Alternatives to Science

From Doug Shaver

Can Reliable Knowledge Be Produced Outside Science?

An apologist for any unscientific belief is likely to declare sooner or later that Science does not have all the answers. Since nobody in the history of modern science has ever said it does, we could dismiss this objection for the irrelevancy that it is and move on to more pertinent issues. However, we may suppose that the apologist is actually objecting, not to an imagined claim by scientists that they have all the answers, but to an inferred claim by the skeptic that no other answers are worth considering. It does seem reasonable for a critical thinker to inquire whether such a claim, were it explicitly made, could be justified. Should we restrict our quest for answers to those susceptible to scientific validation, or might we learn something useful from other epistemological venues? Are we being unduly narrow-minded to suppose that whatever is unscientific is not credible? Let us examine the alternatives with our minds as open as we can keep them in good faith. We might first ask the apologist: If science does not have all the answers, but it is acknowledged to have some of them, then who has the rest of them? The response of course will depend on the apologist and what belief or belief system he or she is defending. It might be suggested that alternative answers are to be found in the Bible or another sacred book; or in the writings of ancient Eastern mystics; or in the insights of the worlds great poets, playwrights, or novelists; or in the wisdom of some philosopher, famous or obscure; or in a horoscope; or in the reflections of one or more theologians; or in something else; or in all the above or some subset thereof. To be sure, all those sources will provide answers. To be just as sure, though, they cannot all be true answers. We are inescapably obliged to discern, among the countless sources of nonscientific answers, which ones we should believe and which ones we should ignore. How are we to do that, assuming that our primary concern is :1:

to believe true answers and disbelieve falsehoods, and considering also that we dont have time to investigate them all, no matter how keen our desire to be open to all possibilities?

Should We Be More Skeptical or More Credulous?

There is no perfect epistemology or foolproof philosophy. No matter how we acquire or analyze our beliefs, some are going to be wrong. We are going to believe some falsehoods and we are going to disbelieve some truths, and the less we do of one, the more we will unavoidably do of the other. A strong aversion to believing falsehoods makes some people cultivate the kind of thinking characteristic of skeptics. Most of what they do believe is likely to be true, but many things they dont believe are true as well. Other people have a strong aversion to not believing true things, and their thinking tends to be credulous. They rarely disbelieve what is true, but they also believe many falsehoods. In this respect as in so many others, humans are signally diverse. Nobody is purely skeptical or purely credulous, and a person who is usually one or the other will likely make exceptions in certain areas. An examination of which way a person ought to lean, and which exceptions might be most justified, must await another essay. And so, we cannot perfectly sort truth from falsehood, and it is difficult even to do a fair job of it, but we may give ourselves credit for an honest desire to make the best effort we can. Though some people claim to believe whatever they want to believe without concerning themselves with truth or falsehood, I think most people have some preference for being right rather than wrong. With that thought, we return to the question of who has the answers that science is lacking. It has occasionally been remarked that the question Who is right? always misses the point, that the relevant question is What is right? The remark commonly is made in the context of putting principles ahead of personalities in any dispute, but it reflects a more general truth. Some statements may in some sense be infallibly true, but no man or woman is infallible even when making such a statement. In the context of plane geometry, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem cannot be false, but any mathematician can be wrong at any time in any context. :2:

There is therefore a sense in which it does not matter where we look for answers. If I have a question, in some way it does not matter whether I take it to a scientist, or an astrologer, or a theologian. The right answer is right and a wrong answer is wrong, no matter which of them gives it to me. Of course each will claim that within a certain field of expertise, he or she has the answers that are most likely to be true. This has a superficial plausibility until we notice how rare and trivial are the matters on which astrologers or theologians agree. If we have a question about God, we can get an answer from a theologian, all right and if we dont like that answer, we can get six other answers from six other theologians. But wait a minute. So what if we dont like an answer? Were supposedly being open-minded, and that means accepting that the truth could be something wed rather not hear . Well, then, do we go with the first answer we get, or do we keep looking until . . . until when? How do we sort the right answers from the wrong answers? We could ask the experts how they do it, but it turns out that their sorting methods were designed after the answers were already accepted, and the methods were designed to validate those answers.

If Faith Cannot be False, How Can it be True?

Faith is often commended as an alternative to science. Suppose it be asserted that prayer can promote a sick persons recovery. Suppose then that many sick people are prayed for and they do not recover. Will that have any bearing on the truth of the assertion, according to its advocates? No, it will not. Advocates of faith will affirm the efficacy of prayer no matter what happens subsequent to any prayer or any number of prayers, under any circumstances, at any time, over any period of time. In effect, what this means is that there is actually no difference between truth and falsehood in matters of faith. The faith advocate says: Prayer changes things. Very well, but what if it did not? No believer can answer that question. In the epistemology of faith, it is not even relevant. :3:

So it is in general with answers offered outside of science. They tend to be incorrigible: Their advocates will acknowledge no way they could be proved wrong. They might not claim infallibility. They might say, Of course we could be wrong. But ask them how they would know they were wrong what evidence, if anyone produced it, would falsify their answers and they usually retreat into evasion or obfuscation. If they do not if they say, We would know we were wrong if we observed ____ under conditions of ____ then were at least moving toward a scientific answer. There is more to the scientific method than falsification, but a falsifiable answer is at least somewhat scientific. Perhaps more to the point of this essay, I have observed that when people start carrying on about science not having all the answers, they invariably are trying to defend something unfalsifiable. What I hope to have demonstrated is the futility of entertaining such ideas. Outside the confines of scientific thinking, the difference between true and false seems to evaporate. In its place we might sort answers by how they make us feel, or by whether we trust the people feeding them to us. Depending on the question, those considerations are not necessarily to be disregarded, but we should never forget that historys most pernicious falsehoods made a lot of people feel good, and those people heard the falsehoods from people they trusted. Answers can come from anywhere. Scientists themselves have gotten answers from dreams, scriptures, poetry, and just lucky guesses. The source of an idea is practically irrelevant to critical thought. Whatever matters is how the idea gets tested. Science is less about producing answers than about evaluating them. In no other system does the evaluation process insistently ask: If this answer were wrong, how would anyone know? If we dont know how something could be wrong, then it just does not mean anything for it to be true. That is why, although science does not have all the answers, it has the only useful answers.

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