FAITH AND WISDOM IN SCIENCE
By Tom McLeish
Oxford University Press. 304 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 0 198 757 559
Tom McLeish holds the Chair of Natural Philosophy at York University. His book Faith and Wisdom in Science has been received as ‘rich’, ‘insightful’, ‘superbly crafted’, ‘eloquent’, ‘inspiring’, ‘grand’, ‘profound’, etc. Regretfully, I beg to differ.
Some things in the book are helpful. For example, he argues, against the atheists, that science doesn’t rule out religion or make theology irrelevant; he acknowledges the difficulty of relating the ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and the arts; he is unhappy at the way science has been politicised. He also provides a shrewd evaluation of the practice of science in modern academia – the ‘publish or perish’ ethos, the inadequacies of peer reviews, and the futility of ‘research assessment exercises’.
