There's an excellent article by Amanda Shaw on the First Things blog about the true spirit of scientific inquiry. She contrasts "scientific positivism" with science itself. The scientific positivists, of course, are the popular intellectuals who pit (reliable, value-neutral) science against (irrational, untrustworthy) religion. Yet the true spirit of scientific inquiry does not shy away from what seems at first to be irrational or untrustworthy.
She uses the concept of imaginary numbers, which are the square roots of negative numbers, as an example. Imaginary numbers are wonderfully useful in many sorts of applied mathematics, yet there is an enduring weirdness about them. Shaw quotes the great Leonhard Euler: "they are neither nothing, not greater than nothing, nor less than nothing, which necessarily renders them imaginary or impossible."
I suppose that a real scientific positivist would say that science has its rational method for investigating things, whereas religious inquiry basis itself on muddle presuppositions derived from ancient texts. Yet when I read about the history of science, there is an undeniable exhilaration which can't be explained as simple satisfaction from the algorithmic application of the scientific method. The important point here is that reason, rightly used, chases joyfully after what is mysterious, knowing that the strangest facets of our reality can be only partially understood on this side of heaven.
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Will,
I so agree. All scientists of the past were inspired by what they found unknowable. Because they saw things in their world that were utterly mysterious, they used method and experiment to try to explain them. There is still so much in the natural world that we cannot explain at all scientifically, and so much more that we cannot prove. Like mysteries in Theology, scientists have to accept the unknowable by faith and continue to study what they can about the world through its lens.
Great blog, William!
Pennie
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