11.25.07
Faith in science, but…faith in Darwinism???
Davies and Taking Science on Faith, agree or not, Davies is an important bulwark against the abuses of design thinking current: take the question slowly but surely without theological obsessions.
Still, much of the discussion adopts current science’s overconfidence about the laws that it has so far discovered. The assumption that this run of luck continues all the way up the scale into all realms of nature is so far merely an assumption. It might be true, but in a form we don’t suspect. The rote extension via mechanization of scientific fundamentals has been challenged almost from the beginning, provoking the crisis of science visible in a figure such as Kant. It is curious that we can’t even be sure that we have defined the ‘organism’ in biology, and it seems that the reductionist regime can, so far, go no further than the threshold of life. That is by no means a rejection of science. Merely that something really revolutionary would be required, as with the transition from Newtonian to Quantum methodologies. So our faith in science needs to be moderated very quickly as we ascend the scale of nature.