Can Science Explain Everything?

Unbelievable Project: John Lennox vs Peter Atkins - 2nd February 2019

In #unbelievable #Unbelievable Project

Can science explain everything? Christian guest John Lennox is emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Oxford University. Atheist guest Peter Atkins is emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University. The episode can be found on the Unbelievable website.

  • Justin Brierley - Christian Moderator
  • John Lennox - Christian
  • Peter Atkins - Atheist
  • Comments by myself, bblais

My short answer is yes (sort of). Along the way we see John playing a little loosely with the language, using equivocation fallacies, making distinctions where none exist, and being credulous in the face of ancient history.

John - We all have faith. Atheists have faith. We all have our beliefs.

Here John is seemingly equating the word "believe" with "faith" even though I’m sure he knows they are different in some important ways. It really doesn’t matter that different people have different beliefs in this discussion. What matters is how we justify those points and the process of science is the only way we know of to verify claims in the real world.

As for whether science can explain everything I would say "I don’t know". There may be limits but we haven’t yet seen those limits. There have been people in the past who have said that certain things were impossible to measure:

On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are ... necessarily denied to us. While we can conceive of the possibility of determining their shapes, their sizes, and their motions, we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure ... Our knowledge concerning their gaseous envelopes is necessarily limited to their existence, size ... and refractive power, we shall not at all be able to determine their chemical composition or even their density... I regard any notion concerning the true mean temperature of the various stars as forever denied to us. - August Compte, 1835, Cours de la Philosophie Positive.

and

In "LENS-LIKE ACTION OF A STAR BY THE DEVIATION OF LIGHT IN THE GRAVITATIONAL FIELD", "There is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly" - Einstein, 1936, Science.

As a result of many such examples, I would be reticent to say that it is impossible for science to explain everything. Once you say it is impossible or you give "magic" as an explanation then all explanation stops - you have a self-imposed limit. This happened to Isaac Newton when trying to describe the stability of the solar system -- Newton resorted to "God did it". The actual solution took until Laplace to be found - even though there was nothing in this solution beyond the abilities of Newton.

I like Peter‘s response about the public nature of the discoveries of science:

Knowledge that can be shared. Evidence that can be shared publicly.

Peter says that scientific ideas sit in a network in relation to each other with hierarchical levels of complexity, e.g. biology, chemistry, and physics. Where they overlap they are mutually supportive which is good evidence that they are true.

Peter also distinguishes between two types of questions what he calls "stupid" questions and "real" questions. Stupid questions are questions for which there is no evidence and science can dismiss immediately. Examples include

  • what is the purpose of the universe?
  • what is the nature of the afterlife?

Real questions can include things like "why is there something rather than nothing" because there is evidence of something. "What is the nature of consciousness?" because there is evidence of consciousness. These are questions that science can answer.

I'd probably phrase it that science deals with well-defined problems, without hidden agendas in the questions themselves. The question "what is the nature of the afterlife?" may have a hidden agenda - assuming there is an "after" to "life" - and so is either not well-defined or requires the answer to the question of the nature of life and consciousness first. The same goes for the "purpose" of the universe - one has to establish that there could even be such a thing, that the words actually mean what we think they mean when applied to objects like entire universes.

John likes to make a distinction between the natural sciences and the historical sciences but I don’t see why that distinction should exist. The distinction is just a matter of the type of data and the level of uncertainty but the reasoning processes are the same. Both the natural sciences and the historical sciences use the methods of prediction, applied probability theory, and falsification. John further said that his Christianity is "evidence-based" yet he seems to believe that the Christian claims and explanations are not addressable by science. In a way he has to do this, even though it is equivocating on the notion of "evidence". He can't admit that his belief is not based on evidence, but it is clear that his claims are not supported by science. Rather than admit that his beliefs are unjustified, John needs to distance himself from science on these issues.

Perhaps another way to think of this, and to demonstrate the problem with John's thinking, is to go back to Peter’s idea of a network of ideas. Claims about the resurrection are based on historical evidence but where that evidence overlaps with the physical sciences and biological sciences (not to mention anthropology and archaeology) you find that it leads to contradictions and not mutual support. In order to be justified, the different levels of explanation cannot be in conflict with each other and must support each other. Bringing in John's analogy (described below), there is nothing conflicting between saying that water boils due to heat and the water in the kettle is boiling because I wanted tea. However, there is something conflicting between saying that entropy increases in a closed system and a body is resurrected after 3 days.

John thinks that science cannot answer questions such as "Where do I come from?", "Where am I going?", and "What is the meaning of life?" and he says that we have to go to religion and philosophy to answer them.

I’ve written before (here, here, and here) about the value (or lack thereof) of philosophical answers to things. Since science has a method for distinguishing true from false claims we can both trust it and know how far we can trust it. Religion doesn’t have that - it has no methodology for us to distinguish true or false claims.

As for the question "where do we come from?" I think science has given a far better story than any religion. Sure, you can always push the time back to before our understanding of it but if you think about the religious answers to these questions they’re all really parochial. The Bible speaks of one world. It never speaks about multiple worlds or universes. It gives no indication about the time-scales that life developed or that the universe developed, or even that the planets developed. Everything that we are confident in we have learned from science and not from religion. What about the question "Where we going?" Again science points in the only directions that make sense. Knowing that processes like life, flames, and other dynamical systems will come to an end at some point eliminates most simplistic ideas of an afterlife. Carolyn Porco does a great job describing the story that is science, including musing on what happens when we die. In contrast the religious story I find to be fanciful and unsupported.

Continuing on with John's confidence in his beliefs, if the best piece of evidence for Christianity is the resurrection then that is pretty weak. The only evidence we have for the resurrection comes from texts written decades afterward from unknown authors. Contrast that with anything else we have even a modest degree of confidence in. Every time I look for the best evidence for nearly anything else I always find evidence far better than that being claimed for the resurrection. Try it yourself some time!

John spends some time on the notion of explanations:

Even when we say science explains, often it doesn't explain comprehensively. How would you explain boiling water? You could explain it through heat conduction and agitation of molecules of water. You can also say that the water is boiling because I'd like a cup of tea. Now those two explanations are very different, they don't conflict - they complement. One is the natural scientific explanation and the other is an explanation in terms of the intention and purposes of an agent.

The problem I think here is with the question - English is a language poorly suited to clarity. For example, there is the question of "why does water in general boil?" and the question of "why is this particular pot of water boiling at this moment?" I think what John is trying to get at is the idea that you can explain things on many different levels of detail. But John is also talking about the role of agency in scientific explanations. Can scientific explanations include agency? Of course they can -- just look at fields like archaeology or anthropology or even in biology. If you’re looking at the development of tools or maybe even the building of dams by beavers, we can ask how they were made physically, what purpose they serve from an evolutionary point of view, how the structure of the tool or dam is related to the physical structure of the agent, etc... However, it is up to the person claiming that an agent exists to give the evidence for its in the first place. One also has to be clear about which question one is trying to address. "How would you explain boiling water?" is an underspecified question.

John claims that God can interject arbitrary events into the universe and yet John doesn’t call this a violation of natural law. He seems to think that it goes beyond natural law. Of course you can make the claim that there is an agent that is somehow able to interject things that appear on the face of it to be contradictions in natural law but it is still an unconvincing claim unless you can demonstrate that the agent actually exists! We have many people in the past who have claimed violations of natural law (e.g. perpetual motion machines) but these claims have no actual evidential support - not a single one. It's gotten so bad that the US patent office - which doesn't require a patent idea to even work - refuses to even look at such claims.

So, if you are going to say (for whatever process) that you have evidence for the violation of the second law of thermodynamics (e.g a perpetual motion machine or a resurrection) then you need to have evidence that would be strong enough to convince physicists. Historical evidence can never rise to this level. There have been many claims in the past that have suggested a violation of the known physical laws at the time - (e.g. cold fusion, faster than light travel, etc...) - yet even these had evidence far stronger than simply historical evidence. Scientists are open to such possibilities but the bar has to be set high because most claims are simply false.

I would add further that I don't really care whether God did it or aliens or some other mechanism until I am presented with enough evidence to see if there is even anything of interest to look at. It is premature to talk about how aliens might have gotten to Earth or what they look like until there is at least some credible evidence that UFOs are alien spacecraft or that alien technology is verified. With the resurrection, there isn't enough evidence to even be confident there is an effect to be studied, let alone to pin down a mechanism.

I often wonder why Christians are convinced by this sort of evidence. When I have brought up the common knowledge that the documents are written many years after the event, that it’s questionable whether we have any understanding of their authorship, and that we have no idea whether they were even eyewitnesses or at least have access to eye witnesses the common responses I've gotten are that this is common in all of ancient history or that you shouldn’t expect historical documents to be like scientific documents. I agree with that! But that should make one less confident in the conclusions not more confident. We should require the levels of evidence that would convince us today. I don’t really care if that's impossible with ancient documents - that's on God, as far as I can tell.

Concerning natural law, I find it interesting that John says the resurrection is not a violation of natural law because the lawmaker is doing it. Here, I think we have a problem with wording. What we call "natural law" is the observed regularity of nature. Perhaps we find that certain regularities are never observed to be violated under every possible measurement that we have ever made. Even there we could be wrong. For example, when scientists were first talking about quantum mechanics or relativity they found that there were regularities which were never violated in everyday life but are violated under certain circumstances (e.g. very small or very fast). Of course, those circumstances were experimentally determined multiple times such that we could - like Hume - say that it would be more likely that the law we thought originally was correct needed adjusting rather than these new experiments were all (consistently) in error. For a resurrection, I would expect nothing less. The probability of a resurrection happening via natural causes is of course astronomical. Even if one grants unknown causes, the probability is still astronomical until you can demonstrate that the unknown cause is so likely as to overturn the astronomically small probabilities of the claimed event. Again, historical evidence or philosophical arguments just don't ever rise to this level.

John reads the book of Genesis where Adam is commanded to name the animals and states that this is the beginnings of the science of taxonomy. Further, he states that in the beginning there was the Word, and DNA is also a language, so the explanations are again complementary.

This to me is reading into the text what you want to see. An easy way to see this is to ask the question the other way - were the early biblical writers able to take their text and use it as a guide to find explanations for things like DNA and evolution and cosmology? Since all of these concepts took hundreds to thousands of years to develop, with no clear advantage given by the content of the Bible, this seems to me good evidence for post-hoc rationalization.

John asks his atheist friends whether they would trust a computer if it was "the result of a mindless unguided process" and he always got the answer "No".

I would give the answer "maybe" -- it would depend on how the process was set up. It could very easily be that you could set up an evolutionary framework that would result in a computational structure that would be able to solve problems in its environment. I see no reason why that couldn’t happen now, even if it’s a little hard to do with silicon just because of the physics. I think John feels that "unguided" must in some way be related to "random" and thus untrustworthy. As an analogy to see the difference, if I place a marble on the edge of a bowl - anywhere on the edge - it will eventually (unguided by agency) make it to the bottom of the bowl in the same spot. Following the laws of nature does not lead to randomness and chaos and could (given a complex enough system) lead to trustworthy computational structures.

John talks several times about the "atheist worldview". This is clearly something he should have learned by now: atheism isn't a worldview. You could talk about a naturalistic worldview but you can’t talk about an atheist worldview.

According to John, he wants to have a worldview that is big enough to live for and to live in.

This strikes me as an emotional response, perhaps the need to feel more important, to feel tied to something bigger than he is and something that is not mindless. I typically follow the advice that if you ascribe psychological reasons for someone else's beliefs while ascribing logical reasons for your own then you’ve lost the argument. Here John seems to be admitting it explicitly so I don't have a problem drawing it out.

To sum up, across the entire debate it is clear that John is credulous about the ancient documents, misuses terminology, and shows sloppy thinking and speaking. He leans on anecdotal evidence, selectively chooses those parts of the data that support his religious views and doesn't seem to see the proper use of scientific and rational thinking to address claims. Some of these are so astonishing (like his seeming confidence in conversion stories) that it is hard to imagine how he could think this way and be taken seriously. Although a pleasant debater, I have never been swayed by any of John Lennox's arguments.