Hello Everyone,
I’ll try to keep this short since I tend to ramble.
I was wondering if there is any apologetic argument out there regarding the problems of the foundations of science. I haven’t heard one yet, but think it’s fairly decent.
Science’s main crux is that knowledge is only obtainable through science. My problem is that is not a scientific statement! So for a secularist to say:
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“Science is the only way to obtain true, legitimate knowable” <----- Not scientific! It’s an absolute statement. It seems to be using a priori knowledge as well. It is an assumption. It can be ever proven through science, the scientific method, peer review, etc. **
I think science can be wonderful and has led to many great things. My critique isn’t with science. It is with those who say (atheist apologists come to mind) that it is the be all end all. Dawkins likes to say religion “smuggles in magic to bolster its cause” or something similar to that, arguing that religion is just a sort of “God in the scientific gaps of knowledge” worldview. I’d say science smuggles in metaphysics to make itself legitimate!
Thoughts?
Thanks!
True!
I have put it this way in discussions here:
Scientism, which maintains the proposition “the scientific method is sufficient for all knowledge,” is above all else self-refuting. One claims to know the proposition, but it is not the result of the scientific method: it does not report an empirical observation about physical/material reality; it cannot be produced by controlled scientific experiments or isolated in a lab, nor is it derived from an equation describing physical reality. It is either a personal policy statement and so cannot make a claim on reality, or it rests on extra-scientific considerations in which case, again, it is self-refuting.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that the scientific method cannot be compromised by entering data from revelation (e.g., Scripture) into formal scientific arguments as proof either.
I can provide you with some quotes that may be on point.
“Being liberally educated requires an awareness not only of the power of scientific knowledge but also of its limitations. Some limitations to scientific understanding are inherent in nature. Quantum indeterminacy, for instance . . . . Other limitations are imposed by the type of problem. There are some problems that traditional science is not prepared to solve. They are too complex, to difficult, or unresponsive to the methodology of science.”
[American Association For The Advancement Of Science, *The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action. Washington, DC, 1990, p. 20.]
“The types of questions that science can address and the part of reality that science illuminates are strictly limited. Certain aspects of human experience–such as esthetics, justice, and honor—are not amenable to scientific description or explanation.”
[American Association For The Advancement Of Science, *The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action. Washington, DC, 1990, p. 26 n3]
Science is not the only way of acquiring knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. Humans gain understanding in many other ways, such as through literature, the arts, philosophical reflection, and religious experience. Scientific knowledge may enrich aesthetic and moral perceptions, but these subjects extend beyond science’s realm, which is to obtain a better understanding of the natural world.
[National Academy of Sciences, *Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2nd Edition, Washington DC: The National Academies Press, 1999, p. 25.
In a chapter devoted to discussing the limits of science Gauch notes:
“Scientists will never observe, know, and explain everything about the physical world.”
“Science cannot possibly supply its own ethical requirements.”
“a striking limitation of science is that it cannot provide its own [philosophical] foundation. Science is based on non-science.”
[Hugh G. Gauch, Jr., *Scientific Method In Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. 368-9.
A high school biology text puts it nicely: “Science is only one way of exploring the world around us; history, religion, and philosophy are others. Science deals only with things that can be experienced directly or indirectly through the senses (sight or hearing, for example). By definition, science has nothing to say about the supernatural.”
[Karen Arms & Pamela S. Camp. *Biology. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Saunders College Publishing, 1987, p. 6.]
On the different realms of scientific and ethical knowledge Laing writes:
“‘In more than 700 operations, I rotated, reversed, added, subtracted, and scrambled the brain parts. I shuffled. I reshuffled. I sliced, lengthened, deviated, shortened, apposed, transposed, juxtaposed, and flipped. I sliced front to back with lengths of the spinal cord, of medulla, with other pieces of brain turned inside out. But nothing short of dispatching the brain to the slop bucket—nothing expunged feeling. (Pietsch (1972), p. 66)’
He is referring to salamanders.
There is no scientific reason not to do that sort of thing to us.”
[R.D. Laing, *The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1982., pp. 22-3]
{article by Pietsch is: Paul Pietsch, “Shuffle Brain.”
Harper’s Magazine 244 (May 1972): 41-48} It is p. 46 instead of 66.
