Can Science Disprove God?

SIR: For all their scientific hubris and triumphalism, the reasoning of Dawkins and Co falls into the theoretical trap that hindered the development of psychology as a science, when it emerged from the dead-end of nineteenth-century Structuralism and embraced Behaviourism as a solution to its methodological problems. This failure of understanding resulted in half a century’s unnecessary eschewal of the real matter of human psychology—the mental events of internal origin, such as emotion, memory and perception.

In fact, the data of both private experience and public observation are mental events. Although “observations” are interpreted as “out there” and experiences as private, both occur within an individual mind and are not shared except via the symbolism of language. And both are able to meet the scientific criterion of inter-subjective agreement (Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery). Dawkins and Co make that same error of assuming that experiential data, which cannot be referred to public observation, is rationally worthless, and demand the latter, observational, type as evidence of God.

Psychology was able to reclaim its proper field when it absorbed the Logical Positivist insight that the qualitative contents of neither observation nor experience can be communicated, but only their relationships as denoted by language. Thus we can agree that a particular object, or rather the perception of it, is the colour “red”, but I can never know if the sensation I call “red” is the same as that of my neighbour. Such questions, it was argued by Bridgman (The Logic of Modern Physics), are “meaningless”.

Dawkins’ demand that a believer prove the existence of God falls into a similar “meaningless” category. One cannot prove the existence of either an object or a percept (a cow, or fear) to someone who does not observe or perceive it. But intersubjectivity of observation or perception allows one to talk about it. Science cannot reject (disprove) observations or experiences (that is, justifiably assert that the mental events they consist in do not represent “reality”), except by demonstrating non-inter-subjectivity. If Dawkins’ interrogated victim were to turn on him and demand that he prove the existence of the colour “yellow”, he would find himself in the same helpless position, and all the scientific means at his disposal inadequate to the task. Yes, he can point to various wavelengths of light and to inter-subjective agreement in identifying its manifestations, but then, so can the believer point to inter-subjective agreement as to the experience of God and the influence of God in human understanding and behaviour.

Further, if people inter-subjectively report a rewarding “warm feeling” (Enid Blyton’s term) when they perform an altruistic act, it is nothing more nor less than pure assertion for the sociobiologist to declare that the response is evolutionarily laid down in their genes. There is no observable evidence for this explanation. It has no more scientific foundation than a Christian believer’s assertion, if he should choose to make it, that it is a sign of God’s approval. The genetic attribution is just as much a case of making the explanation serve a prior conviction.

I agree with Tom Frame (May 2008), that the degree of certainty expressed by militant atheists is excessive. A more modest, or scientifically reserved, approach, given the almost universality of human belief in God or gods, would be to entertain the possibility that, in relation to the perception of God, they are, as it were, a “colour-blind” minority.

(For a much more detailed exposition of the equivalence of observational and experiential data in science, see my paper “Behaviourism Re-Viewed” in the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, Vol. 27, 1974; off-prints available from the author.)

Lucy Sullivan,
Windsor, NSW.