Have we come to the limits of empirical science?

So wondered physicist Lawrence Krauss, who has "fretted," “I worry whether we’ve come to the limits of empirical science.”

Interesting article by Regis Nicoll, an author of Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters, who is a retired nuclear engineer -- and who of course is religious, and an atheist or agnostic is going to know where this essay is going -- so therefore wouldn't read it.

That would be a mistake.

It's not exactly rare to find a scientists who is a religious believer, but rare enough in terms of also being writers willing to raise the theological implications that science can so easily conjure up. Usually, confronted by these implications, scientists, even an inspired one, a gifted artist of a scientist, (and most of them are anything but), for example, like the great Richard Feynman, would whistle up the "God of the Gaps" as Feynman did here:

• God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
• interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 208-209 ISBN 0521354625

What I find so interesting is how the "latest science" easily feels so dated, and so soon, when the great metaphysical arguments are so timeless, so transcending time and place.

In that regard, one wonders what Feynman would say now, 31 after his death,years of fancy, in-depth science (such as the recent coming online of the Large Hadron Collider that Nicoll, the author of this piece, refers to). Would Feynman be amazed at how much they've advanced human knowledge or disappointed? Eager for more of where the research seems to be headed or shocked at how fantasy novel-like -- or even medieval -- that direction seems?

Of course, Richard Feynman -- born in 1918 and died in 1988 -- was an atheist. Of course he was. It would be surprising if he weren't. And he didn't have much use for philosophers. “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.” Maybe so. He would certainly dismiss the great metaphysical arguments for the existence of God as God-in-the-gaps wannabees. But I think something is telling: notice he was referring to philosophy in terms of its relationship to empirical science. It no doubt was completely uninteresting to him otherwise.

Basically, when empirical science broke away from philosophy and focused so closely on the nature world, it gained a tremendous amount of nature-knowledge, and, coupled with bankers who wanted to maximize their profits by investing in discoveries that opened new fields of energy and manufacturing, they created the modern electronic world. It's a godsend, to coin a phrase, feeding seven billion and employing many of them, and so on. However, it also concurrently lost the ability to "see the big picture" and ask the big questions. Descartes or Newton were not atheists for a reason. Similarly, an economist who delves so far deep into the various economic questions and issues that he misses the result of it all -- yes, a materialistically and food-rich world but also an economically relentless go-go materialist culture, ever more humanly shallow as it becomes ever more competitive; a culture that is fast burning people out (the main reason people turn to drugs is the overbearing weight of being a consumer and economic cog in the modern world's merciless machine).

It is so easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, the one essential non-empirical science, Metaphysics, was the Rub' al Khali to Feynman, as it is to so many others. Empirical scientists usually operate on metaphysical principles they don't know exist; they've not consciously reviewed, reflected on, and debated, like actors on a stage who never regard the stage itself, or the reality of the script they're reading. Even tell them Metaphysics, and philosophy in general, is a science (a body of knowledge with its own rules, reviews, and standards of research), and they'll laugh at you.

Like the Rub', empirical scientists fly over it all, or go around it. To them, only a madman or a metaphysician would actually enter what is to them a trackless waste (hence the Rub' al Khali ref) and ask questions like Why do we assume our mental abilities are NOT fevered dreams? Why do we assume we really are conscious and not just the fevered dreams of someone else? How do we know we can grasp reality in any way?

Metaphysicians (maybe not all of them, of course, but by far the most) have always known the limits of empirical western science that Kraus is pondering, because such questions are what Metaphysicians work on. The notion of Scientism, the idea that empirical science is the only knowledge out there worth knowing, or the only form of knowledge by which anything that can be known -- by which anyone can know anything "real" -- is an assumption based on a metaphysics they just assume to be true, or don't even know they're standing on.

They assume it is true because, as Chesterton said about the modern West, they're living off their Catholic capital, the sanity built up in the Middle Ages. It was because Christianity took Jewish revelation and applied it to Greek philosophy that we ended up with the basis for the modern world: the intrinsic value of human beings, their right to property (intellectual and physical), on one side, and that the nature world can indeed be studied because God created it as an objective reality and wants us to study it. (Learning more of its beauty and wonder is delving deeper into God Himself.) We know reality isn't psychotic "projection" and is solid reality because we hold the necessary prior belief that God made it and established a Covenant with it (First Covenant when God blessed the Seventh Day, etc.)

Empirical science did not arise in other lands for a reason: Islam believes God created existence but also that it is inherently unstable, mirage-like, because Allah remakes it every second, and could change it fundamentally at any time; also Islam believes it is blasphemy and damnation to actually study nature! (Yet another way Islam is the antithesis of Christianity.) Buddhism and the Eastern "religions" teach that reality is not real, it's either imaginary from our own evanescent consciousness or a dream of some divinity.

Richard Feynman is dead. Many of the scientists who developed "the latest" ideas in physics are passing away. No "TOE" exists, no Theory of Everything. In fact, everything seems to be getting more and more arcane all the time! And thus the scientist, Regis Nicoll, who wrote this article based it on the "limits" empirical science seems to be reaching has something to say that is more than just a "God of the gaps" trope.

So maybe, maybe, things might be changing. The current generation of Scientism bigshots would have to pass away entirely, of course. And Western Civilization is running a race as to whether it is destroyed by heartless Scientism mated to an equally heartless economics on the one hand, in a myriad of ways it can provide (nuclear war, white plagues, AI, hopeless hedonism, and the mass embrace of a drugged state, etc.) and Islam, the great Know-Nothing Party of history, doing its best to bring everything crashing down so the survivors of the Western Götterdämmerung can live in a perpetual Seventh Century world.

Who wins that race is currently a toss up.

An Préachán