John Lennox had a point in observing that one can know every fact about the words on a page from a scientific perspective - from chemistry and physics - but this knowledge tells us nothing about the meaning of the words themselves. Indeed, meaning is non physical, transcending physical systems. This is just one of the key limits of science. In a culture that has a habit of portraying science as the only source of real knowledge, I see it as critical that the limits of science be known just as well as all of its achievements... Not to attack science, but to ensure that this field of endeavour does not go outside of its scope.
Reductionism is fair enough in the sense of trying to narrow the scope of enquiry into a thing: to be able to understand certain aspects of it while not being distracted by other aspects. Indeed the way science is done is by reducing the world to what is empirical and able to be measured, as a way of better understanding physical reality. The problem is when one takes things an unwarranted step further, claiming that just because something cannot be reduced to the purely empirical, it therefore does not exist. I can understand to some level Richard Feynman's interlocutor, asking if scientific enquiry destroys the beauty of say, flowers. If one takes the fallacious eliminative reductionism, which attempts to claim that that the non empirical aspects of the flower do not exist - its sheer beauty and the thoughts of romance that come with it, then yes, the question seems reasonable. But if there very clearly exists reality beyond the empirical, it is unjustified to claim it does not exist, as eliminative materialism tries to do. The more realistic way to apply reductionist thinking is as a way to better understand the physical components of reality i.e the flower. This does not take away the beauty. By contrast, as Feynman appears to see at a deep level, it adds to the beauty. The reductionism of scientific enquiry is a useful way to see the physical aspects of reality more clearly. It is not a bad thing in this context. But it is folly to wear sunglasses for so long to forget the world isn't dark!
If science functions by using the thinking tool of reductionism, and it is also fair to suppose that
the aspects of reality that scientific enquiry filters out using reductionism still have a real existence, it follows that scientific enquiry, although the best thing we have for understanding the physical universe, is fundamentally limited. We can know everything about the brain chemistry of a person. But we cannot, as such, tap into a person's consciousness. Consciousness, as one example, although linked to matter, cannot be reduced to purely matter. This is just one thing that cannot be completely captured and explained by science. Instead, we have other fields that help us attain knowledge. Aspects of thinking used in science may indeed be applied: careful reasoning, observation, developing and testing theories. But the reductionism in science cannot be applied, This is like making the very thing to be studied disappear before ones eyes. If a thing cannot be reduced to purely the empirical, it obviously cannot be studied by using a method that only looks at the empirical.
I have been pointing out some of the limits of science. In a similar way that science cannot be the only source of knowledge because as part of its method it necessarily reduces things to the empirically observable and measurable, I challenge the claim that science is the source of real knowledge, as it uses concepts and ideas that are not discovered by the scientific method. Mathematics especially is a case in point. That and the laws of logic. They cannot, as such, be discovered by empirical scientific means. To even do science, the laws of logic are taken as axioms. Science does not discover logic- instead, the very act of doing science uses and presupposes it. Quite similarly, numbers are not physical, and so able to be found by empirical means. One does not find a number by pure observation. Instead, they are more a priori concepts which can then be applied to the study of the physical world. The idea is that science itself rests on more fundamental realities, and so, cannot be the only source of real knowledge. It is certainly a critically important source of knowledge. But hardly the only source.
In applying this thinking, I take issue with Sam Harris' claim in "The Moral Landscape" that science determines moral values. No. One can know everything there is to know about a thing empirically, but that does not, in and of itself, give any values of good and evil. Indeed the very judgment and identification of good and evil precedes any scientific enquiry. Instead it is first experienced in an aspect of the person not able to be accessed by empirical means: the conscience. Very simply, it is wrong to say that science is the source of moral values. We experience them by way of non scientific means - philosophy, literature, law etc. Science can be applied to ethics, if one believes it is possible to find out more about human nature and what makes us flourish by scientific means. But the standard of human flourishing, and that law written on our hearts precedes any scientific deliberation.
Aaron Carlin 16/1/2015
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