Dave Pruett: Science's Sacred Cows

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 1)

Dave Pruett, former NASA researcher, emeritus mathematics professor at James Madison University, and author

Skirmishes between science and religion persist. Today’s religious fundamentalists periodically attempt to force the teaching of creationism (or one of its many guises) in public schools, in violation both of science’s domain and the constitutional separation of church and state. For a short summary of the most recent major skirmish, the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, see pages 89-90 of Jason Rosenhouse’s Among the Creationists (Oxford, 2012).

Science’s infractions are subtler but equally damaging to the human spirit. During an enlightening lecture in 2000 by religion scholar Huston Smith, I began to appreciate how science infringes on religion’s domain. Smith thoughtfully distinguished science from scientism. The former is an investigative protocol; the latter is a religion, complete with dogma. Science is a formalized procedure for making sense of the world by studying its material properties, perceived through the awareness of the senses, albeit senses heightened by modern marvels such as the electron microscope, the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Scientism (or scientific materialism), on the other hand, adds to science a statement of faith: The universe is only material. Moreover, given the spectacular successes of science over the past three centuries, it is more than fair to acknowledge that science represents a powerful way to learn about the world. But scientism ups the ante: Science is the best (or only) way to make sense of the world. In short, scientism is to science what fundamentalism is to religion: cocksure and inflexible.

Science remains most true to itself and of greatest value to humanity when it assiduously avoids unnecessary assumptions. Over the long arc of history, science has initially embraced — then discarded — most of the following tacit assumptions: dualism, determinism, reductionism, absolute time, absolute space, the principle of locality, materialism and, most recently, realism. In subsequent posts, we’ll examine each of these in some detail. For now, let’s summarize..."

Pruett then goes on to detail his position on the history of science holding particular "sacred cows" across several articles:

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 2): Absolute Space and Time

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 3): Determinism

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 4): Dualism

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 5): Locality

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 6): Realism

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 7): Reductionism

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 8): Materialism

Science’s Sacred Cows (Part 6): Realism

The results of Gröblacher’s team, published in Nature (April 19, 2007), once again validated quantum mechanical predictions. That was to be expected.  The unexpected occurred in identifying which assumption of local realism failed.  Locality or realism?  Surprisingly, both.  The authors concluded:

“Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are [also] abandoned.”

An independent reality, it now appears, has become the latest casualty of QM. The universe is nonlocal, nondeterministic, and apparently “unreal” as well. Haldane was right: the universe, at least at the quantum level, is “queerer” than we can imagine.

12 years later no one has repudiated the findings, yet how many accept them?