The Frontiers of Knowledge

As I have mentioned, I have been, fairly slowly, reading

Grayling, A. C. (2021). The Frontiers of Knowledge: What We Now Know About Science, History and the Mind. London: Penguin.

It is a good book, nicely written, although of course, it cannot deliver on the sub-title. We know a lot more about science than high-energy particle physics and cosmology, for example. Fortunately, Grayling is well aware of the limits of the book.

I have mentioned already the irritations of the section on physics, and I will not rehearse them again. I am not a historian, but I do think that the middle section on history attempts to do too much. It covers both the evolution of the human from the various fossil traces, and a bit about pre-history and early history which can be gleaned from archaeology. There is a good bit about various sorts of historical denial – starting with Holocaust deniers but moving beyond that to the various issues arising from colonialism and its usually violent interactions with those already settled in the ‘empty’ lands of North America and Australia.

The third section, on psychology and the philosophy of mind I cannot really comment on. The achievements in experimental psychology are great, its implications are uncertain and concerning on ethical grounds. We already know that Internet giants and some governments collect a great deal of data on people’s online habits, and use that to either try to sell us stuff or monitor our activities for possible subversive activity. As with, for example, nuclear weapons, the advances of a young science, in this case, neuroscience, outstrip our moral and cultural resources to decide what we want to do with it. As it is almost impossible in these circumstances, to stop the science being done (perhaps scientists are a bit naive, thinking that no one would use their discoveries for bad purposes) we are left with the uneasy feeling that the advances will not end well for humanity.

Still, Grayling is an atheist, and so you know what you are going to get when you read the book. Actually, he manages to keep his own views on religion fairly well at bay. There are a few ‘god-of-the-gaps’ snipes early on, and an extended part on the iniquities of the Templeton Foundation funding archaeological work on ancient sites looking for evidence of religion. It is a fair point that religion in, say, 10000 BC may not look anything like religion in the 2000s AD. It could, in fact, be noted that religion in, say, Japan in 2020 probably does not look much like (at least so far as material remains may go) religion in England in 2020. The problem is not, perhaps, one of looking for evidence of something, but that archaeology gives a snapshot of material remains, not meanings. We cannot, in fact, reconstruct the meanings that our ancestors placed on certain material items. Speculation is all that remains.

Still, at the end, Grayling launches the long-expected (by me, at least) attack on religion, declaring it irrational (as opposed to rational beliefs). An irrational belief is taken as false when premising them or acting on them leads to a high incidence of poor outcomes (p. 338). Irrational beliefs are also inconsistent with each other or with rational beliefs. Grayling, of course, singles out the problem of evil – the existence of an omnipotent and wholly good deity is inconsistent with natural evils. The god is either not omnipotent or not good.

Grayling claims the theological response to the problem of evil is that suffering serves some greater long term good which we, as mere humans, cannot discern. ‘The carpet of divine inscrutability is always a good place to sweep difficulties under, and the kind of manoeuvre in which it consists is a mark of irrational belief in its own right.’ (p. 339). Perhaps, but for all his acquired erudition in physics, history and neuroscience, Grayling’s theology is a bit suspect. I doubt that divine inscrutability would last long as a theodicy in any undergraduate essay on the problem of evil. To suppose that theologians are not aware of the problems and have, on the whole, moved beyond that solution to the problem of evil is actually to insult theology as an academic discipline, theologians as rational humans, and to presume that theology does not develop as a discipline.

There are many responses, theologically, to the problem of evil that do not sweep it under the carpet of divine inscrutability. Natural evils, after all, often arise from our own errors and sinfulness in using and abusing the world and its resources. The death toll in the 2004 tsunami was a lot higher than it could have been if humans had not cleared the mango swamps to make beaches for tourists. It is quite possible that the Covid-19 pandemic could have been avoided if habitat destruction had not forced wild animals into closer proximity with humans, with consequences for inter-species transmission of a virus. Childhood cancer, or some of them, could well be linked to pollution or environmental chemicals. And so on.

To claim that theology has no rational response to the problem of evil is, it seems to me, to perpetrate a sweeping under the carpet of religious irrationality of the responses which rational theologians have made. This is unfortunate. If Grayling is going to comment on something he could, at least, be fair enough to find more recent responses to evil in the theological literature than his (unreferenced) sweeping statements. After all, he has clearly followed some of the literature in the other fields he focuses on.

The point of the book is to demonstrate that while we are probing the frontiers of knowledge, in all directions, we are simply adding to the stack of things that we do not know, but are becoming aware of being ignorant of. It is a bit of a shame that Grayling perpetrates such ignorance with respect to theology right at the end.