Prove It

Science is, as I've said, good, but it's much more limited than often thought. Not all truth is scientific.

Stealing, for example, is wrong. I think we can all agree on that. But does science demonstrate to us that it is? 

Well, show me the experiments which science has set up which proves it and we'll talk. Tell me about the hypothesis that theft is wrong and how you've tested for that, trying to both prove and disprove that hypothesis, and I might concede that all knowledge is scientific. Otherwise, you've got nothing. You're in out of your depth.

Science can't prove abstractions, yet abstractions are very often good and true. Indeed, they're really what we live off of. We prove abstractions through reason and logic, not science. That's really all there is to it.

The Science Thing

I like science. Science is good. We could not heat our homes, drive our cars, or cure diseases without it. So, yay science.

Yet science is also very rote, very basic. It's a shallow type of knowing. Science tells me that it is cold and windy in Detroit this morning. Well, duh. 

What's my point? Simply that while science can be useful all it really does is give facts which are by themselves rather banal. It does not and cannot make any value judgments. It merely is. Why or whether we should heat our homes, drive our cars, and cure diseases, what we should do with our scientific knowledge, are questions behind science. 

This is where issues of good and bad come in. Those issues are not scientific. Even the judgments that science is useful and good are non scientific. They're not empirical but rational. They are above and beyond science.

Basically, don't tell me that science is the end all be all. It isn't, even on its own terms.

Chesterton on Science and Christmas

A little of Mr. G. K. Chesterton for you today. It may help you understand the punchline to know that he grew rather rotund as he aged.

I like how he, in that very British way, jibes the scientists for supposedly knowing more about what he was doing and why he did it than he did. He was simply looking for his lost coin, rescuing a cat, and celebrating Christmas.

"THERE is one very vile habit that the pedants have, and that is explaining to a man why he does a thing when the man himself can explain quite well — and quite differently.  If I go down on all-fours to find sixpence, it annoys me to be told by a passing biologist that I am really doing it because my remote ancestors were quadrupeds.  I concede that he knows all about biology, or even a great deal about my ancestors; but I know he is wrong, because he does not know about the sixpence.  If I climb a tree after a stray cat, I am unconvinced when a stray anthropologist tells me that I am doing it because I am essentially arboreal and barbaric.  I happen to know why I am doing it; and I know it is because I am amiable and somewhat over-civilised.  Scientists will talk to a man on general guess-work about things that they know no more about than about his pocket-money or his pet cat.  Religion is one of them, and all the festivals and formalities that are rooted in religion.  Thus a man will tell me that in keeping Christmas I am not keeping a Christmas feast, but a pagan feast.  This is exactly as if he told me that I was not feeling furiously angry, but only a little sad.  I know how I am feeling all right; and why I am feeling it.  I know this in the case of cats, sixpences, anger, and Christmas Day.  When a learned man tells me that on the 25th of December I am really astronomically worshipping the sun, I answer that I am not.  I am practicing a particular personal religion, the pleasures of which (right or wrong) are not in the least astronomical.  If he says that the cult of Christianity and the cult of Apollo are the same, I answer that they are utterly different; and I ought to know for I have held both of them.  I believed in Apollo when I was quite little; and I believe in Christmas now that I am very, very big.

~Illustrated London News, Jan. 1, 1910.