The Success and Failure of Modern Science

The invention of logic and deduction by the Greeks is generally regarded as a watershed in western civilization. Less appreciated is how it retarded the discovery of science. Although the Greeks, like the Indians and Chinese, had made many astounding scientific discoveries, they never made the leap to the scientific method.

Throughout the medieval period, scholars held Aristotle and Ptolemy in near reverence and logical deduction was almost the exclusive tool of intellectual inquiry culminating with the Scholastics. Although the components of the scientific method were in long development, they did not really come together until around the 16th century. Methodological science would have to wait more than a millennium. Then human discovery and knowledge practically exploded.

Science, in its essence, is a marriage of logic and empiricism. There was no science so long as the former held primacy over the later. It did not occur to medieval scholars to test their logical deductions against observations and adjust them accordingly. The success and adoration of logic retarded the discovery of science.

Today we see something similar in the success of science. Scientists are disproportionately atheist, either formally or functionally. And most atheists base their convictions on science.

The success of science has crowded out faith and religion.

But faith, properly understood, is an essential ingredient of life. Science, itself, relies on faith and atheists can rightly be said to have placed their faith in the progress of science. Belief in science and materialism is not scientific.

Because we live in an uncertain world in which we are presented with choices that cannot await certainty we must speculate about the unknown in order to make the best decision that we can. We rely on our senses and on the knowledge of others including those who came before us.

Unlike science, religion is a philosophy that openly deals with the great unknowns, the big questions of life. Religion speculates. But it does so in a formal, methodological manner. Typically, atheists fail to appreciate religion because they imagine it to be in competition with science offering alternative explanations of the world.

The problem is that when religion is denied formally it doesn't go away, it simply hides. Scientism, the blind faith in science, rests on an unacknowledged faith in knowability of universe. The refusal to acknowledge the speculative nature of scientism places it outside the realm of reason. It becomes just another superstition.

Refusing to acknowledge the role of religion is not just dishonest, it is intellectually stunting.

Who knows what great discoveries away the proper integration of science and religion.

What Is Supernatural?

Giordano Bruno is generally credited with being the first to put forward the cosmology that we are all familiar with today. Bruno relied mainly on intuition but Galileo's discoveries using his telescope largely confirmed and began the popularization of the modern cosmological view.

Before Bruno and Galileo, the Aristotelian/Biblical Cosmology held that the universe was divided between heaven and earth. While we no longer divide the cosmos in this fashion, pretty much everyone still thinks in terms of the natural and the supernatural. Even atheists who deny the existence of the supernatural.

But what is supernatural?

Christianity holds that God created the cosmos. God is not, therefore, part of the cosmos. But God did create all manner of spiritual beings, angels and souls for example.

Science, on the other hand, concerns itself with what it can observe and predict. So it might seem that natural and supernatural can be so divided: that which can be observed and predicted is natural and the supernatural that which is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

But there are problems there too.

First, what is observable and predictable varies over time. Did the planets become natural when they became predictable or when we realized that they consisted of the same matter as the earth? Can we know what we might be able to observe and predict in the future?

Second, and perhaps as importantly, Christianity holds that human beings have observed the supernatural. Most plainly in the person of Jesus but others who have experienced the supernatural  include Abraham and Moses not to mention all who have witnessed miracles of one sort or another. Granted, human experience of the supernatural is rare and fleeting but if the supernatural were truly imperceptible there would be no Christianity.

There is a related problem: even within what we casually refer to as the natural world there is unobservability and unpredictability. We cannot, for example, observe the past or the future and despite the advance of science most of our daily experience involves the unpredictable. It is impossible, for example, to predict the stock market in part because any such prediction would affect it. We live in a very unpredictable cosmos.

Some atheists postulate a hard reductionist, materialist determinism operating through causality. According to this view, the cosmos operates like a giant mechanism (often a clock analogy is used). If we only knew the starting point and momentum for each particle we could predict the future with 100% reliability. But this theoretical view has been largely undermined by quantum and chaos theory. The cosmos is no longer regarded as even theoretically knowable or predictable.

The traditional Catholic solution is to make two separate distinctions. God is supernatural and all creation, including angels and souls, are natural. Additionally, the cosmos is divided between the spiritual and the material. God, angels and souls are spiritual but souls are joined to material bodies.

Using the terms this way, the scientific field of psychology, for example, can be said to be concerned with observing and predicting the spiritual as well as the material since human behavior is, in the Catholic concept, a manifestation of both the physical body and the spiritual soul.

The Falsifiability of Christianity

Is Christianity falsifiable?

One of the ways that religion is distinguished from science is the claim that scientific claims are falsifiable while religious claims are not. In theory at least, every scientific claim is open to refutation by new evidence. Science proceeds, more or less, by the constant refutation of wrong theories leaving only those that are right, or better, or at least not yet refuted. It is critical, in science, to state hypotheses and theories in such a way that they are falsifiable.

A belief which is not open to refutation, which is not falsifiable, is not scientific. But it may be religious. For example, you might have faith that God exists but lacking any way to test that belief it is not falsifiable. There is no conceivable evidence that could be presented which would refute your belief in God.

It is often assumed, therefore, that religion, in general, is not falsifiable and that this is what distinguishes it from science.

However, there does exist at least one test of Christianity. Among the most fundamental claims of Christianity is that Christ is risen. Saint Paul wrote, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." [1 Corinthians 15:14]

If it were to be shown that Christ were not risen Christianity would be essentially refuted. And one way to show that would be to find his burial ossuary. This is a claim that has been made at least once already, see the Lost Tomb of Jesus.

My point is not to debate this particular find but to simply challenge the conventional assumption that religion, and Christianity particularly, is not falsifiable.

Introduction

Welcome to Modern Heterodoxy.

My purpose here is to explore ideas at the intersection of religion and science treating both as serious and worthy subjects of intellectual inquiry.

I decided to write this blog in part out of frustration with other avenues of discourse. Opinion on religion and science form something of a barbell in two interesting ways. First, there is the distribution of adherents, most people identify themselves as primarily religious or scientific, often dismissing the other entirely. And, second, beginning roughly with the Enlightenment, religion and science had come into conflict and one of the most popular resolutions of that conflict was to treat them as separate domains of specialized knowledge, or knowledge systems.

Thus, today, scientists are loathe to involve themselves in religious matters and clerics generally steer clear of scientific debates. Even when scientists acknowledge a religious faith, they tend to compartmentalize their views.

This division can be expressed in many other ways: faith vs. reason, revelation vs. observation, morality vs. ethics, salvation vs. survival and happiness, divine knowledge vs. worldly wisdom.

Of course, there are, and have always been, dissenters from this truce.

Count me among them.

It's worth noting that the division is not only between science and religion. Religion, itself, is a broad subject encompassing many competing faiths. The very fact that competition in faith is so different from competition in science is, itself, revealing.

For the sake of simplicity, I will primarily explore this intersection of science and religion with reference to Roman Catholicism, the religion on which I was raised, though I will freely make reference both to Judaism and Protestantism.

As the title of this blog implies, however, I will not be hewing to orthodoxy. Most topics will entail heterodoxy, opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position. And, arguably, many will be heretical, directly conflicting. My main concern is the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads.

I invite your comments and will do my best to address them either in reply or in future posts. If you post an article on a related subject, or in reply to mine, do link to it in the comments.