Scientism

What does science tell us about the universe? An enormous amount, evidently. Indeed it has plumped to the very depths and out-skirts of reality. But is science the only source of knowledge that we have? Many atheists talk as if science is the only means by which we can have any knowledge. They believe that nothing immaterial exists and since God, or Angels, or Souls, are all immaterial things, then they are akin to illusions or fairy tales. Forget first that their crude starting point - that there is no such thing as the immaterial - is not on as solid ground as they thought (many philosophers believe that numbers, sets, propositions, universals, mental properties, etc., are all immaterial/abstract entities), the question is whether it is acceptable to find in science the one and only source of knowledge?

Many New Atheists only want to accept what science wants to teach them. The atheist philosopher Peter Atkins puts it

Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets … They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists … While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates. (2006; 123)

But this is like making a defensive remark about one's stance on labor laws by saying you are in favour of 'politics'. 'Politics' is such a nebulous term that has all kinds of philosophical connotations. So too with 'science'. For example, take nature's laws. What are they? Can science answer that question? No. It can only describe and reveal the laws themselves. There is ample room for philosophy and metaphysics to have input on what is the nature of the laws. Are they real or purely theoretical? Do all the laws reduce to some fundamental base law? How do our scientific concepts and natural kind categories interact with the real, mind-independent world? These are all subjects for philosophers, not physicists.

The philosopher Stephen Mumford writes:

But there is never a full and general account, provided by science, of what it is for something to be a law and what, if anything, a law of nature is supposed to do. Such accounts that we have been given seem to be metaphysically inadequate. One authoritative account, for instance, says that a law is ‘a descriptive principle of nature that holds in all circumstances’. If by a ‘descriptive principle’ a statement or proposition is intended, then this would be inadequate as our subject is what in nature is a law. If something in nature is intended, on the other hand, it is difficult to see how ‘principle of nature’ is any more enlightening, or anything different at all, from ‘law of nature’. A reason for this apparent failing, on the part of science, may be that the questions I am asking are specifically philosophical ones. For example: does a law determine nature or is a law entirely exhausted by its instances? Is a law of nature anything like a moral or legal law? If these are specifically philosophical questions, we could hardly expect science to answer them. Despite their expertise in some areas, we cannot expect scientists to be better at answering metaphysical questions than are the metaphysicians. The above questions look more metaphysical than scientific. (2004: 5)

One example of where philosophy has significant input is concerning the natural necessity of laws. As Nancy Cartwright, and other philosophers like Roderick Chisholm and David Armstrong put it, laws are prescriptive and not just descriptive. Science will describe a law but that is it. It has nothing to say on why laws are prescriptive like moral laws. It has nothing to say on why, under certain circumstances, we expect certain laws must manifest. But what gives laws such a status? That the necessity would hold even if no law is manifest. Take, say, the laws of chemistry. Those laws seem no less necessary even if there are no chemical reactions, like in the first few minutes of the universe's existence. Laws are either, as Brian Ellis sees them, the dispositions of ordinary objects, or they are, according to Isaac Newton and David Hume, imposed from outside the objects themselves.

Laws aren't just necessary but immaterial and universal. Borrowing further from Mumford's work, the law of gravitation is described thus:

The law of gravitation states that objects with masses M1 and M2, and having distance apart d, are attracted with force F GM1M2/d 2. This equation involves the constant G – the gravitational constant – which has a value of 6.67259(85) 10 11 N m2kg 2. (2)

As can be seen, laws are described in the language of mathematics and are, hence, abstractions. A more obvious example of this is in the idealised state of most laws. Philosophers of science, like Cartwright, Ian Hacking, and Ellis, have acknowledged that it is very rare, perhaps impossible, for a law to be perfectly manifested anywhere in the natural world. Essentially what happens when describing the manifestation of a particular law is that certain ceterus paribus clauses need to be added in to cancel out other intervening causes that prevent the absolute manifestation of a law. For example, a falling rock fails to perfectly manifest the law of gravity because there are other forces, such as wind resistance, or friction, that intervene. Thus we must abstract away intervening forces in order to calculate the true mathematical statement of the laws of which the physical realisers are only approximations.

What does this all mean? Cartwright argues that the prescriptive force of laws are only possible if God exists and yet she rejects both. But I don't understand how we can even explain how it is that we have immaterial and necessary laws of nature if the universe is the sole product of chance or natural necessity. The latter explanation is circular whereas the former can't explain why it is that the laws are orderly in the first place. There doesn't seem to me to be any prima facie reason why there should be laws as opposed to just random chaos.

This is why its such a straw man for New Atheists and Old Atheists (like Bertrand Russell) to claim that God is nothing but a being in space-time, susceptible to the laws of physics like everything else (Russell's 'celestial teapot' and Dawkins' 'flying spaghetti monster' come to mind). This treats the Judeo-Christian conception of God as if he exists just beyond the reaches of the most powerful telescope or else something akin to the ancient Greek or Nordic gods. On the contrary, God is the very grounds of the laws of nature, the reason why A following B according to some law isn't just an unaccounted for happenstance. God is the reason why the universe is governed by universal, immaterial laws that can't be directly perceived. He is responsible for the very being and existence of the universe and its laws.