Assumptions of Science

1. Assumptions of Science • The world is real. • The real world is knowable and comprehensible. • There are laws that govern the real world. • Those laws are knowable and comprehensible. • Those laws don't [radically] change according to place or time, since the early stages of the big bang.

2. Assumptions of Science • Nature is understandable • The rules of logic are valid • Language is adequate to describe the natural realm • Human senses are reliable. • Mathematical rules are descriptive for the physical world • Unexplained things can be used to explain other phenomenon (e.g. gravity is thus far unexplained but it is used to explain the movement of planets and the bending of light) • Observable phenomenon provide knowledge about unobservable phenomenon

3. Assumptions of science • True, physical universe exists • Universe is primarily orderly • The principles that define the functioning of the universe can be discovered • All ideas are tentative, potentially changed by new information

4. Basic Assumptions of Science Nature is orderly, i.e., regularity, pattern, and structure. Laws of nature describe order. We can know nature. Individuals are part of nature. Individuals and social exhibit order; may be studied same as nature. All phenomena have natural causes. Scientific explanation of human behavior opposes religious, spiritualistic, and magical explanations. Nothing is self evident. Truth claims must be demonstrated objectively. Knowledge is derived from acquisition of experience. Empirically. Thru senses directly or indirectly. Knowledge is superior to ignorance.

5. Basic Assumptions of Science • Assumptions are accepted without proof • Form the basis of all scientific thinking

6. Limitations of Science • Science can't answer questions about value. For example, there is no scientific answer to the questions, "Which of these flowers is prettier?" or "which smells worse, a skunk or a skunk cabbage?" And of course, there's the more obvious example, "Which is more valuable, one ounce of gold or one ounce of steel?" Our culture places value on the element gold, but if what you need is something to build a skyscraper with, gold, a very soft metal, is pretty useless. So there's no way to scientifically determine value.

7. Limitations of Science • Science can't answer questions of morality. The problem of deciding good and bad, right and wrong, is outside the determination of science. This is why expert scientific witnesses can never help us solve the dispute over abortion: all a scientist can tell you is what is going on as a fetus develops; the question of whether it is right or wrong to terminate those events is determined by cultural and social rules--in other words, morality. The science can't help here.

8. Limitations of Science • Science can't help us with questions about the supernatural. The prefix "super" means "above." So supernatural means "above (or beyond) the natural." The toolbox of a scientist contains only the natural laws of the universe; supernatural questions are outside their reach.

9. The Limitations of Science Scientismforms the basis for many modern materialistic and rationalistic philosophies.

10. Scientism • Scientism is the acceptance of scientific theory and scientific methods as applicable in all fields of inquiry about the world, including morality, ethics, art, and religion

11. Materialism • “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities." In a word, the public needs to accept materialism, which means that they must put God in the trash can of history where such myths belong.” Richard Lewontin Retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books,

12. Scientific Materialism • Scientific Materialism accepts only one reality: the physical universe, composed as it is of matter and energy.  Everything that is not physical, measurable, or deducible from scientific observations, is considered unreal. Life is explained in purely mechanical terms, and phenomena such as Mind and Consciousness are considered nothing but epiphenomena - curious by-products, of certain complex physical processes (such as brain metabolism)

13. Scientific Materialism • There is no God, • No angels • No Devil • No good • No evil • No survival of physical death, • No non-physical realities, and • No ultimate meaning or purpose to life • No Heaven • No afterlife

14. Scientific Materialism • Only that which can be observed and measured through the technique of Scientific Method is real, and everything else is unreal.

15. John Horgan’s “The End of Science” • But science itself tells us that there are limits to our knowledge. Relativity theory prohibits travel or communication faster than light. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory constrain our predictive ability. Evolutionary biology keeps reminding us that we are animals, designed by natural selection not for discovering deep truths of nature but for breeding. Perhaps the most important barrier to future progress in science—especially pure science—is its past success.

16. Hogan continued UnsolvedProblems after many years and dollars spent. • Fusion • Weather Prediction • Earthquake Prediction • Gravity • Consciousness • Artificial Intelligence • Origins of life and synthesized life • Higgs Bosons and other basic particles

17. Unsolved Problem- Life • For nearly 50 years since the Miller and Urey experiment which synthesized amino acids and nucleoside in vitro the hope for the artificial creation of life appears ever more distant than.

18. Knowledge • Knowledge is a relationship between ideas about observations. • Are there other ways of knowing in addition to the ways of Science? • Are painting, dance, music, religion other ways of knowing?

19. Knowledge • Are there question asked by art or religion? • Are those question understood by Science? • Can science answer the questions asked by painting or religion? • Can science decide which painting or which musical score is great and which is dross?

20. Transitions to Complexity • Does quantum physics subsume chemistry? • Does chemistry subsume life? • Does biology subsume consciousness? OR Are there unanticipated, non-deducible transitions to new organizations of matter?

21. Organizations of Matter • Prigogine showed spontaneous organization was described by higher order thermodynamics. • Chaotic, entropy dissipating systems “snap” into order as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction,

23. Transitions • Is life or consciousness impossible to understand in terms of physics or chemistry? • The enzymes studied since 1860 is not understood. • Is the ancient Greek goal of unifying knowledge impossible? • Are there isolated islands of knowledge?

24. Transitions Omega Point Psychology Biology Chemistry Physics

25. But Still I Take the Side of Science “I take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.” Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books,