“They Might Be Giants” is a very talented band. I can’t say I’m a huge fan … a lot of their music is just a bit too strange for my taste (both musically and lyrically), but I’m enough of a fan to own one of their albums. They have a couple of great songs for sure, and then they’ve got others where you just scratch your head trying to figure out what on earth they were talking about.
They’ve recently come out with an album dealing with various matters of science. There’s a song on the elements entitled simply “Meet the Elements” and other songs that deal with the planets, the sun, etc. But there’s one song in particular which leads off the album by the name of “Science is Real”, the video of which is posted above. Let’s take a look at some of the lyrics:
Science is real
From the Big Bang to DNA
Science is real
From evolution to the Milky Way
I like the stories
About angels, unicorns and elves
Now I like those stories
As much as anybody else
But when I’m seeking knowledge
Either simple or abstract
The facts are with science
The facts are with science
Science is real (x3)
…
A scientific theory
Isn’t just a hunch or guess
It’s more like a question
That’s been put through a lot of tests
And when a theory emerges
Consistent with the facts
The proof is with science
The truth is with science
My first hope upon listening to this song was that they were being facetious. But as I looked into it more it appears that they wanted everyone to understand exactly what they are saying. The message is simply that science is real, but what they mean by that is this – science is the only way to really know anything. In fact I read as much quoted in an interview with John Linnell which asked a question about the song alienating some listeners. According to Linnell, “John Flansburgh took the bull by the horns by writing that song and addressing that situation, which is that religion cannot take the place of science. It’s not something you can tiptoe around. It’s important that everybody gets what the discussion is about. If we’re talking about the history of Earth, we can’t rely on religious tradition to tell us all the information. He says it in the song: as beautiful as the stories are, they don’t tell us everything we need to know. It’s an old complaint on the part of scientists, but it bears repeating.” (Nature, Aug. 27 2009)
Interesting – when we’re asking questions about facts, we need to go to science. Religion can’t possibly tell us what we need to know. It can give us beautiful stories (= sweet lies) but the truth of it all is found in science. This wouldn’t be quite so bothersome to me if this were not such a prevalent view in our society today. Science, according to many, is the only way to know the truth about the world. Science should be at the center of your worldview – in fact it has to be if you intend for your worldview to be true.
The ignorance of this claim is only outdone by its arrogance. Don’t misunderstand – I agree that science is real. But the idea that only science can tell us truth is nothing short of absurd. To begin with, the notion is self refuting. That is to say, inherent within the claim is the refutation of it. After all, the claim that science is the only way to determine truth is not itself a scientific statement. You can’t test that claim scientifically. Rather, it’s an epistemological claim – in other words, the question of how to know truth is one that only can be answer by philosophy, not science.
But the problems go much deeper than that. It’s hard to even define what science is exactly. Multiple views have been held such as rational realism, rational nonrealism, and nonrational nonrealism, and these include various subsets. For a good overview of some of these different ways of thinking about science, see Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City (which is a great book for anyone looking to go deeper into Christian thinking, btw). Moreland makes a great point at the end of one of the segments on science though that I’d like to keep in mind here: “…science is just not a discipline that is isolated from other fields of knowledge in such a way that it fits into a neat compartment. There are some cases of what most people would consider to be science, but there does not seem to be an adequate definition of science which covers all the cases. Even if one were to emerge, the adequacy of the definition of science would not itself be a scientific issue but a philosophical one, and thus such a definition would itself illustrate the limits of science” (Moreland, Scaling the Secular City. pp. 199-200). What a good way of pointing out the problem! Whatever science is, the definition will not be found by scientists.
Furthermore, contrary to the claim of this song and many who hold the view it espouses, it is obvious that there are important truths in the world which are not accessible to science. For instance, the laws of logic cannot be proven or disproven by science. The law of excluded middle (i.e. a statement is either true or false) and the law of non-contradiction (i.e. a thing cannot be both itself and not itself at the same time in the same way and sense) are both true laws. We know them to be true and they are of great importance. But you can’t go to science to prove or disprove them. Likewise morality is not something science can properly address, although this does not mean scientists have not been foolish enough to try. Scientists have observed life on earth and have seen certain structures in various animals and obviously in humans as well, and have attempted to conclude that morality is simply a construct of evolution. The problem is this isn’t morality. Morality is not a question of what people do given certain situations; morality is a question of what people ought to do given certain situations. And as the old saying goes, you can’t get an ought from an is. Even if scientists had correctly found where our feelings about certain things came from, that would not tell us anything about what we ought to do. Questions about murder, rape, suicide, lying, or more popular specific issues like abortion and homosexuality – these are moral questions – questions about what people ought to do. Science simply cannot address them, though these questions surely have a true answer. Although perhaps it is the denial of that statement that is one of the biggest problems our society has today. But I will leave that debate for another day.
The point is that science simply does not have a stranglehold on truth. And every scientist (or musician) who holds otherwise only manages to cut off the branch upon which they stand. Bold though it may be, it’s a foolish move. The fact is, science can only function because it makes a set of presuppositions which it cannot itself prove. Those presuppositions are just as important as, if not more important than, everything science manages to discover.
As much as They Might Be Giants might want to toss religion in there with elves and unicorns, I am fully unwilling to do so, because elves and unicorns don’t address anything about the way the world works. They are superfluous to these questions. But the question of God is not at all. Indeed, I would argue that without God nothing would be intelligible. Even if that is the mere “unmoved mover” of Aristotle and not something more personal, it’s still necessary. Science is only able to work because there is truth beyond science. But it appears many in the fields of natural science are like the proverbial overnight superstar – they soon forget who got them to where they are. Suddenly science finds itself in the limelight and thinks it got there without any help at all. But this only hurts science. Without a proper knowledge of how science is even possible, science is going to constantly be finding out the wrong answers to questions, and often even asking the wrong questions, and worst of all it will be applauding itself the entire time for doing it all correctly. As it is, most scientists aren’t even open to reasonable possibilities today due to their own philosophical presuppositions. However, when we are able to get back to that point – that point where we realize that not only can faith and science work in harmony, but that science is absolutely in need of what we know as faith to work, we will all be much better for it. Science is real, true enough. But I’ll dare to say it – God is more so.