The Best Science is Always a Judgment Call

In Celebration of Rigorous Guesswork

The ongoing furore over global warming has thrown up a much broader issue. The very nature of science itself is under attack. It is an issue worth debating. If one outcome of the global warming farce is that we come to have a far more realistic perspective upon science it will have been all to the good.

We are not holding our breath, however. In the modern world, "science" has been set up as the great exposer of religion, the source of infallible knowledge which "proves" that faith in the Living God is without foundation: science has settled the question of God, and the infallible conclusion is that He cannot possibly exist. Because science has now spoken on infinite, eternal, and unchangeable realities it is necessary that it itself be regarded as infallible and certain. Consequently the truth claims of science have become more and more strident over the past two hundred years. Society at large has not only accepted this--it has actively demanded it.

But "coal face" scientists know in their bones that the entire edifice of absolute, infallible, and certain objectivity is itself a myth, a house of cards built upon water.
As John Christy, once an IPCC lead author, and a credible scientist in his own right said in a recent article in Nature specifically of climate science:

There is still much messy, contentious, snail-paced and now, hopefully, transparent, work to do.

Whenever you come across a scientist speaking thus, his credibility as a scientist rises substantially.

Uncertainty (or scepticism) lies at the heart of all true science, as it does in every other area of human knowledge, for man is a creature, fallible and finite. He cannot know anything with absolute infallible certainty, except that which the infallible, infinite, eternal and unchangeable God reveals to him.

Michael Polanyi, one of the great physical chemists of the last century, and one of the best philosophers of science in the modern world understood the implicit subjectivity of the scientific enterprise. He argued that much of science is no more nor less than guesswork. This, of course, makes him an troublesome prophet in our modern age, which, having replaced God with science, requires attributes of deity from the latter, including infallibility. He writes:

We may conclude that just as there is no proof of a proposition in natural science which cannot conceivably turn out to be incomplete, so also there is no refutation which cannot conceivably turn out to be unfounded. There is a residue of personal judgement required in deciding--as the scientist eventually must--what weight to attach to any particular set of evidence in regard to the validity of a particular proposition.

The propositions of science thus appear to be in the nature of guesses. They are founded on the assumptions of science governing the structure of the universe and on the evidence of observations collected by methods of science; they are subject to a process of verification in the light of further observations according to the rules of science; but their conjectural character remains inherent in them. (Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964], p.31f. Emphasis, ours.)

In the light of this, recent claims that the science of global warming is "settled" merely serve to show how profoundly unscientific the whole enterprise must be.

Not only are premises and propositions of science conjectural guesswork, and subject to constant, ongoing modification, the very facts or data themselves with which science works are subject to uncertainty and require judgement or guesswork.

The scientist in pursuit of research has incessantly to make decisions whether to take a new instrument reading or some other new sense impression as signifying a new fact, or to regard it merely as a new indication of an old fact--or else to reject it as having no significance at all. These decisions are guided by the premisses of science and more particularly by the current surmises of the time, but ultimately there always enters an element of personal judgement. (Polanyi, op cit. p.90.)

But, to make matters more dense and complex, even in the most rigorous of experimental verification, there remains the problem of "strange coincidence". Polanyi cites several examples from the history of science, including one from his own laboratory. Once studying tin crystals he and his colleagues noticed a particular feature. "Hundreds of such specimens were produced and some of them photographed and their pictures published. Identical photographs were published by C. Burger who had independently made the same discovery." Polanyi, op cit. p. 95. This research was continued for several years, when suddenly the particular feature disappeared and has not been seen again in tin crystals studied. No-one has been able to explain this. "One is reminded--to take for once an example from the field of biology--of the mysterious loss of smell of the musk plant which seems to have occurred a few years ago suddenly all over the planet." (Ibid., p. 95.)

This is science at its rigorous best. When it is most sceptical and careful and non-dogmatic it is a truly helpful servant. When science, however, is separated from its creaturely limitations and is elevated into the realm of infallible dogmatic certainty, at that point it ceases to be rigorous and genuinely scientific, and becomes a stupid, error-ridden, and superstitious idolatry.