She Blinded Me with Science

There is a new blog called ‘Secular Right’ which features one of my favorite conservative journalists John Derbyshire, and I have been reading it a bit and commenting on occasion. It’s an odd sort of place because it’s not merely secular (which I take to mean non-religious), but both aggressively critical of religion and committed to dogmatic materialism, which is unfortunate. I posted a version of the following on their site but thought that I could manifest my laziness by posting it here as well.

I’m neither a theologian nor a particularly orthodox adherent to Christianity. Nonetheless, the skepticism on display at ‘Secular Right’ is notably limited in its application. It certainly doesn’t apply to what should certainly be only referred to as SCIENCE. (Every time one of the posters there mentions the term, there should be a link to the old Thomas Dolby song so that we can all shout it aloud together.)

The naive materialism in evidence at the site reminds one of the following positivist conundrum. The only meaningful statements that can be made are either tautologous or empirically provable. Unfortunately, this particular proposition is neither tautologous nor empirically provable.

This particular problem doesn’t even begin to address what ‘empirical’ actually means. As so many have pointed out, even Popper’s minimal falsifiability standard does not describe how science has historically worked. (Lakatos once notoriously said that the history of science should actually be written not according to how things developed but according to how they should have developed.) According to my empirical observations, the sun does indeed appear to rise and set every day (and, of course, we still speak of these situations in this way). I certainly cannot ‘observe’ the workings of sub-atomic particles, in any case.

Galileo, speaking in the voice of Simplicius in one of his dialogues, says that it is precisely the Aristotelian method that relies upon ‘experiment’ while the new science depends upon mathematical conjecture and the reduction of any observation to number.

Does science produce things, like nuclear weapons, automobiles, high rise buildings, etc (this is not meant to be pejorative)? Yes, but the Egyptians built the pyramids, medieval Europeans built Mont St. Michel and Chartres, etc. Most people have not historically been particularly unhappy with the state of their technology, so the current satisfaction with what ‘science’ produces is not particularly exceptional anyway.

I’m happy that some of those with a scientistic bent are supportive of limited nomocratic government, but I would be just as happy with a bunch white-lightening-drinking hillbillies supporting the same (and I would likely enjoy their choice of entertainment a bit more).