It is a truism that the great philosophers are those who enable us to see the world differently. Mary Midgley, who describes herself as ‘a popular moral philosopher’, has the ability to make us reassess some of our fundamental ways of thinking. In her eighties, she still writes philosophical masterpieces which are models of clarity about subjects that are both complex and important. Over the last thirty years she has produced a series of books, some of which, like Evolution as a Religion, and Science and Poetry, have become classic critiques of the claims of science.

One of the targets of her insightful and, at times, extremely sharp, criticisms has been the claims about human nature made by biologists such as Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson. It was their attempt to understand humanity in primarily biological terms that seems to have first launched her on the path to becoming one of the most widely read critics of science. The fact that Dawkins, in particular, has so frequently ended up in her cross-hairs has led her to declare that she is not out to persecute the man, it’s just that he says the kind of things that tend to draw her fire.

Dawkins’s obsession with the evil that he sees religion to be does not particularly interest Midgley. Whether God is a delusion or not is not the type of question she cares to address. What does interest her are the hidden assumptions that lie behind our thought; assumptions that are often only revealed through the metaphors we employ.

Scientists like Dawkins are bewitched by certain metaphors and myths which have become the guiding principles of modern science. Her use of the notion of scientific myths (like her earlier comparison of evolution to a religion) has not endeared her to scientists. But by ‘myth’ she does not mean something false, rather she sees myths as ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’. These myths are often derived from vivid metaphors that have acted as inspirations to new forms of thought.

The dominant myths of science are atomism (the view that the world is divisible into basic units), reductionism (the view that the world is only properly understood in terms of these basic units), and materialism (the view that the world is both ultimately analysable in terms of physical science and that there is no spiritual, i.e., non-physical aspect to reality). All these myths, or guiding principles, are either derived from or greatly supported by powerful metaphors that are not themselves the result of scientific investigation but are, rather, metaphysical presuppositions. For instance, the metaphor of mechanism, i.e., that the world is like a machine, is not a discovery of science, it is a piece of 17th century philosophical speculation that was adopted by scientists because it made the myths of reductionism and materialism look plausible.

In talking about myths, Midgley does not intend to detract from the obvious achievements of science. She is not in any way anti-science. Her sole intention is to point out that science is not omnicompetent; it is not the grounding on which all our knowledge must be based. Science is one tool, albeit a very powerful tool, in our intellectual toolkit; it is not the only tool, nor are the other tools reducible to it. Science can tell us things about, for instance, human nature; but it is not the sole arbiter of what will count as knowledge.

Philosophy, literature, and religion are also valid sources of insight into many aspects of the world, including what it is to be human. It is the attempt at intellectual imperialism by some scientists that Midgley objects to. One of the obvious things about science, and something which immediately reveals its limitations, is that its guiding principles are not themselves the products of scientific enquiries, but stem from visions and metaphors drawn from ordinary life. The fact that these myths and metaphors have been so inspiring and useful does not mean that they are the only ones we could employ, nor that they are in some way the ‘true’ depictions of reality. Artists, mystics, and sages have all drawn on a rich variety of visions and metaphors to tell their stories; why should scientists believe that their particular ones are the ‘right’ ones?

Midgley suggests other types of metaphors that we could use to give us a vision of the world. The old metaphors that guided the quest for knowledge stemmed from the circumstances of the seventeenth century. Metaphors like ‘conquering’ or ‘dominating’ nature, are obviously borrowed from martial pursuits. While the notion ‘putting nature to the test’, a metaphor introduced by Francis Bacon, derives from the practice of torturing to elicit information. Newer types of metaphor could include the notions of exploring or mapping reality. Rival viewpoints, say those of religion, science, and the arts represent different maps of the terrain.

One of her favourite metaphors is looking at an aquarium through different windows; no window gives the true view, each window just gives a different perspective. She also suggests that we see the investigation of nature as akin to slicing a cake – there is not just one way to slice it: likewise, we can see our knowledge of nature as being essentially organic, something that grows and develops and that has different characteristics at different times. In the same vein the philosopher John Haldane has suggested that rather than looking at nature as if it were a machine that could be reduced to its constituent components, we would be better off seeing it as a work of art; something that can be described in many different ways, none of which is the only way of describing it.

Midgley’s great service to intellectual life has been to teach us to look at science, one of the outstanding achievements of the western world, as something that is not a monolithic structure that represents the only way of deriving the truth about the world and our place within it. Rather, to see it as just one set of tools amongst many others, including religion, that enables us to find meaning in the world.

Dr Ciaran McGlynn lectures in philosophy at University College Dublin.


Midgley Quotes
“It is absurd to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology, and human sacrifice.”

“It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of.”
The Myths We Live By (2004)

"There is widespread discontent with the neo-Darwinist (Dawkins) orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random. This is itself a strange faith which ought not to be taken for granted as part of science." (2005)

"The ideology Dawkins is selling is the worship of competition. It is projecting a Thatcherite take on economics on to evolution. It's not an impartial scientific view; it's a political drama." (2007)