God and Nature Fall 2019
The Limits of Science
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By Sy Garte
(The following essay is adapted from Chapter 8 of the book The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith by Sy Garte, Foreword by Alister McGrath. The book will be released on November 19, 2019, by Kregel Publications. Click for more information.
Several decades ago, I was driving along a country road looking for a cabin owned by a friend of mine. The directions he had given me were vague at best. I came to a spot where the very rustic road vanished completely. To confirm that I had reached the end of the road, there was an old sign that read: "STOP! no motor vehicles beyond this point." I stopped the car and proceeded to walk a couple dozen yards along a well-marked footpath to a clearing where I could see the cabin in the distance.
For many questions about the natural world, we can stay firmly on the road of science as the best path to truth; there is no need to go “off-road.” What is the chemical composition of DNA? How do molecules fit together? How does electricity work? Does smoking cause cancer? When it comes to answering such questions, we have become used to a certain way of moving forward. We have the smooth, well-paved road of science. We travel down that road in our conveyances of rational induction, objective reproducibility, and other vehicles mass-produced by the Rational Materialism Transportation Co. And we almost always get where we want to go, or at least where the road takes us.
(The following essay is adapted from Chapter 8 of the book The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith by Sy Garte, Foreword by Alister McGrath. The book will be released on November 19, 2019, by Kregel Publications. Click for more information.
Several decades ago, I was driving along a country road looking for a cabin owned by a friend of mine. The directions he had given me were vague at best. I came to a spot where the very rustic road vanished completely. To confirm that I had reached the end of the road, there was an old sign that read: "STOP! no motor vehicles beyond this point." I stopped the car and proceeded to walk a couple dozen yards along a well-marked footpath to a clearing where I could see the cabin in the distance.
For many questions about the natural world, we can stay firmly on the road of science as the best path to truth; there is no need to go “off-road.” What is the chemical composition of DNA? How do molecules fit together? How does electricity work? Does smoking cause cancer? When it comes to answering such questions, we have become used to a certain way of moving forward. We have the smooth, well-paved road of science. We travel down that road in our conveyances of rational induction, objective reproducibility, and other vehicles mass-produced by the Rational Materialism Transportation Co. And we almost always get where we want to go, or at least where the road takes us.
"...modern physics tells us that there are indeed some things we cannot know, and when we arrive at these questions, we encounter stop signs we cannot pass." |
But almost always is not always. There are a few roads in our scientific universe that also have stop signs. Signs that say, “Go no further in your vehicle.” In order to continue, we need to dismount and go on foot, or with some other kind of conveyance. This is not a popular idea among some modern atheists—those who subscribe to a view philosophers call scientism. One definition of scientism is the belief that such stop signs do not and cannot exist, and that everything we might ever want or need to know about anything can always and only be learned with the scientific method.
But modern physics tells us that there are indeed some things we cannot know, and when we arrive at these questions, we encounter stop signs we cannot pass. The position of an electron cannot be known at the same time as its momentum, ever, anywhere, by anyone. The uncertainty principle is a fact of nature, and it won’t change. Kurt Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem is another stop sign related to mathematical certainty. It says that “any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.” (1) This means there will always be mathematical statements that are true but are unprovable within the system: uncertainty is a given, inevitable by law. As Johannes Koelman says, “There is no system that is free from contradictions and at the same time free of gaps.” (2)
Scientists have always known that there must be limits to how far we can go in understanding all aspects of reality. And these limits are even more abundant and obvious when we try to address subjects in the “softer” social sciences or humanities. Science is marked by the characteristics of reproducibility and clarity. Knowledge about the natural world should be objective and repeatable. Clarity means that scientific facts and theories must be describable in clear, non-ambiguous terms, often using mathematics. However, scholarship in history and other social sciences is often not repeatable in any way, and history itself does not repeat. Artistic, emotional, and compassionate knowledge does not have clarity—so these types of knowledge cannot be scientific.
So the question is, if and when we come to one of those stop signs that tell us we can go no further in our scientific rational materialism vehicles, should we still try to make progress? If we don’t want to give up and say, “Well, we can go no further with science, so we’ll just turn around and go home,” then how do we proceed? There are a lot of options. We can try the bicycle of philosophy or the skateboard of psychology, or sometimes we might want to use the moped of theology. I would say whatever works is worth a try.
References
1. S. C. Kleene, “On the Interpretation of Intuitionistic Number Theory,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 10, no. 4 (December 1945): 109–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2269016.
2. Johannes Koelman, “Limits to Science: God, Godel, Gravity,” Science 2.0, November 12, 2010, https://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/limits_science_god_godel_gravity.
Sy Garte Ph.D. Biochemistry has been Editor-in-Chief of God and Nature since Spring 2018. He has been a Professor of Public Health and Environmental Health Sciences at New York University, Rutgers University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He was also Associate Director at the Center for Scientific Review at the NIH. He is the author of five books, over 200 scientific papers, and articles in PSCF, God and Nature, and The BioLogos Forum. Sy is Vice President of the Washington DC ASA Chapter and a fellow of the ASA. He is the author of The Works of His Hands.