Science & the Search for God, part 2

I am attempting a series on Kitty Ferguson's book, The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion & the Search for God. Here is the first post, in which Ferguson points out five assumptions which scientists have operated under for the last couple of centuries, at least, and which have been considered necessary to do science. She also points out that recent scientific thinking has indicated areas where each one of these assumptions may not hold.

In her third chapter, Ferguson considers us -- the observers. Some thinkers believe that modern physics tells us that the observer determines what reality is. Ferguson doesn't go nearly that far, but she does think that what is perceived is not merely an objective reality. She writes:

Can our point of view affect what we find? You don't have to believe things are as uncertain on all levels as they are on the quantum level to see that it can. Nor do you have to believe that a point of view changes objective reality. The choice of an experiment that is more likely to coax out one set of evidence than another; the choice based on a theory as to which evidence will be more significant and ought to be coaxed out; the choice of which theory we ought to take seriously . . . such choices don't change objective reality, but they do help determine what we perceive as reality and what will emerge as scientific knowledge. (p. 41, ellipsis in original)

She discusses the discovery of the W and Z bosons, and concludes, I believe correctly, that they could not have been discovered without the prior proposal of a theory that predicted them. In other words, the observers were, in large measure, determining what reality looked like.

Ferguson continues with a discussion of beauty in science, and the choice of theories. Ferguson does not quote Richard Feynman, but I will:
What is it about nature that lets this happen, that it is possible to guess from one part what the rest is going to do? That is an unscientific question: I do not know how to answer it, and therefore I am going to give an unscientific answer. I think it is because nature has a simplicity and therefore a great beauty. Richard Feynman, "Seeking New Laws," pp. 143-167, in Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, New York: Modern Library, 1994. Quote is from p. 167.

I point out two things about that quotation. First, Feynman, one of the great scientists of the twentieth century, says that science can't explain why nature is susceptible to our examination. Second, scientists, especially in physics, are attracted by theories that have simplicity and beauty.

Ferguson briefly mentions some other ideas that bring the idea that scientific findings are especially objective, and unassailable, into question. One of them is that mathematics, on which the physical sciences depend, is a construct that has to be assumed -- it can't be shown, by mathematics, to be complete. Another idea is the importance of important scientists -- they can influence what is studied, or what is believed, even when they are wrong. Science is also influenced by the culture that surrounds it:
We're all to a certain extent prisoners of the mind-set of our culture and time in ways so inherently part of us that none of us can discern exactly how we and our science are influenced. It's easier to see biases in other cultures and historical eras than our own, but we can't look thoughtfully at human history and come away believing that our own culture is for some reason the exception -- free of biases that affect our perception of the world. (p. 73)

The author's third chapter is too complex to be summarized in a single quotation, but this one comes close:
The old, pre-Darwin 'natural theology' was a search for evidence of God in the works of his creation. Because science has found other explanations for the origin of so much that used to be considered explainable only as the work of God, there seems little basis for faith left in natural theology. We can no longer declare that nature points irresistibly beyond itself. However, the philosophical questions raised by science do irresistibly point beyond science. (p. 86) Here's the Wikipedia article on Natural Theology.

Thanks for reading. I hope to continue posting about this book soon.

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A subsequent post deals with comments on this one.