Science Versus Religion? Opus Contra Scientism. (Part 2)

First take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s.

Photo by on

I’ve had-enough of pseudo-scientific atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher) climbing onto a pedestal and claiming victory. As if the fields of science have no skeletons in their closet, no assumptions they cling to religiously, and no arrogance! So this essay is an explanation, and catalog, of the many, many ways that some un-philosophical scientists, the public, and especially silly-men like Hitchens and Maher, exaggerate what science knows and can do.

Let’s begin with an uncontroversial statement (see e.g. Karl Popper’s book Conjectures And Refutations): Science is empirical and refutational, which means: If you can’t measure something repeatedly, and so test/refute your theory, then it’s not science. Theories must posit only natural laws as explanations because, of course, if you’re allowed to explain things with God or miracles, you can explain everything, and learn nothing. So the scientific method proceeds as-if only natural laws exist, and then makes them up as needed, like covering a puzzling hole with ragged patches of cloth stitched together. It may or may not end up being pretty: Some big holes have plagued physics for 100 years (mentioned below). Nevertheless, (atheistic) naturalism is built into the scientific method. That restricts what can be called “science”, and that’s fine.

But an operating-assumption is not a fact. That mere operating-assumption doesn’t mean that everything not-science is second-class. It absolutely doesn’t mean that “If you can’t measure it repeatedly, and so test/refute your rigidly-naturalist theory, then it’s not real!” More concisely, “If it’s not natural (measurable), it’s not there!” That’s a statement about what’s not natural, so that’s not a scientific theory. In fact it is naturalism as a faith, which is called “scientism”. I’m about to refute it, good ‘n hard. But until now, such nothing-ing of everything-that’s-not-science is exactly what some/many of us seem to think and feel, and some of us are intimidated by it, despite the many absurd consequences (listed below).

Careful science knows that we may-or-may-not really know what we think-we-know now, because we can always find ourselves wrong-again. In fact, we already are wrong-again:

1. What are dark matter and dark energy? They’re not in our theories and they’re not measurable on Earth, they’re only showing-up vast light-years away.
2. The 100-year-old incompatibility between quantum field theory (for very small things) and general relativity (for very large things).
3. We now believe that neutrinos have non-zero mass, and therefore the Standard Model of elementary particles is broken.

But none of this makes scientism any humbler.

(The likelihood of being wrong-again is also why climate scientists are reluctant to sound sure. They won’t know their climate models are close-to-right until their predictions are right — too late to prevent serious global warming — and even then they’ll only be not-wrong-yet.)

Photo by on

Here’s a laundry-list of all the things science doesn’t know now, and might never-ever know:

• All the so-called “soft sciences”. For example, you can’t do the same experiment on the same economy twice, because the first experiment will perturb the economy, and you can’t roll it back to the same starting-state, so no-one can replicate your experiment. So economics is not science, but do economists know nothing, and economies aren’t real? Tell them that.
• Similarly psychology. Because nobody can measure my personality directly and completely, and predict how vast numbers of situations will elicit vast numbers of responses from me (and not the same response every time, either), therefore my personality doesn’t exist? Don’t be stupid, Mr Scientist.
• Some things are potentially-measurable but so difficult/expensive that they haven’t been measured and modelled. Personality might be one. The quality of music or poetry might be another. “I can imagine quantifying it” is not “It has been quantified, validated, and published in peer-reviewed journals”. Blithely jumping-to-conclusions across that gap is precisely what science doesn’t do, because it’s likely to be wrong. So science is practically-limited by what’s affordable and actually-done!? Who knew?
• It’s impossible to empirically observe that something doesn’t exist. Show me it, not-existing, not anywhere? That can’t be done. So trash your atheism. Trash your pseudo-science argument that humans are “nothing more than meat-machines” (Dan Dennett). On the contrary, nobody knows for-sure-for-ever that we don’t have souls and don’t survive our physical death, and no scientist can observe (yet) what does/doesn’t happen to us after we die.
• It’s also impossible to empirically observe that the laws and constants of the universe have been constant since the Big Bang — this is taken on faith. And BTW, the Big Bang amounts to, “Give us one inexplicable miracle for free, and we’ll figure out the rest!”
• But science needs more such miracles. It is alleged that a soup of dead chemicals gave rise to the first self-reproducing molecule — before natural selection could apply. Nobody to this day has created a self-reproducing molecule from dead chemicals, and the odds against it are stupendous. So how did it happen? Wherever there is no demonstration, there is scientific faith. BTW, someone making it happen in a test-tube would pollute naturalism with intelligent design, so that’d be a self-defeating demonstration. See the controversy around the book “The Signature In The Cell” (2009).
• For all we know, evolution is guided. Maybe a small change in some creature’s genes made it grow to twice (or half) its size in one generation. Science merely assumes-on-principle (naturalism) that such things never happen. It’d look like a gap in the fossil record, and there are lots of those.
• Every human is different from both their parents by 30 mutations or so. In general, the more complex an organism is, the more mutations occur between generations. Why does science believe that every mutation is “pure random chance”? That’s quite a faith you’ve got there. Prove it.
• Who-knows what kinds of radiation- or force-fields we don’t know about yet. Once-upon-a-time we didn’t know there were Xrays, therefore they don’t exist, what superstitious nonsense, don’t waste your time looking for them!
• Why can’t there be a “free energy device” driven by a kind of field that mainstream science hasn’t discovered yet? 200 years ago, electromagnetism was in exactly that situation and a coil of wire near a lode-stone was a “free energy device”. Today we call it a dynamo, alternator, or turbine.
• There are a vast variety of effects that are never-ever going to be subject to controlled experiments. Near-death-experiences, for example, because causing them is un-ethical.
• Why does anyone think that CT- or fMRI-scans of brains have anything to say about mystical experiences, when nobody has ever had (and probably never will have) a spontaneous mystical experience while lying inside a thumping brain-scanner? And even if a mystical experience did happen right-then, the scan would prove nothing, no matter what it saw, because brain-activity not-equals the experience, nor the cause of the experience. And administering psychotropic drugs to make a “mystical-like” experience happen, tells you nothing about really-mystical experiences, or why/how they happen spontaneously. And happen, they do — there have been millions.
• Speaking of which, subjective experience isn’t measureable, predictable, and refutable, therefore it isn’t real? Don’t be stupid, Mr Scientist. And don’t be stupid, Mr Philosopher. I searched the world-wide-web for a philosophy of knowledge (epistemology) that allowed subjective experience to be real, and couldn’t find one! 2½ thousand years since Plato, and our internal lives are as invalid as God is. That says it all, doesn’t it?

So, get back in your box, Mr I’m-an-atheist-because-science-is-the-answer-for-everything-there-is, you’re waaay over-reaching.

While we’re here, let’s consider a couple of other angles. Some atheists/scientists like to portray religions as pyramids of authority without any reality-checks on their doctrines. Well, I’ve seen science be a pyramid of authority too, with “elder statesmen/women” at the top, controlling the contents of journals and conferences. The “scientific process” is nothing like the rational debate lay-people think it is; it’s actually a food-fight for publication space, wherein (for some scientists) any excuse to reject someone else’s research is a good excuse, because “I” need to get attention for “myself”. Big advances are not accepted over-night, some take decades to become accepted even though they were right the whole time (for example, the discovery of penicillin by Ernest Duchesne circa 1890, not by Alexander Fleming in 1928; similarly plate tectonics took 50 years, from the 1910s to the 1960s). “Science” is a very human, very egotistical process (see Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions”, 1962).

Well-known joke: Why are academics such hard-fighting, un-cooperative prima donnas? Answer: Because there’s so little respect to fight over!

So I walked away from being a relatively successful academic researcher, and became an engineer, because in engineering there’s no room for my-ego-is-bigger-than-your-ego BS. Either you cooperate to get a thing working, or Nature will prove you wrong quick-smart.

What about the reality-check angle? Obviously, science observes physical matter and energy, and corrects itself … eventually. How about, religions are correcting themselves too, replacing their creation-stories with the scientific story? But, religions also have sacred texts subject to interpretation, plus lots of human experience, accumulating to this day, that they blithely ignore. So I concede this point, and only this point: Religions could make use of more data and a broader reality-check.

This is precisely the point atheists seize on when they attack (all?) religion, and then they push this point too far, also: “Science is willing to correct itself because it can be wrong about everything. Are you (religious ones) willing to correct your belief about anything, let-alone everything? What would it take to make you admit there is no God?” You mean, besides atheists needing to back off from the above-listed stupidities, after which there is more room for God? I still smell a rat. Let’s take the first half of that challenge and render it:

Science doesn’t know anything for-sure-for-ever (because theories can always be wrong).

Dear Pseudo-Scientist, do you know that statement for-sure-for-ever? If you answer Yes, you know it, and you’ve just contradicted your own statement. If you answer No, you don’t know it, so why do you bully other people with it? You’ve become the religious authority you claim to detest.

(I see an atheistic meat-machine exploding, after realizing that it was trapped in its own paradox. Even Socrates, 2400 years ago, was too smart to blow himself up with that one.)

But to answer the challenge myself: I have personal experiential evidence, of a once-in-a-lifetime nature, that a non-physical, transcendent intelligence exists. The scientific method, correctly practiced, will never be able to demonstrate that he/she/it does not exist. Science may assume, as hard as it likes, that God is doing nothing; that doesn’t make it so. Applying “Hitchens’ razor” (“Anything that can be asserted on no evidence can be rejected on no evidence”): I can safely reject that God is doing nothing, and have fun making an atheist’s head explode (again): I assert that “If natural laws are not just figments of your pattern-seeking imagination, but are actually obeyed by Nature (at least until you realize that you’re wrong again), then that’s so because God is making it so! Go on then, prove me wrong.

Meanwhile, even miracles aren’t incompatible with those laws-you-don’t-really-know. Yes, miracles. I’ll let you in on a secret: We engineers routinely build in a “back door” to every computer, including our Mars Rovers. Nobody can tell that it’s there — it’s all physics as usual — until we use the “back door”, and then we can do things you (users, operators) can’t. I like to call them “miracles”. If human engineers have thought of this, you think God didn’t?

Here are some examples of currently-known “back doors”.

1. Genetic mutation, maybe it’s not always an accident.
2. Quantum states are probability distributions, maybe what you measure isn’t always a random draw.
3. Chaotic processes, like the weather, require super-computers capable of modeling the quantum states of every molecule involved — again maybe not always random.
4. The emotions and thoughts of every human on earth, maybe we aren’t always free from divine influence.

Poor atheists… start by proclaiming that Man is God, and they get to decide what’s true and real… and end by concluding we’re all as meaningless as dirt. Enjoy, I guess…

Photo by on

This series starts here:

Science Versus Religion? Silly Question. (Part 1)

Next episode:

Science Versus Religion? (Part 3)