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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 24, 2008
Science v. wisdom
Let me be candid with my reader. It has long been my view that 1. Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics offers the foundation for any broad discussion of scientific method, and that 2. the word “science” should be used, generally with more care, and most often in the plural.Or to put the first proposition another way, there is more to be studied in the sciences than contemporary scientists are trained to feel comfortable with. And questions of purpose, of final cause, or let us say, “teleological questions,” have been illegitimately excluded from modern scientific inquiry. Hence the way so many go squirrelly when we merely utter the phrase, “intelligent design.” And need sedation after the use of some such word as “soul.” Yet on the other hand, in my second proposition, “science” means knowledge, and refers specifically to empirical knowledge of the world around us. Our knowledge of that is fragmentary, and will remain fragmentary in the nature of the case -- for we are inside, not outside, the universe; its creatures and not its creator. Fragments are by definition plural. It is for this reason that, while we may perpetually aspire to a unified science, we must perpetually fail to achieve it. And moreover, expressions such as “the science is settled,” the crutches of New Age mystics such as David Suzuki and Al Gore, are intrinsically nonsensical. A religious dogma may be settled, and certain physical facts may be settled (the Second Law of Thermodynamics is solid like Euclid). But the interpretation of either remains open so long as humans live and breathe. In the meanwhile we have “sciences,” with important overlaps between them. However, the difference between, say, physics and biology, is sufficiently great that very few human minds (not even Aristotle’s) could ever accommodate themselves to both. For when we move from the contemplation of physical laws that govern our universe, to the contemplation of the biological life we find on this planet, an intelligent mind will boggle. Yes, a cat dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa obeys the same physical laws as a cannonball. But the creature itself -- even a cat -- has a will that physical laws may restrain but cannot determine. The creature’s “principle of movement” exists within itself. (That’s what “animal” means, from “anima”: breath, spirit, soul.) It has, in Aristotle’s term, a “soul,” an “animating principle” -- even if it is an earthworm. Even the lily of the field, arrayed as no Solomon, has a will to being, to growth, and self-expression as a lily of the field. This is not a theory. It is prior to any theory: self-evident and undisprovable. My reader, endowed as he (or verily, she) may be with “free will,” may now be wondering: What is my point? Why should we devote another minute of our precious time to considering the obvious in high-sounding phrases? The answer is that (eureka!) I have discovered what was once obvious to almost everyone, is no longer obvious, to people indoctrinated through our schools and media in the religion of “scientism” -- to people saturated in the view that “science and science alone” (note the singular) explains everything that can or should be known. That is to say, the worldview in which “science” is openly substituted for religion, and the sciences (plural) are thereby opened to corruption, to regulation and censorship, to serving the agendas of various smelly little orthodoxies. And I get my evidence in email every day, from correspondents both Left and Right in politics and cranial disposition, on subjects ranging from evolution to world climate: drooling subservience to anyone who has donned the priestly mantle of “science.” So let me now return to the two propositions with which I began. The first, I think, partly defines modernism, and has been with us for centuries, since Lord Bacon and René Descartes rewrote scientific method on William of Ockham’s razor principles. By formally excluding purpose, or final cause, from scientific study, we look at nature in a mechanistic and desiccated way, sucking all meaning and moisture out of our atmosphere, reducing everything we encounter to an object for exploitation, and disabling our instinctive reverence for life. The second, I think, largely defines post-modernism. For nature is full of cause, purpose, meaning -- “values” if you will; qualities as well as quantities. And nature tends to retaliate when ignored. Our little spiritual vessels, emptied of reason and common sense, fill with junk and with the consequences of “junk science.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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