Matthew Slyman : Scientific views

Science and Philosophy

On the strengths and limitations of the scientific method, and its inapplicability to certain aspects of religious philosophy.

Why does the human spirit yearn for truth, for understanding, for reliable answers to childlike existential questions?
Is it merely curiosity that sends us groping in the dark, searching restlessly for the answers to... Just what?

Truth is eternal

Some things are true regardless of what we think, say or do, or what our perspective may be. For example, in the pure counting numbers (disregarding symbolic representation); one plus one must always equal two. Such truths were not created, but simply exist. The influence of such truths on our minds is sometimes called the light of truth; since it may illuminate our understanding with insight from beyond the limits of our own faculties; or in other words, enlighten us with contributions to our understanding that we cannot attribute to any other source than truth itself. Photograph of solitary illuminated flower on forest floor at Danes Dyke, North Landing, East Yorkshire.

Truth's transcending power...

A shaft of light shines past the giants
brightening one flower
A symbol of the Truth's defiance
and transcending power...

While walking in woodland near the East coast of England, a solitary flower on the forest floor caught my eye as it was illuminated by a single ray of sunshine penetrating the canopy of leaves. This verse of poetry was almost immediately inspired by the very scene depicted in this photograph.

The investigation of truth: a noble human instinct

The pursuit of truth is an innate and noble characteristic of the human mind and heart; often motivated by dissatisfaction in lacking answers to important questions of life. We may observe in the behaviour of young children that truth has an intrinsic value independent of cultural or religious persuasion.

The eternal nature of truth itself is inspiring. We may honour ideas and obey principles we consider absolutely true, valuing the permanence and immutability of eternal truth above the temporary character of our lives on Earth. This poignant comparison impresses us with a sense of inescapable natural justice transcending personal preferences or beliefs. Many people have died for what they believed to be truth, considering their cause even more important than their own lives. Some of the ugliest acts in human history were perpetrated by people who felt justified through their mistakenly perceived possession of some incontrovertible truth. Conversely, a common understanding of actual truth may unify a people and help preserve peace by securing common consent, approval and collaborative effort for procedures that are painful but necessary for our common wellbeing; providing powerful motivation to ascertain truth and convince our fellow-men of the mutually beneficial truths in our possession.

The scientific method of approaching truth

The scientific method has brought many material benefits through the application of those theories most apt to withstand rigorous evidence-based cross-examination (those theories which therefore, we suppose, approach nearest to the truth.)

In the scientific method:

The physical properties of the universe are observed.
One or more hypotheses are formulated (within the scope of their originators imagination, training, prejudices and inspiration) which theories are perceived by their proponents as consistent with observed facts. An alternative hypothesis is added to this collection of hypotheses, covering the case where none of the proposed hypotheses are correct.
Unbiased experiments are designed to help determine which of the hypotheses is closest to being correct, most often by eliminating from consideration those hypotheses least likely to be correct. In order to do this, the proponents and detractors of the various hypotheses reformulate these hypotheses as predictions of as-yet-unknown (but experimentally observable or otherwise provable/ disprovable) hypothetical data.
The experiments are performed to eliminate the least likely hypotheses from consideration, and/or to strengthen evidence for the best hypotheses. If all proposed hypotheses are disproven or found to be a poor explanation of experimental data, or if the results are inconclusive; the scientists return to a previous stage of this process.
The surviving hypotheses are codified in a communicable format and more widely applied in making economically relevant predictions. The most successful and accurate theories are used with confidence as part of a general scientific framework for generating new ideas and product designs.

Advantages of the scientific method

As a method of obtaining reliable data (in fields such as astronomy, physics, geology, metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, biology and medicine); the scientific method has significant and demonstrable advantages over known or traditional alternatives such as inexact observations propagated as folklore (as found in traditional herbology.) The advantages of the scientific method have been well documented and widely promoted in late 20^th–century and early 21^st–century western culture.

Limitations of the scientific method include:

Only principles accessible to human imagination (and for which this human imagination may devise experiments) may be scientifically tested as hypotheses. (The limitations of imagination and the prejudices of the scientist's training are demonstrated when two scientists draw differing conclusions from the same data, or when observed data remain unexplained for extended periods of time until someone proposes a plausible explanation.)
Presently unobservable phenomena, that might never be directly observable by mortal man. For example, we cannot see to the edge of the universe; even though we can estimate the distance of the furthest objects we can observe, there is no sure indication that the observable universe is the limit of existence... Similarly, there is no concrete indication that the subatomic particles currently being discovered are the smallest form of matter (the very name “atom” is ironic in this respect.)
Infrequent, unpredictable and unreproducible phenomena, unsusceptible to being triggered or influenced by anything we might do experimentally. (Current examples include black-hole formation, supernova events, etc.) All we can hope to do in these cases is to improve our observation and recording techniques to observe as many such phenomena as possible over extended periods of time, continually improving our hypotheses to gradually approach truth more closely.
Truth itself is immutably infinite (see Gödel's theorems for one proof.) Science is immutably finite, since it relies on a finite number of brain-cells and/or finite-state automata for its acquisition and analysis; of lesser complexity and/or numerical magnitude than the particles or systems being observed. Therefore, while science might continually approach nearer to absolute truth, it cannot reach a state of absolute knowledge.

Despite the progress of science, infinitely many truths may always be in some way outside the scope or observable range of any experimental data we may gather. Scientists (as human beings) are (like the rest of us) inherently reliant on the ideas or inspiration that come to them in response to the stimuli they observe and decide to pursue. Because science is forever bound to the study of the countably finite, the frequent, the commonly observable and repeatable, the imaginable etc.; science may not even be aware of many questions relating to the infinite.

Answers to prevalent myths surrounding the scientific method

The limits of human reasoning

According to Gödel's theorem, there will always be truths beyond the scope of any finite model representing them. (Gödel's theorem proves this for number theory, which is a subset of all truth. It shows that any potential “all-encompassing number-theory” must be powerful enough to express basic arithmetic (whatever else it can express), and if so, the proposed theory cannot encompass all of number theory; regardless of the mutual consistency of all true propositions. Therefore no finite theory can possibly encompass all numeric truths, let alone all truths. The composition of multiple theories can only produce another theory that is also covered by Gödel's theorem. Therefore, there will always be truths outside the scope of all the best finite theories combined. Gödel's theorem is not a message of abject doom-and-gloom for the scientific community as it does not demonstrate that a particular fixed question may be formulated that will never be answered by Science. However, since all scientific theories are finite, Gödel's theorem does show that regardless of how far the scientific community progresses in solving problems that were previously intractable, there will always be questions that have not yet been answered by science.)

If the preceding diagram was drawn to true scale, the areas representing “all true propositions” and “all false propositions” would be infinite in scale (perhaps with different infinities representing each.) This diagram is a only rough sketch; there may be possibilities or concepts that have not been represented, for example, there may (as explained later in this article) be truths that are known to some yet are not provable by the scientific method.

The current popular “scientific” perception of the human being is as a biological/ electronic machine with a intricate endocrine (chemical signalling) system. This type of system is by its very nature imprecise... A purely biological creature may perceive truths with relative certitude, however he may not directly discern absolute truth at all. If the biological picture of the human being is complete then we may confidently state that human beings are incapable of reaching any absolute truth via the “scientific method” at all; since a purely biological creature may only approach absolute truth incrementally through experience and experimentation, and at the conclusion of his studies, may never be totally certain that his senses are not fooling him, and that inconsistencies in ones perspective have been overlooked. Therefore paradoxically, if science was the only valid method of approaching truth and our current scientific understanding was complete, as biological creatures swimming in a sea of probabilistic quantum wavicles we could never know anything for certain and would be most ill-placed to assert something so sweeping and grand in scope as that the scientific method was the only method of approaching truth. Therefore, the popular western view of the scientific method as the only valid way to approach absolute truth is at best unsubstantiated; and at worst, anyone positing this proposition is actually claiming special and private knowledge of truths outside the realms of science and therefore contradicting themselves.
Due to the very nature of the biological human mind, with its imperfections and inexact mechanisms of calculation; we might well conclude that we cannot truly “know” anything at all; unless other methods of “knowing” are available that are, as yet, unknown to empirical science. Even when judiciously consulting respected forebears, we may never be completely certain to what degree we are influenced by the Zeitgeist, or the peer-pressure of our local cultural prejudices.

Discontinuities in the progress of science

Living in the modern world with the improvements in material quality-of-life that we enjoy; we have become acclimatised to the idea of the constancy of progression. In our limited viewpoint and with our fallible minds, as we keenly observe the present progress and forgetfully overlook the present retrogression; we comfortably presume that mankind has likewise been progressing in terms of culture, science and civilization at every locus in geography and history; and cheerfully predict that this observed progression will continue indefinitely into the future. A brief examination of history will expose this self-deception, which is at once contradicted by observing that archaeology is considered “romantic” precisely because it comprises the rediscovery of ancient knowledge that has long-since been lost.

A few examples of ancient knowledge and expertise, since lost to humanity; include:

Various ancient civilisations including the Greeks and certain Latin American cultures have demonstrated extraordinary sophistication in their astronomical, navigational and calendrical knowledge.
The Romans anciently used varieties of Concrete technology; a skill that was lost to mankind for 13 centuries.
The design concept of a pin tumbler lock, believed to have been used anciently in Egypt; was reinvented by Linus Yale in 1860.
Languages extinct from antiquity have been partially decoded through discoveries like the Rosetta Stone and through reconstructive forensic techniques.
The Library of Alexandria was burnt and destroyed. The intellectual wealth from this library, which we know from ancient sources to have been very great, has mostly never been recovered.

“The scientists know everything”

Another false assumption often made by the population at large is that if they don't know something, at least the scientists know the answer, and you can always go on Google or Wikipedia to find it out... Because scientists rarely promote fields of science in which they are not personally expert, and because unexplained data are rarely published in popular mass-media. The list of basic facts unknown to science includes some surprising entries. At the time of writing, we do not know:

How heavy a kilogram is (if you want to know the answer to within eight significant decimal digits.) This is particularly surprising when considering that the standard kilogram is at the foundation of almost all modern scientific measurements.
Why the Earth has a magnetic field (note conflicting evidences about the old Dynamo theory...)
Unknown factors relating to the “Big Bang” theory:

Whether the expansion of the Universe is accelerating or decelerating (or whether matter attracts or repels at the largest scale.) 2010 Addendum: There is an increasing consensus in the scientific world around the belief that the expansion of the Universe, between galaxies and clusters of galaxies, is actually accelerating. However, nobody really knows what might be causing this acceleration, which does not fit into the standard model of statistics without some massive fudge-factors called “dark matter” and “dark energy”.
How many “big bangs“ there have been, or how many “universes” still exist from such explosions.
Whether or not the universe has a physical boundary; and if so, what shape it is. (This may be related to the number of physical dimensions.)
How many dimensions there are at the smallest and largest scales of space and matter.

How the Sun's power-output varies over time, and how this might affect weather on Earth. Certain things are known on this subject, but considering the amount of money spent & work done on nuclear physics, and the amount of supercomputer calculation power available to this discipline; it is surprising that so little is known about the workings of the Sun, a very near star that some of the greatest scientific minds and instruments observe continually.

Experience has shown, and theory suggests, that even once scientists have defined or discovered the answers to all of these questions, we will become aware of other questions, greater in number and scale, to which we still do not know the answers.

As Stephen Hawking said recently,: “We understand enormous amounts, but when asked how did it all come to be, we don't have one single answer. Yet.”

Certain questions may be firmly outside the scope of science

As C.S.Lewis explained in his book, “Miracles”; a miracle is precisely so called because it falls outside the scope of prior human experience; above the powers of human reasoning, beyond the powers of the human mind to explain it, or beyond the powers of human influence to repeat it... Yet many miracles are facts attested by numerous witnesses. What can Science say about such well-attested events as the resurrection of Christ? (The cynic may point the finger and call the numerous ancient witnesses a smokescreen for the lack of extant “scientific” evidence; yet this pointed finger does not in any way mitigate the inadequacy of Science in dealing with such questions; it only points three fingers back at the cynic, and makes the statement an admission of unwillingness to exercise faith in a belief that is perfectly harmless and quite beneficial so long as it is not mixed up with any religious fanaticism or bigotry.) As Science may be an inherently incomplete means of understanding the Universe, such questions about miraculous events (particularly where evidence is devoid of historical precedent or as-yet observable repetition) may be firmly outside the scope of science. Therefore, certain religious propositions may rightly be described as being “unscientific”; not because they cannot be true, but because science is inadequate to discuss them, or in other words, because believing such propositions requires additional faith.

The objectiveness of science - a compromised Gold Standard?

Many promote the myth that the scientific method is completely dispassionate, methodical, objective and impartial. Unfortunately this is rarely the case. Since the scientific method requires effort, and since scientists (like all human beings) need money to buy food and live; we may often observe that he who pays the piper gets to pick the tune; or in other words, scientists like everyone else are naturally biased in favour of their paymasters. Usually, those scientific studies are commenced first for which there is most fear-of-the-unknown, and those studies are completed first for which there is most urgent commercial interest.

Alex - Cartoon about priorities in the workplace - altruism vs. earnings. Used by kind permission of the artists.

Copyright to the artists. Used by kind permission of the artists, and The Daily Telegraph newspaper; where the Alex cartoon is published.

Unfortunately, not all that masquerades as “science” is actually written by qualified scientists, and even that portion written by qualified scientists is not all the result of rigorously applied scientific method (which is the very reason why true scientists are so strongly in favour of peer-review.) The author knows personally of certain cases where scientifically unqualified businessmen motivated purely by profit-potential have boasted of writing “scientific white-papers” to surreptitiously give their products a competitive advantage in the marketplace, without ever doing any vaguely scientific research whatsoever into the efficacy of their claims; any more than is necessary to make their work look convincing. In an age of spin-doctors and “public relations” staff who perceive it as their job to get advertising space without paying for it; we should hardly find it surprising that this happens.
The author also worked briefly in a supposedly well-respected “objective and independent” statistical analysis company, whose competitive edge in ensuring repeat-business consisted of doctoring their results to please whoever commissioned the study. It is human nature that wherever a gold-standard exists, someone will seek to debase and exploit that standard - and the “scientific” standard is no exception to this rule.

Reconciling scientific knowledge with common sense

Always check your sources. Far from being exempt from cross-examination; one of the greatest strengths of the scientific method is its proclaimed openness to peer-review and cross-examination. We should apply to our rights and examine for ourselves the “scientific knowledge” presented to us, just as we would scrutinise any other kind of knowledge.

The scientific method converts hard work into a closer approach to the truth. A scientific experiment is a method of discerning the relative likelihood-of-truth of two or more physically testable hypotheses (judging that likelihood within the context of a closed physical subsystem.) A scientific debate is a method of attempting to reach consensus on the relative truth or falsehood of mutually exclusive propositions or theories; where the opposing parties agree to draw only upon supporting arguments within the scope of physically or logically discernible truth.

The scientific method IS:: A method of converting hard work into a closer approach to the truth. It is capable, in at least some cases, of convincingly demonstrating the superiority of one hypothesis over another, with respect to a system of physical or otherwise observable phenomena. It is one tool in a toolbox of methods. At best, it may help us to asymptotically “approach” absolute truth.
The scientific method is NOT:: A panacea, or the answer to all of humankind's problems, or the only valid method of making decisions. It is not a method of understanding all truth because it is long-since proven that certain truths may be completely outside the scope of science. Science is NOT a system of thought drawing religion, philosophy, personal counselling and everything else under its broad and expanding cloak (since although all truth must indeed be mutually consistent; “science” is not a synonym for truth. Scientific knowledge is merely a subset of the knowledge available through a range of methods.) While the scientific method may provide evidence for or against certain aspects of these fields, it can never provide absolute knowledge about all absolute truth, and cannot be rightly said to be “approaching” such absolute knowledge (as the word “approaching” is popularly understood), since science alone can never reach that point of absolute knowledge.

As demonstrated daily by the weather forecast in my area, the scientific method is barely 75-80% accurate in predicting events in the very near future by applying certain principles that have been studied intensively by generations of scientists over many centuries (with personal experience of my location, I can do almost as well just by looking at the sky.) Granted, this particular problem may be caused by the difficulties of timely data-collection and processing as well as due to fundamental problems with the method; however, as demonstrated in this article, the scientific method in general is fundamentally limited and its reach may never be extended to the outer limits of space, time or pure mathematics. The gaps between the reach of Science and the ultimate limits of existence may only be accessible to general philosophy, religion or divine revelation, if they are accessible at all.

We may (or may not) want a crutch to sustain us, as human beings overawed by the universe (that vast environment amidst which we appear so obviously inadequate). We might want answers to existential questions, as we contemplate our impotence in averting death. The scientific method alone cannot sustain us in these obvious inadequacies; nor can we be convincingly sustained through the naive imaginative predictions of “science-fiction”. We cannot afford to console ourselves in vain hopes of the complete mastery of science at any future date, through the application of scientific method alone.

The role of inspiration

What can plug the fundamental holes that must always exist in scientific knowledge? What can save us from excessive reliance on our inherently limited and biased observations? How do scientists get their ideas in the first place?

Thomas Alva Edison said,

“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration... I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work.”

In his moments of inspiration, Edison might well have identified with Archimides in his famous exclamation of “Eureka!” – After Archimedes had made significant effort to prepare his mind, the idea was impressed upon his mind suddenly, without compulsion; as inspiration from above. If Edison was right, that hard work constitutes 99% of the driving-force behind our creativity, we may not be surprised that certain scientists not fully attuned to recognizing inspiration may erroneously claim full credit for their invention; yet few scientists would presume to do this. Acclaimed scientists have often credited the inspiration of predecessors, inspiration from God, or both. Pragmatic effort is only part of the recipe that leads to scientific success. Perhaps therefore it was not merely as a nod to the most popular opinions of the day, and not merely for clever marketing; that Samuel Morse chose these words for his first telegraph message from the Supreme Court chamber in Washington D.C. on 24th May 1844 –
“What hath God wrought?” – So where exactly does this other part of “Genius” come from - this inspiration, to which Edison, Archimedes and Morse refer? Should we fully credit a succession of eminent men with the cumulative genius of the human race, or could God have a guiding hand in our progression?

Cartoon about human viewpoints or inherited insight; drawn by Dušan Petricic.

Copyright Dušan Petricic. Used by kind permission of the artist.
Art originally published in the Scientific American magazine.

It is perhaps noteworthy that Edison did not completely discredit the value of inspiration, but credited someone or something higher than himself for a portion of the “Genius” of his inventions. It is the author's personal conviction that the gentle guiding hand of divine influence cumulatively steers mankind away from self-destruction and towards salvation, without interfering in the individual free-will of man; and that for the most part, God allows us the privilege and pleasure to discover knowledge for ourselves through our own hard work.