Science as an output of Philosophy
Introduction: Why Science is a part of Philosophy and why $cientism hearkens back to $ophistry.
[First in a series, as we explore an obvious fact and error with ‘modern science’ namely its philosophical foundations].
Patterns
There are obvious patterns over Ferdinand Braudel’s long duration of history, that we can see within the philosophical and scientific history of ‘Western Civilisation’. Being a simple man of average intelligence trained in science and technology, I would say there are 3 overriding key patterns.
Pattern 1: The migration of philosophy and ‘science’ from individual efforts and small schools (the medieval period), to that of statism and state control (the ‘modern’ leviathan). The ‘state complex’ is now the arbiter of ‘Science’ once aided by the printing press, now supported by extensive digital technology and media.
Pattern 2: The return to the pagan philosophies of materialism (only matter is real) and nominalism (reality does not exist, nothing is objective). These patterns are regressive not ‘progressive’.
Pattern 3: The obvious philosophical foundation of all ‘science’. In reality, science is a branch of philosophy.
Technology vs ‘Science’
The above schematic was used as a basis for lectures given to mostly bored young students. It comports to what this substack really proposes, namely that modern science is more philosophy than a factual representation of natural reality. The ‘modern’ largely rejects this statement due to a profound and quite religious belief in what they are told by the state, its agencies, and its controlled media. This religiosity is linked to a puerile and incorrect confidence that ‘technology’ and mechancial progress validate ‘Science’.
It should be stated that technological advancement has nothing to do with ‘Science’ as taught in our society and educational systems. ‘Science’ arrives after an invention or creation to try to explain ‘laws’ or ‘axioms’ in an abstract mathematical manner. At best and very rarely, ‘Science’ might help in forming the same. However, no one can plausibly state that technological and practical innovation is dependent on ‘Science’.
Did the creator of anything from farming, to smithing, to building a house, a pyramid, an amphitheatre, a coliseum, an airplane, a can opener, a door knob, a chair, Euclidean geometry, or a semi-conductor chip, whine that it was hopeless because ‘The Science’ was unavailable for guidance? Of course not. Necessity, innovation, creation, imagination, functionality, improvements and inspiration - these are animating forces expressed in the genius of homo sapiens. Sapienta or real wisdom also demands a critical analysis of ‘Science’ and its claims to a divine right to rule.
The image above however rough, inerudite and inaccurate it may be, is stating that ‘Science’ is not a seed planting itself and ascending to design and life. ‘Science’ is the crop whose fecundity and nutrition are always found in the soil of philosophy and worldviews. There is no such thing as ‘independent Science’. That is a chimera.
The philosophical soil of ‘Science’ which provides its life and energy, is largely absent when ‘moderns’ discuss physics, cosmology, ‘evolution’, climate, gender and many other ‘topics’, which are claimed as ‘sciences’. At their core, these are philosophies. ‘Science’ as the medieval knew, is an output of ‘philosophy’.
Unruly gardens
Whilst wrong in the details, the image is not without relevance in context. In using this as a tool to lecture and teach on the history of ‘Science’ to confused young minds, it was taught that there are no independent boxes or lines of demarcation. Philosophy and related ‘Scientific’ belief imitate geology, they are a jumbled mishmash inured to simplistic analysis.
‘Rationalism’ and its advocates for example, happily trample into naturalism, mechanisation, and hyper-positivism. Such categories are fungible, malleable, with dozens of branches and offshoots. Like a chaotic garden they mingle and feed off each other. Despite all this, it is still useful to abstract and simplify.
Based on the above one can and should make some clear statements and ‘postulates’ on ‘Science’ which is an expression of philosophy.
· First, all ‘scientists’ are philosophers. It is impossible to state that Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Galileo, Darwin or Einstein amongst dozens of other acclaimed ‘scientists’, were not philosophers. They were first and foremost precisely that. This is never taught of course.
· Second, the underlying philosophy will always impart and force an interpretation of whatever phenomena is being discussed. This is obvious when discussing physics, cosmology, materialism, ‘long ages’ or geological theories for example.
· Third, in many cases the philosophy will deform observational data to make it conform to a preordained conclusion.
We see proof of the last two postulates in many areas of ‘Science’ including the psychology of Freud and Skinner, the positivism of Comte and Russell leading to a modern hyper-materialism, the Relativistic cult of Einstein and Hawking, the creation story from Big Bang theology, the naturalist-pantheism of the Gaia cult and its illiterate obsession with Co2, (a trace chemical necessary for life); and the sexual degeneracy as normalcy from Kinsey and his followers which now redounds in the mental illness of ‘trans’ and ‘poly’-genderism. These are just some examples of desecrating ‘data’ to fit desired determinations.
Antecedents
There is always a history. Nothing is really that novel. This substack has outlined inter-alia, how Galileo and Newton were fed with 400 years of physical experimentations. Galileo invented very little in reality. He appears to be an equivalent for ‘The Science’ of the famed 19th cenutry Russian ‘scientist’ ‘Popov’, who the Communists claimed, invented pretty much everything. Even Galileo’s telescope was inferior to many of his contemporaries and his ‘defence’ of Copernican philosophy was embarrassing and at odds with extant knowledge.
Newton’s value, outside of identifying a force called ‘gravity’ whose actual detailed workings have never been explained, is in the invention of calculus, which was developed at the same time and independently, by Leibniz. Both of these men invoked many predecessors. Without hundreds of years of previous work and effort, Newton would never have arrived at anything.
Few know that both Galileo and Newton were fundamentally philosophers, engaged with naturalist science, to form and propagate certain worldviews. This does not make their ‘Science’ invalid. But it is true that others with different worldviews came to different conclusions based on the same observations. This is evident with every single ‘scientific’ elaboration in history. But we rarely discuss it. Newton’s use of God to explain the orbiting of planets along the same plane and in the same direction at the same yearly rate, is reflected in Einstein’s constant and the Big Bang’s ‘Dark Matter’.
Philosophy or Sophistry?
We know that philosophy often turns into sophistry.
Socrates and Plato fulminated against the surreal anti-reality programs of sophists who could twist an evil untruth into a proclaimed proven veracity. Jacob Burkhardt in his magnus on Greek history phlegmatically describes the monetary benefits which accrued to sophists, an advantage that is demonstrated in the modern world at a far higher multiple. Burckhardt would argue that perhaps Plato was a sophist. Sophistry is the opposite of sapienta and truth.
We know that ‘Science’ often turns into Scientism.
Many hundreds of scientists, philosophers and writers have highlighted this truism including Paul Feyerabend, David Berlinski, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Coleridge, T.S. Eliott and C.S Lewis. One of the great ironies when discussing ‘Science’ is that much of it is simply ‘Scientism’ or an expression of philosophy.
Scientism is a doctrine of epistemology, which is a branch of philosophy which is focused on knowledge and how humans obtain, gather and develop knowledge. Further, Scientism is the religion of an all powerful State which seeks total control over its population. Scientism must subsume if not destroy all other philosophies and religions which attempt to explain the world around us.
Scientism or the claims by ‘The Science’ to epistemological ‘truth’, are of course self-refuting. Ironically ‘Science’ cannot claim to be the only way to understand reality, given that its own program denies that philosophy can prove natural reality. As philosopher of ‘Science’ Del Ratzsch once wrote, ‘science cannot validate either the scientific method itself or the presuppositions of that method’. There is never ‘one’ ‘scientific method’. There are many.
We know that Scientism often turns into sophistry.
Thus, an unvirtuous cycle has been established. Scientism takes Western Civilisation right back to the sophists. Let’s pause and reflect on what ‘Science’ cannot explain.
A plausible and provable origin of the universe and the Earth, a naturalist process to explain the Earth’s multi-layered atmosphere, molecular combinations producing elements such as H2O or CO2, the perfect properties of water, the existence of flora and fauna, the laws of ‘nature’, the amount of salt in oceanic water if the Earth is 4 billion years old, universal fine-tuning, consciousness, imagination, morality, emotions, sexual reproduction, extinctions, mutations which degrade, the arrival of 80 billion neurons in our brain, the development of 70 trillion cells in our bodies from a zygote, 6 feet of DNA per cell, how gravity works, how light works, why the Sun is positioned where it is, how our moon was formed…ad infinitum, add your own list.
When we look at reality, we realise how little ‘Science’ explains or proves. For example, we can declare that DNA was discovered by ‘scientists’ (atheists) who did use advanced technology. They did not however, use ‘scientific theories’ to unravel DNA but employed intuition, previous insights, investigation and experimentation. ‘Science’ per-se has little to do with microbiological discoveries.
Further, these men and subsequent generations cannot explain how and why DNA was formed in 70 trillion human cells. They can only offer up rather inane materialistic theories, which are unscientific and unproven. Their ‘Science’ explains precious little, yet we conflate materialistic philosophy (why, how DNA) with observational and experimental evidence (what is DNA). From this confusion and conflation we are told to accept that the materialistic philosophies and explanations about DNA are now ‘Science’. This is absurd.
Scientism
Philosopher of ‘Science’ Tom Sorrell commented thirty years ago that ‘Scientism’ is the ridiculous, unsupported belief that only ‘natural science’, or the quantitative measurement of natural materiality, is the only explanation of truth and reality. Based on the small list above, ‘Science’ is a failure.
“What is crucial to scientism is not the identification of something as scientific or unscientific but the thought that the scientific is much more valuable than the non-scientific, or the thought that the non-scientific is of negligible value.” (Sorrell, 1991)
Given that ‘Science’ explains very little, the claim that it has explained ‘everything’ can only be made by the insane or delirious. Then we have the corruption of money, complex maths and models, awards, power, careers and relevancy which is the core of much of what is claimed to be ‘The Science’. Yet this is also rarely discussed.
Nearly forty years ago, the philosopher John Kekes made the valid point that if you want to claim that ‘Science’ is a paradigm of ‘rationality’, you must establish that the presuppositions of ‘Science’ are preferable to other presuppositions. Nothing of the sort has been evidenced. The short list above is a departure point for why that is true.
One can debate about the type of pattern which informs philosophy and ‘Science’ throughout Western history. Many atheists, pagans, and classicists invoke a rise, fall and resurrection of both Western philosophy and science, which corresponds to their views of antiquity, the medieval era, and the so-called ‘modern age’. While prevalent, this view is certainly unacceptable and the opposite of reality. It was propagated by those with a philosophy and worldview to establish and a current state (theology, the Church, monarchies) to disestablish. Without the medieval era, there is no ‘modern’ era.
Bottom Line
Evidentially, we can see that there is a long process over 3 millennia in which Western ‘Science’ as an epistemological philosophy, attempted to use naturalism to explain our world of the 5 senses. The philosophies which are the core of the modern belief system around ‘Science’, or Scientism, which are the foundations for ‘naturalism’ are not new. Materialism, Relativity, Rationalism, Positivism, and Sophistry are ancient concepts found anywhere, in any age, where men have lived and thought. We have gone full circle. Maybe absent our technology, we are not so ‘modern’.
Science has mutated into Scientism and is now protected and financed by the ‘State’. ‘Science’ has migrated from seeking the truth to imposing a worldview - hence the truism that at its core ‘Science’ is an outgrowth of philosophy. Scientism and modern ‘Science’ is suffused with the distortion of power, maths, models, money, awards, careerism and philosophical worldviews.
I would maintain that the greatest of modern philosophies which have distorted and destroyed real science are those based on Darwinism, Relativism and Nietzsche’s anti-moralism. All of these are the preferred philosophies which ‘Science’ funds and venerates. They are the foundations of ‘modern Science’.
In the following posts we will discuss why ‘The Science’ is simply ‘A Philosophy’ and elaborate on the image at the beginning of this post.
Some sources related to Scientism:
Tom Sorrell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science. London, 1991
John Kekes, The Nature of Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980)
Del Ratzsch, Science and Its Limits, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000)
Rom Harré, The Philosophies of Science, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
JP Moreland, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, 2018
Joseph Natoli, A Primer to Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)