Science originally simply meant the study of the natural world. It was initiated as an attempt to explain the natural world, how it fits in the scale of every other thing that exists. The study of it explains certain truths about the natural world, but the knowledge it reveals is ultimately fractional in the scale of all that exists. For many of the early scientists, their pursuit of science was strongly motivated by their desire to defend their faith in a personal Creator. For Isaac Newton, he believed that scientific study of the world would lead straight to the God who created the world. Science shows us “what is the first cause, what power he has over us, and what benefits we receive from him,” Newton wrote, so that “our duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the light of nature.” The business of science is to “deduce causes from effects, till we come to the very first cause which certainly is not mechanical.”
But today, many intellectuals assume that science is the source of all genuine knowledge. Science has been conflated with scientific naturalism, the philosophy that the natural world is all that exists. Science has become the only source of knowledge and thus everything that exists can be explained in terms of natural forces.
With this philosophy propagating our world, it has immediately reduced by large the sphere of universal knowledge. The fractional knowledge of the explainable natural world has now become all there is to pursue and explore. Any other things or ideas that cannot be reduced to empirical facts or does not contain reasoning based on mathematics – that is, with science – then according to David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, “it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” These every other things including love and beauty, good and evil, God and conscience, are being denied, omitted, and pretermitted from human intellect and rendered nothing but rubbish when their very existence suggests a whole new world apart from the natural world yet to be explored and understood.
This scientific naturalism is in every way limiting, limiting human potential and limited in itself. It seeks to subsume everything under naturalistic categories. Human beings are reduced to ‘objects’ or ‘things’ to be inspected, experimented on, and ultimately controlled. This is denounced by philosopher Arthur Koestler as “the ratomorphic fallacy” and described as the “abolition of man” by C.S Lewis, “for it denies the reality of those things central to our humanity: our sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God.”
If we deny the things that make us truly human, in Charles Colson’s words, “we will create a culture that is, by definition, inhuman. If we treat morality as subjective feeling, then moral ideals will be relegated to the private realm, and the public realm will be stripped of all morality. If we deny the reality of the virtues that make us superior to the beasts, then those virtues wither away, reducing is to level beasts. Thus while science has created technological advances that make life easier and healthier, when science is confused with the philosophy of the scientific naturalism, it destroys the very things that make life worth living. We gain control over the natural world at the cost of our own souls.”
So, if the basis for true science is to help our understanding of this infinite universe and lead us straight to the Creator, then has the current understanding of modern science done justice to the original cause of scientific studies? Has modern science in our day and age make human beings more knowledgeable and advanced or more foolish and purposeless?
It is about time for justice to be done to true science.