{"id":20,"date":"2010-03-06T02:18:34","date_gmt":"2010-03-06T02:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/headofleslie.com\/blog\/?p=20"},"modified":"2010-03-06T15:01:26","modified_gmt":"2010-03-06T15:01:26","slug":"science-is-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/headofleslie.com\/blog\/science-is-real\/","title":{"rendered":"Science is Real"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“They Might Be Giants” is a very talented band.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

They’ve recently come out with an album dealing with various matters of science.\u00a0 There’s a song on the elements entitled simply “Meet the Elements”\u00a0 and other songs that deal with the planets, the sun, etc.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Let’s take a look at some of the lyrics:<\/p>\n

Science is real
\nFrom the Big Bang to DNA
\nScience is real
\nFrom evolution to the Milky Way
\nI like the stories
\nAbout angels, unicorns and elves
\nNow I like those stories
\nAs much as anybody else
\nBut when I’m seeking knowledge
\nEither simple or abstract
\nThe facts are with science
\nThe facts are with science<\/p>\n

Science is real (x3)<\/p>\n

…
\nA scientific theory
\nIsn’t just a hunch or guess
\nIt’s more like a question
\nThat’s been put through a lot of tests
\nAnd when a theory emerges
\nConsistent with the facts
\nThe proof is with science
\nThe truth is with science<\/p>\n

My first hope upon listening to this song was that they were being facetious.\u00a0 But as I looked into it more it appears that they wanted everyone to understand exactly what they are saying.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In fact I read as much quoted in an interview with John Linnell which asked a question about the song alienating some listeners.\u00a0 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.<\/em>” (Nature, Aug. 27 2009<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Interesting – when we’re asking questions about facts, we need to go to science.\u00a0 Religion can’t possibly tell us what we need to know.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Science, according to many, is the only way to know the truth about the world.\u00a0 Science should be at the center of your worldview – in fact it has to be if you intend for your worldview to be true.<\/p>\n

The ignorance of this claim is only outdone by its arrogance.\u00a0 Don’t misunderstand – I agree that science is real.\u00a0 But the idea that only science can tell us truth is nothing short of absurd.\u00a0 To begin with, the notion is self refuting.\u00a0 That is to say, inherent within the claim is the refutation of it.\u00a0 After all, the claim that science is the only way to determine truth is not itself a scientific statement.\u00a0 You can’t test that claim scientifically.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But the problems go much deeper than that.\u00a0 It’s hard to even define what science is exactly.\u00a0 Multiple views have been held such as rational realism, rational nonrealism, and nonrational nonrealism, and these include various subsets.\u00a0 For a good overview of some of these different ways of thinking about science, see Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City<\/a> (which is a great book for anyone looking to go deeper into Christian thinking, btw).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/em>” (Moreland, Scaling the Secular City<\/span>. pp. 199-200).\u00a0 What a good way of pointing out the problem! Whatever science is, the definition will not be found by scientists.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, contrary to the claim of this song and many who hold the view it espouses,\u00a0 it is obvious that there are important truths in the world which are not accessible to science.\u00a0 For instance, the laws of logic cannot be proven or disproven by science.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We know them to be true and they are of great importance.\u00a0 But you can’t go to science to prove or disprove them.\u00a0 Likewise morality is not something science can properly address, although this does not mean scientists have not been foolish enough to try. \u00a0 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.\u00a0 The problem is this isn’t morality.\u00a0 Morality is not a question of what people do given certain situations; morality is a question of what people ought<\/em> to do given certain situations.\u00a0 And as the old saying goes, you can’t get an ought from an is.\u00a0 Even if scientists had correctly found where our feelings about certain things came from, that would not tell us anything about what we ought<\/em> to do.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Science simply cannot address them, though these questions surely have a true answer.\u00a0 Although perhaps it is the denial of that statement that is one of the biggest problems our society has today.\u00a0 But I will leave that debate for another day.<\/p>\n

The point is that science simply does not have a stranglehold on truth.\u00a0 And every scientist (or musician) who holds otherwise only manages to cut off the branch upon which they stand.\u00a0 Bold though it may be, it’s a foolish move.\u00a0 The fact is, science can only function because it makes a set of presuppositions which it cannot itself prove.\u00a0 Those presuppositions are just as important as, if not more important than, everything science manages to discover.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 They are superfluous to these questions.\u00a0 But the question of God is not at all.\u00a0 Indeed, I would argue that without God nothing would be intelligible.\u00a0\u00a0 Even if that is the mere “unmoved mover” of Aristotle and not something more personal, it’s still necessary.\u00a0 Science is only able to work because there is truth beyond science.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Suddenly science finds itself in the limelight and thinks it got there without any help at all.\u00a0 But this only hurts science.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As it is, most scientists aren’t even open to reasonable possibilities today due to their own philosophical presuppositions.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Science is real, true enough.\u00a0 But I’ll dare to say it – God is more so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“They Might Be Giants” is a very talented band.\u00a0 I can’t say I’m a huge fan … a lot of their music is just a…<\/p>\n

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