Some years ago I had an Instant Message conversation with a co-worker of mine. It had something to do with religion, and I’ll never forget a phrase she used: “For me, I’ll stick with science.” It was not the forum to challenge such a hollow contention, but it was indicative how many Americans and Westerners think. When we reflect on epistemology, which few people do (unfortunately most Christians as well), the question is how and if we can actually know things. Or in other words, can we have confidence that the things we know are in fact true. In the 21st century secular West the default position is that science is the only reliable way we can know things (scientism). Everything else is guess work or preference, or “true for you, but not for me.” Science can indeed give us wonderful and helpful knowledge, but it is dubious thing upon which to place our trust for true knowledge, and an extremely thin reed upon which to stake all our knowing.
I learned just how thin some months back when I read a piece at American Greatness titled, “The Impending Death of Science.” Why does this author think science is on the verge of death? I had to know given the unquestioning trust people put in what science supposedly says (if “science” says it, it must be true!), and how unwarranted that is. What he means is death in the sense of credibility. Any well-read person who’s been around some decades can recall when “science said” something, and then not many years later said the exact opposite thing. I won’t cite examples, but I’m sure some come immediately to mind. Part of the reason science sometimes seems confused is, well, because it is! And there’s a reason found in the piece’s first paragraph:
There were approximately 2.5 million scientific papers published last year. Think about that. A researcher would have to read nearly 300 papers an hour, non-stop, just to keep up. And that is not accounting for the more than 50 million scientific papers that have been published since the 17th century. If the researcher somehow managed to read 600 papers an hour (that’s 10 scientific papers each minute) in order to catch up with the established scientific literature, it would still take him 20 years to consume all the papers written. Once again, this is assuming that he didn’t eat or sleep, and was somehow able to read and absorb 10 technical papers each minute.
Now, take a dive into all of that, and see what kind of knowledge you come up with. But the problem is more than just the colossal quantity of data, but the inability “to test and reproduce the results of each paper.” The author calls this a “reproducibility crisis,” and the statistics of actually being able to reproduce results are abysmal. And this is supposed to be the epistemological ground of our existence? Good luck! And this doesn’t even include “an overly bureaucratic and esoterically compartmentalized academia with perverse funding incentives will doom the practice of science no matter the methodological guardrails.”
In it’s place, science can be an inestimable blessing, but outside of that place it can be a horrible curse. Think of the carnage of 20th century warfare (north of 100 million dead!) made possible by science, and of course sinful human nature. Which is the point, isn’t it. Science isn’t a neutral source of pure, unadulterated objective knowledge. Scientific knowledge, rather, is always filtered through sinful human beings, and their pride, greed, envy, all the things that make humans human, including the good things. True knowledge from science that we can depend on obviously filters through, but in the full panoply of possible knowing, it is very little.
Therefore, what the explosion of scientific knowledge calls for is epistemological humility, not as is the tendency in the secular West, to make science as a God. We know what happens when we turn good things into ultimate things (AKA idolatry): disaster. And the 20th century is a sad example of that. As is the state of a culture in the 21st that thinks science our only hope for true knowing. The title of J.P. Moreland’s latest book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, tells us that much is at stake in the question of how we know what we know, and if we can know.
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