Does Science Have the Answers?
A Project for the January 2001 mid-service Short Course at
St George’s House, Windsor
Mark Warrick BSc BCS
Introduction:
The Popular Perception of Proof and Scientific Enquiry
For some decades there has been a tacit agreement in our society that science has, if not all the answers, then a very great number of them and the ability to find all the others, given time. Enough money spent on enough research will find all that we want to know. This belief has recently been challenged by a number of public health matters such as the outbreak and rapid spread of the human immunodeficiency virus and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, for neither of which has there been developed a cure and both of which has left politicians here and throughout the world struggling to find suitable policy and appealing to scientists for help. In different ways each of these diseases has brought humanity face to face with its own ignorance in spite of apparently great progress in scientific understanding of the way the universe is supposed to work.
The general perception of science is that it is a dispassionate search for the truth: the scientist simply wants to find out how things are and how they work and will apply objective tests which will provide absolute proof. Hence advertisers, for example, can claim that products are, "scientifically proved" to give certain (desirable) results. By these means we tend to believe that human knowledge has gradually increased over time, enabling benefits to accrue to humankind. How accurate is this perception?
The General Method of Hypothesis-testing
In principle, the way that scientific enquiry works is that, building upon the work of those who have gone before, an educated guess (a hypothesis) is made at the way things ought to be and then experiments are devised in an attempt to disprove the hypothesis, removing factors not relevant to the hypothesis as far as it is practical to do so. By failing to disprove it, evidence is gained to support the hypothesis. Thus it is relatively easy to dismiss a hypothesis by finding one phenomenon which could not be the case if the hypothesis were true. It is much more difficult, and some would say impossible, to prove that one is true.
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn (1) wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he showed that science does not progress in an orderly fashion from lesser to greater truth, but rather remains fixated on a particular dogma or explanation - a paradigm - which is only overthrown with great difficulty for a new paradigm to be established. Thus the Copernican system (the sun at the centre of the universe) overthrew the Ptolemaic (the earth at the centre) one, and Newtonian physics was replaced by Einstein’s Relativity. Science thus consists of periods of conservatism ("Normal Science") punctuated by periods of "Revolutionary Science".
For example, before Herschel "discovered" Uranus, the planet had been seen several times but the astronomers "saw" it as a star and not as a planet. Later Herschel saw Uranus with an improved telescope and thought he had discovered a comet, but various attempts to predict the cometary motion failed. Only later it was suggested that Uranus might be a planet. After this suggestion was accepted, astronomers were able to find more planets that they had been unable to see until that minor paradigm shift.
Kuhn’s theory has been attacked since, and Thomas Rauchenstein (2) has said, for example, that Kuhn leaves us with a defective and deficient picture of historical science as a non-rational sequence of monumental paradigm shifts. Primarily, difficulties arise in attempting to define what a paradigm actually is, and Kuhn's own views cannot escape his own strictures. He concludes that Kuhn has misconstrued both the internal structure and the historical nature of science itself. Nevertheless, Kuhn has opened the debate on the nature of scientific enquiry and questioned its objectivity in a way that has never been completely answered. To read Stephen Hawking’s popular book, A Brief History of Time is to read an account of many a paradigm-change and to expect that there may be more such to come.
Hawking asserts that any physical theory is always provisional and is never proved (3), and he illustrates this copiously. One example of provisionality will suffice for us here, which is the severe argument between Sir Arthur Eddington (with Albert Einstein himself) and his student Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar about the possibility of zero-sized stars, the so-called black holes which Chandrasekhar worked out to be a necessary corollary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, created by stars too large for them to be able to hold a stable size after burning up all their fuel. (4) The gravitational attraction is too great for the atoms to repel one another and the star collapses to a very small body of immense density (perhaps even a point of infinite density) with such great attraction that even light and other electro-magnetic signals cannot escape, and passing light is drawn in.
Having established evidence for his belief in black holes, Hawking then goes on to discuss these phenomena in some detail, even though the whole idea is still hypothetical. Some of what he says is, even in its language, wishful thinking: "It is greatly to be hoped ...", "It is difficult to believe ...". (5) While all of the argument leading to belief in black holes is internally consistent and does not, violate anything one can see to be the case, it has to be noted that neither is there much real evidence that they actually exist! It could be said, to simplify Kuhn’s model, that the existence of black holes, if not all their properties, is part of the current paradigm: scientists and laymen talk about them as if they are real, scientists consider the effects they would have upon the universe and then conduct experiments and study natural phenomena in an attempt to discover these effects, thereby strengthening the belief in the existence of black holes. My correspondence with an astrophysicist involved in this field (See appendix) confirms that no experiment has yet found evidence to destroy belief in black holes, but there is still a minority of scientists who claim that other phenomena could account for the results upon which others rely for their belief in black holes. Experiments continue.
Reductionism: The Quest for a Theory of Everything
In bringing together the General Theory of Relativity and the insights of Quantum Theory, Hawking and his colleagues are attempting to generate a "Theory of Everything" (6) which will be able to explain how the world is in such a simple and elegant formula that it will be widely understood by ordinary educated people. In the sense that these two fields are capable of explaining most physical phenomena (assuming they are correct, that is), then further work on bringing them together may well go some way to explaining a great deal about the material universe. In what sense this can be said to explain anything that anyone except physicists really wants to know is a question they do not seem to address. While the manner in which the world was made and the manner in which it may end are of some intellectual interest to many people, why they are starving, why their nations are in conflict and whether their wives or husbands love them are matters of far greater significance to most humans, and the Theory of Everything does not begin to answer any of these things. Indeed, it could be said that vast tracts of human concern, including the most important matters, are simply not addressed by science at all, even though science has indeed delivered a great number of inestimable benefits to humanity.
Behind the apparently all-embracing reach of scientific study are some basic assumptions which remain almost totally unspoken. Primarily there is the assumption - some might say faith - that the universe is in fact ordered and therefore capable of being studied in an ordered way. Secondly there are assumptions - which can seem fairly arbitrary - about what is within the purview of the scientist and what is not. For example, the effort being made to prove the existence of black holes which no-one has ever seen, and by definition ever will see, contrasts markedly with the effort to study such phenomena as ghosts which many people claim to have seen. Under the present paradigm such phenomena are not studied.
Beyond these two restrictions on science is the greater restriction that is imposed by the very physical universe that science is trying to study. The planet on which we live limits the size of instruments we can use, but apart from such difficulties as this there are limits on how small an object we can see because the light used to observe them begins to have a substantial effect: this is the basis of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. We can never know just where a subatomic particle is or how it is moving because we change those factors by trying to look! At the other extreme we cannot see before the so-called Big Bang and we cannot see into the future, and neither can we see beyond the (albeit vast) confines of the universe we inhabit. What, if anything, lies beyond? An eloquent visual comment on this was made at the end of the motion picture "Men in Black" where the camera appears to zoom out from a city street until the earth disappears into a mass of stars and then the galaxy becomes small and insignificant until all the universe seems to be shown as one whole which is then gathered up as a marble by a fantasy creature in a fantasy landscape and placed in a bag with several similar marbles! This was intended as comedy and there is no evidence to suggest that such is the truth, but there is little or nothing to prove that it is not, either!
In the quest for this so-called Theory of Everything it is all too easy to fall into the trap of what Dr Rodney Holder (7) after Professor Donald MacKay (8), calls, "nothing-buttery," in which we claim that significant things, such as our thought patterns, are "nothing but" the movement according to physical laws of the electromagnetic pulses in our brains and we are in any case "nothing but" collections of "successful" genes. Such reductionism makes life seem worthless and suggests that all that has happened was inevitable from the beginning. In a sense it is a continuation of the scientific determinism suggested by the Marquis de Laplace at the beginning of the twentieth century, supposedly extinguished by Planck and Heisenberg. The arguments seem to make sense: if there are "laws" governing the interaction of the wave-particles from which all is made, and if the uncertainty principle relates only to our perception of where things are and how they are moving rather than to any actual vagueness in their physical state, then it ought to be possible to calculate - if one lived long enough, and if one had the data from the beginning - exactly how every single moment of history from every point of view would work out in every respect.
We should ignore the conditions about the need to live long enough and to have the data from the beginning of the universe since these, important constraints though they are on the scientist, are only concerned with our inability to know what is going to happen and not with whether such things are, in principle, already "decided" by the position and movement of the wave-particles of which all the universe is composed. The significant conditions are those of the status of natural physical laws and of the status of the uncertainty principle. Physical laws, of course, are not rules: they are statements about what has been observed to happen in every case so far observed of a particular type of event. Very few, if any, are without exception, especially in extreme circumstances. Indeed, it is observed failures of nature to "obey" currently believed "laws" which leads to advance - what Kuhn might term the paradigm shift. The breakdown of general relativity in very small particles is a case in point and has led scientists to where they are now in terms of trying to reconcile the two "ends" of physics.
Again, while Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle only states that we cannot know what is happening in terms of position and movement of sub-atomic particles, we cannot therefore know whether there is any randomness in this movement - or even divine intervention! There is a gap in knowledge here which can never be filled, and it is a highly significant gap, for at this level information is transmitted through the exchange of energy from atom to atom, and herein is thought. We are far from saying, then, that our thoughts and feelings, and our decisions (and therefore our impact on the universe around us) are nothing but the pre-determined (even though unpredicted) movement of wave-particles in our brains. This we simply cannot know, and it is therefore more a question of what we prefer to believe. If you really think you have experienced love, and it means something to you, then you are at liberty to believe that it is so! Science has emphatically not shown otherwise and never can.
Some criticisms of Hawking says that his whole argument leads to the conclusion that there is nothing left for a creator to do, so much being an inevitable consequence of the way things are: the universe, and humanity with it, is nothing but an accident, the result of long ages of random collisions and driftings. Such musing in the media is common, but I would want to defend Hawking from the charge of making God redundant. He seems to believe that by studying the origin of the universe he will understand the mind of God, and I wonder if herein is a hint of the improbability of succeeding in the fusion of general relativity and quantum mechanics to generate the Theory of Everything that he seeks, or whether he and others simply have too small an idea of God. Has our preaching sold modern humanity short?
I do think some have too small an idea of creation. Physicists agree with Genesis that at the start of the world something was already there, although the singularity of which Hawking writes is somewhat different from the primeval waters of Genesis! The principle, though, is that by this point something is already existing, and some rather precise rules have been set about the way things are going to be. Why is any of this here at all? Even if there have been many universes before this one, and even if it is not really a universe at all but one of many such exploding and imploding singularities beyond each other’s ability to observe, why any of it should ever have happened cannot be answered just by improving the description of what did happen when this particular group of swirling and separating galaxies came into being. That there seems to be intelligence behind it can be argued from the ability of intelligent beings such as ourselves to understand it, even if only in part, although it can also be said that the time it is taking us to do the work would suggest that there is no intelligence there at all and we are vainly trying to make a random set of variables orderly so as to convince ourselves that there is a reason for our existence! The conditions required for life are so specific that for it all to be an accident seems unlikely and a creator has to be a serious option for consideration by the open-minded, but this creator does not have to be seen in the manner of a boat builder completing his work and letting it go, but rather as the sustainer and upholder of all that is, intimately involved in its life (in the very interactions between its sub-atomic particles, even), and trying to elicit some sort of response from the intelligent creatures he has put here on this planet and quite possibly though not necessarily on many others, too.
Such a description of God is taken up by WH Vanstone in Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense (9), and is similar to the Hindu concept of a god whose dance is creation. Once we can get away from the idea of a God who simply "boots" the universe, whether he then comes back to intervene in it or not, to a God who, much more like Jesus’ description of his Father who has never stopped working, is closely identified with his creation, then we have no difficulty with scientific concepts like evolution (again a theory which is still not really "proved" but which is part of the present paradigm) (10, 11).
Having established that there is still some mileage in the God theory, we still have not stated why he has brought all of this into being, but at this point, of course, we leave science behind.
Conclusion: Implications for the Church in Society
This all-too-brief look at the real nature of scientific enquiry and knowledge has necessarily left a lot of gaps but I hope covers the general area enough to give some encouragement for Christian theology and mission in the new millennium. Contrary to what is so often portrayed in the mass media, recent scientific discoveries do not actually conflict with Christian faith. Some of what is presented as scientific discovery is not even accepted by all scientists and is in any case "provisional", Professor Stephen Hawking’s own word, and much of what passes for Christian belief is expressed in terms too dependent upon the paradigms of past ages.
Therefore the Church can have confidence in her message in the present age: life has meaning, God sustains the world in his love and is constantly active in it while giving us the freedom to respond to him. Science is to be encouraged as part of our loving response, for at heart it is a search for greater understanding of God through knowledge of what he has done and is doing in his world. If there is truth in what we profess as Christians, there is nothing to fear from scientific enquiry, and a great deal of God’s majesty in creation to contemplate.
Bibliography
Appendix: