Tag Archives: Philosophy of science

Philosophy, Truth

Is Science Dependent on Other Disciplines?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The use of the scientific method as a way of learning about the natural world has yielded fantastic technologies and discoveries over the last few hundred years.  Nobody can doubt the power of the scientific method – collecting data, developing hypotheses about that data, and then testing those hypotheses with empirical experimentation.

In fact, some people are so enamored of the scientific method that they declare that this is the only way we can gain true knowledge about anything.  Philosopher J. P. Moreland was once told by a man finishing his doctorate in physics that “science is the only discipline that is rational and true.  Everything else is a matter of mere belief and opinion. . . . if something cannot be quantified or tested by the scientific method, . . . it cannot be true or rational.”

Is this true?  Does science stand on its own without any support?  Is it the only way to know anything?

The answer, my friends, is an unequivocal no.

Moreland explains that the statement “only what can be known by science or quantified and empirically tested is rational and true” is self-refuting.  Why?  Because this statement itself is not a statement of science but a statement of philosophy about science.  In other words, at least one philosophical statement must be true for science to even get started.  The aims, methodologies, and presuppositions of science must be upheld by disciplines other than science, for science cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps.  Science is like the second story of a house; it cannot stand without the first story and the foundation underneath.

What are these things underneath science, supporting it?  Moreland provides several examples.

First, “one must hold that the senses are reliable and give accurate information about a mind-independent physical world.”  This is a philosophical position and there are some in academia who would deny its truth.  The scientist must take this philosophical statement to be true before he can start doing science.

Second, “science must assume that the mind is rational and that the universe is rational in such a way that the mind can know it.  Science must assume some uniformity of nature to justify induction (i.e., science must assume that one can legitimately infer from the past to the future and from the examined cases to unexamined ones of the same kind).”  For example, just because hydrogen and oxygen have formed water in the past, why should we believe it will continue to happen in the future?  Again, this is a philosophical presupposition of science.  In fact, the assumption that the universe is rational such that we can know it is a big surprise if you are a naturalist who denies the existence of a rational creator.

Third, science assumes that “the laws of logic are true, that numbers exist, . . . that language has meaning, . . . that truth exists and involves some sort of correspondence between theories and the world.”  None of these things are demonstrated by science.  They must all be true for science to work in the first place.

Fourth, “science assumes certain moral, epistemic, and methodological values.  Regarding moral values, science assumes that experiments should be reported honestly and that truth-telling is a moral virtue.  Regarding epistemic virtues, science assumes that theories ought to be simple, accurate, predictively successful, and so forth.  Regarding methodological values, science often values such things as disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and procedural rules.”

Fifth, and finally, boundary conditions are not accounted for by science.  “The mass of a proton, the rate of expansion of the big bang, the existence of the big bang itself – in short all cases of genuine brute givens not subsumable under higher laws – are boundary conditions for science.  They are givens which cannot be accounted for by science.”

The idea that science is the only way to find truth is obviously false.  Science rests on piles of presuppositions and assumptions that science-worshipers seem to forget.  Why is this important?  Because there is a whole world of metaphysics, ethics, logic, mathematics, and linguistics that must be studied and understood.  As soon as these things are pushed aside as irrelevant, and forgotten, science dies.

Existence of God, Philosophy, Science and God

Can the Mind Be Explained by Physics?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some naturalists are betting on it, because ultimately physical laws, in their worldview, have to explain everything.  For the naturalist, there is nothing but physical reality which is governed by physical laws.  That being the case, everything, including the human mind, must be reduced to the purely physical and mechanistic.

Philosophers have pointed out serious problems with this attempt to reduce the mind to physics.  In a fascinating discussion of the origins of modern science, philosopher Richard Swinburne explains that mental states have been purposefully excluded by scientists because mental states were not seen as anything that science could measure or investigate.  Here is Swinburne:

Thermodynamics was conceived with the laws of temperature exchange; and temperature was supposed to be a property inherent in an object.  The felt hotness of a hot body is indeed qualitatively distinct from particle velocities and collisions.  The reduction was achieved by distinguishing between the underlying cause of the hotness (the motion of the molecules) and the sensations which the motion of molecules cause in observers. . . .  But this reduction has been achieved at the price of separating off the [sensation] from its causes, and only explaining the latter.  All reduction from one science to another dealing with apparently very disparate properties has been achieved by this device of denying that the apparent properties (i.e., the ‘secondary qualities’ of colour, heat, sound, taste, etc.) with which one science dealt belonged to the physical world at all.  It siphoned them off to the world of the mental.

But then, when you come to face the problem of the sensations themselves, you cannot do this.  If you are to explain the sensations themselves, you cannot distinguish between them and their underlying causes and only explain the latter.  In fact the enormous success of science in producing an integrated physico-chemistry has been achieved at the expense of separating off from the physical world colours, smells, and tastes, and regarding them as purely private sensory phenomena.  The very success of science in achieving its vast integrations in physics and chemistry is the very thing which has made apparently impossible any final success in integrating the world of mind into the world of physics.

Swinburne’s point is profound.  Modern science was never meant to deal with the mind and its mental states.  Not only that, but its very avoidance of explaining the mind is what has made it so successful.  Naturalists who demand that science explain the mind are asking it to do the impossible.  Maybe the mind is not reducible to physical laws.  Maybe it’s just the opposite – physical laws are ultimately reducible to The Mind.

Intelligent Design, Philosophy

How Can We Tell the Difference Between Real Science and Pseudo-Science?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most common charges that intelligent design (ID) opponents hurl at ID theorists is that ID is not real science.  They will say that a real scientific theory must be testable against the empirical world, must make predictions, must be falsifiable, must be explanatory by reference to natural law, and so forth.  They point to ID and say that it doesn’t meet all of these criteria, and therefore ID must not be science.

But is that true?  Are there really criteria that define whether something is science or not science?  Well, if you ask philosophers of science (the academic experts on this question), they will tell you that no such criteria exists.  Every attempt at formulating an ironclad set of criteria has ended up accidentally excluding what scientists consider to be legitimate scientific fields.  There is no set of agreed upon criteria for separating science from pseudo-science; it just doesn’t exist among philosophers of science.

According to philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, leading philosophers of science such as Larry Laudan, Philip Quinn, and Philip Kitcher have argued that the question of whether something is science or non-science is both “intractable and uninteresting.”  Meyer explains that “they and most other philosophers of science have increasingly realized that the real issue is not whether a theory is ‘scientific’ according to some abstract definition, but whether a theory is true, or supported by the evidence.”

That is the key.  Theories should not be rejected or accepted with definitions of what is or is not science, but with the evidence that supports the theory.  This concept seems so simple and obvious, but the attempt at demarcating between science and non-science is a favorite technique of ID opponents.  By calling ID non-scientific, opponents never have to look at the evidence.  How convenient!  Call it pseudo-science and move on, without ever stopping to examine the evidence or evaluate the arguments offered by ID proponents.

Meyer quotes one philosopher of science, Martin Eger, who concludes, “Demarcation arguments have collapsed.  Philosophers of science don’t hold them anymore.  They may still enjoy acceptance in the popular world, but that’s a different world.”  Indeed it is.

For further reading on this issue, see this article by Stephen Meyer.