The American Crisis: Origins-
The Failure of Modern Science and Our Historical Dilemma
Parts 7 & 8
Journal Entry #24
…physicists have placed their faith in the idea that deep down the universe is coordinated by a great plan, a rational system of organization, a hidden but accessible scheme…There remains the obvious question: By what standards might we determine that faith in science is reasonable, but that faith in God is not? –The Devil’s Delusion; Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions; David Berlinski, PhD Mathematics

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. –Isaiah 5:20

The Failure of Modern Science and Our Historical Dilemma

Part 7
If we must, as science stipulates, observe a strictly material worldview to gain “positive” knowledge and guarantee intellectual legitimacy- despite the possibility that materialism describes an incomplete universe- what would the ultimate effect be on the welfare and advancement of human knowledge? Could a species so completely dependent upon conceptual and abstract thought tolerate a mode of thinking that always can but sometimes won’t yield truthful knowledge, without inviting some sort of societal catastrophe?

In this the esteemed scholar Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book The Human Condition, offers us insight as she recognized early in the Cold War era the peril to the traditional integrity of Western thought as modern science delved ever more deeply into the universe and the atom.

Concerning what she termed the ‘truths’ of the modern scientific worldview, Ms. Arendt noted the increasing inability of leading scientists in the Cold War era to express in common speech and thought what they otherwise could represent mathematically. The consequent divide to which she refers- between knowledge and thought- might be understood more clearly as a fracture ultimately separating the qualitative from the quantitative realms of nature which the human intellect formerly perceived jointly.

“If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”*

Ominous indeed are the consequences to humanity if knowledge (understood as know-how) and thought are separated, this being a prelude to an ever more ruinous situation in which scientists selectively disassociate the empirical side of science from the rational, thereby producing rival descriptions of the same universe. In essence, establishing incompatible or conflicting explanations of what is real; contemplated- but never reconciled- through Orwellian doublethink. Ultimately, we would witness a tragicomedy in which science demands we adhere only to the empirical evidence the universe displays, even as they flout this very evidence in practice.

One reality would entail conventional know-how and technology suited to the everyday needs of the practical world; another reality would accommodate scientists' unrestrained speculations on the origin and nature of the existing universe. In such a situation empirical-rationalism would no longer represent that coherently reliable method it once had been in promoting the cause of truth: the truth of an expansive yet circumscribed universe existing independently of the observer, and the truthful thoughts the observer entertains about that universe.

Part 8
In the Western intellectual tradition, empirical-rationalism was regarded as the most effective means of defining the universe, because it firmly established the language and method of the scientific enterprise. As the language of science is mathematical- involving the numerical (or quantitative) description and measurement of material objects and processes of the physical universe- so the method of science, according to which the mathematics should conform, is appropriately delegated to the philosophical.

Ordinarily, this notion of a philosophical method of science is almost unknown by the mass of America’s students. But of critical importance- and what so engrosses this observer- is that this philosophical method of science is virtually ignored amongst the scientific community; that is, by those who are extensively educated enough to know better.

Routinely, scientists incorrectly presume both the language and method of science fall entirely within the realm of mathematics. Aside from the fact that the study of philosophy is conspicuously held in disdain by scientists- even as they all continue to philosophize- there really is no objective justification to presume a strictly quantitative or mathematical universe.

According to this philosophical method every scientific theory, without exception, is framed syllogistically. That is, from a set of known facts called premises, we derive a previously unknown factual conclusion; all such conclusions are, without exception, inductive in nature. For a scientific conclusion to be considered acceptable, it must follow from and be supported by true premises. Otherwise, the proposition or conclusion has no basis for, nor claim to, acceptability.

To the extent a set of premises contain increasing evidential proof, the conclusion has an increasingly greater claim to validity. Herein lay the philosophical strength and flexibility of scientific speculation. Because the scientific method proceeds inductively, additional empirical evidence gathered affords the scientist the opportunity to reinforce, revise or alter entirely the conclusion.

Here we may distinguish these inductive scientific explanations- being tentative by reason of their probable truthfulness- from deductive conclusions, which are certainly and necessarily true. Only in a deductive syllogism do the premises provide indisputable grounds for the truth of their conclusions, while at the same time establishing a relationship between the conclusion and its premises, such “that it is absolutely impossible for the premisses to be true unless the conclusion is true also.”** In the study of logic, the only philosophical impossibility is an argument which contains true premises and a false conclusion.

What follows in all of this, and what elevates this issue from the purely academic to the immediately practical is the skewed habit of mind supporting the current modern scientific material worldview. This skewed- and illegitimate- habit of mind confuses the tentative and probable nature of inductive conclusions with the certain and necessarily true conclusions characteristic of deductive arguments.

A perfect example of this illicit tendency to treat an inductive scientific proposition as if it were a deductive conclusion is the Darwinian “theory of descent with modification”: biological evolution. Modern science prospers greatly by the placement of preferred or culturally popular theories such as Darwinian evolution, firmly in a category that is above debate and beyond dispute.

Compounding this philosophical confusion brought about by mistaking inductive propositions for deductive conclusions is the equally deceptive practice of selectively interpreting the empirical evidence supporting a theory. To selectively interpret evidence, scientists acknowledge only that data which tends to support their preferred theories, while discounting or ignoring evidence which might call into question or dispute such theories.

In formal logic this skewed habit of mind and the selective interpretation of evidence combine to inaugurate a perpetuating chain of fallacious reasoning, properly termed the fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question, in which “...one assumes as a premiss for an argument the very conclusion it is intended to prove…”*** That assumption, that initial premise goes by the name of philosophic materialism.

In the modern scientific worldview the universe is defined and studied according to material criteria, by which all that exists is either matter, or some property or function of matter: the material world is the ultimate reality. In the service of philosophic materialism the function of empirical evidence is to confirm "…the concept of nature as a law-bound system of matter in motion"****; a closed system of material cause and effect, eliciting only natural- as opposed to supernatural- phenomena and processes.

Such a strict materialist perspective toward the universe had been observed as far back as Greek antiquity, having been advocated by Democritus and Epicurus in the fifth through third centuries before Christ, and by the Roman philosopher Lucretius in the first century B.C. But as a practical device for scientific reasoning, materialism proved conceptually useful beginning with the thought of Rene Descartes.

In his 1632 work Le Monde, the Discours de la Methode in 1637, his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations) in 1641 and the Principia Philosophiae (Principles) in 1644, Descartes reasoned in the historical climate of the philosophic transition from Medieval to Enlightenment thought- the dawning of the Scientific Revolution. At that time, a material worldview simply acknowledged that all the observable and mathematically measurable things in the universe are material objects.

Notes
*Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1989) 3.
**Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic: Sixth Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1982) 51.
***Ibid., p. 107.
****John C. Greene, The Death of Adam; Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1959) Preface.

Montag