Are scientific explanations for everything always rational?
Asked by
MilkyWay (
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April 25th, 2011
The Big Bang theory, existence of the soul, God, love etc.
Are all these and more explanations always rational? Or do you think that there are some scientific explanations of things out there that do not make sense?
Or do you think science doesn’t really explain things at all?
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37 Answers
I haven’t heard actual scientific explanations for the existence of the soul, or God (although there is some pretty good, rational evidence for why people might believe in souls or God). If you can share some of them, that might help us answer the question.
Scientific explanations are generally based on evidence, found through repeated testing that has stood the test of time. If it “doesn’t make any sense”, it probably would not be a scientific explanation. (You didn’t say who it is that thinks they don’t make sense. My guess is, it might be someone with insufficient training, education, or experience.)
Science explains a great many things, to those patient enough to puzzle out the answers. Some people also say religion does the same thing for them, but in a “different” (read: not rational) way. From the sound of your question, you may be trying to blend the two.
Compared to the alternative explanations (religious, circumstantial, etc), yes.
The beauty of science is that the facts that you use to explain things can be proven or supported. If a fact is untrue, then we can find ways to eventually disprove it. It’s hard to be biased with science because you can have people call you out on misleading or incorrect facts and statistics.
And that’s another thing – nothing is assumed.
Science frequently makes mistakes, but the process is designed so that mistakes are discovered and corrected over time. As a result Science is in a state of perpetual improvement, with the goal being a solid rational basis for the testable/observable world. A necessary corollary to that point, is that Science doesn’t deal with the supernatural, such as God, religion or other phenomena that cannot be observed or tested.
When taken in context of their times, yes. But that doesn’t mean they will always be. After all, the universe doesn’t revolve around the earth anymore.
There are some explanations for things at a quantum or particle physics level that seem to make no sense to those of us living in a macro world where we measure time in “seconds” rather than nano-seconds. For example, the idea that light can be both particle and wave, or that “observation” of quantum events can change their outcomes. But the theories make “sense”, based on the things we know and the things we suspect but can’t yet prove.
“God” is something that science can’t even approach yet. If It exists, probably all we will ever do is get nearer and nearer to It, without ever being able to look It in the eyes or “shake Its hand”.
Alot of times scientific theory is presented as scientific fact.
By it’s very nature,science is supposed to rule out the irrational.
Unfortunately it more like caveat emptor. ;)
In my opinion, science can explain a lot, and help us learn a lot, but I don’t know if science can provide a rational or logical explanation for souls or Gods, I think it’s something out of our comprehension.
The unfortunate problem with questioning the rationality of scientific theory is that you are normally incredibly old or dead before it has been either proven or accepted beyond a shadow of a doubt.
If it’s not rational it’s not science.
Calling something irrational “science” does not change that.
@Joker94
“t I don’t know if science can provide a rational or logical explanation for souls or Gods,”
That’s because such concepts aren’t rational. I mean this not in the sense that they are what we normally define as irrational or delusional, but because any valid, rational scientific theory must be falsifiable, and theories about gods and the like are not falsifiable.
@crisw . . . The path the water in a river takes as it passes around a rock is falsifiable and yet the water’s path cannot be 100% determined by scientific process.
Does that make the river or the rock irrational?
@boffin, I think the key to why your soul-science thing isn’t totally scientific is as follows (quoted from another page on the site you linked for me):
What Is Noetic Science?
no•et•ic:From the Greek noēsis/ noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding. As defined by the philosopher William James in 1902, noetic refers to “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority…”
no•et•ic sci•ences: A multidisciplinary field that brings objective scientific tools and techniques together with subjective inner knowing to study the full range of human experience.
That’s the difference between what I think of as “pseudoscience” and regular science: that part about “subjective inner knowing”. Scientific hypotheses can come from anywhere – a dream, a gut feeling, symbols your dog pee’d in the snow, whatever. But then they must be tested, and they must hold up to testing. If it’s just accepting a gut feeling, it’s not science (imho).
The unfortunate problem with questioning the rationality of scientific theory is that you are normally incredibly old or dead before it has been either proven or accepted beyond a shadow of a doubt.
the water’s path cannot be 100% determined by scientific process
That is a gross misunderstanding of what science is.
Science cannot predict the result of one coin flip. It can give you a very close estimate of the results of one thousand coin flips.
@lucillelucillelucille I think you may be confused about the scientific meaning of the word “theory.” Theory when used in a scientific context has a very specific meaning that’s very different that it’s colloquial use of “hunch” or “unproven guess.” Scientific theories don’t graduate into laws once they become proven (which is a very common misconception). This article clarifies the confusion in the context of evolution, but the same principles apply to all scientific theories, scientific laws etc.
Your statement “Alot of times scientific theory is presented as scientific fact” isn’t really as problematic as the rest of your post implies, because all scientific theories are facts.
@jaytkay . . . I learned that the water’s path cannot be 100% determined by scientific process by doing a great deal of reading regarding chaos theory.
If chaos theory, and what it hopes to one day explain, is a gross misunderstanding of what science is then I guess I’ll go back to calling heads or tails.
@Blondesjon
“The path the water in a river takes as it passes around a rock is falsifiable and yet the water’s path cannot be 100% determined by scientific process.”
These two things don’t have a lot to do with each other; just because we don’t currently have a theory doesn’t mean we cannot or will not. Complexity doesn’t rule out scientific explanations.
@crisw . . . Never said it didn’t. Just basing my post on your answer to @Joker94
@gorillapaws Your comment…“because all scientific theories are facts” is really not true. Not all theories are facts, they are ideas that are merely upgraded hypotheses supported by factual evidence. A theory allows us to see the big picture so as to make sense of all of the evidence that surrounds it. Theories allow us to see the significance of what was before just random information. The Big Bang is a theory and has been for a long time now and certainly not a fact…yet.
@Cruiser to quote the article I linked above: “In science, theory is the ultimate goal, the explanation. It’s as close to proven as anything in science can be.”
A scientific theory is certainly more than “merely upgraded hypotheses supported by factual evidence”. They have had to withstand rigorous attempts at falsification. One can debate the epistemic criteria for establishing that something is a fact, but the big bang theory is as factual as it’s going to get (assuming direct human observation isn’t a requirement for establishing facts).
It’s possible that the details of the theory will be modified and improved over time with more experimentation and observation, but it’s a fact that the universe is expanding outward, which implies that it was all smashed together at one point, and that energy was necessary to get it moving outward.
There is a great big difference between an idea that is logically or rationally sound and one that is scientifically sound.
Science requires experimental verification. It doesn’t matter how much sense something makes if you can’t construct a falsifiable hypothesis about it and test that hypothesis.
Because of that requirement, there are many things which science will probably never be able to address. Existence of poorly-defined entities like gods, souls, or ghosts is a likely example.
@Blondesjon Its true that chaos theory tells us that we can’t predict the flow of water 100%, but thats not because science is failing us. The reason is that we don’t have
1) Ways of measuring the initial position and velocity of each water molecule to 100% accuracy.
2) A way of storing an infinite number of decimal places.
Because of these two problems, what happens is that we start out with an “estimate” of where the water is and what its doing. Eventually, the error between that estimate and actual starting conditions leads to huge errors in our predictions. There are ways of dealing with this problem to stave off the errors in predictions but they can’t eliminate them completely.
The science is 100% correct, but its our ability to apply it that is limited.
Its similar to this: the equation for the area of a circle is pi * r ^ 2.
If you take pi = 3.14 you get something close to the area of the circle, but not quite exactly right.
If you take pi = 3.142 you get closer.
If you take pi = 3.1416 you get even closer.
Etc…
But you can’t get the EXACT answer since pi is irrational. That doesn’t mean that the equation for the area of a circle is wrong, it just means we aren’t able calculate it exactly.
Other than that, there are two separate questions embedded in the question here.
Question 1: Are scientific explanations always rational? Yes, if the science is done correctly (or, as some people would say, its is “real science”) they are always, in a sense, rational. They represent the best understanding we have of the world given the facts we have uncovered (e.g. data about planets, electrons, etc…). However, one could argue that they are not maximally rational. Why? Because we have a lot of data about certain things. Its possible that with the data we have, we could come up with a better theory (as opposed to needing more/better data). So science is as close to rational as we can get given the complexity of what we are studying and the limitations of the human brain.
Question 2: Can science give us a rational explanation for everything? We can’t really answer that for sure. Can science give a full explanation for love? Who knows. Its certainly made some headway into it, but there may be a point where the scientific method just can’t get any further. Maybe data collection is impossible past a certain point or maybe at some point falsifiable hypothesis are impossible to create.
@gorillapaws Really great reply and thank you for that. But the Big Bang is still a theory again based and built upon facts and until someone can prove what really happened in that first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang it is all just really good theories based on lots on really good physics facts. CERN may provide that elusive clue and hopefully in my lifetime.
@roundsquare . . . I don’t believe I ever said that science had failed in any way nor that it is wrong.
Perhaps, you could read my posts again?
A lot of science work because people choose to believe the theory. They believe what they believe because they believe the measurement, experiment, or what they see or don’t. People of science one time thought the world was flat and that stood until someone was able to show that was wrong. It was thought the Sun circled the world like the Moon until that was proved wrong. They thought the large Green bands on Mars where forest of 600ft trees, again they were wrong. The Big Bang? It is a guess based on readings taken from certain elements believed to have decayed at a certain rate or the shift in starts they believe is old. Science uses the best logic to prove its point but ignore the logic that because they have not actually been there and stuck a thermometer in it or stretched a measuring tape around it they could be wrong or off.
It would be as if one was way high up on a mountain side looking at a beach off in the distance. Down below between the cliff side and the beach are two bluffs allowing the beach to be seen between them. Someone is trying to determine the depth of the sand. They can shine lights at it, hit it with a laser, blast sound at it etc, but there is a grass fire way off and causing haze. If they were too far away for it to be smelt the only way you know there is haze that is not suppose to be there is to be there unless they can see it with out the haze. Things in space happen very slowly scientist of today will not know there is an obstruction clouding the measurement or test etc if they don’t know it is there. I have not met any that would phantom to possibility that their measurements could be wrong. If this planet is said to have X % of sulfur it does, keeping in mind they never been there to see for sure up close. On the surface fool’s gold look like real gold too.
The rational part would be if you can’t sift it through your fingers, put it under a microscope or see it with your eyes there could be the possiblity you are not seeing all you think you are.
By definition, yes, but the common assumption that scientists behave in fundamentally rational ways by their job description seems to wrong according to many neuroscientists. Our brains are capable of both rational and irrational thought.
This is why peer reviews are so important. One scientist might offer irrational scientific explanations, but the collective brain is able to correct this.
Some scientific explanations also fall into the category of speculation, so they are neither hypothesis nor theory.
@Cruiser I would argue that your standard of proof is too high. Even if it were possible to “prove what really happened in that first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang”, it would still remain a theory (one with even more evidence).
This is delving a bit into epistemology (although the nature of the original question lends itself to this type of discussion imo), but there is very little that we can claim to know with 100% certainty (maybe Christopher Columbus was really a secret twin pretending to be his brother, while the real Columbus was locked away in a closet in Portugal). As a result, the things we take to be 100% absolute facts always have some degree of uncertainty about them (the exception being a priori logical/mathematical proofs and axioms). I would argue that major scientific theories have met the same burden of proof that other universally accepted historical facts have.
@gorillapaws I think we are on the same page overall here and completely agree with your sentiments over “proven” theories….just when you originally said “all theories are facts” I said to myself “hell no they aren’t” as history is littered with theories once held in high regard as absolute “facts” later to be proven as false.
Here are some of the more famous ones
Scientific explanations are rational but that doesn’t mean they are true.
@flutherother They are, in fact, almost certainly wrong. They are just our best guess.
Are mutations rational? Nope. (just an e.g.)
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