Letter: Science should glory in its limitations

Science should glory in its limitations

Sir: Thank you for your coverage of the Dunblane slaughter, which has been helpful. I write with a plea on behalf of physical science, in the light of what Peter Atkins wrote (15 March).

You had no reason to include a scientist among your commentators, any more than you might have a banker or a plumber. As human beings such persons may help us to assuage our grief, understand our anger, relieve our pain and that of others, and come to terms with evil. For those purposes your other contributors all had relevant professional skills, and I thank them. But to identify science with the view that "this glorious world is but a mechanism" is to declare it irrelevant to all the most serious issues that confront human beings, and will continue to put off many good people from pursuing it.

Needless to say, plenty of physical scientists would disagree with Peter Atkins, and take a spiritual view of the nature of this glorious world. His concluding statement, that his science does not make him inhuman, is quite right: he ends up using words like "comfort", "inhumanly", "aspirations", "grief", "enjoying", and "apotheosis of evil". But he has to stop being a "scientist" in his own sense in order to do so.

Science is marvellous, not least because it is done by real and fallible souls. But to pretend it can tell us how we relate to evil, anguish and God will make good people hate it. For such truths we must look elsewhere, as Andrew Marr clearly perceives, and a good scientist, like a good plumber or banker, will say so.

Professor the Rev S G Hall

Elie, Fif