The limitations of science (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Monday, February 15, 2010, 08:21 (5394 days ago)

In his post of 13 February at 14.49, under "Politics and Science: is science being corrupted", David wrote:-We depend on science in our discussions here. Is it safe to depend too much on current scientific conclusions and theories? Again, to harp on current climate science, the answer is no.-Aside from the fact that it's never safe to depend "too much" on anything, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on this. I acknowledge how essential it is that in our discussions we never lose sight of the findings of science. In that sense, yes, we depend on it. But as you and Matt are constantly emphasizing, science can rarely give us "truths", and in many areas relevant to our discussions, scientists themselves are divided even on "likelihoods". On none of the questions relating, for instance, to the origin of life, chance v. design, the nature of consciousness, what preceded the Big Bang, does science provide us with anything but speculation. Its restriction to the material world provides it with potential reliability ... potential being far removed from actual ... since the material world can be studied, but this leads to the exclusion of experiences which by their very nature suggest the possibility (no more) of something beyond the material world, at least as we know it. -The scientific contributions made by you, George and Matt are invaluable to a non-scientist like myself, although I could scarcely resist a cheer when I read Henk Tennekes' castigation of what he calls "hermetic jargon". All too often, this is language used to obfuscate rather than explain ... but that's another subject. The point I'm gradually moving towards is that our discussions depend on a great deal more than science. Indeed, the moment a scientist draws philosophical conclusions from his scientific findings, he ceases to speak as a scientist. And the moment our discussions enter into the realm of subjective judgement or experience, we leave science behind without necessarily leaving "truth" behind. Your own route to God, like George's atheism, came largely through science, whereas BBella and Frank came to their form of God from a totally different direction; Matt tends to follow a scientific route away from God but keeps his options open because there is more to life than science (I hope that's a fair summary). From my own point of view, the personal experiences passed on to us by you and BBella, and earlier discussions with various contributors on the nature of a possible God, on ethics, on art, on the "paranormal", are every bit as important as the "scientific conclusions and theories".