Alan Lightman has recently published a series of essays in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit in which he relates an experience I think illustrates the paradox of empirical science, the fatal paradox that has a universe made up of mathematical laws dreamed up by men whose minds were imbued with an unshakable, indeed, motivating belief in God being enforced by practitioners who dare not claim the existence of a supreme being.
In the title essay, Lightman describes how early in his career he finds, much to his pride, a solution to an important scientific problem. When his solution hits the light of day, however, he discovers that the solution has already been discovered by a pair of scientists on the other side of the world.
After recovering from his disappointment, Lightman realizes an eternal truth about science. He realizes that the universe is fixed and unchangeable. It is a structure of laws waiting to be understood by scientists. He concludes, much the way Whewell concluded, that if Newton hadn't discovered gravity, someone else would have. The universal truth that the experience taught Lightman is that science is just waiting to be figured out.
The 02/05/05 column discusses Whewell. Whewell was a fanatical believer in God. Faced with the fact that the outcome predicted by Newton's mathematics did not match reality, that the size of the planets could not be used to predict their orbits and thus Newton's gravity had no scientific basis, and faced with the additional fact that Newton's gravity had been reversed, that the orbits of the planets were now being used to predict the unprovable, what was deep down inside the interior of the planets, Whewell concluded, much as Lightman does in his essay, that it wasn't how the law was discovered that was important. While Lightman doesn't express the source of the law, Whewell pointed out that God put the law in place and its discovery, rather than the manner in which it was discovered was all that was important.
Thus, just as Lightman does without God, Whewell creates a universe whose operation was mathematically constructed by God and, in Lightman's words, those laws are just waiting to be figured out.
At the outset, we need to establish one simple fact. Science deals with reality, with the physical world in which we exist, a world that is made up of solid matter that is held in place on Earth and moves in space. The reality we deal with involves energy primarily in the form of light, heat, fire, magnetism and lightning. Science deals with questions involving the nature of the forces that produce or prevent the motion in our existence.
Science deals with the reality of the physical world in which we exist because we have minds that can produce pictures of reality that do not exist in reality. When we create pictures of reality that do not exist in reality, we can use those pictures to change reality. The reason that we want to change reality is to make it more accommodating for our existence. We use our minds to find out about reality so that we can change reality to our benefit.
Changing reality involves engineering and produces technology. We need as accurate a picture of reality as possible so that our technology will reflect reality. If we have a botched picture of reality, we will produce a botched technology. Science is limited to an analysis of the reality in which we exist because science is what produces the pictures we use to engineer our technology. The root meaning of science is having knowledge, and having knowledge presupposes that there is something to have knowledge of.
There are, however, certain questions dealing with reality that have absolutely no relationship to the accuracy of the technology we develop. These questions, by definition, require belief and belief does not involve knowledge of the real world in which we exist because beliefs will botch, rather than perfect our technology.
The primary question that requires belief and therefore does not involve our technology, is where the matter we see in the universe came from. Questions dealing with the origin, size or ultimate fate of the universe raise questions the answers to which we will never know. In addition, questions dealing with the origin, size or ultimate fate of the universe have nothing to do with the technology that reflects the real world in which we exist. Thus, questions that have no relationship to the development of a technology that accurately reflects reality are questions of religion and belong in the realm of God.
God, on the other hand, is not involved in the process we use to form the pictures of reality that we use to engineer our technology. The pictures we form to engineer our technology must be fluid pictures, pictures that grow as the number of facts in our arsenal of scientific reality grows. If we believe that the universe is operated by a fixed set of mathematical laws just ready to be discovered, then we are not engaged in the practice of science, we are engaged in the practice of religion. We have to take as our basic premise the basic premise of our dead lawmakers, the premise that God created the universe using well-defined laws and our job is not to discover the nature of reality, but rather to spend our time and energy discovering the laws that were put in place by God. It begs the question that empirical science claims to be secular, that it claims there is no God.
By basing the entire empirical enterprise on Newton's laws of motion and his concept of gravity, empirical science has placed the very questions that are all important in forming an accurate picture of reality so that we don't botch our technology in the realm of religion, out of the reach of analysis in the dicta of belief. Motion is either historical, the result of the big bang that originated the universe, or the swirling masses of gas that the big bang produced, or it is the result of being a static property of matter, a property like color or hardness, which simply is.
In addition, for a science that needs flexibility, a continually expanding picture of reality as the facts of science expand, the very questions that control the nature of those facts are fixed in laws created by God-driven men, laws that are inflexible. Newton's two contributions to the ignorance of empirical science, the inaccuracy of the pictures of reality we have and the distorted technology that results are his gravity is a property of and proportional to matter hypothesis and his law of motion that objects travel in a straight line unless a force acts on them to change that motion.
Empirical means originating in or based on observation or experience. The foundations of empirical science, Newton's two fantasies, originate in neither and are based on neither.
Newton used the notion that the Earth and the moon were uniformly made up of uniform particles to predict the orbit of the moon. The accuracy of the prediction, he claimed, would prove that gravity was holding the moon in orbit, and because he was using proportionate gravity, his conclusion that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter was correct. Newton's mathematics did not predict the orbit of the moon, producing a moon with too much matter to fit the prediction. When Newton's mathematics were applied to the rest of the solar system, the discrepancies were even greater.
Yet empirical science, a science that claims to be based on reality, a reality that has been confirmed by observation and experience, continues to claim that Newton's prediction proved his hypothesis, that gravity is a static property of matter forever out of the reach of our technology. We produce a technology that reflects our ignorance about the nature of gravity, that a dynamic force requires a dynamic source and a dynamic source should be describable in mechanical terms that allow the formation of pictures that permit us to use this dynamic force in our technology.
What about the notion that an object will travel in a straight line unless a force acts to change that motion? The ancient law, objects at rest will stay at rest until a force acts on them is based on observation. Where is the empirical observation for the eminently reasonable, but never observed notion that objects in a straight line will travel in a straight line unless a force acts upon them? This statement is obviously true in the abstract, but there is nothing in reality that moves in a straight line so why did Newton tack it onto an ancient law based on observation?
Because Newton needed to show that the matter in the Earth and the moon was causing the moon to orbit the Earth and the only way he could do that was to make the assumption that the moon would be traveling in a straight line but for the force he was trying to prove. He could not construct a mathematical equation unless he had a prior motion for the moon that was being affected by the force of the gravity he was attempting to prove. Thus, he made up a situation that doesn't exist in reality and tacked it on to one that does, and then he computed the force it took to cause the moon's straight-line motion into the circular orbit we measure it to be in.
There is nothing at all empirical about this. Claiming that something that has never been observed is universal is pretty unempirical, and in fact, totally based on belief. In short, it belongs in the realm of religion. What has this dead man's law produced? The galaxy rotates. If each star in the galaxy didn't rotate with the galaxy, it would be moving in a straight line. However, there is not enough of the only force in the universe, gravity, in all the stars that make up the galaxy to keep the stars from traveling in straight lines. Thus, there must be a whole lot of matter we can't see, dark matter, changing the straight-line motion of the stars in the galaxy into the circular motion we see. Science or religion? This has nothing to do with perfecting our technology and therefore it is totally in the realm of religion.
Dead lawmakers like Newton did not have an inkling of the structure of matter or its connection to the production of light. They didn't even know about the existence of galaxies. They were, by the standards of the factual reality we have today, ignorant. They couldn't graduate kindergarten. Yet we base our entire technology on the accuracy of their fantasies and we build a science that involves itself totally with those fantasies rather than with the reality of the world around us, the reality of a world that has dynamic forces that produce motion that are ignored by the same empirical science that concerns itself with the unobservable and the unexperienced.
Modern empirical science is in the same position that the medieval church enjoyed. It soaks up society's resources in return for claiming a contribution to society, in the case of the medieval church, the saving of souls, in the case of empirical science, the advancement of learning (with a baseless claim thrown in that it produces our technology as if its idiotic explanation for light guided Edison in the production of the light bulb).
In reality, the medieval church spent its time counting the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin while empirical science spends its time chasing after fantasies made up by dead men who knew nothing.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com