This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm
This series has been delayed several times. I had originally planned to do a series of essays on religion and the philosophy of science back in April of last year, but when the pandemic came along I decided against doing anything that would even hint at being critical of science. To be clear—and this is a point I will be bringing up repeatedly over the course of this essay and the next two so as not to be mistaken—I am fully pro-science in every respect. I believe in an old Earth, in a spheroid Earth, in natural selection by evolution, in anthropogenic climate change, and in the importance of vaccinations, and I believe these things because of my trust in science. This is a trust that I will be defending over the course of these essays, but in the process, I will be debunking some common beliefs about what science is, and last April was not the time for that.
I then planned to do this series in December, but then my series on the pathologies of religion and ideology ended up requiring two months, so I had to bump it again. Then I broke my hand and had to bump it again while I recovered. To be honest, it’s been tempting to bump it yet again, because in the intervening time I’ve accumulated an enormous amount of research on the subject and in order to get through it all I’d probably need at least another six months, but whatever the subject, there’s always going to be more research, more to learn, more to discover, and if I waited until I knew everything I’d never get anything done. So here it is, for the next half hour or so and for the next two episodes I have planned for this month: A Satanist Reads the Bible discusses religion and the philosophy of science.
I’ll open by summarizing my opinions on science: It’s good that science be trusted by the general public because science warrants that trust. As I said earlier, that’s a trust that I intend to defend over the course of these essays. That said, popular beliefs in the nature of science, scientific progress, scientific knowledge, scientific method, and the like, are generally very dogmatic, inaccurate, and at times approach an unwarranted degree of near-religious reverence.
I grew up watching the scientific advocacy of Carl Sagan on public television. I spent much of my childhood aspiring to be either a chemist or an astrophysicist. I think that likely would have been the course of my life had not my useless, ignorant grade school teachers discouraged me from it due to their perception of my ineptitude at mathematics. (I discovered later in life that I actually enjoy mathematics and am rather good at it; what is taught in American grade schools, however, is not something that can properly be called mathematics, and my lack of skill in that area was likely due to an understandable childhood disinterest in what amounts to tedious, repetitive, and pointless data entry work). Given such a background, it might seem odd that I’d spend some 15,000 words seeking to dissuade people from certain beliefs about what science is when many of those beliefs are entirely superlative. But here’s the thing: because of my love of science, I want it to be understood for exactly what it is, nothing more or less, and I think many of the popular beliefs about science either understand it as being much less than what it is, or much more, and both are problematic. Given the enormous role that science plays in our lives, we owe ourselves the best possible understanding of what it is, what it can and should do for us, and what it can’t or shouldn’t.
These questions—questions about the nature of science itself—are part of the field of inquiry known as philosophy of science. I remember being surprised to learn that there even was such a thing, as I had always considered philosophy and science to be entirely different things. And, while what we now call science was originally a branch of philosophy, they have indeed become distinct branches of inquiry, though what falls in to which category is a subject of perpetual misunderstanding and something I aim to address in these essays. In any case, science itself, as with anything, is a viable subject of philosophy.
I’ve seen from discussions on the internet that people can be a bit prickly when it comes to the matter of interrogating science as a source of truth and knowledge, and given the current intellectual climate in much of the world, I don’t think that’s at all unwarranted. It may seem arrogant that I, living in a heated home, typing this up on a laptop more powerful than the computers used to get humans to the moon, reading this into a condenser microphone plugged into an audio interface connected to a digital audio workstation with more technical capabilities than the studios used by the Beatles to record their classic albums, am using all this to question the very methodology which brought me these things in the first place, but science is fundamentally about inquiry and when we stop asking questions just because it’s worked out well for us, we do an injustice to the very spirit of the discipline. And besides, much of my investigations will concern not so much what science can do as what it should do.
The risk is that science become what the philosopher Daniel Dennett, following psychologist Philip Tetlock, calls a sacred value, a value that is “so important to those who hold [it] that the very act of considering [it] is offensive” (2007, p. 22). I think that scientists would agree that the truth has everything to gain and nothing to fear from inquiry. Scientist Hugh Gauch, whose book Scientific Method in Practice (2003) has been one of my core sources for this series of essays, agrees with this: “…[A] trial by fire, by being exposed to arguments against science’s rationality, offer scientists their best chance to uproot complacency and thereby to really understand the principles of scientific method” (p. 77).
I’ll be exploring this more in the next two episodes, but the 5th Tenet of the Satanic Temple reads as follows: “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs” (Tenets, n.d.). Without reading into it more than I think it’s intending to say, I think this is excellent advice. I take this to essentially mean that one should not hold unscientific beliefs. I agree with that, and I’ll be examining what constitutes an “unscientific belief” further on. But looking at it in a more literal way, it has some problems, chief among which is that our best understanding of the world is not scientific—at least, not in the way that science is traditionally and popularly understood—and our best science is not something that we understand. “Best scientific understanding,” then, is not something that actually exists.
Let’s start with quantum mechanics, which stands at present as our most advanced theory of the physical world. This requires some grounding both in science and physics in general and in classical, or Newtonian, mechanics, the theory which preceded it.
One of my main sources in looking into these questions has been the popular science book Something Deeply Hidden (2019) by quantum physicist Sean Carroll. Carroll’s book argues a position—that we should accept a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics as the correct one—with which I disagree, but he nevertheless presents an accessible, informed, and accurate perspective on the subject matter in question and tackles the questions of philosophy of science as they apply to quantum physics in an honest and revealing way.
Much of the scientific tradition can be traced back to the 4th century BCE Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle, student of the philosopher Plato. Science was practiced by humans for thousands of years prior to Aristotle, but his writings are some of the earliest we have on the subject that haven’t been lost or destroyed. Aristotle sought to understand the causes of phenomena, the reasons why things are the way they are. He described these causes in terms of four categories, which I think are best explored through example, and as I often do, I’ll use the example of one of my fountain pens, a TWSBI Diamond 580. What is it that caused this pen to be what it is, and to exist at all? First is what Aristotle called the material cause, and in the case of the pen, the material cause is plastic resin and metal alloy, the materials which compose it. If the pen were made of different materials, it would be a different pen, or something else entirely. Next is the formal cause: the pen is what it is because it has a particular shape and structure. Again, if the pen had a different form, it would either be a different pen or a different kind of thing. The efficient cause is what we typically mean when we use the word cause: it’s the story of how it came to be. I don’t know all the details here, but the efficient cause of the pen goes back to the Big Bang, the formation of various atomic elements in the hearts of stars, their distribution throughout the galaxy, their accumulation in the stellar disk from which the Earth was formed, and their collection, transformation, and assembly in a factory in Taiwan based on the designs of (most likely) several illustrators and engineers. And what was the purpose behind the design and manufacture of the pen? This is Aristotle’s final cause, which in this case was to create a tool for the act of writing and a commodity which could be sold for a profit. Aristotle endorsed a philosophy called teleology, which focuses on the ends and purposes of things, and indeed believed that everything in the universe had a purpose and thus a final cause. There is, of course, disagreement with Aristotle on this point, and later philosophers such as David Hume and Bertrand Russell would actually go so far as to jettison the notion of cause entirely as it’s not something that we ever actually observe directly.
Whether accurately or not, Aristotle is credited with the creation of scientific method, which is a systematic process for conducting science and answering the kinds of questions that Aristotle was asking. Scientific method is often spoken of as the scientific method, and that will serve as the first misunderstanding of science that I’ll address in these essays. There is not one single scientific method which is applied universally in all scientific activity, nor is there universal consensus as to why or how the scientific method works. In the aforementioned book Scientific Method in Practice (2003), scientist Hugh Gauch quotes the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in stating that “The scientific method’ is often misrepresented as a fixed sequence of steps,’ rather than being seen for what it truly is, ‘a highly variable and creative process’” (p. 3). The basic idea is simple enough: hypotheses are tested through experiment. One observes the world, makes a conjecture (a hypothesis) as to the reasons for what is observed, makes predictions based on that hypothesis, and performs an experiment to see whether those predictions hold.
Moving on to the matter of physics, when we look around at the universe we inhabit, we see a great deal of stuff, which we call matter. What is this stuff exactly and how does it behave? These are the questions that led us to the development of physics as a branch of scientific inquiry, and physics is generally understood as being able to provide objectively true answers to those questions by applying the scientific method and confirming hypotheses through experiment. Whether or not that understanding is accurate is a matter that will be addressed further on. For the moment, let’s examine the understanding of the world provided to us by the framework known as classical, or Newtonian, mechanics.
Classical mechanics takes our basic observations about matter—that objects have masses as well as positions in space that change deterministically as a result of various forces—as a given and describes these observations mathematically. The word “deterministic” is of critical importance here. The basic idea is that, if we know the mass, position, and velocity of an object and the sum of all the forces acting upon it, we can precisely and accurately predict how its position will change over time. The concepts here are easy enough to understand but the implications are staggering. According to classical mechanics, it is possible, at least in principle, to do this with every particle in the universe and thus learn its complete history and future. Under classical mechanics, the universe itself is deterministic and its entire future was set forth from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Things like chance and probability are only reflections of our lack of knowledge about the outcomes of seemingly random events like rolling dice; according to classical mechanics, probability is only a mathematical description of this lack of knowledge with no basis in reality, a reality which is fixed and unwavering in a course that was set from its very first moments.
We’ve been able to achieve remarkable things using this framework and the mathematical formulas associated with it—they work perfectly well in almost all cases—and despite that, we happen to know that it is, at the most fundamental level, incorrect. Classical mechanics was modified over the course of its history by such things as the relativistic theory of Albert Einstein, but these were only refinements of the overall framework. Around the beginning of the 20th century, certain anomalies had appeared within the framework of classical mechanics and the new theory of quantum mechanics was developed to account for these anomalies. Quantum mechanics is incompatible with classical mechanics and the understanding of the universe given to us by classical mechanics is now known to be erroneous.
How can this be? How can our predictions be so consistently accurate when the theory they’re based on is known to be false? Well, we don’t know, and that in itself isn’t really surprising. Quantum mechanics is a relatively recent development in science and it’s understandable that we wouldn’t have all the answers yet. One of the great things about science is that “We don’t know” is always an acceptable answer when it’s the truth. What is surprising is that there’s no consensus among scientists that those sorts of questions are even ones that science should be bothering with. And what’s more surprising still is that there’s no consensus among philosophers of science that these sorts of questions are ones that science is even capable of answering at all.
According to classical mechanics, the world is much as it appears. No interpretation of the theory is required in order for it to mesh with our experiences (Carroll, 2019, ch. 1, para. 44); unless one is travelling near light speed or in the vicinity of a massive gravity well, what you see is what you get. According to quantum mechanics, on the other hand, the way the world appears to us and the way the world actually is are two very different things. The crowning achievement of quantum mechanics is the Schrödinger equation, which, like the equations of classical mechanics, describes how a physical system evolves over time. Curiously, the output of the equation is probabilistic rather than deterministic. If the equations of classical mechanics are applied to, for example, an electron, we can, given the initial position and velocity of the electron and the sum of forces acting upon it, perfectly predict its trajectory. Under quantum mechanics, electrons do not have determinate positions or velocities and the Schrödinger equation gives us the probabilities of it being found at different locations or having different velocities when those properties are measured (and it’s not possible to determinately measure both at the same time).
If we want to explain why the world that appears to us is so different from the mechanics that govern its behavior, we need an interpretation of the theory. Several are available and we don’t know which of them—if any—is the correct one, but in general the matter of interpretation is something that physicists avoid bothering with at all (Carroll, 2019, prologue, para. 14). The popular understanding of science is that it seeks to understand the natural world (ibid., ch. 1, para. 83), to know not only how the world works but why it works that way. Scientists, or at least physicists, largely disagree, with most subscribing to what is referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (Schlosshauer et al., 2013), famously summed up by the physicist N. David Mermin as “Shut up and calculate!” (Mermin, 2008). However much we might desire to make sense of quantum mechanics, we don’t require an interpretation to be able to use the mathematics to make perfectly accurate predictions. Quantum mechanics has consistently proven itself able to make these predictions and we’ve been able to apply it to all manner of problems and develop new technologies based on it, and according to the Copenhagen interpretation, this is all that is required (Carroll, ch. 1, para. 78). We have the mathematical framework and anything else falls outside the scope of science.
Of course, not all physicists agree with this approach. Albert Einstein didn’t (Carroll, ch. 2, para. 14), and as I mentioned before, physicist Sean Carroll advocates for a particular interpretation, which is called the Everett or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but my point here is that we’ve landed on some distinctions between the actual practice of science and how it is understood by people in general.
We see that, first of all, the notion that there is one single consensus scientific understanding of the world is simply mistaken. Scientists do not collectively agree on the way that the world is. The problems with the popular understanding of science continue to mount from here, and by way of once again preempting any claims that any of this constitutes an anti-science perspective, I’ll remind my listeners that my citations here have been and will continue to be drawn largely from science books written by scientists. Hugh Gauch, the aforementioned scientist and author of Scientific Method in Practice, embraces these inquiries into the nature of science, writing, “Intellectual growth often is limited more by lack of good questions than by lack of accurate answers. So scientists can benefit greatly from penetrating and disturbing questions that are intended to unsettle science, even if the final result for most of them is to affirm science’s traditional claims with new insight and greater conviction” (2003, pp. 80-81).
The 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper was concerned with questions of what exactly demarcates science: what is science and what isn’t? Looking to Einstein’s theories of relativity as a clear example of scientific theory, the criterion that he ultimately landed on was falsifiability: a theory is scientific if and only if it can be proved false through empirical observation. Einstein’s theories, for example, claimed that the apparent positions of certain stars would shift when observed during a total eclipse of the sun, and this was tested by an expedition in 1919. Had the expedition confirmed that the apparent position of the stars had not shifted, the theory would have been definitively proven false, and that is precisely what makes those theories scientific, according to Popper. The problem follows from this is described quite pithily by Gauch: “…Popper offered his demarcation criterion of falsifiability to separate science from non-science, but at the cost of separating science from truth” (p. 82). In my opinion, this overstates the case a bit: to know that a given theory is false is still to know something true; we would know that it is true that a given theory is false. But according to Popper, science can only provide us with truth in this negative sense. The 1919 expedition confirmed Einstein’s predictions, but it is at least remotely possible that those observations could be explained just as well by a different theory, which leads to the next problem: observations underdetermine theories.
To say that one thing underdetermines another is to say that the second thing is not conclusively determined by the first thing. In his book, Gauch states: “For any given set of observations, it is always possible to construct infinitely many different and incompatible theories that will fit the data equally well” (p. 83). This is a remarkable claim and he provides several citations to support it: the 1984 book Scientific Realism by the philosopher Jarrett Leplin, the 1995 paper “Does Every Theory Have Empirically Equivalent Rivals?” by psychologist and philosopher André Kukla, the 1994 paper “Empirical Equivalence, Underdetermination, and Systems of the World” by philosophers Carl Hoefer and Alexander Rosenberg, and the 1975 paper “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World” by philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. This last paper is the most famous of the set and the one I’m already familiar with.
As is typical for Quine, “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World” is intricate, difficult, elegant, and highly logical. It’s hard to see what exactly he’s getting at until one has read through to the end, and then everything pops sharply into focus: he proceeds from the base concept of the scientific theory and eliminates various formulations of underdetermination until he lands on one, which he describes as “modest and vague” (p. 327), that cannot be ruled out. His ultimate endorsement of that formulation is likewise modest and somewhat less strong than Gauch’s statement indicates.
The article on underdetermination on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, 2017) gives the following analogy for Quine’s formulation: imagine a Cartesian coordinate plane and a point on that plane. How many functions contain that point as a solution? Even if we restrict ourselves only to linear functions, there are infinitely many possibilities. Now add another point: only one line passes through both, but still an infinite number of other functions. Continue to add points in this fashion. With every point added, an infinite number of possibilities will be eliminated, and an infinite number will remain. A more concrete example in the same article supplied by philosopher Bas van Fraassen notes that Newton’s laws are consistent with our observations whether we assume that the universe is at rest or moving as a whole in any one of an infinite number of velocities.
There is disagreement as to how much underdetermination threatens scientific epistemology; my opinion is that the threat is minimal and of little practical concern, but the picture it paints of science differs from science as it is commonly understood. My point here has not been to suggest that science is wrong or misguided in itself, but rather that the picture we have of what science is and what it can provide for us are not entirely accurate, and this has implications for its implementation, which I’ll be getting to.
The most famous criticism of the popular understanding of science comes from the philosopher Thomas Kuhn and his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’ve discussed on the show before. Science is popularly conceived of as accumulating knowledge through a gradual and incremental process, with each new discovery building on the last. According to Kuhn’s model, drawn from a close observation of the history of science, this is not how science truly operates in practice. Rather, according to Kuhn, science operates within a paradigm, a particular model of the way the world is, and proceeds to articulate that paradigm through the process of what Kuhn calls normal science. Rather than seeking to better understand the world, normal science takes a paradigmatic understanding as a given and works to describe the world in those terms, suppressing novelties and anomalies, which are empirical findings that do not fit within the paradigm. When such anomalies pile up, the process of normal science breaks down until a scientific revolution occurs and establishes a new paradigm, at which point normal science resumes. Kuhn observes that paradigms are incommensurable; they are fundamentally different understandings of the world with no common measure, and this presents something of a problem:
If… out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter. Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.
2012, p. 3
Other criticisms of science emerged over the latter half of the 20th century and especially during the 1990’s, a period described in some academic journals as the “science wars.” What remains unavoidably the case despite these criticisms is that science has shown itself capable of making increasingly accurate predictions over an increasingly broad range of phenomena over the course of history. Thus, when the scientific community tells us that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, or that vaccines are a safe and effective way of preventing disease, or that Earth’s climate will continue to rapidly warm unless we making sweeping changes to our industrial processes and consumption habits, we have good reason to believe them. Our lackof certainty that science is capable of providing us with fundamental, objective, universal truth is not a barrier to our being able to use it for the betterment of human life. What is important is that we be able to recognize how it works and why it works and that we possess an understanding of its scope, an understanding of when it’s applicable at all and when it’s not.
What science cannot do is provide us with values, even values regarding science itself. Values cannot be empirically observed. Values cannot be falsified. As the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber pointed out in the early 20th century, the science of medicine can extend the human lifespan but cannot tell us when it is right to do so: medicine does not and cannot ask when and whether life is worth living (Weber, 1958, p. 144). Questions such as “how can we destroy an entire city with a single bomb” or “how can we efficiently exterminate an entire people” are perfectly scientific, with answers that can be and have been obtained through scientific method, and there is nothing in science to say that those are abominable things which should never be done.
The astrophysicist and public educator Neil deGrasse Tyson famously stated that science is true “whether or not you believe in it” (Gupta, 2014), which is really a very stupid thing to say—or, at the least, a very stupid way of saying what it was that he probably meant—for a number of reasons. Firstly, no truth is contingent upon belief in the first place; Tyson’s statement implies that there are some fields of discourse in which things are true because they are believed to be true, and that science is not that way. Second, science does not have a truth value. Truth is a property of claims, and science is not a claim but rather a methodology and a field of discourse in which claims are made. Science is neither true nor false. We can make the claim “scientific claims are true,” but there are some problems with this as well. One is that, as we’ve seen, there are claims, such as those of Newtonian mechanics, which are both scientific and false; and two, that claim cannot itself be evaluated scientifically—to do so would be to beg the question, as we would have to presuppose the truth of the claim in the first place. We might take Tyson to mean both that scientific claims are true and that it doesn’t matter whether or not people believe them. While it’s true that the truth of scientific claims is independent of any belief in that truth, the belief in science or lack thereof has significant practical applications. The truth that vaccines are an effective way of preventing disease does not itself prevent disease; people do indeed have to believe in that in order to effect that reality, as only if they believe in the efficacy of vaccines will they have them administered in the first place.
I’ve found that the arrogance and flippancy that Tyson displays here is actually quite typical of his discourse, and illustrates the problem with much of popular scientific thinking, even as it exists among scientists: it amounts to a belief, absent evidence and even in light of evidence to the contrary, that science is equivalent to truth, that everything that is scientific is also true and that everything that we know to be true has come to us from science. This mindset is sometimes referred to as scientism, which Wikipedia describes as “the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values” (“Scientism,” 2021). Being a belief that science is indefeasible, this position is, plainly put, a dogma.
We can find another example of scientism at work in the 2004 book The End of Faith by neuroscientist and famous antireligious atheist Sam Harris. Harris’s book is largely an argument against all religious belief, an argument predicated in part on his beliefs about the validity of science, and includes a sub-argument claiming that moral values can be scientifically determined: “A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures” (2005, pp. 170-171). Harris writes as if he’s stumbled on a new and revolutionary way of thinking about morality when this is actually an approach (typically referred to as utilitarianism) that goes back at least as far as the philosophers of ancient Greece. Not only has he failed to engage with any of the literature on the topic, he blithely hand-waves the necessity of doing so in the book’s notes, claiming that the philosophy isn’t relevant because he’s not approaching the questions philosophically (ibid., p. 272). Harris’s conclusions from his “rational approach to ethics” include unrestricted violence against Muslims (ibid., pp. 52-53), an endorsement of torture (ibid., p. 198), something bordering on an endorsement of fascism (“The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists,” Harris, 2006), and the remarkable claim that the West holds a position of moral superiority not because we never massacre the innocent, but because we feel bad about it when we do (2005, p. 144). Purely rational, utilitarian justifications can indeed be provided for each of these positions; had Harris engaged with the extensive philosophical literature on the subject, he might have come to realize the limitations of purely utilitarian thinking and thus the limitations of his own moral judgement before arriving at abhorrent positions.
As I mentioned, Harris implements his scientism in part in an argument against religion. Even when not taken to the level of scientism, science and religion often come into direct conflict. This relationship between science and religion will be the subject of the next essay.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited and Referenced
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