BSE, MMR and GM: who's telling the truth?

Derek Burke

Abstract of a presentation to the 2001 Christians in Science Annual Meeting.

We, who are working scientists like to believe that uncertainties in science are resolved primarily by the accumulation of ever-clearer evidence. However, others maintain that such resolution is achieved through a social process, and not by inexorable logic, driven by a set of crucial experiments. So the scientific process, they maintain, is partially subjective and irrational, with empirical evidence playing, at best, a subordinate role. This is a real threat to science but also to the Christian faith, for how can we argue for the 'truth' of Christianity if we don't even agree on what counts as 'truth'? So how can we tell what is 'true'?

Earlier papers have been concerned with this threat, but I want to talk about a different threat to science. This threat comes from a change in the attitude of society to science; best summed up in the stark opening words of a recent House of Lords report called 'Science and Society:

"Society's relationship with science is in a critical phase. Science today is exciting, and fall of opportunities. Yet public confidence .... has been rocked by BSE and many people are uneasy about the rapid advance of areas such as biotechnology and IT

Let's start with BSE. What went wrong? Why did this happen? Lord Phillips, who chaired the BSE inquiry, recently said: "Perhaps the most important single lesson we learned is of the importance of the open communication of information to the public. In the months after BSE was first identified, there was an embargo on the disclosure of any information about this new disease." So who was telling the truth? The damage this episode has done to trust in the scientific integrity of government scientists and politicians will take years to put right. What about the MMR vaccine, effective against measles, mumps and rubella? It has been claimed that children developed autistic disorders because they had been given the vaccine, despite apparently safe use for 30 years. There is another issue here. How do you ever prove that the people who say that the vaccine is unsafe are wrong? They might be right! Who is telling the truth here?

What about GM foods? What are we to make of the claims that GM foods caused cancer in rats, when there is no evidence that any food derived from genetically modified organisms is unsafe? Who is telling the truth here? And how can we find out? I suggest there are three sorts of reaction to such events. The first come from those who see science as socially constructed, and lacking objective 'truth'. They believe that natural systems are more than the sum of the parts, that reductionism does not see the whole picture and fails as a political or social tool of analysis. For these people the 'natural' has a very special meaning.

There is a second, held by Richard Dawkins and others, who argues that science is value-free, that it is the only way to get at 'truth', and what we discover in science displaces other human ideas, including those of religion. This view is common, but it may be counter-productive; for it is not just Christians that find this bare reductionist world both uninviting and threatening.

There is a third, Christian, position; for we worship not the creation but the Creator. We do not fear the discoveries of science for what we discover is God's handiwork in the first place. Philosophically we are critical realists; with a firm theological basis for regarding the world as 'real', but aware too that our fumbling attempts to understand it are error prone, and that we work by a series of approximations, some of which are conditioned by the society we live in. But in the end, we find a coherent, intellectually satisfying position that reflects the glory of God.