Science, truth with a capital T?

Science: Truth with a Capital T?  

 

Science is a master of prediction and control. It can predict where planets rotate in orbit millions of miles away and employ technologies to defy gravity in manmade flight. And it gives us amazing medical devices that mend hearts and limbs and eyes and cure diseases. Science devises ways to control nature in many ways; one for example is re-engineering plants that increase yields or allow for additional harvests. And amazing technologies have been invented like the computer and internet and smart phones. There are a thousand different technologies science innovates that promote a longer and more advanced life style. These scientists become the new magicians.  Much like the ancient mound building priests who held the mysteries of the calendar and fashioned corn out of a wild plant and informed the farmer when to plant based on observations of the heavens.

 

Based on these astounding feats, science claims to be a specialized form of knowledge, and most importantly the only method to Truth with a capital T.

 

 Everything else is just opinion, not solid truth like science, they would claim.

Surprisingly, both science and Christianity make faith statements. Science believes it can find a fundamental reality operating under basic uniform set of Laws. Scientific supposition, through scientific experimentation, attempts to “discover” the laws.

 

It also believes that science in time will be able to uncover all the mysteries of the physical universe, despite untold questions of the physical universe yet unanswered and mysteries unsolved. This faith is called Promissory Materialism. Of course well over one hundred years ago science felt it was on the verge of solving all the mysteries of the universe.   Lord Kelvin a most prominent scientist from the late 19^th Century said "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” This is just before the discovery of the particulate nature of the atom, relativity, quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, etc. But truth be known new questions continually pop up upon resolution of old mysteries. It’s never ending.  It empirical data subject to revision: Not Truth with a capital T.

 

The Christian Religion, (as does Judaism and Islam) on the other hand, tenders revealed faith statements about spiritual realities, and employs reason to delve them. The Scriptures reveals a Supreme Being that is worthy of our worship that created a world that is good. On the other hand Eastern spirituality which sees the “Real” world as maya or illusion; something that is meant to be transcended not investigated. Contrast this with Saint Paul who writes in the book of Romans 1:20 “ For since the creation of the world His (God’s) invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…”

 

And for that matter Modern Science derives much of its belief about the value of attempting to discover fundamental truths about the Universe from the God who created a World that was Good that is real, as described in Genesis as ascribed to by Jews, Christians and Moslems theologians.  The Ancient Greeks on the other hand, seeing the very obvious corruption in the world with its crime, deceit, violence, temporality et cetera, believed the world was created by a lesser god, the demi-urge.

 

It was the Eternal verities, truths, that were worthy of pursuit  NOT the corruptible material world. What around you, they would submit, would last through time? Certainly, not the furniture, clothing, your house, yourself. Only Eternal truth, the Good, existence being the most fundamental Good, is worthy of pursuit. 

 

 

Another obvious faith statement says there is evil in the world, Something science can offer no statement or solution. And Christianity offers a resolution to it, through the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

 

There is a moral universe that science can not speak to. Everyone feels there a right and a wrong. No one is impassible to every instance of insult or injury, violation seems inherently wrong. Everyone will feel wronged at one point in time in their lives and will want to extend this wrong to some measure of a universal precept. (no one should behave in such a fashion they might say to themselves.) Much the same principle is seen in the Bible but oriented to God.

 

There is a transcendent moral imperative, as depicted in the Book of Genesis; Adam and Eve for their transgressions are expelled from earthly paradise violating God’s Eternal Law. Their violation is against the transcendent Almighty God Himself  not just against yourself or the community.

 

We also seem separate from the world. We are self-aware and aware of others. We have awareness of our mortality.  We have a Self, a consciousness. We have a sentient soul that is meant to dwell with God in a transcendent reality yet not denying the current one. Our sentient soul is not content with bread alone Jesus Christ says in the Gospels, which is why we do need beauty, music and art, whether high or low brow. Science attempts to offer explanations for the existence of conscious but fails to fully explain how consciousness could have arisen out of simply a material universe.

 

Some scientists even deny its existence such as the Paul and Patricia Churchlands, who emphatically deny the existence of consciousness. The fact is: science really can’t find US, the Self…our “Me”. They haven’t found the projection screen where reality gets extrapolated….must not be a self, US or “Me” these scientists are saying.

 

These are faith statements about which science can offer little.

 

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Hume, the 17^th Century English philosopher, produced a profound critique of scientific truth. Basically, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Science predicts but speaks to no guarantee about repeated continuation of the event. For example can we conclude all swans are white, if a scientific sampling of swans shows only white ones over a vast span of time? Well no. We know otherwise of course. You need to know that black swans weren’t discovered until sometime in the late 18^th century. Prior to that saying something was common as a black swan, simply meant an impossibility.

 

 

Science makes numerous claims about Truth based on these same empirical samplings. These claims are largely reliable but not conclusive Truth. Likelihood is not certainty. Hume might say just in regards to sampling, just because a certain number in a game of chance arises several times in a row doesn’t mean we can expect to continue to do so.

 

 

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Since the pre-Socratics some 2500 years ago natural philosophers have been looking for fundamental elements, in contrast to mythic stories to explain the elemental composition of the universe. Some said water, fire, earth, wind were the elemental components of the universe. Another just water. Another just air. Another fire. Or some other fundamental element that formed the substance of all material. Science is still looking. With the recent discovery of the Higgs boson (fundamental particle necessary to explain the mass of other subatomic particles) the Standard Model is complete. The maze of subatomic particles have been properly classified and ordered. Once again science has dispelled the ignorance surrounding nature. But it seems we’re back to the idea of ether: particles pushing their way thru an energy field and gaining mass. Do we begin to question Einstein? He’s been around one hundred years, Newton more than two hundred  plus before him. Of for that matter have we made any progress towards what Einstein searched for the remainder of his life: that is the unified field theory that combined forces of gravity and sub-atomic forces?

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What scientific discoveries that mapped the universe a hundred years ago are in vogue now? The scientist then was just as certain of his understanding as today’s scientists. They had little notion of the vastness our galaxy. And the universe was deemed to be something in a steady state, eternal and largely unchanging. Nothing like the expanding universe science sees today that became in vogue. Continents were deemed to chang so ever so slowly or not at all. Continental drift and sudden canyon creation by cataclysmic events were unheard of and dismissed out. Only the Biblical community looked for geological  cataclysms remnants of the Great Flood, dismissed by natural philosophers.

 

Isaac Newton’s physics at one time were rock deemed solid Truths, being demonstrated for well over two centuries without contravention. Think about the white swan empirical verification; it was as if a black swan hadn’t been observed and science had been looking for two hundred years….must not be any [Black Swans]. And the Black Swan of Of course there was a tiny, itsy bitsy problem with Newtonian physics: the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Newtonian physics couldn’t adequately predict the migration of Mercury’s closest point to the Sun in its elliptical orbit: a point that would precess each year.  Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity best came to explain it.

 

Of course black body radiation is another anomaly the Classic science couldn’t explain. Material solids when heated begin to emit radiation; they can begin to glow. You’ve heard the expression “white” hot. Classic radiation would have predicted an ever gradual increase in intensity as frequency increased but intensity collapses at some point near the highest frequencies.  That led Albert Einstein to the formulation of the quanta theory of light that gave him the Nobel Prize in 1921.

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It seems Science claims much of its authority in large part by dismissing our mythic creation stories; the creation account in Genesis, of which many believing thinkers, including the Ancient Church Fathers, was not meant to be literal depictions of seven day period of creation but expressive of spiritual and moral realties. The primary truth being Creation was good and the essence of humankind was created the image of God. In contrast Science portrays creation as an act of random necessity and its biological creation as brutish and animalistic.

 

The Genesis account goes on to say on the 7^th Day God “rested”.  And one might ask how can the sustainer of the universe cease his activity? In answer it can be said that God set natural forces in motion for his purposes and yet is without option to intervene.

 

Now admittedly, this high tech science is much beyond me. I’m kind of like the 4 year old that only knows his colors and not much more when it comes to many of these things. However, let’s just say this 4 year old noticed that something amiss with Christmas. Santa Claus was seen at all the Malls and in the parades almost like two places at once and shouldn’t he be up on the North Pole making toys and how did he get down the chimney? It didn’t make sense. Kind of like all the claims science makes. Science claims to an all-encompassing  knowledge but holes in their theories pop up like rodents in the whack-a-mole game too numerous to list.

 

One mystery that’s arisen recently is the purported Dark Matter. The universe has balanced or rather teetered between a razor edge of continued expansion without end or gradual slowing expansion and then collapse back into the Singularity. This process has been going on for some 20 billions of years. This is like balancing a broom stick on your hand for 100 years. Why? There isn’t enough observable matter in the universe to accomplish this, matter and its gravity being required to slow the expansion. So Science posits dark matter. They haven’t found dark matter, just like they haven’t found gravity.  An yet science continues to claim exclusivity of Truth, as if scientific discoveries are continually subject to revision.

 

And there are limits to the empirical method of science. The fuzziness of the universe, termed Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, hypothesized in the 1920’s, remains the biggest mystery for science.

 

Science, when it makes these claims, resembles more a leap of faith than the march of discovery about the empirical universe, stuff we can observe. And it’s a faith that there’s a something out there to be discovered, something fundamental. Something they’ve been looking for over 2,500 years. It’s also a claim that they are on the cusp of figuring this whole thing out: the promissory materialism. Stick with us here since we’ve (the scientist) been right about so much already (with periodic revisions of course). Something they have yet to reach.

 

 

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Let’s speak to what makes science really seem authoritative. Science touts Control as its trump card. The amazing technological advances that control the forces of nature:  the power over gravity in flight, extending the voice and script through communication over the expanse of the globe with telegraph, telephone, internet, smart phone; control of diseases and disabilities through medical advancements, the list is endless. We live lives unimaginable in previous epochs. Without the medical science I would have been born dead as an RH negative baby. For countless generations infants died of this condition; no one before my generation survived the mother’s blood attack on its own baby’s blood. We are given life, comfort, ease, information, entertainment, travel due the technologies offered by science.  Of course the claims of ultimate Truth with a capital T and promise of being just on the cusp of figuring it all out are false. 

 

Yet, all in all the ability to control of our environment doesn’t constitute the entirety of our lives. What about control of ourselves?

 

Because of our lack of control of our own behavior we have foolishly created the possibility of scenarios in which the planet can be destroyed by nuclear weapons or greatly alerted by technologies that bring about deleterious climate change through global warming. Or destruction of habitat by paving the world due to the demands of lifestyles based on advanced technologies…oops there went the Amazon forest or the Polar Ice caps. Or rather oops we just built something that rather than control nature, and making things more convenient, actually threatens life itself…a nuclear fusion bomb!

 

In 1962 just by the dumb luck of having two world leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, exercising restraint, we didn’t have civilization as we know it destroyed; a specter of destruction brought to us by same scientific technologies that tout power over environment that grants us comfort, ease, longevity and health.

 

Science largely ignores the mind and what control it can have. Our wellbeing, as demonstrated by evidence of Placebo effect, can be greatly affected by our attitude about it. Any drug research has to be sufficiently efficacious to rise above the level of the sugar substitute, the Placebo effect being so profound. It’s an effect science has no explanation for. Sudden healings or sudden deaths can be attributed to the effect of the mind, an even more powerful demonstration of this placebo effect. It’s been said that Hindu Yogi’s have been known to be able to control their heart beat and even stop it.

 

What we have is a promise that science will uncover all the mysteries of the universe eventually; with that premise statements about scientific universal Truths are made. But actually science more resembles a project with a flash light lightening a huge mosaic gestalt pattern; sometimes the mosaic forms one thing then another but the ultimate “fundamental” elements never crystalize.  

 

 

Don’t get me wrong. I take the results of science quite seriously. For one, the Earth seems frightfully old, not 6,000 years like some people who claim they’ve determined it by adding up lives in the Bible. Not that the Bible should be dismissed as Holy Scripture but it’s not meant to be a scientific treatise. The truth of the decay of isotopes indicates vast ages. The Ancient Church fathers, one of whom was St. Augustine, read the Bible allegorically at times, if need be, to preserve the meaning of the text, not as a statement about scientific processes regarding natural phenomena. For how else can we interpret that Almighty God “rested” on the 7^th day. The Bible is meant to tell you how to get to heaven NOT how the heavens go.

 

Christianity is revealed Truth. What is revealed truth, one might ask? It is NOT simply scientific empirical data. It is eternal truth: obtained less cryptically than information on CERN Hadron collider in Switzerland. Information mediated by our thoughts and senses more directly than the Hadron Collider with all of its vast network of instrumentation and levels of mediation.

 

And yes, sensory data needs reasoning of scientific methods to clarify truth (flat earth versus spherical). And this same reasoning is used to make order out of the world unattainable with instruments: the “Why” questions whose answers have been revealed: the ones Science can’t answer but would like to claim it can.

 

St. Augustine, the Church Father of late 4^th and Early 5^th century recognized both the “book” of nature and the Holy Book of the Bible are both employed to discover Truth. The Holy Book couldn’t contradict the “book” of nature. Make note that The Holy Book was written to accommodate the understanding of the period. That is the patriarch Joshua, when he is said to have stopped the sun for a whole day, we can safely say it didn’t likely halt the movement of the earth around the sun for obvious reasons. To the audience to which it was written in a geocentric universe this would seem physically possible. This scripture might not best be interpreted as an actual natural event, although and Almighty God might what he wills. Nonetheless, The Bible is meant to tell you how to get to heaven NOT how the heavens go.