goals, when assessing science, religion, and why we may or may not believe.