...the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers. James Clerk Maxwell 1831-1879
I have been in a conversation with one
of our daughters lately; she tells me that people are losing confidence in
science, generally. This lack of confidence in scientific belief is causing
them to do some bad things. For instance, they are not giving their children
immunizations because they think that adverse side effects of vaccines cause
all sorts of bad things, such as autism.
I will admit that scientific reasoning
does not hold the high ground in the thinking of many people that it did 100
years ago, when Enlightenment philosophy was the predominant pattern of belief.
However, science has been a huge benefit to humankind in the last 200 years or
more. No thinking person can really deny that. Just think of how science has
impacted your life whenever you get in a car or airplane, turn on the
electricity, or use the internet.
The problem with general belief which
our daughter notes is caused by the fact that scientific thinking has invaded
areas where it does not belong. To summarize the problem, scientists answer the
question of “what” in the puzzled human mind; but it does not answer the
question of “why.” Scientists can examine our universe and find out many things
about how it works; but they cannot tell us why the universe is here in the
first place. And…try as they may, they cannot tell us how and why life exists.
The question of life gets even more complicated when they try to explain such
things as consciousness, imagination, art, morality, kindness, and many other
things.
The “incredibility” of scientific
understanding comes when scientists try to extrapolate their bench research
findings into philosophical and less objective fields of understanding.
Some scientists fail to understand that
there are several ways to get at truth. For instance:
1) Experimental truth
is obtained in laboratories of one kind or another. Making hypotheses, testing them
against collected data, drawing conclusions, and relying on replicability to
confirm findings. This is the home ground of scientific understanding; and it
is the area where science shines as an expounder of truth.
2) Historical truth
is obtained by consulting historical records. For instance, if one wants to
know how many Irish immigrants lived in Detroit in 1910, one consults
historical records.
3) Mathematical truth
is obtained by deducing facts from previously confirmed formulas.
4) Psychological
truth is determined by interviewing people. For instance if one wants to know
what is going wrong in a marriage conflict, one must interview the two people
in the marriage.
5) Philosophical truth
is obtained by logic and reasoning with words. This truth relies on history and
common sense.
6) Sociological truth
is obtained by interviewing a randomly chosen group of people and applying
statistical models to the collected data.
7) Theological truth
relies on historical records and reliance on the only one who was there in the beginning,
God, Himself, as expressed in the Bible.
When scientists push their naturalistic
disciplines to their logical extreme, they logically come to the conclusion
that God does not exist as a real actor—they see Him as a construct of human
imagination. Whenever scientists step
out of their area of competence, they draw down doubt on their competence and
believability. Their system of thought, when applied to areas outside of their
area of competence invariably brings them to a belief in a purposeless
evolution of molecules to life and, furthermore, to a belief in purposeless
life evolution. Common sense contradicts this purposeless process. A person who
looks at the internal workings of a human cell can tell with just a bit of
common sense that all the “random change, natural selection, and passage of time”
rhetoric we hear from scientists is nonsense; and it makes their arguments
silly. The scientific method does not translate well into many areas of truth
searching.
It seems that some scientists deny data
that does not fit with their naturalistic, atheistic, presuppositions. Data of
that kind shows the common observation that the various parts of our universe
are extremely well coordinated to work together to produce the livable planet,
which is our home. Scientists do not have an explanation for that in their
paradigm of a “purposeless” creation.
No reasonable person is going to
denigrate the reputation of science unless the purveyors of that discipline
begin to jump the limits of their discipline and claim the right to determine
things outside their area of competency. Scientists deserve to be disbelieved
when their beliefs erode into areas only served by non-objective facts
regarding ultimate truths.
It must be added that distrust in
science has resulted from the terrible wars and mass killing that has taken
place in the 20th Century mediated by ingenious scientific killing
devices. This kind of skepticism should not negate the many beneficial effects
of scientific advances in medicine, public health, and other fields.
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