Science without end.
There’s a simple paradox, well-known in the philosophy of science, which I’ve always thought of as the Great Counter-induction. I think it’s broached in Hume, if only because so many of the best paradoxes are. It goes like this:
Science is built on evidence, and the greater the evidence the more likely the theory is to be true: once you’ve observed a dozen, or a thousand, or a million objects falling to earth at a specific rate, or humans carrying traits from both parents, or what have you, you’re entitled to believe that objects in general fall at that rate, and that children inherit features from both parents. In time, these laws get refined to account for wind resistance or recessive genes, but there, too, measured phenomena are extrapolated to predict the behavior of unmeasured ones. I’m eliding a whole bunch of important caveats here, but never mind. The important point is simply that we have reason to believe what we believe.
The problem is that we have a sort of meta-argument here which contradicts that one: all previous scientific theories have turned out to be false, therefore it’s reasonable to assume, according to the same principle described above, that our current scientific theories will be false as well. In short, we have reason to believe that what we believe is not true.
How to negotiate this paradox is a long and complicated question, and I mention it just to set up a thought. The universe is, we believe, about 16,000,000,000 years old. Mankind has been around for maybe the last 200,000 years, civilization for about 6000, and the scientific method, as we understand it, for about 500. It would be a hell of a coincidence if we happened, in that infinitesimal stretch of time, to have figured out how the universe works, or to be even close to doing so. Thinking that we do would be, among other things, an incredible coincidence: Charles Sanders Peirce once proposed that the purpose of the universe is to grow something that knows it, which is a pleasant idea, but it would be excessively self-congratulatory to think we, on this tiny planet, in this fleeting century, have a chance of being that thing. We look on ancient scientific theories with amusement and contempt. Mightn’t future humans, or whatever they may be, look on ours the same way?
Darwinian theory is, I think, the most beautiful empirical idea we have ever come up with. It’s simplicity, explanatory power, and obviousness after the fact has no equal. But it’s only 150 years old. Multiply that by a hundred: what if, in 15,000 years, it looks to be, not just mistaken, but deeply, conceptually wrong?
Lately, I’ve found myself wondering what future science will be like. Of course, if I knew – if I had any idea – I’d be a thinker for the ages, but it’s bracing to try. Even a million years is nothing in the life of the universe: what might science, or knowledge, be then?
It’s possible that these things will simply be settled, long before then, and science will cease to be an active endeavor. Certain branches of it – chemistry, for example – seem to be pretty much done. Sure, there are lots of details to work out, but I can readily imagine that the profound conceptual underpinnings of chemistry are simply fixed and known, and that from here on in it’s simply a matter of filling in the blanks. We’re never going to give up on the idea that there are atoms, and molecules, and various forces and bonds, and so on. Surely not all theories get superseded. Do they?
They have so far, and if it’s hard for us to imagine that we’re so far from the truth, it was hard for ancient Greeks to imagine there weren’t multiple gods, too. It’s in the nature of these things to be convincing. It’s in our interest to be both skeptical and humble, and besides, this is what imagination is for. I myself like to imagine for example, the possibility that there are substances in the universe that are not physical or material, that aren’t measurable, that don’t exhibit law-like behavior. This is heresy to any working scientist, I know, and comes awfully close to dualism, and even to deism. But so what?
Of course, there’s a risk here: science is, almost by definition, that which is most reasonable to believe, and I don’t want to leave the door open to, say, anti-vaxxing, or crude religiosity. In the absence of any good reason not to, it’s always best to believe whatever the best available science tells us to believe. But I do think we should hold those beliefs lightly. There’s an inconceivable amount of time left to change our minds.