Saturday, April 28, 2007

For Science

Last night I dreamed about a presentation. The speaker was a scientist and a Christian, and I believe he was involved in the human genome project, maybe. He gave a talk and displayed some powerpoint slides.
One of these slides contained a diagram, with a big yellow section labeled "Nature" and then an orange section labeled "human knowledge." The orange section was long and narrow and had a chain stretching through its length. In successive slides, little chunks of "nature" broke off and became links in the "human knowledge" chain. The speaker told us, the audience, that as a Christian he considered it our mandate to endeavor to realize that goal through science, and that perhaps one day we would reach it.
I asked him a question, but he failed to adequately address it in his response, so afterwards I came up to him and talked to him. "See," I explained, "what I'm saying is that once (hypothetically) we comes to a full knowledge of the universe, our theory of the universe is also within the universe. So we must then alter our theory to take our theory into account when accounting for the universe. But then it's not the same theory anymore!"
He gave a response to this, that was basically that science had demonstrated remarkable progress in the realm of human understanding so far, and that he hoped that the trend would continue and eventually explain the whole of the universe, even if it took millions and millions of generations. He seemed to have misunderstood my objection, so I tried again. I wasn't saying that how could we ever know everything about the universe given that the universe is so huge and enormous. My point was that in order to be truly comprehensive, science must always be trying to explain itself in relation to the rest of the universe, and that sort of meta-knowledge couldn't be reached by his simple acquisitive scientific process represented with the chain links.
Here I was in essence arguing against scientism. My case was loosely related to an argument against scientism that J.P. Moreland employs several times in his various books. The essence of Moreland's argument is that the proposition "Science is the only possible source of knowledge" is self-contradictory, as it is not a testable hypothesis, cannot be empirically observed with the senses, etc.. When I woke up, I was rather pleased for recalling these things in my subconsciousness.
There was also a bit in my dream about starting a role-playing game in which Nick Padgett wanted his character to be a six-foot tall ambulatory hot dog with mustard, but that is another story entirely.

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