The Civilization That Built Its House Upon the Sand

Myths and Just-So Stories

Modern science is a mixture of fact based truth, on the one hand, and speculative story telling, on the other.  Rarely, however, is the distinction made.  If it were, the factual basis of most "science" would crumble to the ground, along with a heap of salaries, academies, and newspapers.

Paul Gosselin writes:

. . . science deals with observable and reproducible processes.  The rest is outside the domain of science (or should be).  But science has gained such prestige that it exerts a quasi-irresistible attraction, seducing many ardent admirers among those who hope to exploit this prestige for their own mythical/ideological purposes. 

When one looks back to the beginning of all things, we find ourselves reaching the limits of our means of observation, either at the macro level (the universe) or at the micro level level (the subatomic world).  Empirical data becomes harder and harder to come by.  But more importantly, finding the means to repeat the processes that we are attempting to explain also become increasingly difficult. The closer we find ourselves to the limits of science, the greater importance we find our theories taking on (as well as the subjectivity involved in choosing their presuppositions) while (proportionally) the real influence of the available empirical data decreases.   [Paul Gosselin, Flight From the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West.  Volume I.  (Quebec: Samizdat, 2012), p. 52.] 

Quantum mechanics has been confronted with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.  The sub-atomic academic world has reached the limits of observation of the behaviour of electrons and sub-atomic particles.  When empirical testing and proving up no longer is possible, the realms of speculation await.  The study of the origins of the universe and life within it has rapidly devolved into speculation and "just so" stories.  Anyone care for a "multiverse"?

It must be understood then that when scientists attempt to explain unique events that took place at the origin of time, they go beyond the limits of science, as these processes are no longer observable.  Knowingly or not, they have left the field of empirical science and have begun to navigate the wild and wonderful world of myth and cosmology.

Of course things aren't always totally black and white.  Scientific research involves some grey areas.  In geology, for example, one can study rocks, examine strata and discover new ore deposits.  There is plenty of empirical observable data to check out and sort through, but one can neither observe nor replicate conditions that produced the strata or deposits which sometimes cover thousand of square kilometres, any more than biologists can observe the conditions which gave rise to the first living cell.

Like the Battle of Waterloo or the fall of the Berlin Wall, these are unique events, no longer directly observable today.  This leaves us with little more than nice "scientific" stories framed in the context of the dominant materialistic origins myth.  This is the best that we can expect.  

But these qualifications and limitations are rarely acknowledged, let alone confessed.  To do so would threaten, if not undermine, the truthfulness or authority of what is being asserted or "proved".  It would threaten careers.  It would throw the world into a tizz wazz. 

Of course, frankly asserting that the process of evolution involves storytelling is generally considered extremely irresponsible, if not heretical, but read this startling admission  from the prestigious evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr:

Biologists have to study all the known facts relating to the particular problem, infer all sorts of consequences from the reconstructed constellation of factors, and then attempt to construct a scenario to explain the observed facts of this particular case.  In other words, they construct a historical narrative.  

Because this approach is so fundamentally different from the causal-law explanations, the classical philosophers of science--coming from logical, mathematics, or the physical sciences--considered it inadmissable.  However, recent authors have vigorously refuted the narrowness of the classical view and have shown not only that the historical-narrative approach is valid but also that it is perhaps the only scientifically and philosophically valid approach in the explanation of unique occurrences.  Of course, proving categorically that a historical narrative is true is never possible.  [Ibid., p. 53]

Probably the most threatening move any critic of modern science and cosmology could make would be to ask (repeatedly)--"Please, sir: how do you know that X  is true?"