Lewis Wolpert on Science

A lot of people might feel that William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience was not exactly a science book.

I suppose that’s true. It’s not precisely a science book, but James is trying to understand religion in a scientific sort of way. He tries to give some insight into it. I became interested in religious experience myself and I found it a wonderful book. Although it was written over a hundred years ago it could have been written yesterday.

William James was the elder brother of the novelist Henry James. He was a philosopher and a psychologist. Would you say that the things that prompted his own interest in religious experience were the same things that prompted yours?

I doubt it. I think I partly got involved with religious experience because my youngest child became very religious at one stage. He was evangelized and became a fundamentalist Christian, and people thought that I – a bad Jewish boy from South Africa – would be upset. I never was for a single moment. I never ever tried to persuade him not to be. Instead I began thinking about why people were religious and I even wrote a book about it, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which is really about the evolution of religion. So the William James book is important to me.

Because James does not dismiss extremes of religious experience?

I think that one of the most important things that he says, is that when people do have a religious experience, it’s as real to them as anything that goes on in their day-to-day lives and I think that’s very important to understand. He also says that a truth experienced in the extreme of a fever is no less authentic because of the fever. Why shouldn’t fever be a state in which truth is experienced.

Tell me about John Adams book, Risk

John Adams is actually a colleague of mine, and when I read his book it completely changed my image of risk. For example, Adams discusses at great length whether seat belts actually have reduced the number of accidents, and his point is that when you have a seatbelt on you might drive more dangerously, because you feel more secure. In other words he’s saying risk is not a simple, straightforward thing. He has this brilliant idea which I always quote. If you want to get people to drive more carefully, have a spike set in the steering wheel, pointing towards the driver’s heart. Isn’t that wonderful?

It's certainly a very vivid image

It’s about compensation. How you adjust for risk. I’m a cyclist. Adams thinks, how wise is it to wear a cycling helmet? Perhaps it makes you cycle more dangerously.

I’m a cyclist too, and on the road I divide the traffic into monkeys and rhinoceroses – those who avoid danger through agility and those who do it by putting on armour.

I do wear a helmet, I must admit.

So do I. But what’s next?

Well I don’t think they’d be able to drive a car frankly.

(Laughs) Your next book is Styron’s Darkness Visible.

I had a very bad attack of depression about fourteen years ago.

You wrote a book about that too, didn’t you? Malignant Sadness, which led to a television series.