Science and Natural Philosophy

When push comes to shove, I define myself as a “hard,” top-down spiritualist. By that I mean that reality comes from a single conscious agency. From this vantage reality appears to me as hierarchically arranged. If that word jars, I suggest a glance at this recent post. This viewpoint clashes with materialism but is yet entirely compatible with a scientific approach to reality. Science can and should be viewed as a discipline, one of the disciplines of thought. Its focus is the observation and explanation of observable reality based on the rules of reason. The western world has excelled in this discipline and has vastly enlarged our understanding of organic and inorganic nature. This is a marvel and a triumph—and all of humanity has benefited. The determination of how things work and how they are arranged is subject to objective determination and, in very large regions of reality, even to experimental verification. In this sense I’m also a “hard” scientist.

Science is said to have emerged from “natural philosophy”—and said to have displaced the latter. I rather think that speculative or contemplative thought about Nature remains alive and well to this day; science hasn’t displaced it at all. The more disciplined approach to observation, augmented by experimental and statistical methods of verification has, instead, greatly empowered philosophical thought about the observable and measurable world. The task of natural philosophy, indeed of all philosophy, is to work with why rather than with how or what questions. And those questions remain perennially new. They remain—and shall remain—open. We may gain much better and firmer answers to those questions—but not in our current state of existence.

Materialism, in effect, is one school of natural philosophy. It interprets and makes assertions about the meaning of scientific discoveries. Its conclusions, much like those of any philosophy, natural or metaphysical, must be assessed comprehensively in view of our total understanding of all facts and values available to us. And no philosophy produces a “final solution” to the questions that we pose. All of them have a tentative character. They’re all approximations.

I emphasize this distinction because there is a distinction. The very definition of science suggests that, with appropriate study, qualifications, effort, and (often) sufficient funds, anybody should be able to replicate the findings of science to his or her own satisfaction. Problems arise at the edges of genuine science—where science gradually slips away into the speculative mode. Examples of such regions are those where “hard” data are impossible to obtain. Not that these regions are off limits to investigation (the very deep past, the very tiny, the very large, the origin of life); but in these areas a certain kind of humility is necessary—not least the open admission that the investigator, if he or she offers conclusions that cannot be replicated by experiment, may be practicing natural philosophy rather than science. But, as I say, conclusions of that philosophy may also be examined. It’s simply that the rules to be applied to that kind of result are not scientific but—philosophical.