Is There Any Reason To Believe That There Are Things About Which Science Cannot Tell Us?

In today's society the trust and (sometimes blind) faith put in science is both marveling and somewhat ironic. For an area of "knowledge; that is predicated on the belief that no judgment can be cast on any idea without adequate evidence, there are a great number of ignorant apologists. The phrasing of the question and the ambiguity of the words "tell us; is such that I think it necessary to refine the question to "Is there any reason to believe that there is knowledge that cannot be gained through science;.

"Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods;; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know; Bertrand Russell

There are many who believe that in the last 300 years mankind has progressed to a point where the scientific method is the only valid process of gaining knowledge, yet methodological naturalism is far from all encompassing. Despite what thinkers like Popper say, science in its simplest terms is theories based on observations and or repeated tests. If "A;, then "B; is likely. With inductive reasoning based on information gained through perception, we have supposedly amassed a wealth of knowledge that is never actually truly professed to be certain. Then comes the descri ption of what knowledge is. For the purpose of this essay, I find it necessary to pay less attention to both capacity and acquaintance knowledge due to the fact that my "knowing; of New York and that of how to brush my teeth don't seem to relate to the question. The phrase "tell us; hints at the knowledge of facts as a result of enquiry or at least some thinking and reflection. Furthermore it is far less difficult to prove that my recognition of the walls being white comes not from science per se, but from being able to match what I see before me with what I've been taught all my life.

Thus the focus here will lie on propositional knowledge. For centuries it has been agreed that for me to be correct in saying, "I know that if I jump up, I must come down;, it must first be a true proposition. Following on, it is impossible to imagine a genuine knowledge claim where the speaker does not believe in their claim. Lastly, there exist no beliefs where the believer does not have what they see as adequate reason for their belief. The role of the philosopher is then to analyse and verify whether such justification is valid or not. Although these themselves require further qualifying, we can consider the necessary conditions of propositional knowledge to be justified true belief (JTB). Yet although we could question if in fact any information gained from the stated scientific method can be classified as knowledge, there still exists the very strong case that can be made for everything outside "science;, the case that on its own would already prove that there are in fact things about which science cannot tell us.

The initially obvious response to the question is that there are millions of things we consider we know that we are not told by science. It is clear that science is a posteriori and works through extrapolating, anything that exists outside the material, or that requires more than just observation to be understood, such as music, drama, art or emotion is beyond the reach of science. Although through careful study we may be able to explain how the striking of a tighter string produces a higher pitched sound, when multiple notes are strung together, it is not science that tells us the riff is melodious. Despite the fact that no fields provide a conclusive or exact explanation as to why a face is beautiful, in each society there are unspoken standards of beauty that are known but can never be described in scientific terms. In his book "God's Undertaker; John Lennox uses the analogy of "Aunt Matilda's Cake; to describe this limitation of science. Having studied extensively a cake baked by Aunt Matilda, scientists of all fields could break down the cake to its chemical composition and describe the processes that went on in the baking of such a cake. Yet though they could describe how the cake came about, what they would never be able to find out, through their fields, is why she baked that cake. This is a fact that could only be revealed by the baker. Although science can explain certain observational fields, at this present time none can see a way in which it will be able to explain abstract thought or reasoning. Furthermore as it has been established that science deals with only that which is observable in the material world, if there were anything such as a deity or forces that existed or acted outside our natural world, then by definition knowledge of those things could never be gained through science.

Despite the above argument, a matter that I have thus left unchallenged is whether knowledge can at all be gained from science. The JTB descri ption of knowledge states that for anything to count as such it must be a (sufficiently) justified true belief. However, as Hume pointed out there is one great problem with all inductive arguments. Stated above, a simplified version of the scientific method is "If ;A', then ;B' is likely;. Yet as with all induced knowledge, what is often overlooked is a proviso that must stand for any such arguments to work. That is the principle of uniformity, which I will call A1. "Instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience; (THN, 89). Therefore the scientific method, and all inductive arguments, are actually deductive and must be expanded thus: If A is true and A1 is also true, then B is likely to be true. Deductive arguments are valid because it is impossible to imagine a situation where they could be wrong. Knowing that Bob is taller than Chris, and Adam is taller than Bob, I can deduce that Adam is taller than Chris as that is the only possibility. The great problem then arises concerning the justification or lack thereof of A1. A1 is not adequately justified and cannot be taken as true because the only justification presented is as follows "The pattern spotted in the observed will be continued by the unobserved because that is how (from what we have observed) things have always worked. This cyclical justification is not a priori and is invalid because it is possible for us to imagine that things will be completely different tomorrow to the way they have always been. In a class of 200 where 199 pupils are intelligent, it would be wrong to believe that the 200^th pupil is also intelligent based on the 199 tested. For in such a class it is perfectly plausible for the 200^th pupil to not be intelligent.

Then comes the aspect of truth in the JTB. What history has shown us is that we should never have full confidence in a theory. Today, when a theory is presented, it is up to the scientific community to disprove that theory. If it cannot be disproved, then it stands conditionally until in the future it is expanded or disbanded. This considered, a very strong case could be made against science as the insufficient justification and possible falsehood of all information gained through inductive reasoning prove that it is in fact a stretch to say that science gives us knowledge. Far from being so strong as to be the only way in which things can be told to us, if we really analyze that which we are "told;, there isn't a conclusive reason to believe that there are things that science can assuredly tell us. Straying from the question it may seem, what I wish to illustrate is that the question itself could be completely missing the point. If there are things at all that we can be assuredly told (know), must they not come from areas of knowledge outside of science?

Alas, there are two paths available to us when searching for a resolution. The first, the way in which we reason most of the time, assumes that we live in a paradigm where infallibility is not a necessary condition for knowledge. Neither do we need to take in to account Hume's problem of inductive arguments. In this paradigm what matters is that we have made leaps and bounds, through science, in understanding the world that we live in. The information gained through science is not only seemingly accurate but also clearly practical. Yet as argued much earlier in the essay, if we can say that science does indeed tell us a lot, then so too are we told a lot in multifarious other ways, from our reading of emotions and body language to our appreciation of the arts. However, two and a half thousand years ago we also accepted now disproved information as knowledge because "it worked;. Therefore if we consider the second option which is to be the global skeptics that require infallibility to be "told things;;; then we must rely solely on analytic philosophical thinking that is logically infallible to gain information. Impractical as this may seem, Descartes' masterstroke of "cogito ergo sum; (an argument that could not have been formulated through methodological naturalism alone) is proof that there is at least one thing we can know without science. Regardless of which path we take, for the critical mind there is indubitable reason to believe that there are things about which science cannot tell us.