Eric Hedin is a PhD physicist originating from the University of Washington. He's done post-doctoral research on plasma physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Eric has just published a book through the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He began a course at Ball State University, with the approval of the University authorities. 'Boundaries of Science' was an exploration of where science might fade off in efficacy. This is a theme that also interests me of course. Science has become 'god' for many. Adherents to a 'hard scientific worldview' consider it to have limitless capacity and potential for uncovering truth and dismissing superstition and blind faith. They look at technical progress, and understandably perhaps, make a leap of reasoning. They assume science can answer all questions and, with technology, solve all problems. Provided of course we stay the course and don't lose faith in science itself. And there, of course, lies the rub. Is it appropriate and reasonable to have this sort of pervading faith in the scientific method?
Hedin sought to examine issues here, rather than indoctrinate people into his own Christian faith. However, he was accused by Jerry Coyne, a well-known atheist and evolutionary biologist, of proffering a 'religiously infused science course'. This was an interesting accusation, and it is certainly very possible Mr Hedin was partially motivated by a desire to steer minds into further thought; examining the case for the Biblical Creator.
Actually atheists and agnostics have written on the limitations and possible blind spots of the scientific method as well. I have previously mentioned two popular-level books addressing such concerns. The first is 'a Different Universe' by Robert Laughlin, the second 'What We Cannot Know' by Marcus du Sautoy.
Why is Coyne so edgy and keen to shut this sort of thing down? Does he have logical and reasonable grounds?
More profoundly, is the near absolute reverence for the scientific method, held by many scientific thinkers, well-founded? Is it as logical and rational as they say? I've addressed this before, but Hedin states the paradox embedded in scientific naturalism very succinctly. I don't know if the way the argument is presented is original to Hedin. But I'll re-state the essence of it here. Naturalism, incidentally, is a science-related term for the quest to explain everything by purely natural means, i.e. to exclude the supernatural or mystical.
Hedin basically says, very simply:
1) Science seeks explanations of observed phenomena that rely solely on natural causes.
2) A scientific model makes testable predictions about natural phenomena allowing us to revise or abandon the model if the predictions do not agree with observations.
Makes a lot of sense on the surface. But definitely not complete sense. The Big Question. Is definition 1) subject to the scrutiny of definition 2)? In other words, is science subjected to its own constraints? If we define and treat science itself as a scientific model, do we then subject it to the scientific tests and possible adjustments set out in 2)? The answer, in the general thinking of most scientists, is 'No'. We don't use the method of science to prove or disprove the scope of science itself. If we tried to, the case for the all-sufficiency and supremacy of the tool of science would disassemble. It's an unwarranted precondition (or at best, a tentative working assumption) to say that any model of reality must be based only on what we presently consider to be natural causes. To assume point 1) is actually a constraint on our truth-searching, if our aim is to pursue reality by any and every possible means. This assumption that point 1) can be adopted, without limiting our thoughts, postulates and activities, is widely made but usually not explicitly stated. It's a precept which must be adopted before we can get started with science. But it's actually an arbitrary precept. It came out of 'thin air'. Science is a way of looking at reality, but in truth it is only an arbitrarily constrained way.
Scientists usually start with this assumption and work with it in the background. A little thought shows that what we defined with point 1) is actually only a restrictive patch of reasoning, not the sum total of all possible logical reasoning.
We can see that the scientific method is not saying, 'let's look at everything we might glean about reality using logical thought'.
Instead, it's saying, 'let's assume everything about reality can be explained using what we already know about reality'.
This really (sorry) is not nearly as logical as hard science reductionists like to think, or to tell us.
Robert Laughlin, the Nobel Laureate author I mentioned, was aware of this paradox. He mentioned unease about how we use concepts derived from everyday observation, such as waves and particles, to attempt to penetrate to the very core of absolute reality. Stated another way, he noted that, yet-to-be-discovered, underlying physics manifests to us, in the form of particles and waves. The reality itself is very unlikely to be correctly, adequately modelled using those particle- and wave- paradigms. Yet our whole mathematical set of constructs revolves around spatial constructs like waves, and integer counts of objects such as particles.
In scientific and indeed mathematical thinking, you can never reduce back to nothing. In fact you cannot even reduce back to just one commodity or variable. This is because all causes and all equations are relationships between multiple parameters.
If there's a transcendent Creator, as Hedin and myself believe, then what we can understand of His Creation will be discernible and comprehensible only because He made it possible for us. Not because we are really smart and on top of the search for underlying causes.
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