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RE: Faith has much to do with it...

"Scientists observe, make theories, and then, test those theories in experiments."

Quite right. But it’s instructive to note that no scientific theory can be *proven*--only disproven. Therefore, all scientific knowledge is *provisional*. Nor are scientific laws verifiable.

In one of life’s delicious ironies, it was the rabid atheist, David Hume, who first demonstrated the limits of science. Unfortunately, many who worship at the church of science are ignorant of Hume and succumb to the pretensions of science and scientific overreach.

So, why are scientific laws unverifiable? Hume’s answer was that no finite number of observations, no matter how large, can be used to derive an (unrestricted general conclusion that is logically defensible).

Herewith a few examples, courtesy Dinesh D’Souza, that help to explain Hume’s position: You might insist that all swans are white. To prove this you might make a million confirmations of that fact or ten million. So what? Hume’s point is that you don’t really *know* this. Tomorrow you might see a black swan and there goes your scientific law. Nor is this a frivolous example. For centuries, before Australia was discovered, people in the West had never seen a swan that wasn’t white. Western literature is chalk full of references to “White as a swan.”

Now, academics might counter by saying something like, "Well, that’s the great thing about science, it’s self-correcting. Science is always open to revision. Upon discovering Australia, science learned of black swans and adjusted its knowledge base."But to say this is to miss Hume’s point, which is that science was not *justified* in positing such a rule (only white swans) in the first place.

We give a theory the benefit of the doubt until we find out otherwise. There is nothing wrong in all of this as long as we remember that scientific laws are not "laws of nature." They are human laws and they represent a form of best-guessing about our world. What we call laws are nothing more than perceived patterns and sequences. We assume the world works this way until future experiments put the lie to our assumptions.

Again, science cannot *prove* theories; it can only falsify them. When we have subjected a theory to expansive testing and it has not been falsified we can say of it that it’s *provisionally* true. This is not however because the theory has proved to be true, or even because it is likely to be true. Rather, we proceed in this way because, practically speaking, we don’t have a better way to proceed.

By the way, it is no rebuttal to Hume to say, "Okay, admittedly, scientific laws are not 100 percent true, but at least they are 99.999 percent true. They may not be certain but they are very likely to be true." How would you go about verifying this statement? How would you establish, for instance, the likelihood of Newton’s inverse square law? This law cannot be tested except by actually measuring the relationship between all objects in the universe. And as that is impossible, no finite number of tries can generate any conclusion as to how probable Newton’s statement is. Ten million tries cannot establish 99.999 percent certainty or even 50 percent probability because there may be twenty million cases that haven’t been tried where Newton’s law may prove inadequate.

Hume is not arguing that science doesn’t work, but it doesn’t follow that scientific laws are known to be true in all cases. Newton is a wonderful example of what Hume is driving at. (Newton’s laws were, for nearly two centuries, regarded as *absolutely* true.) They worked incredibly well. The industrial revolution was based on Newtonian physics and Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s ideas were validated millions of times each day and his theories led to unprecedented material success. No body of scientific statements has ever been subjected to so much empirical verification.

Yet Einstein’s theories of relativity contradicted Newton’s theories, despite their enormous quantity of empirical verification. This and other such examples led Karl Popper to conclude that no scientific law can, in a positive sense, claim to *prove* anything at all.

But can’t scientific laws be derived from the logical connection between cause and effect?

No, Hume argued, because there is no logical connection between cause and effect. We may see event A and then event B, and we may assume that event A caused event B, but we cannot *know* this for sure. All we have observed is a correlation and no number of observed correlations can add up to a *necessary* connection.

Consider a simple illustration. A child drops a ball on the ground for the first time. To her surprise, it bounces. Then the child’s uncle, an honors graduate of MIT, explains to his niece that dropping a round object like a ball causes it to bounce. He might explain this by employing general terms like "property" and "causation." If these are not meaningless terms, they must refer to something in experience. But now let us consider a deep question that Hume raises: what experience has the uncle had that his niece has not had? The difference, Hume notes, is that the uncle has seen a lot of balls bounce. And every time he has seen someone else do it, the result was the same. This is the basis and the *sole* basis of the uncle’s superior knowledge.

Hume now draws his arresting conclusion: the uncle has no experience *fundamentally* different from the child’s. He has merely repeated the experiment more times. "Because I have seen this happen many times before, therefore it must happen again." But the uncle has not established a *necessary* connection, merely an expectation derived from past experience. How does he know that past experience will repeat itself every time in the future? In truth, he does not know. Hume concluded that the laws of cause and effect cannot be validated. (His conclusion has never been disproved.) Hume is not denying that nature has laws, but he is denying that we *know* what those laws are. When we posit laws, Hume suggests this is merely a grandiose way of saying, "Here is our best *guess* based on previous tries."

You might wish to consider this the next time you become overly confident about "existential" observations.


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