Just So . . .

Stories We Tell Ourselves

Modern science--that is, materialist science--constantly finds itself eliding into metaphysics or cosmology that is anything but scientific. Stephen Prickett in his Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700--1999 makes reference to the following illustration of the point:

Water boils the same way in Scotland, Thailand and New Guinea, and everywhere else too. Under given conditions it boils at predictable temperatures--for example at 100 degrees C at standard atmospheric pressure. Sugar crystals form is much the same way under similar conditions all over the world . . . We usually assume that all these things happen because the appropriate materials, under the appropriate physical and chemical conditions, are under the influence of natural laws--laws that are invisible and intangible, but are nevertheless present everywhere and always. There is order in nature; and the order depends on law.

These hypothetical laws of nature are somehow independent of the things they govern. For example, the laws governing the formation of sugar crystals do no just operate only inside and around the growing crystals, but exist outside them. . . The sugar crystals that are forming today in sugar factories in Cuba are not following local Cuban laws, but rather laws of nature which apply everywhere on earth, and indeed everywhere in the universe. These laws of nature cannot be altered by any laws the government of Cuba may pass, and they are not affected by what people think--not even by what scientists think. Sugar crystals formed perfectly well (as far as we know) before the structure of sugar molecules was worked out by crystallographers; indeed, these crystals were forming perfectly well before there were any scientists at all. Scientists may have discovered and more or less precisely described the laws governing the formation of these crystals, but the laws have an objective existence quite independent of human beings, and even independent of the actual crystals themselves. They are eternal. They existed before the first sugar molecules arose anywhere in the universe. Indeed they existed before there was a universe at all--they are eternal realities which transcend time and space altogether.

Prickett writes that the argument above elides at the end into metaphysics. "How, for instance, could we possibly know that the laws of nature existed before the universe came into being? What we are confronting . . . is that process by which legitimate science is imperceptible transformed into metaphysics. We start with a more or less simple and obvious proposition, and move, by a series of steps, each of which appears in itself to b e totally safe and logical, to a position that has become totally unprovable (and unfalsifiable) hypothetical construct. . . .

". . . the apparently objective truths of science, on inspection, turn out to be no so much timeless truths, as narratives we tell ourselves about the timeless nature of our world."

The current reigning paradigm of evolutionism is a classic example of what Prickett is describing. Evolution is a metaphysic, totally unprovable and unfalsifiable. It is a story the secular world has invented to tell itself. But this is hardly respectable from a scientific standpoint. So the Academy seeks to evade the embarrassment by asserting and insisting ad nauseum that evolution is scientific. And that, too, is just another story the modern world tells itself.