Science Schmience!

I'm starting to hate science. It's a shame really, because of how useful of a tool it is, but in today's society it's paraded around like it's some ultimate authority on Truth. Standing on every street corner is a white coat fundamentalist who comes at you preaching the gospel according to Science. Religion is held to be a long outdated idea; man is now living in the age where scientific investigation and technology shall answer everything that lies before him. This, however, is a belief I believe to be complete foolishness. Science, while valuable, is not all it's claimed to be.

Science could never get off the ground without philosophy.

Many people seem to think that science is really the only way to obtain knowledge. This can be summed up in the popular phrase that seeing is believing. Yet, have they ever tried to validate the scientific method using science? I'll save them some time- it cannot be done. It's like arguing that you will only believe in what you can see. The problem is that you cannot see the metaphysical and epistemological principals behind that statement. Thus, the person could not believe in the statement they just made, and therefore, the view that (only) 'seeing is believing' is false and self-defeating.

Further, science cannot use the scientific method to justify the laws of logic; the existence of truth, numbers, and values; the causality and uniformity in nature; or to demonstrate that we can trust our senses. All of these different foundations must be in place before science can even begin to operate, but they are beyond the scope of scientific investigation. Sadly, in today's day, all this goes ignored by a large portion of the public, and they seem to think that they are givens.

Science is not without interpretation.

Scientific theories are not a set of straight up facts. Behind them lie certain presuppositions and philosophical views. For example, if we came across a set of kitchen utensils ranging from a spoon to a pot and every similar object in between we could interpret this data in different ways (assuming we knew nothing about them). We could say that the pot evolved from the teaspoon, or we could say that they were designed. Further data must be brought in to determine which theory better fits the facts at hand. Applying the previous example to the diversity of life and we have theists who believe in supernatural causes, and therefore have no issue with allowing for a designer; but then we also have atheists who only hold to natural causes, and they are left with only natural mechanisms to explain the biological diverseness. The debate that follows from here lies in an area of philosophical argument, science only comes in later to add weight to the thrust of the arguments. However, as we will see in the next section, scientific understanding is always in constant flux.

To give an example of something that's not a matter or creation vs evolution; and therefore, hopefully less controversial and more blatant, let me quote particle physicist John Polkinghorne from Beyond Science:

In the middle 1950s great effort was exercised by many physicists in trying to understand some puzzling coincidences in the behavior of meson decays. They believed there must be two sorts of particles involved because they seemed to be seeing two different kinds of behavior... yet, all the other properties of these supposedly different mesons were exactly the same. After about two years of increasingly desperate but unconvincing attempts at ingenious explanation of this strange coincidence, two American-Chinese, T.D. Lee and C.N. Young, made the brilliantly simple suggestion that maybe particles in these types of decay did not have to have a unique form of behavior under reflection... there could be just one kind of meson involved, after all... that what we call parity is not conserved in weak decays.

Once Lee and Young had this new outlook they needed to show that parity, while conserved in electromagnetism, strong interactions and gravity, was actually violated in weak interactions. With this new theory in practice they discovered through further testing that this was indeed the case. Thus, as we can see, science not only has philosophy behind it, but different outlooks and ideas have a large effect on how we interpret the data.

I would argue that current scientific data does not contradict the claims of Christianity, it is the naturalistic interpretation of the data that does so. I would also admit, that parts of current scientific understanding does call for an explanation from the creationist camp. Either by incorporating the information into a creationist model, or by holding that more investigation will prove the current understanding to be false. Areas of testing that will allow for falsification must be given and examined.

Science's understanding of reality is never finalized.

Scientists are always proving themselves wrong. I'm not saying that the scientific method is invalid, but that the nature of how science operates is though checking itself by looking for circumstances where the expected result will not occur. Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World makes his offering at the altar of science by praising it to be the savior of humanity due to it's skeptical nature. He writes:

[T]he reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff... [In Science] diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend- substantively and in depth.

If science were to argue that the current understanding of the universe is how it actually is then the entire endeavor would end in ultimate failure. If science closed the book on light when James Clerk Maxwell argued that electromagnetism spread through space by means of the aether this theory would have completely fallen short on explaining the reality. In the twentieth century Einstein demonstrated that light had a wave/particle duality. Then Paul Dirac gave the first quantum field theory giving a quantum mechanical account of light. The scientist's work is never done, and therefore, we must be careful to allow science to have the final say on matters because scientific scrutiny always looks at itself as currently incomplete and incorrect.

When it comes to understanding the universe it seems that the more we come to learn, we ironically find that we know less and less. We used to believe that the atom was indivisible, then we discovered subatomic particles, and things got even messier when we found quarks, photons, and neutrinos. Ptolmy's geocentricism was moved aside when Copernicus came upon the scene with heliocentricism, and Newton's view on gravity was replaced by Einstein's. What awaits us in the future? Stephen Hawking ends his book A Brief History of Time saying that we one day might know the mind of God. If we can only find a theory that explains the totality of the universe, then we can be like God and know the answers to the why the universe is the way it is as well as how the universe operates. Yet, the more we crack into the universe's shell, the more we realize we really are not any closer than when we began. And sadder yet, if science actually does one day come to completely answer all the questions in life, then man kind is left in ultimate despair.

Science cannot answer man's ultimate purpose and guide him in life.

The musical group King Crimson sang in Epitaph that "knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules." When it comes to science we can gain a greater understanding of the world around us, but we must look other places if we wish to know how we should use this information. Richard Dawkins blatantly states this to be true:

There was a well-known television chef who did a stunt recently by cooking a human placenta and serving it up as a pate, fried with scallops, garlic, lime juice, and everything. Everybody said it was delicious. The father had seventeen helpings. A scientist can point out as I have done that this is actually an act of cannibalism--worse, since cloning is such a live issue at the moment, because the placenta is a true genetic clone of the baby. Science cannot tell you if it is right or wrong to eat your own baby's clone, but it can tell you that is what you are doing, then you can decide for yourself whether you think it is right or wrong.

Unfortunately Dawkins gives the privilege to every man on what to do. Science can tell us what we are doing, but we are the final authority on if we ought to do it. A scary thought, but it will not be added to, the main point here is that science cannot tell us everything about the universe. Science is not the ultimate guide. Science can help us understand the particulars, but it cannot tell us how we should live, or give us our purpose. We can make scientific advancement our personal endeavor in life, but science cannot provide us with a reason to do such. Such a decision comes from a man's own values.

Newton's formulas can help us send a space probe to Mars, but they cannot explain the totality of our solar system, for this we need Einstein's theories. Science can help save us from invading viruses, but science cannot help save us from ourselves. Newton can help us send a missile to decimate other nations, but his research cannot help us know if we should do such a thing.

Stephen Hawking fears mankind when left to only itself as well:

My only fear is this. The terror that stalks my mind is that we have arrived on the scene because of evolution. Because of naturalistic selection, and natural selection assumes natural rejection, which means we have arrived here because of our aggression. And my hope is that somehow we can keep from eating each other up for another 100 years. At that point science would have devised a scheme to take all of us into different planets of the universe and no one atrocity would destroy all of us at the same time.

Technology is a great thing, but it can only take us so far. When shall we turn away from attempting to pull ourselves up from the goo by our own technological bootstraps, and turn to that which can provide us with a real purpose to live for, and a guideline to follow in how to do it? Leonardo da Vinci realized years ago that man, when left with only himself and the particulars, is destined for complete pessimism. Science today is trying to actually show Leonardo's fears that man is nothing more than a machine, that humans can be reduced to nothing but natural causes and effects (that somehow came to realize this through that cause and effect). With nothing to live for, and no hope to break free from the grasp of determinism it's of no wonder that so many are checking out of life. The supposed savior of mankind is becoming (has been) its own harbinger of death.

Truly, then, theology is the queen of the sciences, for it can provide us not only with an adequate world in which science can operate, but one in which we can live as well.