It is my view that events of the last twenty-plus years are replacing the tattered and torn body of the scientific method with its evil parody called scientism. Physicist Stephen Hawking, in a profoundly philosophical statement, announced that “Philosophy is dead!” — having been steamrollered by physics, apparently.Far be it from me to attack someone as pre-eminent as Dr. Hawking but his statement identifies that the methodology of science is being increasingly conflated with a philosophy of scientism. “Follow the science!” they said. “The consensus view of science is to follow this policy,” they ordered. “Attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science,” snorted Dr. Fauci. Indeed. But isn’t the attack the point of science?“Follow me!” has said every religious leader ever.“Follow me by following the science!” has said every authoritarian creep ever. Science is being made into a religion and that is not good.There is no such thing as “the science.” Rather there is a body of information that has been acquired using the epistemological process called inductive reasoning. We call this the scientific method. Science is much more a verb than it is a noun.Further, science, which is objective, sits atop a philosophical base, which is subjective. Not only a philosophical base but a metaphysical base. Have you ever wondered why the scientific method only arose in the Judeo-Christian West? Lots of people have and the answer seems to be that it rests on a very deep and interesting philosophical statement — the universe is rational and follows specific, knowable natural laws. Science is the pursuit of unveiling and understanding those natural laws using the scientific method. But how can the universe be rational unless there is a creative force behind it that is itself rational? It is for this reason that early scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton called theology the “Queen of the sciences”. And it is why scientists such as Alfred North Whitehead have believed that science is the daughter of faith.Metaphysics aside, the power of the scientific method requires belief in a rational and knowable universe. A chaotic universe based on a random crap shoot, leaves no room for science. Choose for yourself whether the sustaining rational and creative force is evolution or God.Let me offer a controversial story as background to my belief that objective science is being made into subjective scientism.In about 150 AD, a Greek philosopher named Ptolemy put together a set of tables that predicted planetary motion based on the premise that the earth is at the center of the universe and the heavenly bodies move around it. Fourteen hundred years later, Copernicus challenged the premise underlying Ptolemy’s surprisingly accurate concentric tables and moved the sun into the center (heliocentricity) but stayed with circular orbits. Unfortunately, he needed to impose a fudge factor to have his predictions approach reality. The fudge factor was an epicycle or loop in the orbital path to extend the time for heavenly bodies to circle overhead. Copernicus’ epistemological leap, fudge factors and all, didn’t improve dramatically on Ptolemy’s tables. Things started to heat up in the scientific community when Galileo adopted the Copernican theory and used his newly invented telescope to provide corroborating data. His arguments were fairly met by Dominican scientists who stoutly defended Ptolemy, Aristotle and their hero Thomas Aquinas. Remember that most 'scientists' in the 16th century were priests and monks. The very hot debate between Galileo (and some Jesuits) and the Dominicans was not church against science but scientists supporting one hypothesis against scientists supporting a competing hypothesis. It took another fifty years and Kepler’s replacement of the “perfection of the circle” with elliptical orbits to bring the new theory into focus with reality.As Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, scientific hypotheses or paradigms are not easily changed and for good reasons. It is the ferocity of this struggle over paradigm change that makes science so powerful and useful. And that fierce struggle appropriately continues to this day. Dr. Daniel Shectman was attacked for his hypothesis that amorphous crystals exist and was stripped of his job and research funding. In his attack on such stupidity, Noble laureate, Linus Pauling said, "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” In 2011, Dr. Shectman received the Nobel prize in chemistry for his proven theory of amorphous crystals. Science is a contact sport. But that is the point. It is never settled and always fractious. When we erode the philosophical base which empowers the enterprise called science by suggesting that it is “settled” we become pagan worshippers of scientism and that is very dangerous. Galileo’s sufferings had nothing on what a lot of scientists are going through today and have gone through in the past twenty plus years. First in a two-part series. Part two will examine some of that suffering.
