Melanie Phillips is a well known columnist in The Daily Mail, and is also a regular on the BBC’s Moral Maze. In Monday’s Daily Mail she published a ludicrous attack on Richard Dawkins and on science more generally. The article is also reproduced at her website.
Starting off by agreeing with Dawkins about new age quackery therapies, Phillips goes on to draw parallels with some of the modern day conspiracies: 911 being brought about by the US government, Princess Diana being bumped off by MI5 and David Icke’s Illuminati. Phillips sets herself up as the voice of reason. A beacon of rationality in a confused and conspiracy-addled society.
Is she?
She argues that “The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.”. According to Phillips abandonment of religious faith has led to GK Chesterton’s alleged quip “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” becoming the reality.
our post religious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.
That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.
This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.
This section of her article reminded me of some of her past reporting on MMR vaccine:
Little William Kessick was a bubbly and jolly baby. Bright as a button, he was born without problems 14 years ago, and passed all the normal milestones of child development with flying colours.
Then, at 15 months, he had his MMR jab — a triple vaccination for mumps, measles and rubella. Within a few weeks, his mother Rosemary says she watched her child start to disintegrate.
Reason replaced by emotion? Thinking replaced by feelings? You decide.
A while later Phillips published a MMR vaccine article that was dissected by the irrepressible Ben Goldacre in The Guardian who argued that Phillips’ “response is a microcosm of the problems that can arise when journalists engage with science.”.
Phillips obtained a right to reply entitled: The case against me boils down to smear and evasion, with the lead in: “Scrutiny of evidence on the MMR vaccine is being stifled by the government and a reckless medical establishment.” Phillips was scornful of Goldacre’s claim that she had fallen for pseudoscience by believing evidence that has never been peer-reviewed and that has only been published in the “in-house magazine of a rightwing US pressure group well known for polemics on homosexuality, abortion and vaccines”. You can find more on the in-house magazine Phillips’ cites here – interesting bunch. Quite how Phillips can be critical of modern society for the view that “there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.”, while at the same time studiously dismissing objective evidence when it suits her is beyond me.
While Phillips is commendably unimpressed by claims that Princess Diana was bumped off by the Royal family or that the Royal family are lizards, she is under the impression that “legitimate scrutiny of the real questions that have been raised are being stifled by the government and a medical establishment that have behaved recklessly and spinelessly, and are busy suppressing all attempts to hold this up to the light.” with regard to MMR vaccine. This conspiratorial view of science as a monolith crushing all alternative views is also in yesterday’s article, in this case arguing that Dawkins and others are hounding distinguished scientists who promote intelligent design and jeopardising their careers “for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it.”
Even more laughably, Phillips argues that creationist scientists who are arguing the case for intelligent design are having their claims stifled, because of “the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.”
This is dealt with by Dawkins in The God Delusion (p’153):
Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water. When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution would ever be falsified, J.B.S. Haldane famously growled: “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”
Phillips just doesn’t live up to her own proclaimed values:
1. She calls others “bonkers” for believing in conspiracy theories: but herself believes the truth about MMR vaccine and intelligent design is being stifled.
2. She argues that others are replacing reason and thinking, with emotion and feelings: yet does this herself when emoting about MMR vaccine and autism.
3. She argues there has been a collapse of objective truth, “our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic”: yet she ignores valid science in reputable journals and cherry-picks quackery published in weird “journals”.
How can you deal with the constant drip drip of twaddle like this in newspapers?
One Comment
Excellent post and full marks for taking the trouble to read and rebut Mel P’s latest rant. She really does my head in and always has,ever since she used to write about education for the Observer. Thankfully she appears to have found her true level with the Mail.