What Is Science? Something that needs a specific metaphysical underpinning...

Science, science, science.

As we used to hear with Global Warming, "It's the science! The science is settled!"

Is that true? Currently, lots of fighting going on about "science" being bandied about, as here about Oregon: 

Oregon's governor, Kate Brown, said, "From the beginning of this crisis, I have worked within my authority, using science and data as my guide, heeding the advice of medical experts.'' 

Ah, but first off, the guv'ner had a 28-day window on how long she could impose restrictions, and she's exceeded that. The Oregon legislature has not extended that 28 days, but Oregon Supreme Court says, "Oh, no you don't." So chaos ensues, legally and morally.

(Personally, I suspect such issues will probably be decided by open rebellion. People are fed up with these Democrat Party Napoleons and things are going to get ugly. Or "government" may just wilt under the pressure. A good essay on the limits of government is here at the Conservative Treehouse.)

But the "science"...? Truth is, medical "experts" don't agree, neither do a lot of scientists in related fields, and debate rages. Heated debate. And it is clear that "the science" is being politicized. Massively so. The mainstream media clamps down on all this, but the debate is real. And I suspect the damage to "science" is real. Politicize anything and you pretty much ruin it.

Yet what is Science? I think a little background is needed.
First off, science is something that needs a specific metaphysical underpinning...

In most people's minds, "science" means the "scientific method." So, can we define "science" as a particular set of methods to study reality?

Ah, first, before any such method is developed, one has to have a philosophy — and it is not merely a "belief" or opinion, but an organized system of thought founded on logic — that objective reality itself is real, objectively real; i.e. that we're not mad, or trapped in a Matrix, etc. This is the great revolution in thought that produced the modern world, for most humans have followed religions (and philosophies) that taught that reality wasn't real, but a dream of some deity ("We are all a dream of Brahma, and some day Brahma will awake") or as in Islam, wherein reality is real enough for the moment, but a capricious Allah might change the basic laws of physics (or morality or anything else) from one second to the next — because Allah's will is supreme: this is called "Islamic Volunteerism". 

Only in the West did we have a religion that insisted Reality was Real, that God blessed it as a good in itself, and made a covenant with it (first verses in Genesis 2). It was in defense of that First Covenant that God set out to rescue His Creation, to undo and repair and make anew the world He had blessed in that First Covenant when Adam and Eve marred His Creation by their Fall.

Reality was thus understood to be good in itself, inherently good, and worthy of study, for of course we humans were there (in the unFallen Adam and Eve) when the Lord of Hosts "rested" on the Seventh Day and blessed it. This idea is foreign to so many religions and philosophies that it is remarkable that it came into existence in the first place. Indeed, its mere existence is a proof of the Existence of the God who made it. 

Then the early Church took that theology and melded with the Greek philosophical inheritance from Socrates through Plato and especially Aristotle — helped mightily by Boethius — cemented the idea in the West that reality was real and we could study it; i.e., that unlike in Islam, where the study of the physical sciences is blasphemy, we in the West were free and encouraged — in fact, we were made to study and interact with the world, rather than merely endure world -- to use our minds to explore the creation we are a part of. Western empirical science is founded on this ancient metaphysics.

Of course, the ancient competing idea that reality isn't really real, somehow or other, or that the physical world is evil and the spiritual world an escape from this evil (Manichean doctrine/Catharism, etc.) or that we can make reality by willpower, manifests itself today in many, many ways. Marxism/Leftism insists — against all evidence — that an earthly Utopia can be made by sheer willpower (and killing enough of those who don't agree). One of many current examples is that sex-change operations produce sex change: that one can change one's sex, via gruesome surgery and hormones. Or of course that homosexual can marry, that their phyical intimacy, a mere tribadism, is the equal to the transmission of life between male and female. 

This impulse — to demand that reality is malleable and conformable to our will, is a form of the ancient "reality is a dream" belief; it is what lies behind these malicious (or deeply foolish) people wrecking modern Western empirical science in the name of following some bizarre contemporary fetish or other that motivates them, that gives meaning to their otherwise metaphysically empty lives. (Walker Percy, the great novelist, used to say that the Sexual Revolution was in part about modern people secretly suspecting that they were mere ghosts, and needed "hooking up" to try to convince themselves they weren't disembodied nothings.

Global Warming is obviously a classic example, and now the "Let's kill ourselves to preserve ourselves from contagion" incoherence fits in the same genre. It's a great crusade, a jihad, to "save the planet" and thus, of course, give substance to ghosts.

An Préachan

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