Dogmatism in Science

[AgnosticBoy]

Here are excerpts from an interesting article that shows the need for agnosticism in science:

Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything

Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”

But the concept of scientific omniscience always suffered from fatal flaws. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific.

Over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them humble--and that is a good thing.

As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious, and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states. It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat, nematode or smart phone. As I argue in my new book Mind-Body Problems, science appears farther than ever from understanding the mind.

Over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them humble--and that is a good thing.

Source: The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience by John Horgan

And to all of this I say in the spirit of agnosticism:
"When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble."
- Thomas Huxley

These are obvious examples of dogmatism in science.

What are your thoughts on dogmatism in science? Is materialism a dogma in science?

*Keep in mind, that I am in no way against science. What I am against is dogmatism, which seems to be inherent part of religion, but it also tends to creep into science.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Another example of overconfidence by scientists:

In 1897, the physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin looked at all the tremendous advancements in electricity, astronomy and biology that marked his age and concluded: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

But that same year, physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered the electron — and physicists quickly realized their understanding of physics was far from complete. Electrons, mysteriously, behaved like both particles and waves. The electron's discovery kicked off a new age of scientific research — but it also deeply impacted the individuals who devoted their lives to finding some kind of logic to the electron's baffling wave-particle behavior.

Source: NBC