Is scientism a faith?

I find it fascinating that the connotation of the term scientism has changed over the past two decades. It has changed from a term of abuse to a position that some people proudly self-identify with. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (published in 2005) stated that:

‘Scientism’ is a term of abuse. Therefore, perhaps inevitably, there is no one simple characterization of the views of those who are thought to be identified as prone to it. In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays one open to the charge of scientism.

(a) The sciences are more important than the arts for an understanding of the world in which we live, or, even, all we need to understand it.

(b) Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.

(c) Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such.

In 2011, Philosopher Alex Rosenberg proudly embraced scientism and described it as

“the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals (...) Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about. (...) Being scientistic just means treating science as our exclusive guide to reality, to nature – both our own nature and everything else’s.”

The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions,  pages 6–8.

In the quotation above I have put some words in boldface to highlight how grand the claims of scientism are. They are value judgements. In other words, science will provide meaning for life, moral values, and technical solutions to all social problems. Like naturalism and logical positivism, scientism is a philosophical position.

Scientism is not the same thing as science. Like foundationalism and logical positivism, scientism is self-defeating. They all make claims that fail to meet their own criteria for what is true. In other words, you cannot use science to determine if scientism is true. Like any worldview, scientism can be viewed as a faith.

Science, Humanity, and Jesus

Theology on Tap in Brisbane recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.

On Sunday, June 8, I will give the next talk, on "Science, Humanity, and Jesus." Here is the abstract.

Cultural, political, economic, technological, and philosophical forces have been steadily eroding our humanity over the past few hundred years. Scientism is the notion that science has the answers to everything and has led to a reductionist, largely biological view of what it means to be human. With irony, I will give a scientific argument, using the concept of emergence, that the natural sciences are largely irrelevant for understanding our humanity. Emergence notes how reality is stratified and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Instead of science, we need to look to the humanities, including theology for insights. Truth, justice, and beauty are irreducible and transcendent. Meaning and significance comes from human relationships where love, mercy, hope, forgiveness, and grief are central. Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of humanity and offers us the power to be truly human.

Location is Raven Hotel in West End. 

Flyer is here.

Here is a copy of the text and of the slides.

Behold! Life!

Is life a miracle to behold or a problem to be solved and something to be explained?

I have enjoyed reading Wendell Berry's book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. It is a passionate critique and response to E.O. Wilson's book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

[A brief and helpful summary is in Kirkus Reviews].

Berry is a poet, farmer, and former professor. He takes umbrage at Wilson's scientism and reductionism, which Berry considers to present an impoverished view of life, nature, and the university.

Berry has lived and worked on a farm for decades while writing. I cannot imagine doing this, as I am impractical. The passages below [page 45] gave me insight into what he is trying to achieve.

"In all of the thirty-seven years I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being as I am. My success, as I well know, has been poor enough, and yet I am glad of the effort, for it has helped me to make, and to remember always, the distinction between reduction and the thing reduced..."

“But, when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.”

Berry taught at a university for many years but eventually became disillusioned for reasons discussed in his essay, The Loss of the University.

Christian Platonism and Science

Recently the theology reading group we discussed A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge by Paul Tyson. 

Paul is a former member of our group and so were happy he could join us to discuss his book. Here is one summary.

We have come to separate natural knowledge (science) from faith and moral beliefs (religion), leading to serious difficulties in integrating knowledge and meaning, facts and values, and immanence and transcendence.

At the root of these dissonances is the difficult relationship between a naturalistic philosophy that purports to be a scientific realism and the things that make us human: transcendence, faith, meaning, and purpose. This is the result of science displacing Christian theology as Western modernity's first truth discourse. However, Christian theology contains deep resources in its approach to knowledge and reality that have not been brought to the science and religion conversation since the late nineteenth century.

You can download the beginning of the book here.

I have a great interest in the subject of this book and it stimulated and challenged my thinking. 

Tyson builds on two important ideas from the historian Peter Harrison. In his book, Territories of Science and Religion, Harrison makes the case that "science" and "religion" are ill-defined entities and their definition and "territories" [the domain of their relevance and authority] have shifted over time. Second, in a 2006 article, Harrison, observes that in the late 19th century there was a "remarkable reversal" "from Christian theology interpreting the true meaning and validity of natural philosophy to science interpreting the true meaning and validity of Christian theology" (page 31).

In other words, "This is a profound shift from faith-based theocentric ontological foundationalism (TOF) to egocentric epistemological foundationalism (EEF)." (p. 32). 

Thankfully, there is a ten-page glossary at the back of the book so the reader can keep refreshing their memory of how the author defines different terms. This is important as terms such as truth, theory, quality, meaning, wisdom, knowledge, and understanding are used in the sense that Plato used them, not how a modern scientist or citizen might use such terms. For example, theory (theoria) is "A vision of meaning. An inescapably imaginative and interpretive act of the meaning-discerning mind" (p.120).

I appreciated the book for giving a gentle introduction to a range of philosophical concepts, particularly metaphysics and transcendence.

The heart of the book is chapter 7, which includes several helpful diagrams, such as the one below, based on Plato's metaphysics.

This is based on four distinct categories of awareness considered by Plato. Tyson translates these into wisdom, mathematics, belief, and perception.

The central claim of the book is that modern science as a "first truth cultural discourse" has made the line between rationalism and wisdom uncrossable. In other words, modern physics has reduced metaphysics to the unreal, the realm of speculation and fantasy. We cannot know the true essence of reality, the ground of being. We can only know existence. Tyson has a very different vision. He claims that the separation of metaphysics and physics is intellectually incoherent. He cannot accept the position of some Christian scientists, such as myself, that the methodological naturalism of science is not necessarily in tension with Christian theology. He wants to imagine that Christian theology can provide a vision of natural knowledge.

Today we are a long way from Plato who considered metaphysics as the basis of physics. That is, one starts with qualities such as the character of God and from that reason towards what one thinks the world is like. This led to Aristotelian physics, which was discredited by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. This is why scientists, Christians and non-Christians, are nervous about elevating Christian theology [a specific metaphysics] back to its pre-modern status as "the first truth discourse". It has a bad track record.

On the other hand, some atheist scientists claim physics determines metaphysics. In different words, the content of physical theories tells us what the world is really like. Science determines questions of meaning, purpose, values, and morality.

Update. (March 2024). Peter Harrison has written a helpful review of the book.

The intellectually illegitimate children of Isaac Newton

The incredible scientific success of Isaac Newton led to intellectual revolutions in science, philosophy, economics, and theology. But many of the ideas developed and promoted have a dubious intellectual parentage. 

The key issues to consider centre around whether Newton's approach, success and interpretations in physics translate to other topics of interest.

Newton studied a specific topic: the mechanical motion of bodies, including cannonballs and planets. He used a method appropriate to that topic. High levels of precision, both in measurement and in making theoretical predictions were possible. This led to high levels of certainty about what was true and what was not.

A few intellectual bastards fertilised, fed, and sustained by the success of Newtonian mechanics include the following.

 The mechanical philosophy

The clockwork universe. 

People are machines.

 Strasbourg Astronomical Clock

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was the first philosopher of modern science and a founder of sociology (social physics). He was the founder of positivism, claiming that societies progress through three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. These correspond to eras of primitive (Christendom), Enlightenment, and modern science. Comte promoted a hierarchy of sciences with physics as the most fundamental. Comte's legacy has been roundly criticised by Pierre de Gennes, a Nobel Laureate in Physics.

Foundationalism seeks to establish truth logically by starting from a few axioms that can be taken as self-evident or "justified". There are parallels to Newtonian physics in that it starts with just Newton's laws and can deduce all the details of mechanical motion from these laws.

Theology was diverted in unfruitful directions and impoverished by these intellectual movements that claimed credence because of the success of Newton. There was a desire to mimic methods and levels of certainty of Newtonian physics. Here I identify several problematic movements in theology.

Deism. This was a natural outgrowth of the clockwork universe.

Foundationalism. Theology is largely concerned with propositional truth rather than with godly living. The object-subject distinction was considered possible and desirable.

Liberal theology. Since one could not match the confident certainty of Newtonian science one was left with doubt about everything: the reliability of the Bible, miracles, the existence of a heavenly realm, and the divinity of Jesus. The solution was the methods of historical-biblical criticism (form, source, redaction, literary, .. criticism), demythologisation, ...

Fundamentalism.  This reaction to liberal theology led in the opposite direction. A desire for certainty produced notions such as the infallibility of scripture, the inerrancy of scripture, and strict true-false dichotomies with little room for paradox, dialectic, imagination, or polyphonic readings of texts.

Modernist forms of apologetics.  In the second half of the twentieth century in the U.S.A. , there was the development and promotion of evidential apologetics and presuppositional apologetics. They attempted to show the intellectual validity of orthodox faith to the point that anyone who did not believe or accept the arguments presented was portrayed as irrational. Presuppositional apologetics aims to show a non-Christian that their worldview is intellectually incoherent and then in their despair preach the gospel to them.

In conclusion, I do not think any of these movements was particularly helpful. They impoverished theology rather than enriching it. Their intellectual foundations were shaky. They created as many problems as solutions. They lacked nuance and in hindsight are now seen by many as problematic. Humans and the Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are not cannonballs or planets orbiting the sun like clockwork. The methods and certainty of Newton cannot be uncritically transposed onto other areas of knowledge.

You should be skeptical about Scientific American

The cover story of this months Scientific American is "How Big Bang Gravitational Waves could revolutionise Physics," by Lawrence Krauss

It begins:

If the recent discovery of gravitational waves emanating from the early universe holds up under scrutiny, it will illuminate a connection between gravity and quantum mechanics and perhaps, in the process, verify the existence of other universes

Unfortunately, for the magazine, this "discovery" was discredited a few weeks ago. You can read about it here, on Peter Woit's excellent blog, that consistently critiques string theory and the multiverse.

As a scientist, I find the level of hype and speculation masquerading as science that is found in popular science magazines, particularly New Scientist, disturbing. It is quite unrepresentative of what the majority of scientists actually do, believe, and actually know.

Does science explain anything?

Of course it does, is the quick defensive answer!

But, the distinguished philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the provocative statement:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

What is this about?
 [Edward Feser has a helpful commentary on this and on friday at UQ John Lennox discussed this].

Examples of the laws of nature are Newton's laws of the motion and the laws of thermodynamics. What are these laws? They are codifications or statements, often in mathematical form, [sometimes approximate] of the regular behaviour that have been observed in numerous scientific experiments. Reproducible exceptions to this behaviour are never observed. One never sees water run uphill or a body accelerate in the absence of an external force or an scrambled egg spontaneously unscramble.

On one level, Newton's laws of motion and law of gravity can be said to "explain" why planets move in elliptical orbits. But, what is the explanation of Newton's law of gravity? Why is it like it is? Well, we could say it is a particular limit of Einstein's general theory of relativity. But, how do we "explain" Einstein's theory. .... We are not sure... string theory is struggling, but that is another story.... The point is that science does not and cannot provide ultimate explanations. 

We can deal with the "why?" question in two ways.
One way is to rule it out of order.

Before Darwin, even educated people who had abandoned “Why” questions for rocks, streams and eclipses still implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the “Why” question where living creatures were concerned. Now only the scientifically illiterate do. But“only” conceals the unpalatable truth that we are still talking about an absolute majority.

        Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden 

Alternatively, we can follow the distinguished biochemist, Erwin Chargaff  and acknowledge

"Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'."

Then, we might consider looking outside science for ultimate explanations.

The possibility of miracles is another issue where Wittgenstein's statement is relevant. Miracles do "violate" the laws of nature. But, that does not mean miracles are impossible. By definition, a miracle is something extra-ordinary, i.e. something different from regular behaviour. But, if God determined the laws of nature [i.e. the way things normally happen], He certainly has the power and freedom to make things happen differently at certain times.

The problem with popular science books

Most really are not about science.

It used to be claimed that distinguished scientists writing books for the general public would provoke the snobbish disdain of their colleagues. It was considered to be intellectual shallow to take ones research to the masses. However, all that changed with Stephen Hawking's bestseller A Brief History of Time. It made him a lot of money and a celebrity. After that many scientists got in on the act. Now there is a steady stream of popular science books.

I think scientists should write books for popular audiences. My problem is that I think in the end most really aren't about science.
There seem to be two common agendas of authors. Both are extremely ambitious and filled with hubris.

One agenda is that the topic of the authors research is THE big thing in science. It doesn't just revolutionise a particular specialised field of science but will revolutionise all of science. The author promotes their specialisation [chaos theory, string theory, complex adaptive systems, quantum information, self-organised criticality, systems biology, evolutionary biology, emergence, cosmology, …..] as THE most fundamental and important sub-discipline of science, because it has such profound implications for all of science.

The second agenda goes even further. The work of the author and her/his field is THE answer to the meaning and purpose of humanity and the universe. Only when we accept this will we truly understand why we are here, where we are going, and how to tackle the grand challenges facing humanity.

I illustrate the latter by giving quotes from the end of several highly acclaimed and influential popular science books. I have featured these quotes in earlier posts.

``Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really scientific socialist humanism? Only, we suggest, in the sources of science itself,..... it is the conclusion to which the search for authenticity necessarily leads. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immmensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.''

Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modem Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 167

But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (Basic Books, 1977), pages 154-155.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, .... Then we shall all ...[discuss] why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would truly know the mind of God.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

This post was stimulated by reading an excellent paper by Ian Hesketh about Big History where he discusses the whole genre of popular science writing. More on that later….

I can have science and Jesus too!

I can have both!
On monday night, this was the classic line of John Dickson (from the Centre for Public Christianity) on the popular Australian TV show Q and A. Every monday night it features a panel who answer questions from the audience (both studio and external).
It was refreshing to hear from a Christian leader who saw no conflict between scientific knowledge and orthodox Christian belief.

Also on the panel was the New Atheist and astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss. He made grand claims for science, including that it provided a basis for ethics and showed that the universe has no purpose. To me these are philosophical claims which require interpreting scientific knowledge. Different people will (and do) interpret this knowledge differently. Krauss seems to ignore and deny this distinction between science and philosophy, claiming only his interpretation is "scientific" and "rational".

Some earlier posts also considered Krauss' grand philosophical claims about the Higgs boson and the beginning of the universe.

What did C.S. Lewis believe about evolution?

Everyone likes a good C.S. Lewis quote to bolster their argument.

On Biologos David Williams has a great series of blog posts Surprised by Jack about C.S. Lewis considering his views on Scripture, Genesis, the Fall, and Evolution. It challenges our views of Lewis [why are conservative evangelicals so infatuated with this Anglo-Catholic?] and examines what he actually believed rather than what we might wish he believed.

Here is an extract of the post about evolution, which first discusses how Lewis overall accepted the science of evolution.

What Lewis did believe to conflict with Christian faith was what he called the great “Myth” of “Evolutionism” or “Developmentalism.” But this is not the same as evolutionary theory per se. “[We] must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism which is certainly a Myth,” he writes in his essay "The Funeral of a Great Myth.” 

Lewis believed that the great myth of “Evolutionism” conflicted not only with the Christian faith, but with Reason itself, undercutting the grounds for believing in human rationality and, therefore, in any human rationale that could be offered for believing in Evolutionism in the first place. According to Lewis, Evolutionism’s chief premise, namely, Naturalism, invalidates human reasoning itself, amounting to “an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.” “All possible knowledge…depends on reasoning,” he writes in chapter III of Miracles. “We infer Evolution from fossils: we infer the existence of our own brains from what we find inside the skulls of other creatures like ourselves in the dissecting room.” All sciences, including evolutionary science, depend upon the validity of human inference for their own validity. “Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.” Naturalism, however, with its grand Myth of Evolutionism explains all of reality, including human reason, in terms of non-rational natural causes and effects, reducing all human reasoning to being no more than the accidental byproducts of chance, matter and time, and thereby undercutting the validity of reasoning itself.

 This important distinction between evolutionary science and evolutionism [a philosophical perspective] has also been stressed by Tim Keller.

Why would a scientist be a Christian?

A group from my church is going through the Test of Faith video series. I think it is an excellent introduction to exploring the relationship between science and Christianity. Much of it is based on interviews with leading scientists who are Christians and some theologians who have backgrounds in science.

The website also has some excellent resources.
I liked this brief interview with Simon Conway Morris (Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University) about why he is a Christian.

Beyond scientism: a broader vision of reality

Does science have all the answers?
What are the philosophical implications of the stunning success of science?
The New Atheists would answer "Yes" and "Atheism".

There is an interesting review in First Things of the Lawrence Krauss' book A Universe from Nothing. The review is by a philosopher, Edward Feser. Here is an extract that is particularly relevant to the above questions.

Critics have exposed [the New Atheists] errors and fallacies again and again. Yet these writers keep repeating them anyway, for the most part simply ignoring the critics. What accounts for this? To paraphrase a famous remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, I would suggest that a picture holds these thinkers captive, a picture of the quantitative methods of modern science that have made possible breathtaking predictive and technological successes. 

What follows from that success is that the methods in question capture those aspects of reality susceptible of mathematical modeling, prediction, and control. It does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. 

But as E. A. Burtt noted over half a century ago in his classic book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, the thinker who claims to eschew philosophy in favor of science is constantly tempted “to make a metaphysics out of his method,” trying to define reality as what his preferred techniques can measure rather than letting reality dictate what techniques are appropriate for studying it. He is like the drunk who thinks his car keys must be under the lamppost because that is the only place there is light to look for them—and who refuses to listen to those who have already found them elsewhere.

Just because science is very good at answering some specific questions [e.g., how old is the universe? what is the molecular basis of genetics?] does not mean that it is good (or even able) to answer other questions.

Furthermore, a "scientific" attitude to reality means that the object under study determines the relevant questions, methods, and concepts to be used. In the context of emergence have discussed such a perspective in detail earlier. 

Against the arrogance of the reductionists

Phil Anderson is one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the second half of the twentieth century. He has also been a strong critic of reductionism, emphasizing the role of emergence in all of science. He recently published a book of his essays, More and Different: notes from a thoughtful curmudgeon. I highly recommend it. Here is small extract from an essay "Emergence vs. Reductionism".

Physicists - and scientists in general - love to do two things; (a) to take apart, to analyze into simpler and simpler components; (b) to mystify, to say it is not really this, it’s that. They like to take upon themselves the role of the shaman or the mullah. Everything comes from a First Cause – the First Equation – and only the appropriate scientist can investigate this with his very expensive equipment, and understand it with his abstruse theories. 

The arrogance this attitude fosters has to be experienced to be believed. Such books as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time covers the whole of science in six brief chapters, spending the rest of the book on personal speculations about the first millionth of a picosecond of time when, he seems to feel, all that matters happened.

Problems with logical positivism

Does Richard Dawkins implicitly assume some particular philosophy of science?

At the beginning of the 20th century logical positivism was one of the dominant views in philosophy.  Logical positivists claimed that real knowledge is only what can be measured and verified. A statement is meaningful only if it can be verified by observation.
But this verification principle cannot be verified. "Meaningful" is not a scientific category which is amenable to testing in the laboratory.
Karl Popper also exposed problems inherent in logical positivism even within philosophy of science. Popper emphasized that scientific theories cannot be verified but only be falsified.

Perhaps, the most visible proponent of logical positivism today is not any professional philosopher, but popular science author Richard Dawkins.

Before Darwin, even educated people who had abandoned "Why" questions for rocks, streams and eclipses still implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the "Why" question where living creatures were concerned. Now only the scientifically illiterate do. But only conceals the unpalatable truth that we are still talking about an absolute majority.

God's utility function, River out of Eden: A Darwinian view of life, 1995

Freedom from religion

What is true liberty? Can the truth set us free? Do we need to be set free from religion?

The above engraving, entitled "Disenfectation" (L. Isore, 1885), shows a priest fleeing from the Pantheon in Paris, being replaced by Victor Hugo holding a banner "Liberte". The caption is "Ignorance gives way to genius." In 1885, with the funeral of Victor Hugo, the Pantheon was finally converted from a church to a secular "temple" and burial place for leading French citizens. The cartoon title is a play on the words "disenfection" and "desaffectation" (abandonment). I scanned it from a tourist booklet The Pantheon: Temple of the Nation.

I am planning on using the cartoon in a talk I am giving next week to a student group Groupes Bibliques Universitaires (GBU) in Strasbourg. One issue I will explore, using Jesus teaching "The truth will set you free" in John 8, is how God's grace is needed to set us free from religion and the associated self-righteousness. The torment associated with not receiving grace is nicely illustrated by the policeman Javert in the musical version of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

Methodological vs metaphysical naturalism

Science is an empirical and limited enterprise that is theistically agnostic, concerned only with the how mechanisms of nature as pointed out in chapter two. It is methodologically naturalistic; however, it is not metaphysically naturalistic. And the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism is immense. Science is metaphysically neutral.

Science, Creation and the Bible, Carlson and Longman, page 132

How value laden is science?

A common view of science is that it is completely objective and free from the personal values of scientists.

Kirsten Birkett has a nice section in her book Unnatural Enemies: An Introduction to Science and Christianity which discusses how values do enter science and it is never completely ojbective. Most of the discussion is in terms of how values enter decisions about which research gets done because it gets funding.

However, I think there is an additional major area, theory acceptance, where the personal values of scientists enter science. Consider, the question: What kind of evidence is required to convince an individual scientist that a particular theory is valid, i.e. gives a satisfactory description of experimental data?

Here are some issues that come into play.
-role of curve fitting
-role of computations and modelling
-independent confirmation from other research groups
-status and track record of the authors
-whether ones skepticism is weighed by a possible conflict of interest of the authors [e.g. are they confirming or refuting their own theory].
-the weight given to the "simplicity" or "beauty" of the proposed explanation.
-the weight given to other possible alternative explanations.

My experience from almost 30 years of scientific research is that these values vary significantly between individual scientists. I suspect my "standards" are sometimes higher than those of some of my colleagues.
I would like to think this is partly driven by a theological conviction about "the total depravity of man" which results in an impressive ability to deceive ourselves.
But I do not have a monopoly of this view. Richard Feynman, one of the most famous theoretical physicists of the 20th century, was an agnostic but often said "the easiest person to fool is yourself."

I should stress that this post is not at all claiming that most scientific knowledge is just "wishful thinking" of scientists. Most of what is in text books is on very solid ground. It is just the latest results, and particularly some of what makes headlines in the popular press.
Eventually, theories accumulate enough evidence to convince the majority of the scientific community, are refuted, pass away for lack of evidence, or are superseded.

The point is that personal values do enter how science is done in practice. There are no universally agreed criteria for widespread acceptance of a theory. Individual scientists make this decision based on their own personal criteria.

Does Science Disprove God?

Here is the current draft version of the slides for my talk in The God Experiment series in Melbourne tomorrow.
Comments welcome.

The End of Science is the Beginning of Theology

In 1996, John Horgan, a journalist with Scientific American, published a book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. The book received a lot of attention and was widely criticised, particularly by members of the scientific community. In the book he describes interviews with an impressive cast of scientific leaders, including Roger Penrose, Stephen Jay Gould, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Edward Witten, David Bohm, Philip Anderson, Lyn Margulis, Murray Gell-Mann, ..

Here is the main point of the book (p. 6)

Optimists who think they can overcome all these limits [of scientific knowledge] must face yet another quandary, perhaps the most disturbing of all. What will scientists do if they succeed in knowing what can be known? What, then, would be the purpose of life? What would be the purpose of humanity? ... 

Given these troubling issues, it is no wonder that many scientists whom I interviewed for this book seemed gripped by a profound unease. But their malaise, I will argue has another, much more immediate cause. If one believes in science, one must accept the possibility - even the probability - that the great era of scientific discovery is over. By science I mean not applied science, but science at its purest and grandest, the primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it. Future research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.

Much is revealed by the chapter titles, Introduction: Searching for The Answer. The last chapter is Scientific Theology, or the End of Machine Science. The Epilogue is The Terror of God. In the latter he describes how his despair led him to his own personal mystical experience. Here are a few extracts:

At the heart of reality lies not an answer, but a question: why is there something rather than nothing? The Answer is that there is no answer, only a question.... The world is a riddle that God has created in order to shield himself from his terrible solitude and fear of death. ....

...everything comes down to God chewing his fingernails. This belief even gives me a strange kind of comfort. Our plight is God's plight. And now that science - true, pure, empirical science- has ended, what else is there to believe in?

I warmly recommend the book. It is well written and fascinating reading. Much of it I do not agree with (especially "The Terror of God" idea). But, it to me it clearly illustrates that Science does not have The Answer that some so desparately seek within it. Science ultimately raises existential questions. Why are we here? But, we must look outside Science to find the answers.

Reducing reductionism to irrationality

Francis Crick is best known as the co-discover with James Watson of the structure of DNA and of the hypothesis of the genetic code. This was the beginning of a whole new field of science, molecular biology. Given this scientific success perhaps it is not surprising that Crick was a passionate reductionist. Later in Crick's career he turned to neuroscience and wrote a popular book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul. In it he makes the classic reductionist claim (p. 3):

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules"

In response John Polkinghorne writes that Crick's agenda is 

ultimately suicidal. If Crick’s thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen… The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and one of us believes it to be so.

John Polkinghorne, One World, p. 92.

I thank Lewis Jones for bringing these quotations to my attention. They are discussed in more detail by John Lennox, in God's Undertaker: Has science buried God?
On a lighter note, these issues are also discussed here.