Beyond Opinion: Science, Reality and Truth

By W.P. Olson

Science has been misused and kicked around by the university, postmodernists and atheists for a century or two. It is time for science to be allowed to tell its own story. The overall purpose of this book is to help people better understand what science really is and what it can and cannot do. It is about the road from opinion and conjecture to fact and truth. It is about the discovery, definition, history, and defense of science. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.P. Olson
• Release date: Dec 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223872634

Book preview

PREFACE

Please note that several words are used in the book that may be unfamiliar to the reader (or their use in the book may be different from what the reader considers common usage). Therefore the first time they appear in the book, each of them is shown in italics, followed by **. This is a reminder to the reader to refer to the book’s Glossary for the definition of the word as it is used throughout the book.

Science.

I never thought much about it. I’ve practiced it for most of my life. I thought I knew what it was. But I found out that even after decades of working with it, I did not know what science really is. And I’ll bet that you don’t, either.

This book is about the road from opinion and conjecture to fact** and truth. It is about the discovery, definition, history, and defense of science. Science has been misused and kicked around for a century or two. It is time for science to be allowed to tell its own story—its very own story.

The book begins with the search for a detailed definition of science. With that found, the remainder of the book is based on that definition, which is itself based on the attributes of science learned from its history. That detailed definition will become our Rosetta Stone, which may also be considered by some to be a wrecking ball, as we will use it to deal with several cases of misuse and abuse of science.

A few times I will state my opinion (and so state that it is opinion), but other than that, the book is intended to be factual.

I am a scientist by inclination (my high school class predicted that I would be a nuclear physicist), by training, and by practice. During my career I would also become, by osmosis, an engineer.

I did go on to get a Ph.D. in plasma physics, so my high school class wasn’t far off the mark. For the first part of my career I worked in space plasma physics, building models of the Earth’s orbital space environment. The models and the science on which they were based had both an academic and a practical purpose. They contributed to the science of the interactions of plasmas (a gas of charged particles) with electromagnetic fields and to the determination of the effects of that environment on astronauts and hardware systems placed within it. It was an exciting time, happening in the decade just after the Apollo Lunar Landings. Gradually, though, I was pulled into management. By the end of my career, I was responsible for the building and deployment of space hardware systems for a large aerospace company.

The theme, for me, has always been science and engineering. So how did I come to write this book? If we go back to a few years ago, I became interested in the loud debate between the defenders and the deniers of God. The deniers have been labeled the New Atheists. The defenders have no moniker that I am aware of. I read a couple dozen of their books. The one thing that stuck with me was that, in many cases, authors on both sides of this debate claimed that their positions were defended by science. However, I could not find the links between their claims and the science they were citing in defense of them. I was left asking: what, if anything, can science tell us about this?

As part of my reading, I also bumped into other ideas that gave me pause. One was relativism. Is it true that everything is relative, that there are no absolutes to which things can be compared? This flew in the face of my experience with science, which is full of absolutes: its particles, fields, and laws are all unchanging throughout time and space.

Then there is the idea that reality exists only in our minds. That, too, was puzzling to me and seemed to be wrong. I thought that as a scientist, I was dealing with reality all the time, and it was not just in my head.

And then there was the basic premise of postmodernism**: there are no stories (or narratives) that apply to all people, only mini-narratives that apply to groups of people. For example, each of the world’s religions is considered to be a mini-narrative, a way of explaining our Universe that no one can prove or disprove (though many try) and that is not universally agreed-upon. Its proponents claim that science is also one of these mini-narratives: unprovable, relative, and not universally applicable. That, too, was puzzling to me, because I worked as a scientist with the firm belief that what I was dealing with was the same throughout the Universe, and certainly it was true all around the world.

Finally, since college, I have always questioned the claim that some academic fields were called sciences. I had friends who obtained degrees in psychology and sociology who claimed that they were scientists, too; yet they had taken no math courses or courses in physics, math and chemistry. I always wondered if what they would be doing was really science.

For all of these ideas, I kept returning to the same question: what, if anything, could science itself tell us?

By then I was hooked. I had to take the steps to try to answer this question. The first step was to figure out more specifically what question I was trying to answer. I considered and discarded the question, Is there a God? Plenty of people seemed deeply interested in answering that question one way or another, but my interest was more specific. I wanted to know what science could tell us, and there had to be a question that was more specific to science. After a lot of searching, I became most comfortable with the following question:

Is the Universe all there is, or can there be something, anything at all, that might exist outside of it?

That was the question, and the condition placed upon it was that we were going to try to answer it using science alone. No inputs from philosophy or from the ancient texts of the world’s religions were to be allowed. Science only! We want to know whether science itself can speak to this question.

So, I was ready to go to work. It turned out to be hard. Very hard. I thought that I would cite a few references about science, write down its definition, and be on my way. However, I soon realized that if we were going to use science only, we had better be certain that we were using real science and not some distant third cousin. But how could that be done? We needed a yardstick.

To make matters worse, it turned out there are several serious claims that have been made against science over the past century or so. They would have to be addressed. Also, there was a list of questions that I thought, at a minimum, should be asked and answered regarding what science really is. For example, can science explain everything? Why does it use mathematics? Is science unchanging, or does it change like everything else?

So how would we be able to critique these claims and answer these questions? The first step had to be all about agreeing on what science really is. Its definition and description had to be detailed enough to respond to these claims and questions. This would be our yardstick. However, after an extensive search, I reluctantly found that the required detailed description of science did not exist. We would have to find it ourselves.

This, to me, was amazing. After a career in science, I now look back and find that there has been little examination of what science really is. I am amazed that my professors, classmates and I did not talk seriously about it. My guess about everyone, and the early scientists in particular, is that they were all so taken by the brilliant successes of science that they didn’t ask why it worked. They simply tried to apply it to everything. There are other possible reasons for the lack of the detailed description of science that are discussed in the book.

I did finally find the detailed description of science that was needed. Then it got really interesting. As you will see, having this description was somewhat like having our own Rosetta Stone. Once found, it allowed us to address and answer the claims that had been made against science. They had been around for decades and were like festering sores in the fabric of science. It also equipped us to address additional concerns regarding science.

Recall that this had to be done in order for us to be confident we were using real science to answer our boxed question above. We can characterize this entire activity as finding the answer to another question:

What is science?

So, we actually have two questions to answer. We must first answer what is science? In PART I, we will find the definition of science. In it, we show that science consists of discoveries and that it, itself, was also discovered. So, PART I is about what science is and what it can do. PART II is where we use the detailed definition of science, our Rosetta Stone, first to defend science against the claims that have been made against it and then to further define it by distinguishing it from other academic practices. PART II, then, is about what science does not do—what is not science. In so doing we have been preparing for PART III, where we finally get to ask and answer the first boxed question above.

If this book were a meal, its first two parts would be like a meat and potatoes dinner, serious and important: or, in a word, meaty. With the main course, we learn to distinguish science from philosophy, from metaphysics, from non-science, and from the technology it spawns. We also learn about the tangled history science has had with postmodernism, with scientism, and with relativism. We examine the motivations of the groups who have been antagonistic toward science, concluding with several important findings about real science and its implications.

The final third of the book, then, is the dessert. It has to come after the main course, which is the preparation required for it. In it we finally get to our question: Can there be something, anything at all, that could exist (or even be required to exist) outside of the physical universe? Though I won’t spoil it by telling you the answer now, I can tell you that the dessert is delicious.

I can also tell you that, in addition to answering both of the boxed questions, we mounted a strong defense of science and fought back against several long-held academic practices that, using science, were shown to have no merit.

So, please join me then on this adventure as we seek to find answers to these two important questions. The road we travel will have several bends and maybe a hairpin turn or two. Hopefully many of the questions you ask yourself as you read the book will be the same ones I had to ask and answer a short time ago. I shall try to be a good guide. I knew a lot about how to use science before I wrote this book. Now I also know a lot about what science is. It is my hope that you, too, will learn a lot about what science really is and what it can and cannot do.

W. P. Olson, Ph. D.

January 2021

PART ONE

THE DISCOVERY OF SCIENCE

Icon: Finger pointing at atom

PART I is about the discovery and the definition of science: about what science is and what it can do. In PART II, we will further distinguish science by learning about what science is not. The goal of the book, as mentioned in the Preface, is to answer a pair of questions. Of necessity the first question is: What is science? The second question is: Can there be something, anything at all, that exists separate from and beyond the physical Universe?

We will not be joining the emotional Is there a God? debate. Rather, our questions are directed at science itself. So how must we proceed? We must first be convinced that we are using real science and not a pretender.

What is science, really? We all use the word, but do we really know what it means? We must start by finding its detailed definition. I say detailed because, as we will find, there are several claims that have been made against science. Is science this, or is it that? In order to address such claims, we need to have such a definition of science against which to measure.

That is our first task. We will find that we have some work to do in order to obtain this definition. We must look through the history of science.

PART I contains seven chapters. The first defines the problem we must address: finding the detailed definition of science. (Now, if this sounds boring to you, let me say that my reaction was something like: Oh no, this is going to take a lot of work; I hope it’s going to be worth it. Well, it was—and then some.) The next four chapters present a brief history of science. That is followed by the sixth chapter that builds a detailed definition of science based on the attributes of science we have found in those four chapters.

Importantly, we are going to find that science is not a human invention. It was, and continues to be, a human discovery. We will also find why science uses mathematics and will find the answers to many other questions about it.

This definition of science will then be used in PART II first to examine the claims made about science in Chapter 1 and to further distinguish science from several other fields and, along the way, solve a couple of longstanding problems of the philosophy of science.

If not by the end of PART I, at least early in PART II, I expect most readers will be more interested in what is being learned about science than they are in anticipation of answering our question in PART III. We will find that both are exciting and important.

CHAPTER 1

LOOKING FOR REAL SCIENCE

We begin by asking what science really is. We must ask this question because there have been many claims about and against science. We must be able to address all of them. There are also several general questions of science that are asked by almost everyone. We need to be able to also answer those questions. We need to do these things first because we need to be certain that we are using real science before we attempt to use it to answer important questions about the physical Universe.

Humans have been interested in nature**, and physical nature in particular, throughout all of recorded history. (As defined in the Glossary, nature in this book is taken to mean the non-living part of the physical Universe.) From our present-day perspective, when we think about nature, science comes to mind. Most of us would agree that it is science that has helped us to learn about nature, as well as making possible most of the technology that shapes our lives. We hear about advances and discoveries in science regularly, and we tend to trust what experts tell us that science has proven, about everything from illnesses to human behavior to what kind of car is safest to drive.

Yet how many of us really know what science is, what it can and cannot do, and how it came to be? Can it really answer our questions about life and the Universe? The more we sit and think about science, the more we realize we are constantly using a word we don’t fully understand. We may have a general understanding, but that’s about it. These days, we just assume that science can speak authoritatively about all sorts of things. The phrases studies have shown… and we know from science that… get tossed around a lot, even on non-scientific topics. But when we slow down and take a look at this thing that so many of us take for granted, we begin to realize that we might not understand science as much as we think we do.

01 QUESTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE

For example, why do scientific findings seem to keep changing, even though scientists use the same equations over and over? Is there anything unchanging or absolute about it? Why does science use mathematics to describe things? Can we make science be and do anything we wish, or does it have limitations? Can science say anything about human choices or about moral values?

We are going to be looking for a definition of science that is detailed enough to answer questions like these and detailed enough to address the following claims that have been made about and against science.

02 CLAIMS ABOUT AND AGAINST SCIENCE

In addition to being able to answer such questions, we also must respond to several claims that have been made about and against science. On the surface, several of them sound specious. So there are actually two thorny questions on our plate. First, how do we find or develop the detailed definition of science we require? Second, how do we deal with these claims? Below, each of these claims is presented as it has been promulgated by its authors. In this first chapter, we will simply be describing each of the claims; there is no discussion here about what each of them means for science or about their other possible implications. That will come later in the book.

These claims have all been made recently—most dating from the last decades of the twentieth century up to the present. They are critical of scientists and of science itself and are almost entirely attributable to academicians and professors in the sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history departments of the modern university, which are the part of what we shall refer to as the North Campus.** We will speak of the North Campus and South Campus as we proceed through the book and discuss in detail the bifurcation of the modern university into its North (without science) and South (with science) Campuses in Chapter 12.

Here is a list of these claims:

Science is just another story, one of many; it is a social construction.

Vast sectors of the humanities and the social sciences seem to have adopted a philosophy… that regards science as nothing more than a ‘narration,’ a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others. ¹ Thus, there is no ‘scientific method’ and a scientist is before anything else a person who ‘tells stories.’ ²

A grand story is one that offers a big picture understanding of the universe, or an organizing worldview for people. Religions are a good example of this. Of course, in our world and throughout history, there have been many such ‘grand stories,’ but none of them is universally agreed upon, so it is claimed that none of them is truer than the others. In this claim, science gets lumped in with other worldviews (like religions or philosophies) and is said to also contain little or no truth. It is just another made up story. Scientists are merely storytellers, and their stories are no truer than anyone else’s stories.

All knowledge, including science, is regional. It is the product of a particular culture and changes with time.

Because reality is in part culture dependent, it changes over time, as cultures do from community to community. Knowledge is neither eternal nor universal. ³

…science is ‘situated’ knowledge, conditioned by the historical circumstances that engender it and reflective of the ideological patterns of dominance and authority that prevail in the society. ⁴

Recent developments in the history and philosophy of science have led to a re-evaluation that acknowledges that the goals, methods, theories, and even the actual data of the natural sciences are not written in nature; all are subject to the play of social forces… social, psychological, and political norms are inescapable… ⁵

According to these claims, there is no knowledge that persists for all time and places. This includes scientific knowledge. There is no universal science. This is because, it is claimed, all knowledge arises in a particular place and time. Science is therefore the product of that time and place and, as is true of all culture, it changes with time.

Science is error-prone and therefore cannot be trusted.

The argument roughly but accurately paraphrased (and all too familiar from New Age tracts, among other things), is that since physics has discovered the uncertainty principle, it can no longer provide reliable information about the physical world, has lost its claim to objectivity… ⁶

Since the birth of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century, the scientific community has known that an atomic particle’s location and velocity cannot both be accurately measured simultaneously. Based on that discovery, it has been claimed that all of science can no longer provide an accurate quantitative description of nature.

Other aspects of scientific discovery have led to variants of this same claim. For example, one of the words commonly used in science is "entropy."** Entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. Science teaches that disorder is always increasing. It is claimed to the contrary that sometimes order increases and that science is wrong.

The dialectic between order and disorder also suggests a reevaluation of the Law of Entropy, no longer viewed simply as system decay and breakdown but as creations of new forms of order. ⁷

Reality is in our brains; it is not out there. Science does not produce truth.

Many leading philosophers over the past two centuries have believed and taught this position.

Following Nietzsche, a number of Austrian, German, and French philosophers—among them Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Bruno Latour—together with a few Americans, including Richard Rorty and Austrian-American Paul Feyerabend—began rejecting the idea that reality and facts existed independently of our thinking about them. ⁸

These post-Nietzsche philosophers claim that there is nothing beyond us waiting to be discovered. There is no truth that is detached from our minds. Everything is only what we think. Science, therefore, does not provide us truth.

Everything is relative, including science; there are no absolutes or ultimate truths.

Related to the above, it has been argued that there is no single way to view anything. There is no single way to know science. That is because there are no absolutes or standards that can be used to measure facts and findings against. Everything is at best only relative; there are no absolutes or ultimate truths. Philosopher Paul Feyerabend stated,

The world, including the world of science, is a complex and scattered entity that cannot be captured by theories and simple rules… There is not one common sense, there are many…. Nor is there one way of knowing science; there are many such ways… ⁹

If science were done over, it would be better.

The implication here is that science can be redone. Several groups assert that science was developed by white males in Western Europe. Each group claims that if it had developed science instead, the science would be different, and it would be better. It is also claimed that science is driving us toward an environmental disaster and must be redone. Only a new science can save us.

This mission is especially crucial since only postmodern science can save us from the ecological catastrophe into which modern science is driving us. ¹⁰

Science is part of the present order and must be overthrown.

There is a related claim that a better society can be built and that the current one and the science that propped it up must be gotten rid of. Science is claimed to be an instrument of the reigning head of the current society and is stained by the wrongdoings of that society. Further, it is claimed that science acts to prop up and protect that power. Science is therefore considered impure because of the wrongdoings of that society and particularly because of its leadership. Just like a society, it is claimed that science can be done over by different people and made better. MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson writes about this claim,

…what counts as scientific knowledge is little more than the dominant opinion of the self-appointed scientific power-brokers. At its most extreme, this social constructivist position argues that scientific theory is the product of oppressive, Eurocentric, capitalistic, sexist, self serving prior commitments, and that the very content and findings of science would be (and perhaps will be) different when derived in the context of a liberated multicultural world-view. ¹¹

Religious texts are accurate sources of scientific knowledge.

The above claims against science have been made by academics. However, the literalist theists, especially Christians, are also important. This heading includes Judaism and Islam but pertains primarily to the literalist Christians. They interpret their sacred texts as precisely as they know how to and are at odds with science. Their biblically based estimate of the age of the Earth is between six and seven thousand years. They also teach that all life was placed on the Earth as we now see it. These religious literalists claim that their texts are infallible and eternally reliable, whereas science is stumbling around and always changing its mind. These literalist theists take their position in order to defend their Scripture.

Ultimately, the question of the age of the earth is a question of the truth and authority of Scripture. That’s why the age of the earth matters so much and why the church cannot compromise with millions of years (or evolution). ¹²

Science has explained everything. Time and matter are eternal. There is no need for a creator.

Atheists claim that science has explained everything. Atheism claims that there is no need to posit a God as explanation for anything. Atheists also state that nothing has been created; time and matter are eternal. Atheists share many of the claims made by the academy. We will discuss the Big Bang, the multiverse conjecture, atheism, and scientific atheism in PART III of the book.

We note here that each of these claims is an opinion made about science. They are not facts based on science. This is quite a cacophony! To address them, it will be necessary to use a detailed definition of science. Such a definition is also required to answer the questions about science asked in section ¹.

03 THE DETAILED DEFINITION OF SCIENCE

How then do we answer these questions (Section 1) and claims (Section 2) about science? We need to find a detailed definition of science; otherwise, we won’t have any foundation from which to form answers to these questions and claims. If we are to answer these claims, we need details. It is said the devil is in the details. That is certainly the case here.

Describing science only as the study of the universe is not enough. We need the details regarding what science is and does.

We begin by looking for popular answers: what your average person on the street thinks science is. These are the easiest to come by and should provide a view regarding how the public thinks of science. I approached multiple friends and acquaintances with one simple question: Tell me what you think science is and what you think it can do.

Everybody’s answer was different.

What people say about science:

It is a way to find out how the universe works

It is knowledge and the opposite of ignorance

It is a method for creating knowledge

It is just another story; I am not sure I believe it.

It is used to kill people; it should be gotten rid of.

It is a body of knowledge

It’s all about the scientific method, and it can be used on anything to do science

It’s all about experiment and observation and different people getting the same results

It is an almost magical way of finding out about things

Many people just said that they did not know. Strange, isn’t it? After all, as we discussed, science is talked about in popular culture all the time, and we are all continuously exposed to it. Yet for all of that exposure, we seem to have wildly different—even contradictory—understandings of what science is and does. Popular culture therefore provides little help in describing science. We are not going to get helpful answers to our questions from friends and acquaintances and likely also not from the media.

Remember, we must find information about science that enables us to answer the questions and claims that have been asked and stated in Sections 1 and 2. Our next step is to look at what the dictionaries and encyclopedias tell us about science.

Book definitions of science

From McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms: ¹³

A branch of study in which facts are observed and classified, and, usually, quantitative laws are formulated and verified; involves the application of mathematical reasoning and data analysis to natural phenomena.

From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: ¹⁴

1 The observation, identification, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena: new advances in science and technology.

2 Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena: the science of astronomy.

3 A systematic method or body of knowledge in a given area: the science of marketing.

From Collins English Dictionary: ¹⁵

1 The systematic study of the nature and behavior of the material and physical universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement and the formulation of laws to describe these facts in general terms.

2 The knowledge so obtained or the practice of obtaining it.

3 Any particular branch of this knowledge: the pure and applied sciences**.

4 Any body of knowledge organized in a systematic manner.

From Random House Webster’s College Dictionary: ¹⁶

1 A branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.

2 Systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

3 Any of the branches of natural or physical science.

4 Systematized knowledge in general.

5 Knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study.

6 A particular branch of knowledge.

7 Any skill or technique that reflects a precise application of facts or principles.

From The American Heritage Student Science Dictionary: ¹⁷

The investigation of natural phenomena through observation, experimentation, and theoretical explanation. Science makes use of the scientific method, which includes careful observation of natural phenomena, the formulation of a hypothesis, the conducting of one or more experiments to test the hypothesis, and the drawing of a conclusion that confirms or modifies the hypothesis.

From Merriam-Webster: ¹⁸

1 The state of knowing: knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding.

2 A department of systematized knowledge as an object of study (the science of theology).

3 Knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.

These definitions, somewhat like those collected from friends and acquaintances, provide many definitions of science. There is emphasis on science and knowledge, investigation, and the scientific method. However, the dictionaries and encyclopedias also define science as:

A systematic method or body of knowledge in a given area

Any skill or technique that reflects a precise application of facts or principles

The state of knowing: knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding

Knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method

Such definitions pose their own questions. For example, does any area with a systematic method or body of knowledge constitute science? Accounting comes to mind; that field is pretty systematic and works with a body of knowledge, but surely accountants are not scientists. Also, according to the dictionaries, any skill that reflects a precise application of facts is claimed to be science. Science is also said to be the opposite of ignorance, which seems rather vague. These dictionary entries also claim that science is all about the use of the scientific method **. Is science a method, or is it more than that?

These definitions do not provide anywhere near the detail we require. However, they consistently talk about nature and the physical universe. So, let’s imagine that the Universe is represented by what is inside of a circle drawn on a sheet of paper. Science deals with what is contained within that circle. But that sheet of paper also contains white space outside of the circle. That space represents anything that is outside of the physical Universe. From these definitions, we will tentatively assume that science deals only with the physical Universe and nothing else. It does not deal with metaphysical** questions like, "is there a God?" nor can it be part of philosophical conjectures.

This assumption is tentative. We will see whether there is support for it as we move forward. No matter what, we require a much more detailed definition of science and must therefore continue our search.

Government agencies’ and associations’ definitions of science

So, we next look to science agencies and societies that are tasked with the use and the protection of science. Each of these agencies depends on science to achieve its mission and should therefore have a definition of science, which they keep in mind… right?

The National Science Foundation (NSF):

The NSF was founded in 1950 to promote the progress of science. It is responsible for about one fourth of all the basic research funding received by the nation’s colleges and universities. It has an annual budget of over 8 billion dollars. On its website, it has a dedicated section on definitions, but science is not included. Some of the responses to the query definition of science include STEM talent, STEM education, Definitions of Research and Development, and What Is Basic Research. However, there is no definition of science.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):

NASA began in 1958 and led the national goal of