The Role of the Heretic

by Isaac Asimov

(First appeared as the Foreward to Scientists Confront Velikovsky, 1977, Cornell University Press)

What does one do with a heretic? We know the answer if the “one” referred to is a powerful religious orthodoxy: the heretic can be burned at the stake. If the “one” is a powerful political orthodoxy, there heretic can be sent to a concentration camp. If the “one” is a powerful socioeconomic orthodoxy, the heretic can be prevented from earning a living.

But what if the “one” is a powerful scientific orthodoxy? In that case, very little can be done, because even the most powerful scientific orthodoxy is not very powerful. To be sure, if the heretic is himself a scientist and depends on some organized scientific pursuit for his living or for his renown, things can be made hard for him. He can be deprived of government grants, of prestige-filled appointments, of access to the learned journals. This is bad enough, and not lightly to be condoned, but it is peanuts compared to the punishments that could be, and sometimes are, visited on heretics by other orthodoxies.

Then, too, the religious, political, and socioeconomic orthodoxies can be universal in their power. A religious orthodoxy in full flight visits its punishments not on priests alone; nor a political one on politicians alone; nor a socioeconomic one on society leaders alone. No one is immune to their displeasure. The scientific orthodoxy, however, is completely helpless if the heretic is not himself a professional scientist—if he does not depend on grants or appointments, and if he places his views before the world through some medium other than the learned journals. Therefore, if we are to consider scientific heretics, we must understand that there are two varieties with different powers and different immunities.

Let us consider the two kinds of scientific heretics: (1) There are those who arise from within the professional world of science and who are subject to punishment by the orthodoxy. We might call these heretics from within “endoheretics”. (2) There are those who arise from outside the professional world of science and who are immune to direct punishment by the orthodoxy. These heretics from without are the “exoheretics.”

Of the two, the endoheretics are far less well known to the general public. The endoheretics speaks in the same language as does the orthodoxy, and both views, the endoheretical and the orthodox, are equally obscure to the nonscientist, who can, generally speaking, understand neither the one nor the other nor the nature of the conflict between them.

It follows that if we consider the great endoheresies of the past, we find that the general public was not ordinarily involved. In the few cases where the public was involved, it was almost invariably on the side of the orthodoxy. The patron saint of all scientific heresies, Galileo, was, of course, an endoheretic. He was deeply versed in Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, which he dethroned, as were any of his Aristotelian/Ptolemaic opponents. And since in those days and in his particularly society, the scientific and religious orthodoxies were the same, Galileo had to run far greater risks than later endoheretics did. Facing the Inquisition, he had to consider the possibility, not of a canceled grant, but of physical torture. Yet we cannot suppose that there was any great popular outcry on behalf of the rebel. The general public was not concerned, nor even aware, of the dispute. Had it been made aware, it would certainly have sided with the orthodoxy.

Next to Galileo, the greatest of the endoheretics was Charles Darwin, whose views on the evolution of species through the blind action of chance variation and natural selection turned biology upside down. Here, the general public did know of the controversy and did, in a very general and rough way, have a dim view of what it was about. And the public was definitely on the side of the orthodoxy. The public has remained antievolution to this day. Science has accepted Darwin without, up to this time, respectable dissent. The more sophisticated churches no longer quarrel publicly with Darwin’s views. But the general public, in what is probably majority opinion if a vote were to be taken, stubbornly adheres to the tents of a lot and dead orthodoxy of a century and a quarter ago.

Galileo and Darwin won out. Along the way, a number of the endoheretics did win. But never by public pressure. And never by a majority vote of the general public. They won out because science is a self-correcting structure, and because observation, experimentation, and reasoning eventually support those heresies which represent a more accurate view of the Universe and bury those orthodoxies which are outpaced. In the process, orthodoxy gets a bad press. Looking back on the history of science, we might suppose that every endoheretics was right—that each wore the white hat of heroism against an evil and short-sighted orthodoxy. But that is only because the history of science is naturally selective. Only the endoheretics who was, in the end, shown to be right makes his mark. For each of those, there may have been perhaps fifty endoheretics who were quite wrong, whose views are therefore scarcely remembered, and who are not recorded even as a footnote in the history books—or, if they are, it is for other, nonheretical, work.

What, then, would you have the orthodox do? Is it better to reject everything and be wrong once in fifty times—or accept everything and be wrong forty-nine out of fifty times and, in the meantime, send science down endless blind alleys? The best strategy, of course, would be neither, but to reject the forty-nine wrong out of hand and to accept and cherish the one right. Unfortunately, the day that the endoheretical pearl shines out so obviously amid the endoheretical garbage as to be easily plucked is the day of the millennium. There is, alas, no easy way of distinguishing the stroke of the intuitional genius from the stroke of folly. In fact, many an utterly nonsensical suggestion has seemed to carry much more of the mark of truth than the cleverly insightful stroke of genius.

There is no way, then, of dealing with the endoheresies other than by a firm (but not blind or spiteful) opposition. Each must run the gauntlet that alone can test it.

For the self-correcting structure works. There is delay and heartbreak often enough, but it works. However grim and slow the self-questioning process of science may be (indeed, that the process exists at all is a matter of pride to scientists), science remains man’s only self-correcting intellectual endeavor.

The problem of endoheresy, then, is not a truly serious one for science (though it may be, we all know, for the individual endoheretic); and the questioning process is not one which must be carried out in public.

But what of exoheresy?

We had better first be sure of what we mean by an exoheretic. Science is split into endless specialties, and a specialist who is narrow-minded and insecure may see anyone who is not bull’s-eye on target within the specialty as an “outsider”.

Robert Mayer was a physician and James P. Joule was a brewer who dabbled in physics. Neither had academic credentials, and, while both of them recognized the existence of the law of conservation of energy, their observations went for nothing. Neither could get his views accepted. Hermann Helmholtz, third in line, was a full academician, and he gets the credit.

When Jacobus van’t Hoff worked out the scheme of the tetravalent carbon atom, the orthodox chemist Adolph Kolbe denounced the new concept intemperately, specifically and contemptuously mentioning the fact that van’t Hoff was teaching at a veterinary school.

But this kind of attitude won’t do. If we wish to be fine enough and narrow enough, then all scientific heretics are exoheretics in the eyes of the sufficiently orthodox, and the term becomes meaningless. Nor should we label as exoheretics those who are not formally educated but who, through self-education, have reached the peak of professional excellence. Let us, instead, understand the word exoheretic to refer only to someone who is a real outsider, one who does not understand the painstaking structure built up by science, and who therefore attacks it without understanding.

The typical exoheretic is so unaware of the intimate structure of science, of the methods and philosophy o f science, of the very language of science, that his views are virtually unintelligible from the scientific standpoint. As a consequence, he is generally ignored by scientists. If exoheretical views are forced upon scientists, the reaction is bound to be puzzlement or amusement or contempt. In any case, it would be exceptional if the exoheresy were deemed worthy of any sort of comment.

In frustration, the exoheretic is very likely to appeal over the heads of the scientists to the general public. He may even be successful in this, since his inability to speak the language of science does not necessarily prevent him from speaking the language of the public. The appeal to the public is, of course, valueless from the scientific standpoint. The findings of science cannot be canceled or reversed by majority vote, or by the highest legislative or executive fiat. If every government in the world declared, officially, that the Earth is flat, and if every scientist were forbidden to argue the contrary, the Earth would nevertheless remain spheroidal, and every scrap of evidence maintaining that conclusion would still exist.

Nevertheless, the appeal to the public has other rewards than that of establishing scientific proof. (1) A favorable public response is soul-satisfying. The exoheretic can easily convince himself that his position at the center of a cult demonstrates the value of his views. He can easily argue himself into believing that people would not flock to nonsense, though all history shows otherwise. (2) A favorable public response can be lucrative. It is well known that books and lectures dealing favorably with a popular cult do far better than do books and lectures debunking it, even when the books in favor may be poorly written and reasoned, whereas the books against may be models of lucidity and rationality. (3) A favorable public response may hound scientists into open opposition, and they may express, with injudicious force, their opinion of the obvious nonsense of the exoheretical views. This very opposition, casting the exoheretic into the role of martyr, works to accentuate the first two advantages.

Public support or no, the exoheretic virtually never proves to be right. (How can he be right when he, quite literally, doesn’t know what he’s talking about?) Of course, he may prove to have said something somewhere in this flood of words that bears some resemblance to something that later proves to be so, and this coincidental concurrence of word and fact may be hailed by his followers as proving all the rest of the corpus of his work. This outcome, however, has only cultic value.

We see, then, the vast difference between the effects of the views of endoheretics and exoheretics. First, the public is generally not interested in the endoheretic, or, if aware of him at all, is hostile to him. The endoheretic therefore rarely profits from his heresy in any material way.[1] The public, on the other hand, can be very interested in the exoheretic and can support him with a partisan and even religious fervor, so that the exoheretic may, in a material way, profit very considerably by his heresy.

Second, the endoheretic is sometimes right, and since startling scientific advances usually begin as heresies, some of the greatest names in science have been endoheretics. The exoheretic, on the other hand, is virtually never right, and the history of science contains no great advance, to my knowledge, initiated by an exoheretic.

One might combine these generalizations and, working backward (not always a safe procedure), state that when a view denounced by scientists as false is, nevertheless, popular with the general public, the mere fact of that popularity is strong evidence in favor of its worthlessness. It is on the basis of public popularity of particular beliefs, for instance, that I, even without personal investigation of such matters, feel it safe to be extremely skeptical about ancient astronauts, or about modern astronauts in UFO’s, or about the value of talking to plants, or about psi phenomena, or about spiritualism, or about astrology.[2]

And this brings me to Velikovskianism at last.

Of all the exoheretics, Velikovsky has come closest to discomfiting the science he has attacked, and has most successfully forced science to take him seriously. Why is that? Well—

1. Velikovsky has been a psychiatrist, so that he has training in a scientific specialty of sorts and is not an utter exoheretic. What’s more, he has the faculty of sounding as though he knows what he is talking about when he invades the precincts of astronomy. He doesn’t make very many elementary mistakes, and he is able to use the language of science sufficiently well to impress a layman.

2. He is an interesting writer. It’s fun to read his books. I have read every book he has published and hope to read any he writes in the future. Although he doesn’t lure me into accepting his views, I can well see where those less knowledgeable in the fields Velikovsky deals with would succumb.

3. Velikovsky’s views in Worlds in Collision are designed to demonstrate that the Bible has a great deal of literal truth in it, that the miraculous events described in the Old Testament really happened as described. To be sure, Velikovsky abandons the hypothesis that divine intervention caused the miracles and substitutes a far less satisfactory hypothesis involving planetary Ping-Pong, but that scarcely alters the fact that in our theistic society any claimed finding that tends to demonstrate the truth of the Bible is highly likely to meet with general favor.

These three points are enough in themselves to explain Velikovsky’s popularity. Supply the public with something amusing, that sounds scholarly, and that supports an idea it wants to believe, and surely you need nothing more. Erich von Daniken and his theories of ancient astronauts have succeeded on little more than this, even though his books are less amusing than Velikovsky’s, sound less scholarly, and support something less substantial than belief in the Bible.

Velikovsky, however, has succeeded beyond such popularity. Because of the climate of the times when Worlds in Collision was published, there was an astronomical overreaction. The appearance of excerpts from this book, prior to publication, in Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, and Collier’s, and the widespread publicity given to his views, goaded some astronomers into an attempt at censorship. To paraphrase Fouché, this was worse than immoral; it was a blunder.

The fact that Velikovsky could then portray himself as a persecuted martyr has cast a Galilean glow upon all his endeavors, and has canceled out any attempt on the part of the astronomers to demonstrate, clearly and dispassionately, the errors in the Velikovskian view. All attempts in this direction can be (and are) dismissed as persecution.

It also gives a glow of heroism to Velikovsky’s followers. They can attack an orthodoxy—ordinarily such attacks are accepted as courageous—and can do so with complete safety, since in actual fact (as opposed to Velikovskian fantasy) the orthodoxy does not, and indeed cannot, strike back.

From the standpoint of science, is Velikovskianism nothing but an irritation and a waste of time? Not at all. It has enormous benefits. For one thing, Velikovskianism, and indeed, any exoheretical view that becomes prominent enough to force itself on science, acts to puncture scientific complacency—and that is good. An exoheresy may cause scientists to bestir themselves for the purpose of re-examining the bases of their beliefs, even if only to gather firm and logical reasons for the rejection of the exoheresy—and that is good, too. An exoheresy may cause scientific activity which, in serendipitous fashion, may uncover something worthwhile that has nothing to do with the exoheresy—and that is very good, if it happens. The Fates keep science from remaining unchallenged. Science is in far greater danger from the absence of challenge than from the coming of any number of even absurd challenges.

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1974, scientists as a group responded to Velikovsky’s exoheretical challenge for the first time. Four of the five essays in this book were prepared for and read at that meeting for other scientists and are now published in slightly revised form for the general public. For reasons explained in Donald Goldsmith’s Introduction, the papers by Velikovsky and Irving Michelson do not appear in this book.

It was altogether fitting and proper that Velikovsky and his opponents agreed to hold this discussion at the AAAS meetings. Though one could be sure from the start that nothing scientists could say would in the least move the Velikovskians, and that no amount of mere logic would shake their faith, it was still a good thing—for science.

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[1] I must qualify these generalizations because there are exceptions, of course. Edward Jenner, who advanced the endoheretical technique of smallpox vaccination, was accepted eagerly by the public, and profited materially as a result.

[2] Of course, I would also have used this line of reasoning to feel it safe to be skeptical about the value of smallpox vaccination, but the facts would have converted within a year in that case.