The Nutty Professor

We’ve always been a credulous species, and I don’t exempt myself. Once a week I watch a man in a frock claim to make the body and blood of a Jewish criminal - executed many years ago by the Roman provincial authorities - appear ‘really and substantially’ on a table. Despite the fact that they look like bread and wine I believe him. Fortunately having been ipso facto excommunicate for over thirty years I escape the attendant cannibalism.

  In the Middle Ages credulity’s chief beneficiary was the organisation set up by the criminal I mentioned earlier. Today it’s the scientist.

  Before going any further, it’s probably as well to make a few things clear. Firstly, I have no doubt at all that Darwin’s theory of evolution fits the facts. Anyone who thinks that Genesis is a scientific treatise is terminally stupid: the book says light was created before the Sun! One would have thought that even the dimmest evangelical would have noticed that there’s a certain causal relationship between the two and that the Bible inverts it. The fact that I smoke doesn’t mean that I’m silly enough to deny the link between tobacco and cancer, simply silly enough to carry on puffing. And I’m sure that human activity contributes to global warming; though, having studied Geology as a subsid, I know that the Earth has gone through frequent dramatic climate changes without any human intervention in the past. They made bugger-all difference to the viability of the planet though they proved very inconvenient for some of its species. So my beef isn’t with science but with our response to it.

  In Chaucer’s day the average layman knew as little about theology as s/he does today about astro-physics. But he knew someone who did: the priest. Accordingly anything an ecclesiastic said was authoritative: he lived on a superior intellectual plane. There’s currently an ad on Italian television in which a scientist from Rome’s Sapienza University scientifically ‘proves’ - using arcane terminology which neither I nor the majority of RAI’s other viewers understand - that Gillette’s deodorant for men is superior to rival products. I’m about as impressed by this claim as I am by Chaucer’s Pardoner’s that:

‘…in his male he hadde a pilwe-​beer,

Which that, he seyde, was our lady veyl:

He seyde, he hadde a gobet of the seyl

That sëynt Peter hadde, whan that he wente

Up-​on the see, til Iesu Crist him hente.’

But advertisers wouldn’t pay a scientist to peddle nonsense if they didn’t think that many people would be taken in by him, just as their mediæval ancestors were by the Pardoner.

  Which brings me to Professor Nutt. The salient point to remember is that scientists are authoritative - unless they’re being paid to betray their calling - only when speaking about the area of their expertise. Outside that area their opinions carry as much or as little weight as that of the man or woman in the street. When I was an undergraduate the Professor of Physics was a leading proponent of evangelical Christianity. Note not Catholicism - which at the time had a certain intellectual rigour - nor Anglicanism - where it’s possible to completely disavow the supernatural - or Quakerism - an eminently sensible sect - but evangelicalism, the refuge of the intellectually confused and sexually deprived. So when the professor spoke about Physics he was authoritative; when he spoke about God he wasn’t. Professor Nutt has gone on record as saying that Ecstasy is intrinsically less dangerous than riding, the implication being that if you allow people to ride to hounds then you should let them take Ecstasy. The fact that, because many more people take Ecstasy than ride horses, the damage done by the former - though statistically less dangerous - is much greater seems a logical step too far for the professor. Semantics don’t seem to be his strong suit either: he seems unable to distinguish between the meaning of the word ‘advisor’ and that of ‘legislator’. As a former English lecturer, speaking within my field of expertise, I can authoritatively state that their meanings differ.

  I would go further than Nutt. I think that the criminalisation of drugs probably does more harm than good. But that is not a point of view that would find much support in the popular press. The same popular press which is intent on turning Nutt into a martyr. The same popular press which loathes Brown and extolls Cameron. Cameron the leader of the Conservative party which solidly backed Johnson’s sacking Nutt. Conclusion? Science like religion is too often twisted to serve unworthy causes by those who have no understanding of or real interest in the thing they pervert.