The Futile Cycle

Dr. Free-Ride over at Adventures in Ethics and Science has written a post on a topic near and dear to my own heart: the boundaries between science and belief. Her position is that there is no conflict in the mind of a scientist who believes in a supernatural deity. It’s a topic that I’ve been mulling over for the past 10 years or so.

In some ways, it is very easy to fall into the strict regime in which “if one believes that the scientific method leads to truth, that is the methodology to be applied in all beliefs of truth, public and private.” I think many scientific atheists hold to this sort of belief very often.

There is, of course, that very crucial “if” in that sentence that many philosophers will jump on. Does the scientific method lead to truth, exactly? Maybe not. No truly introspective scientist says that they know the entire truth; all we have are models that work well enough. Where does the photon “go” when it’s absorbed by an electron? Well, we don’t know; we don’t even really know what “absorbed” means, but as long as we do good bookkeeping on the energies and momenta of all the particles, it seems to work out pretty accurately, at least as far as we can tell.

In addition, can I know that my senses are the same as others’? What makes a schizophrenic’s reasonings about the truth of the world less “true” than mine? Does the fact that I have to wear glasses make a difference on my conclusions about how something looks? So truth is, perhaps, more a social construction, especially truth based on scientific observation. “Truth” needs to be verifiable to someone else, and based on some standard that others can replicate, not based on my unique, idiosyncratic senses.

But I feel something fundamentally wrong with simply saying that the scientific doesn’t lead to some sort of generation of knowledge. After all, the keyboard under my fingers feels real enough. I can hit it with other things, to ascertain its existence. Is the possibility that I’m some sort of “brain in a vat” really going to bar me from asserting the truth that my computer exists? Though Dr. Freeride might characterize my belief in the reality of the world I sense as a scientifically unjustifiable metaphysical commitment, can it really not be? Am I not justified in asserting that the world is real until I have reason to believe it’s not? (Being unplugged from the Matrix might do it.)

Is there, then, truth other than this sort of knowledge?