Chapter 5.               (continued) 

If all natural law statements are seen as being, at best, only temporarily true, then Science can be seen as a kind of fashion show whose ideas have a bit more shelf life than the fads in the usual parade of TV shows, songs, clothes, makeup, and hairdos. In short, Science’s law statements are just narratives, not true so much as useful, but useful only in the lands in which they gain some currency and only for limited time periods at best. Thus, those skeptical of Science can justify writing off any parts of it that don’t suit their tastes.

 

The logical flaws that can be found in empiricist reasoning aren’t small ones. One major problem is that we can’t know for certain that any of the laws we think we see in nature are true because even the terms that we use when we make a scientific law statement are vulnerable to attack by the skeptics.

 

When we state a natural law, the terms we use to name the objects and events we want to focus on exist, the skeptics argue, only in our minds. Even what makes a thing a “tree”, for example, is dubious. In the real world, there are no trees. We just use the word “tree” as a convenient label for some of the things we encounter in our world and for our memories of them.

 

A simple statement that seems to us to make sense, like the one that says hot objects will cause us pain if we touch them, can’t be trusted in any ultimate sense. To assume this “law” is true is to assume that our definitions for the terms hot and pain will still make sense in the future. But we can’t know that. We haven’t seen the future. Maybe, one day, people won’t feel pain.

 

Thus, all the terms in natural law statements, even ones like force, atom, acid, gene, proton, cell, organism, etc. are labels created in our minds because they help us to sort and categorize sensory experiences and memories of those experiences, and then talk to one another about what seems to be going on around us. But reality does not contain things that somehow fit terms like “gene” or “galaxy”. Giant ferns of a bygone geological age were not trees. But they would have looked like trees to most people from our time who use the word “tree”. How is a willow bush a bush, but not a tree? If you look through a powerful microscope at a gene, it won’t be wearing a tag that reads “gene.” 

 

In other languages, there are other terms, some of which overlap in the minds of the speakers of those languages with things that English has no word for or a different word that covers other sense data not even included in the lists that the other language’s term signifies. In Somali, a gene is called “hiddo”. And the confusions get trickier. German contains two verbs for the English word “know”.  Spanish contains two words for the English verb “be”.

 

We divide up and label our memories of what we see in reality in whatever ways have worked reliably for us and our ancestors in the past. And even how we see simple things is determined by what we've been taught by our elders. In English, we have seven words for the colors of the rainbow; in some other languages, there are as few as four words for all the spectrum’s colors.  

 

Thus, we should keep in mind that from the start, our natural law statements gamble on the future validity of our invented terms for things. The terms can seem solid, but they are still gambles. Some terms humans once confidently used turned out, in light of new evidence, to be inadequate.                               

 

                                              

      

 

             Isaac Newton (artist: Godfrey Kneller) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Newton’s laws of motion are now seen by physicists as being approximations of the relativistic laws described by Einstein. Newton’s terms body, space, and force once seemed self-evident. But Einstein showed that space is not what Newton assumed it to be.

 

A substance called phlogiston once seemed to explain all of Chemistry. Then Lavoisier did experiments which showed that phlogiston doesn’t exist.

 

On the other hand, people spoke of genes long before microscopes that could reveal them to the human eye were invented, and people still speak of atoms, even though nobody has ever seen one. In this book, we shall adopt the view that some terms last because they enable us to build mental models and do experiments that get results we can predict. For now. But we must also admit that the list of scientific theories that “fell from fashion” is long.

                            

                                      Chemists Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier 

                                                   (credit: Wikimedia Commons)