In the last article, we have refuted about the claims about the indisputability of evolution. We also questioned the infallibility of science in last article. In this article, we will see more on what science is and its limitations.
What is science?
A.J. Carlson is a distinguished scientist, as is attested by his writings and by his presidency over the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Religious ideas and their relation to science have attracted his attention, and his conclusions are found in the twice-published article, “Science and the Supernatural." One must note what he says on the nature of science as well as what he says on its relation to religion. He writes, "Probably the most common meaning of science is a body of established, verifiable, and organized data secured by controlled observation, experience, or experiment….”
And he defines the method by which science gains knowledge when he says,” What is the method of science? In essence it is this—the rejection in toto of all non-observational and non-experimental authority in the field of experience….When no evidence is produced [in favor of a pronouncement] other than personal dicta, past or present ‘revelations’ in dreams, or the ‘voice of God’, the scientist can pay no attention whatsoever, except to ask: How do they get that way?"
So a summary of the above definitions would be that science gains knowledge by ‘controlled observation, experience or experiment’ with rejection of all ‘non-observational and non- experimental authority’.
John Robbins made some interesting observations about why science can never discover truth. He mentions 5 fallacies that science commits[1]:
1) Observation is unreliable
One line that one most commonly encounters when reading a textbook on any scientific subject goes something like this, “Repeated experiments have shown that… “. The above statement is used to convince the reader that the results of the experiments are reliable and should be accepted as fact. But why should an experiment is repeated if it is indeed true? Why not just do it once? This is to guard against inaccurate observations. And the results of the experiment most often do vary each time it is repeated. This is because of the number of errors that can influence the outcome. Hence numerous readings are required. This is so much a part of the scientific method that experiments with unrepeatable results are never taken seriously. All that this proves is that our senses are unreliable as indicators for the truth. They are very prone to error. And what about the instruments that we use to make the measurements we are making? They are prone to even more error. Then on what basis do we claim that the result of the repeated experiment is ‘fact’?
At this point I would also like to remind the readers that no one has yet ‘observed’ evolution. So they don’t have claim to this argument of science.
2) All scientific experiments commit the fallacy of asserting the consequent
In syllogistic format it can be worded like this, ‘If p, then q. q; therefore p’. This argument is fallacious because a number of different factors may lead to q and hence p can be replaced by a,b,c x or y. Hence the statement can no longer be asserted as the truth because it is not logically deducible.
Bertrand Russell stated It this way,” All inductive arguments in the last resort to the following form: "If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true." This argument is, of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: "If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing." If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the argument upon which all scientific laws are based.”
Gordon Clark explains, “If a student doggedly works through Plato’s Republic in Greek, he will know the Greek language; this student knows Greek; therefore he has read Plato’s Republic. This is the fallacy of asserting the consequent, and it is invalid whenever used. But it is precisely this fallacy that is used in every case of scientific verification. If the law of gravitation is true, a freely falling body will have a constant acceleration, and the eclipse will begin at 2:58:03p.m.; but freely falling bodies do have a constant acceleration and the eclipse did begin at 2:58:03 p.m.; therefore the law of gravitation is true. Or, if the periodic table of atomic weights is true, a new element of such and such a weight must exist; this new element has now been discovered; therefore the period table is verified. And, if I eat roast turkey and plum pudding, I lose my appetite; I have lost my appetite; therefore, we had roast turkey for dinner.”[2]
In the context of evolution the argument similarly asserts the consequent when it says,” If evolution is true then there will be similarities between the embryonic forms of lower forms like fishes and higher forms like humans. There are indeed similarities between the embryonic forms of fishes and humans… therefore the theory of evolution is true”. Similar arguments are used to advocate for evolution in the fields of comparative anatomy, molecular biology, behavioral psychology and numerous other fields.
I could rephrase the above statement to the following, “If an intelligent creator created all life forms then there will be similarities between the embryos of different life forms. There are indeed similarities between the embryos of different life forms; therefore an intelligent creator created all things.” This statement would also appear logical, but is as equally fallacious as the previous one.
Unfortunately many of the books and articles that are written against evolution use the above argument to propound the theory of intelligent design. For example one recent article that I read had the following statement,” negative evidences against evolution are, at the same time, strong positive evidences for special creation”[3].
This is why creation by an intelligent design can never be ‘proved’ scientifically any more than evolution can. One has to assume the same fallacious arguments and methods as science. But it can be used as a good ‘ad homenieum’ argument. In other words people have shown that creation is a better ‘scientific’ explanation than evolution is. We will look into this later on.
3) Science commits the fallacy of induction
Induction attempts of make a general statement or law based on observations of specifics. For example a man doing an experiment to determine the colour of crows would observe 999 crows which are black and state, based on his observations that all crows are black. But this statement is untrue. How can he claim that all crows are black when he has not seen all crows. What about crows that are albino? How can he assert about ‘ all crows’ when he does not know the colour of all the crows that have existed so far, or the ones that are about to be born. The best that he can do is to state, ‘all the crows that I have seen so far are black’. But to make a general rule or law based on this observation is fallacious. Remember we are talking about science discovering a true ‘law’ of nature which should be universally applicable and not just a reflection of majorities. This is not possible with inductive reasoning.
4) Equations are always selected, they are never discovered
Let us consider for a moment a scientist doing an experiment to determine say the boiling point of water.
Since water hardly boils at the same temperature, the scientist conducts a number of tests and the slightly differing results are noted. He then must average them. But what kind of average does he use: mean, mode, or median? He must choose; and whatever kind of average he selects, it is his own choice; it is not dictated by the data. Then too, the average he chooses is just that, that is, it is an
average, not the actual datum yielded by the experiment. [4]
By what experimental procedure does one determine that the average is the sought-for fact and that none of the observed readings is? Or, further, would it not be justifiable for the scientist to choose the mode, or the median, instead of the arithmetic mean? Is it not a fact that the mode is… —as much a fact at least as that the average is? Really, is it not more the fact, because the mode occurred several times in the list, while the mean has not occurred at all? Or, should we say that in this essential item of scientific procedure, science throws all the facts (observations) out the window and sticks to what is not a fact (the unobserved average)! Perhaps there is an aesthetic delight in averages that is not found in modes.[5]
But of course the problems don’t just end there. All scientific experiments have a degree of variable error. So the scientist has to subtract each of the observed values from the average and then find the average of these differences to calculate the variable error. Now he is left with the boiling point of water according to his experiment and assumptions, which looks something like 100.124 +/- 0.1. So it is like saying that the boling point is more or less this value.
Now what if the scientist is trying to determine a law of nature in which an experiment like the one done above is just a small part of a larger process. Then the problems become compounded even further. In order to derive an equation that defines the law of nature in question, the scientist is going to have to plot his readings from the experiment on a graph and from the curve that is obtained, derive his equation. But how does he plot points on a graph when each of his values have a variable error? So a value, say 100.124 is actually not 100.124, it is 100.124+/- 0.1. This of course can only be expressed as an area on a graph, and never as a single point. So now the graph shows a series of areas. But even a school kid will tell you that an infinite number of curves can be passed through a series of areas. But the scientist chooses to draw only one.
Once he has drawn his curve the scientist gets the equation that defines the curve, and voila! He has ‘demonstrated’ his law. Thus we see that, ”The particular law that the scientist announces to the world is not a discovery forced on him by so-called facts; it is rather a choice from among an infinity of laws all of which enjoy the same experimental basis”[6].
“It may be a fact that gold is heavier than water, but it is not a scientific fact; it may be a fact that the longer and the farther a body falls, the faster it goes, but Galileo was not interested in this type of fact. The scientist wants mathematical accuracy; and when he cannot discover it, he makes it. Since he chooses his law from among an infinite number of equally possible laws, the probability that he has chosen the "true" law is one over infinity, i.e. zero; or, in plain English, the scientist has no chance of hitting upon the "real" laws of nature”.[7]
5) All scientific laws describe ideal situations
Gordon Clark explains this perfectly by using the example of the law of the pendulum.
‘Take for example the law of the pendulum .It states that the period of the swing is proportional to the square root of the pendulum’s length. But when the scientific presuppositions of this law are examined, it will be found that the pendulum so described must have its weight concentrated at a point, its string must be tensionless, and there must be no friction on its axis. Since obviously no such physical pendulum ever existed, it follows that the law of the pendulum describes imaginary pendulums, and that physical pendulums do not obey the laws of physics. Note especially that the analysis does not separate pendulums under laboratory conditions from pendulums in living-room clocks, and does not conclude that in the laboratory, but not in the living room, the laws of physics hold. The analysis shows that no physical pendulum, no matter how excellent the laboratory, satisfies the scientist’s requirements. The scientist’s world is (on pre-Heisenberg theory) perfectly mathematical, but the sense world is not.’[8]
Now that we have been shown that science and its methods are flawed and always come to false or unjustifiable results. The scientific method of gaining knowledge by ‘controlled observation, experience or experiment’ with rejection of all ‘non-observational and non- experimental authority’, is in fact completely inaccurate. It can never hold claim to the ‘truth’ because by its methods, it can never know the true nature of anything. Contemplation of this truth led Albert Einstein to say, "We know nothing about it (the universe) at all… The real nature of things, that we shall never know, never."[9]
British Philosopher Karl Popper said, "We know that our scientific theories always remain hypotheses… In science there is no knowledge, in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth.’[10]
"On closer analysis we even find that science knows no ‘bare facts’ at all but that the ‘facts’ that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain way and are, therefore, essentially ideational.’[11]
Can we make scientific observation?
First, I will define what is meant by Scientific Observation. Observation is either an activity of a living being (such as a human), consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments.[12] The word sense is defined as ‘a faculty by which outside stimuli are perceived’.[13] The five traditional senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste according to Aristotle. In addition to these, there are five other type of senses, namely nociception (pain), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception and kinaesthesia (joint motion and acceleration), sense of time, thermoception (temperature differences).[14] If I am observing the color of a bird say, crow, and I have come to the conclusion that the color of the crow is black. The empiricist will claim to say that we acquired this knowledge of color through the sensory root of vision. Now the issue which we are going to look at is whether we can acquire knowledge through senses or not. Suppose you are standing on the road. At a distance, you are seeing something like a post box on the road. But as the time passes by, the size of the box like object increases and finally you are realizing that it is a truck. Let us go to other situation. Suppose your friend using a motor is rotating a metal disc at 5000rpm. Now the color of the disc is white. How do you know that it is white disc or disc with seven colors painted in it? With your sense observation, how can you get answers in case of the above two examples?
Empiricists believe that human mind is empty when a person is born. Aristotle said human mind is ‘tabula rasa’ i.e. blank mind at birth. Slowly as the person observes the surroundings through his senses, he gets to know about the universe. Imagine that a father is showing his child who has not seen a car in his life. Suppose if he is pointing to a green car standing near a building and says that that is a car, what do you think that boy should record in his mind according to this ‘blank mind’ theory? He should remember the following possibilities as car if the person is having ‘blank mind’:
1) Anything dad is pointing.
2) Anything which has green color
3) Anything which has building as background
4) Anything which has the similar shape of that car which his dad pointed out
All these are the limitations of science. Science is not true. All scientific laws are false. You might be shocked on hearing this. You can ask, then how is all the technological advancement like computers, vaccines, satellites, which are successful in this earth? All of these are based on science? If science is false, then how can these things work? These are the questions which might arise in your minds. I’ll give you one syllogism.
1) All Washington people are vegetarians
2) All vegetarians are Americans
3) Therefore all Washington people are Americans
In this above instance, the first and the second premises are false. But the conclusion from this is true. Definitely not all Washington people are vegetarians. Vegetarians are there even outside America. But the conclusion obtained from these two false premises is true. In the same way, just because science can do things and solve our problems with technology, it does not mean that it is true. So we should not think that science is infallible and we can find truth through science, rather it is a useful tool, which can be used either for creative or destructive purpose of human life. So with science, we cannot discover the truths about the real nature of universe (metaphysics). Science cannot be the source of knowledge for discovering the truth about nature (epistemology).
[1] John W. Robbins, Logic Seminar, Westminster Institute, July 1995, as quoted by W. Gary Crampton, The Biblical View of Science, The Trinity review, January 1997
[2] Gordon. H. Clarke, Science and Truth, The Trinity Review; May, June 1981
[3] The Scientific Case against Evolution,
[5] Gordon. H. Clarke, Science and Truth, The Trinity Review; May, June 1981
[6] ibid
[7] ibid
[8] ibid
[9] Cited in the foreword of Gordon. H. Clark, The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God ,The Trinity Foundation 1987
[10] ibid
[11] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, as quoted by W. Gary Crampton, The Biblical View of Science, The Trinity review, January 1997
[12] Wikipedia June 2010 under topic ‘observation’
[13] www.eioba.com/a7019
[14] JewishEncyclopedia.com-Senses, the five
If you have liked this, you can also read Evolution- Masterpiece or Myth
Wow this is amazing, Thanks for the detailed explanation.I was looking for something like this.Now I know why empirical epistemology cannot stand under hard critical analysis.
ReplyDeleteKeep writing...GB