One atheist objection to Christianity goes like this: there is no Muslim science, Hindu science, Buddhist science–there's just science. Science isn't sectarian. It's the same everywhere. The transcultural nature of science is due to the fact that science, unlike religion, is grounded in objective, detectable, verifiable reality. I believe Richard Dawkins has popularized this claim, although I don't have a quote at my fingertips.
Up-to-a-point that's true, but deceptive. Scientific agreement depends on taking many metaphysical and epistemological positions for granted. Given the rules of the game, there's a lot more agreement than in religion. But when you shift from scientific practice to the philosophy of science, agreement disappears.
Moreover, there are different kinds of science. Some are more abstract than others. When we get into theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, science and philosophy of science blend. And that's not confined to philosophers of science. For some major scientists like Mach, Poincaré, Einstein, Bohr, Penrose, and Hawking, science and the philosophy of science are interwoven, and fundamental fault-lines surface. To take another example, consider Russell's famous thought-experiment:
There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
And here's a formal argument for Last Thursdayism:
Pruss doesn't subscribe to Last Thursdayism, but his formulation quickly exposes the specious contrast between science and religion. You only need to peel back a few layers to show how theory-laden science really is.
On another front - in the early 20th century (1890s to 1930s), Social Darwinism was considered the cutting edge of science. Germany wasn't the odd one out. 22 of the United States and 11 European countries had bought into eugenics and were in the process of legalizing steps such as forcible sterilization when the Nazis came to power. Science answers the where, when, & how questions and, soemtimes, the why. But it says nothing about the right or wrong of a situation. It is knowledge, not wisdom. As I taught my child when she was growing up - "Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should*"
ReplyDelete1. In addition to theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, there are plenty of philosophical questions involved in and often even underpinning scientific and mathematical research into the brain-mind (e.g. the hard problem of consciousness, what is it like to be a bat, qualia, intentionality, p-zombies), "what is life?" in the biological and chemical sciences, probability theory, etc.
ReplyDelete2. Indeed, as most readers of this weblog likely know, the very foundations of science require philosophical justification (e.g. evidence, inference).
3. Not to mention much depends on the scientist. So, for example, sometimes cognitive dissonance is unavoidable no matter how unbiased one's methodology may be. For that matter, emotions can affect how a researcher or investigator may view reason and evidence.
4. Often scientists formulate a theory prior to evidence. For instance, the Higgs boson was theorized to exist prior to evidence it existed. That was because the Higgs boson had explanatory power. Another example is how the extinction of the dinosaurs came about. That was due to inference to the best explanation.
5. Quite arguably science hits a hard wall in many cases. The hard problem of consciousness. Hume's problem of induction. Godel's incompleteness theorems. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The law of conservation of energy vis-a-vis perpetual motion machines.
Evolutionists like Dawkins and Coyne often tell people that evolution (neo-Darwinism) is undirected and purposeless. Isn't that fundamentally a philosophical matter? How is science qua science going to prove or disprove this? Yet the belief that evolution is an undirected and purposeless process is often assumed when discussing evolution.
DeletePerhaps Dawkins is attempting to suggest religions conflict with one another over fundamental questions than science does. That may be true, but so what? It doesn't undermine let alone disprove Christianity.
DeleteBesides, there's tons of conflict not only with science vs. religion, but with science vs. history (as jttayler notes above), with science vs. philosophy, with science vs. economics, with science vs. all sorts of other things. Even with science vs. science. It's not as if science vs. religion is alone in this regard.
Science has presuppositions or axioms which cannot themselves be proven scientifically but must be assumed [almost like "faith"] in order for science to be done [i.e. to even begin]. Some of those presuppositions include:
ReplyDelete[[The following list is my own modification [with additions] of a list taken from William Lane Craig & J.P. Moreland's book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview]]
(1) the existence of a theory-independent, external world;
(2) the orderly nature of the external world;
(3) the knowability of the external world;
(4) the existence of truth;
(5) the laws of logic;
(6) the [general] reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers/identifiers and as a source of justified true beliefs in our intellectual environment;
(7) the adequacy of language to describe the world;
(8) the existence of values used in science (e.g., "test theories fairly and report test results honestly");
(9) the [presumed] uniformity of nature and [propriety of the use of the principle of] induction;
(10) causation
(11) the existence (or at least usefulness) of numbers. Given atheism, it's a strange "Happy Coincidence" that nature is so very much structured on mathematics that physicists can make predictions about the universe which are later confirmed empirically. Whereas, given the existence of God it makes perfect sense that God would create the physical world mathematically, and intellectually/rationally accessible.
As J.P. Moreland has said, (paraphrase) The claim that you can only know things through the methods of science is not itself something that you can know through the methods of science. This is a self-refuting claim like, "There are no sentences longer than three words."
These assumptions and the subscription to them make sense in [Christian] theism, but the various atheistic worldviews have difficulty grounding such axioms. Most atheists live by "faith" (so to speak) when they operate with these working/operating assumptions.
This is a helpful list
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