Science and love, music, art, etc. (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Monday, February 16, 2009, 13:25 (5556 days ago) @ David Turell

This is not a reply to David's post but a continuation of the general discussion, triggered by two articles in different Sunday newspapers, which seem to me to epitomize a basic problem. - The first was in The Sunday Telegraph by Christopher Booker, whom David Turell quoted last week and whom George Jelliss characterizes as "a journalist who specialises in being sceptical or ornery about scientific controversies": - Last Tuesday, "various eminent figures from the scientific establishment" wrote to The Daily Telegraph wanting those who reject evolution to accept that the evidence is now "overwhelming". (They also wanted anti-theists like Dawkins to keep quiet "because their vehemence is discrediting the theory".) On Friday, another group of scientists wrote that Darwin might have been right about micro-evolution (Galapogos finches etc.) but the "evidence for how complex organisms developed" is "modest in the extreme". Is it surprising, they asked, "that there is such incredulity" that random mutations alone can "account for the vast complexity of life"? In other words, these questions are far from settled, and if we attempt to shut down the debate, "we dishonour the spirit of science". - In The Sunday Times Christopher Hart, reviewing a book by Michael Brooks entitled 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, writes, on the subject of dark matter and dark energy: "To date, however, there's not a shred of evidence for either, even though teams of scientists have been looking for years. [...] The only alternative to dark matter is to tweak Newton's most fundamental laws of physics and suggest that they don't apply everywhere, all the time, in quite the same way. But physicists are a law-abiding bunch, and detest this idea." - It is worth bearing in mind that dark matter and dark energy are believed to constitute 96% of the universe. Scientists cannot agree among themselves on many basic scientific questions, and they certainly have not come up with "reliable answers" (George) on the topics that form the heading of this thread. Of course, we cannot discount the central role science has to play in the quest for explanations, but the vast gaps and contradictions in its present state do not seem to me to provide much basis for any kind of belief beyond the agnostic one that we don't (yet) know any of the fundamental truths.