Can science disprove God?(Letter to the editor)

SIR: For all their scientific hubris and triumphalism, the reasoning of Dawkins and Co falls into the theoretical trap that hindered the development of psychology as a science, when it emerged from the dead-end of nineteenth-century Structuralism and embraced Behaviourism as a solution to its methodological problems. This failure of understanding resulted in half a century's unnecessary eschewal of the real matter of human psychology--the mental events of internal origin, such as emotion, memory and perception.

In fact, the data of both private experience and public observation are mental events. Although "observations" are interpreted as "out there" and experiences as private, both occur within an individual mind and are not shared except via the symbolism of language. And both are able to meet the scientific criterion of inter-subjective agreement (Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery). Dawkins and Co make that same error of assuming that experiential data, which cannot be referred to public observation, is rationally worthless, and demand the latter, observational, type as evidence of God.

Psychology was able to reclaim its proper field when it absorbed the Logical Positivist insight that the qualitative contents of neither observation nor experience can be communicated, but only their relationships as denoted by language. Thus we can agree that a particular object, or rather the perception of it, is the colour "red", but I can never know if the sensation I call "red" is the same as that of my neighbour. Such questions, it was argued by Bridgman (The Logic of Modern Physics), are "meaningless".

Dawkins' demand that a believer prove the existence of God falls into a similar "meaningless" category. One cannot prove the existence of either an object or a percept (a cow, or fear) to someone who does not observe or perceive it. But intersubjectivity of observation or perception allows one to talk about it. ...