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.