Science and Consensus
Who really believes in science?
How do we know when science has proven something? One year I was teaching high school freshmen about the function of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. One of the boys told his friend, “Did you know that most of the greenhouse gases actually come from the methane given off by cows farting?” I quickly pointed out to him that although many people repeat this fact, there has actually been no scientific studies done to prove it. His response? “That doesn’t matter. Everyone still knows that it’s true.”
Without realizing it, this high school student was buying into the notion that scientific consensus makes science. However, is Thomas Kuhn was wrong, and a paradigm shift is not the source of the Scientific Revolution, then what was? My attempt to point him in the direction of a scientific study was the approach I was using, because every scientific study uses experiment and empirical proof.
In the 13th century, a bishop of Lincoln, England named Robert Grosseteste had just pointed out that the terms “experience” and “experiment” both have the same Latin root. During Grosseteste’s lifetime, the ancient Greek philosophical texts had recently been translated from Greece into Latin. This brought to bear the age of Scholasticism, where the medieval Christian world could interact with ancient Greek philosophy for the first time. He lived at the same time period as Thomas Aquinas, who was using the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle and bringing it to bear on Biblical texts. Grosseteste was also interested in the work of Aristotle, and especially his natural philosophy. Although he did not completely disagree with Aristotle’s natural philosophy, he did point out where Aristotle’s conclusions did not match observations, especially in the study of optics. Since God created light first, Grosseteste believed that light was the basis of all other natural observations, and he carried out experiments to show the nature of light. He was able to observe the wave nature of light, and used observation and experiment to differentiate the effects of reflection and refraction. Because he trusted in an unchangeable God who made a universe with predictable natural laws, Grosseteste reasoned that mathematics could be used to model the natural world, and became close to devising the Law of Refraction, which would not be completed until nearly 300 years after Grosseteste passed away.
Using Grosseteste’s process of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion, his student Roger Bacon was able to define more clearly the scientific process. Bacon noted that most of Grosseteste’s experimental observations proved Aristotle wrong on the nature and behavior of light. He continued to build upon Grosseteste’s experiments, and used the scientific method to determine how rainbows were formed. Because his method was so powerful in conducting experiments, Bacon was able to expand his studies from optics to the structure of the eye and how it sees light. Although many of his conclusions were wrong, Bacon’s observations and experiments with refraction were the basis of the Isaac Newton’s work in optics.
The scientific method became the standard of scientific experiment in Europe for the next 300 years. In his book, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies, Nicholas Copernicus posited the idea that Earth was not in the center of the universe. This refutation of geocentrism went against the current doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church at the time, but also the philosophy of Aristotle. It had been 300 years since Thomas Aquinas had adopted the geocentrism of Aristotle as the doctrine of the church. Since Copernicus’ book coincided with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Copernicanism was quickly outlawed and his books were burned.
Although Copernicus had formulated the theory of heliocentrism, that the Sun was the center of the solar system, it had yet to be proven by experiment. About 30 years after Copernicus passed away, Galileo decided to use his newly designed optical telescope to look into outer space. What he saw provided a crucial counterexample to the theory of geocentrism when he observed that moons orbited around Jupiter and that the planet Venus had phases. Jupiter’s moons showed that not every object in the universe orbited around the Earth, while Venus’ phases showed that the planet clearly revolved around the Sun. Although Copernicus had formulated the theory of heliocentrism, it was Galileo’s experiments that got him into trouble with the college of cardinals. His empirical evidence was a powerful counterexample to geocentrism, and Galileo was the type of personality who enjoys showing off his skills of deduction. It was not a challenging paradigm, per se, that put Galileo in trouble, it was the empirical evidence that he observed in experiments that did.
Galileo’s experiments were famous throughout Europe, and news of them reached Francis Bacon in England. Although not related to Roger Bacon, Francis was a natural philosopher and politician in the court of King James I. In 1620, shortly after Galileo published his telescopic observations, Francis published his work Novum Organum, in which he formally outlined the steps of the scientific method and explained how the method is rooted in empirical observation. Bacon explained that the scientific method’s process of discovering the natural world was rooted in inductive reasoning, rather than deductive reasoning like Greek philosophy. Inductive reasoning uses specific examples to draw universal conclusions, while the Greeks had used universal conclusions in order to explain specific examples. Because the Greeks relied primarily on logical deduction, they often missed using experiments to verify their claims. Inductive reasoning’s reliance on experiment (think “experience”) elevated the counterexample to an important place in scientific reasoning. For example, Galileo’s observation on the moons of Jupiter provided a powerful counterexample to geocentrism. Although he did not specifically prove that heliocentrism was true, it did prove that geocentrism was false. Bacon's inductive method started with observations that would lead to the construction of systematic tables of the presence, absence, and comparisons of properties.
In the 20th century, the natural philosopher Karl Popper added another important contribution to scientific study, which was identifying the characteristic of falsifiability. In the 1930s, Popper was a Jewish refugee from Austria to England, fleeing Nazi Germany. Popper had originally identified himself as a Marxist, but after spending time in jail for breaking windows during a student uprising, he realized that Marxist ideology did not support the common man as it claimed to do. Karl Marx had claimed that Communism was the only scientific way to order society, yet Popper had experienced a powerful counterexample to that notion (Popper 296). Additionally, after attending several university lectures in England on Freudian psychology, Popper was struck by the fact that the scientific method does not work in the social sciences, as Sociologists did not need to have controlled experiments or formulate theories with any predictive power. Often, social phenomena could only be understood by the person involved in a study, which meant that social sciences were non-falsifiable; they made claims that are not able to be proven wrong (Okasha 117). Popper went on to explain that the claims of science are basically negative; science cannot prove anything, it can only disprove. In Popper’s estimation, Galileo’s experiments disproved the possibility of geocentrism, but did not prove falsifiability; that science can only make claims that are able to be proven wrong. In the social sciences, if a psychoanalyst was criticized on their results, they merely changed their theory to fit the facts (Okasha 11). In his Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper argued that falsifiability was the distinguishing feature of scientific study. In order to be a scientific claim, a claim must be able to be proven false. Therefore, the statement, “I am sick” is a scientific claim, but the statement, “I am happy” is not. Rather than the laws of nature, Popper observed that the social sciences claimed to have discovered “laws” of history. He stated that this is “based on a gross misunderstanding of the method of science, and especially neglect of the distinction between scientific prediction and historical prophecy” (Popper xliii).
Although the Scientific Revolution depended on logical empiricism, most natural philosophers today will speak derisively of anyone who continues to support it. Thomas Kuhn argued that “theory-neutral” data did not exist, since scientific data meant nothing outside an interpreting paradigm. Kuhn believed that the scientific paradigm, not the scientific method, could determine which scientific theory was superior. Therefore, logical empiricism gave a “simplistic” view of science (Okasha 84). Just as Popper observed, this push was originally an attempt to make social sciences part of natural science. Over 100 years ago, the birth of Freudian psychology led many away from the notion that science needed to be based on empirical evidence, since the psychologists would merely change their hypotheses to fit the facts (Okasha 11). The evolutionary philosopher Samir Okasha states that in the social sciences, controlled experiments are not needed because theories do not need to have predictive power. Since social phenomena can only be understood by the person involved in the situation, the science has more to do with needing to understand the person, rather than a natural phenomenon (Okasha 117-118). Kuhn’s work led to the rise of “social constructionism” in sociology, the notion that there are “social constructs” in society that are independent of minds. Communists called this the “Spirit of the People,” or the “Spirit of the State.” When the claims of science are always changing, “the assumption that there is a fixed, unchanging ‘scientific method,’ used by all scientific disciplines at all times, is not inevitable” (Okasha 118). Okasha casts a broad definition of science, claiming that science is any pursuit of truth (Okasha 19). Because science becomes the study of any truth then that opens the door to scientism, the belief that everything in nature can be explained by science. Okasha states, “perhaps science deserves to be worshipped” (Okasha 114).
This clearly leads to a radical relativism, where there is no objective truths existing in the natural world, only truth that resides within an individual person. “Without a clear distinction between theories and observable facts the rationality and objectivity of science would be compromised” (Okasha 74). And as Popper said, “Relativism is one of the many crimes committed by intellectuals. It is a betrayal of reason and of humanity” (ref??). Besides destroying both rationalism and objectivity in science, relative truth also destroys the foundation of the Scientific Revolution: belief in an unchanging, Creator who made the natural world. Since rationalism not only believes that an individual man is rational, but also means that men must have faith in the reason of others, not only does relativism break down an individual’s ability to reason, but also his ability to have a relationship with other reasoning individuals. “Christianity, by teaching the fatherhood of God, may make a great contribution to establishing the brotherhood of man, I also think that those who undermine man’s faith in reason are unlikely to contribute much to this end” (Popper 461)