SUNDAY, 20 JULY 2025

Nowadays many online posters argue enthusiastically in favour of what they term ‘science’; one popped up on my Facebook feed this morning. The person who was speaking seemed supremely confident about what science is and equally certain about what can be labelled pseudoscience. While I suspect that almost all of us would place evolution by natural selection into the former category and creationism into the latter, there is a huge raft of cases where we cannot feel so secure. So rather than place science and pseudoscience into two binary categories to which they can be definitively assigned, I tend towards the idea that they should be conceived as existing at the two ends of a spectrum rather than as a binary opposition, and that much human thought and intellectual enquiry tends towards the centre of this spectrum.

Popper is usually the first voice mentioned in discussions about this dichotomy of science/pseudoscience. He starts by recognising the impossibility of proving anything with total certainty: Hume’s ‘problem of induction’, later explored and expanded by thinkers like Russell. Even if something happens a million times, we can never be sure that on the next occasion it will happen again. So Popper turned this search for certain proof on its head and argued that distinguishing between science and pseudoscience was a matter of falsification, not confirmation. In short, we can never prove hypothesis X by experiment no matter how many times we perform the experiment and its results support our thesis, but we can disprove it by setting up an experiment in which the expected outcome fails to occur even once (this is slightly simplified because we would need to first thoroughly check that we hadn’t made some kind of mistake in the experimental procedure).

Popper went on to argue that Freudianism and Marxism were pseudosciences because they are circular systems of thinking that can never be refuted. This brings to mind the hoary old joke – Patient: ‘I loved my mother’; Psychoanalyst: ‘Ah, so you hated your mother’. He contrasted this with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the predictions Einstein made by which it could and would be tested, by observations of Mercury’s orbit around the sun and the perceived position of stars during a solar eclipse. This is certainly impressive, but demanding such high standards of what constitutes evidence would push so many branches of human thought, and arguably the majority, towards a point where most research, even in prestigious institutions, would fail to satisfy the requirements of a bona fide science. What we can claim to know with any surety based on observation and experiment alone is very limited.

Common sense enters the equation at this point, of course, and we accept many things as true because we couldn’t function as human beings if we didn’t. It’s all very well for people like me with a penchant for philosophical musing to argue that it can’t be proven that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, but in reality we all assume it will. My problem with a radical scientific purism which relegates so many fields of human enquiry to pseudoscience is that it becomes a very big sledgehammer to crack the tiny nut of hypotheses like creationism. Evidence becomes the gold standard in separating what is pseudo from what is real, but this allows a covert physicalist metaphysics to take over the discourse and label all alternatives to its materialism as pseudoscience, because, just as in Marxism and Freudianism, the philosophical conclusions of physicalists like Dawkins are included in their premises. The contemporary form of Peirce’s concept of abduction – guessing to the best estimate – might help us to reject this tangle of metaphysical assumptions, but we must also accept that common sense can be wrong (the sun does not go round the earth) and a key role of science (and human thought in general) is to find out when what seems intuitively correct does not correspond with reality.

I acknowledge that many of the scientists like Dawkins who strongly attack what they consider to be pseudoscience talk about the sense of wonder they feel from studying the miracle that is the universe and life. If I’m honest, though, I’m always left with the impression that they feel that their experience is more authentic than that of a religious believer who expresses the same sense of wonder because the latter is scientifically uninformed, in what is a kind of reversal of Keats’ criticism of unweaving the rainbow. And I know I’m cherry-picking, but when I compare quotations from scientists like Einstein, Bohr and Feynman with today’s batch of online proselytisers for science, I can’t help but sense there has been a narrowing of vision despite all the incredible theories that are swirling around in modern physics.

Scientific hypotheses tend to be general and universal, as do most of the claims in areas which are slated as simple pseudoscience. Chemical A reacts with chemical B in the same way every time we put them together in a laboratory; a trine between Jupiter and the Moon at birth is always favourable. And theories will reflect the underlying beliefs of the people who put forward evidence on their behalf. Dinosaur bones in the earth are proof that these creatures existed in the distant past and attest to an evolutionary link to modern birds; these bones were placed there by the Devil to confuse us and make us stray from the true path. The evidence for the former in these cases is, of course, hugely more convincing than for the latter; that is not the salient point. The key point is that singular events which occur in the world can never be as abstracted as these claims, and many of the things that human beings study in the social sciences are specific and multi-factorial, so it becomes difficult to categorise our study of them as either science or pseudoscience: the distinction becomes largely irrelevant.

When we move beyond the fields of the hard sciences, most attempts at explanation become examinations of singular events that cannot be repeated. One dominant explanation may take hold of the public consciousness and become a generally known ‘fact’ and act as explanation, usually because of what is taught in schools – for example, World War One happened because of the assassination of Archduke Ferninand – but once-off events can never be fully and satisfactorily explained in this simplistic way even with the (often dubious) benefit of hindsight. We not only have to identify what we believe to be all the main causes, but we also have to speculate about the relative importance of each cause and how they might fit together. This is clearly true in the spheres of history, politics and economics, but is often also at least partly true of physical events like hurricanes. We can outline a general theory of how they develop when the water of a warm ocean evaporates and rises and an area of low pressure develops near the ocean’s surface, but we often can’t predict the force or the direction of a specific hurricane. Chaos and complexity theory have tried to fill this gap, but from my reading I get the feeling that many materialist scientists have a low opinion of these fields of study, perhaps because they stress the difficulty of making predictions and emphasise the limitations of our intellect, and can consequently seem like a dangerous step towards a rejection of reason or even full-blown obscurantism.

I feel this fixation on searching for abstract, generalised truths with concrete proof has led to the denigration of disciplines that are not part of the hard sciences, and yet, despite their relegation to the B-league of academia, what they study may be more relevant to daily human life than the things which undisputed scientists explore, such as the origins of the universe. Many of these disciplines have also started to ape the methodology of the hard sciences in the hope that some of their kudos rubs off on them. But however foolish and bizarre the theories of Freud and Jung and Adler may seem to many of us now, is modern psychology really such a huge advance, with its tick-box questionnaires that decide whether your score is high enough to show that you have OCD? Its papers, full of graphs and statistics, may help it escape the accusation of doing pseudoscience, but do they teach us much worth knowing? Freud and Marx were probably wrong about most of what they said but their failure has arguably been far more fertile in terms of the thinking they inspired than anything produced by modern psychology and sociology, with their turn away from grand narratives, or economics, with its obsession with econometrics. We may regret that the humanities can never offer an equivalent to Newton’s laws or evolution through natural selection or quantum theory, but for many of the things that happen in our lives the imprecision of the humanities is often all that we have.

The most common factor put forward to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, constantly repeated by Dawkins, is that science is based on evidence and pseudoscience is not. Dawkins may be correct to put so much emphasis on evidence but its use is not unique to science: we use it all the time, even in daily life. If I am accused of a crime in place X on day Y, I show proof that I was in place Z for the whole of that day: offering evidence is a natural part of supporting or refuting a claim and not limited to hard science. Even the loopiest creationist does the same; their evidence is just far less persuasive. Also, the idea that data is simply fact and can be neutral and objective and ‘out there’ somewhere for us to discover it seems naive. Evidence must be examined and interpreted before it can be presented as proof and it’s easy for beliefs to influence this interpretation, even among scientists committed to objectivity. For example, if we firmly believe that the results of the research we are reading cannot happen, we will scour the paper for inconsistencies; if we assume that the outcome was what we expected all along, we may not be as rigorous. And as a quick look back at history shows, and we recognise the racism, sexism and homophobia in what was the official science of its day, it is arrogant to assume that our own generation is somehow different: there can never be a science without bias. The aim to avoid it may be admirable, but in general it will never be completely expunged.

Phrases like ‘critical thinking’ and ‘logical fallacy’ are used all the time these days. I don’t dispute that this is a broadly welcome development in that it is better than magical thinking and burning witches at the stake, but so often these phrases are used gratuitously as a way of trying to score a point in a rhetorical move, or as a demonstration that we are smarter than the average bear. Accusing someone of committing a logical fallacy is used as an insult to hurl at your opponent in a dispute, as if counting up the number of fallacies committed and having fewer means that this alone shows you have won the argument. It sends the main point under discussion down a detour, reduces a debate to a list of indiscretions, and distracts from the bigger picture we are trying to explore. And at times avoiding one logical fallacy may lead to committing a different one which stands in opposition to it (e.g. the appeal to authority and the ad populum fallacy): perhaps abstract thought without logical fallacy may even be impossible. Most crucially, constructing a plausible argument is much more than merely avoiding logical errors. Thinking is a creative activity: we must be willing to make mistakes in our thinking if we hope to advance our ideas.

I haven’t said much in this essay about the things which are nearly always deemed to be pseudoscience. Partly this is because I didn’t want to turn this into yet another discussion about ghosts or astrology or alien lizards from Planet X who can take on human form and have taken over our governments (although I have to admit that the evidence for the last claim is getting stronger). I’m not here to advocate for the supernatural (although I suspect that my opinions on some of the things which are usually placed under this banner, such as the I Ching, which I have studied for more than fifty years, might bring derision from materialists). It’s back to sledgehammers and nuts. I wanted to focus on emphasising the value of disciplines which can never be hard sciences and shouldn’t try to be: the arts, humanities and social studies, which can sometimes borrow and use the methods of the sciences but are betraying themselves by mindlessly trying to ape them. As a result, they are becoming second-class citizens in a world where there is a general declaration of belief in ‘science’, but often without much thought about what this word might actually mean.

As I stated earlier, many things that are studied in the humanities and social sciences are events that happen only once and are therefore limited in their potential for abstract theory and generalisation. History is perhaps the perfect example of this, although it is also true of fields like economics. There can only be one history, the history that actually occurred (even if our version of it is distorted by our modern perspective and often seriously flawed and may not have happened as we picture it). We have access to a single history only: that of planet Earth in our universe. And when we turn to my field, the arts, the contrast with science is even more striking: almost everything is subjective and very little can be proved. This does not entail, however, any kind of inferiority of the humanities and arts. The human search for understanding should take place for the general good of human beings, not in search of some abstract Truth which may, as could possibly even be the case of mathematics, have no reality except as a concept in human minds.

As I reach the end of this essay, I realise that my essential question is not about the categories of science and pseudoscience, but the values and the uses of science in a world where it has made our lives much more comfortable but in which research suggests people are becoming ever less happy. Contemporary science, with its nightmare visions of AI taking over the world and enslaving us, or an asteroid blasting the earth and blowing us to kingdom come, or tiny nano-robots turning the whole world into grey goo, or a supervolcano erupting and throwing the globe into a nuclear winter, has become a source of anxiety and neurosis, the very opposite of what was forecast in the Enlightenment. Whereas once it was religious nutjobs who bore a sandwich board informing us that the end of the world is nigh, science seems to have taken on this role with relish. It is no longer seen by many as a beacon of optimism but as a harbinger of the apocalypse.

Why do people turn to the nonsense of pseudoscience when most of it is so obviously looney tunes? Because it offers them more on a personal level than science does, by bringing hope and meaning into their lives. Some scientists react to this by blaming the laity for its ignorance, indifference and gullibility, but that just makes the chasm between them and the general population grow ever larger. We must aim for a science which once again has a human face, and part of this should involve extending the concept of science so that it includes less strictly delimited forms of human enquiry which use completely different methods and tools as they aim to expand our understanding of the world. Perhaps we need to go back to the roots of the word ‘science’, which originally meant simply ‘knowledge’ before its meaning became more restricted in the 18^th century, and we should no longer automatically condemn all ideas which do not conform to physicalism as pseudoscience. And maybe we should accept that logical perfection is elusive and that our thinking will always be stained by a lack of rational purity. Who knows, this might even stop people believing in alien lizards.