is my Trade Tripper column in this weekend's issue of BusinessWorld:
Gone are the days when the world’s debates
hinged on ideologies, be it communism, socialism, feminism, Marxism, or
any other -ism. Pretty much everybody now agrees that a democratic,
market-oriented form of governance works best for societies (and
particularly the poor). This all the more because socialism and
communism, going by empirical evidence, are clearly spectacular
failures.
Indeed, any possible source of struggle for the 21st century
would likely be from the differences in religions (or the lack thereof).
The secular progressives’ response to this is to advance the idea of
science as the better alternative to faith-based philosophies.
Unfortunately, they presuppose certain things about the nature of
science that are not actually correct.
One thing that people may not realize is that the scientist’s ability to
function hinges substantially on what ordinarily would be considered as
mere beliefs. Secularists would like us to think that science works
exclusively on cold data. The fact of the matter, however, is that
oftentimes it operates a lot on blind faith. Think about this: how many
scientists actually talked to the foreign or past researchers they
referred to, how many of them actually bothered or had the time to
verify the information contained in the studies, journals, or research
they relied on for their own work, or vetted the universities or
international organizations they cited (not to mention their source of
funding)?
Considerably, all scientific work proceeds from three huge assumptions:
that the scientific process was done properly, that the modes of
perception upon which the observations were based were optimum, and that
the interpretation of what was observed was done objectively.
This fact was actually highlighted by a series of stories The Economist
ran last 19 October 2013 (“How science goes wrong”): “A simple idea
underpins science: ‘trust, but verify’. Results should always be subject
to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has
generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century,
modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and
overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed complacency. Modern
scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying -- to
the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.”
Furthermore, the “hallowed process of peer review is not all it is
cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research
past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers
failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even
after being told they were being tested.”
Finally, in “Trouble at the lab” (The Economist, 19 October
2013): “The idea that the same experiments always get the same results,
no matter who performs them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s
claim to objective truth. If a systematic campaign of replication does
not lead to the same results, then either the original research is
flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of
the original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is
awry.” All the foregoing “fits with another line of evidence suggesting
that a lot of scientific research is poorly thought through, or
executed, or both.”
As a political aside, such is probably why even US President Barack
Obama (who seems to want to give an image of being a man of facts rather
than of faith, unlike his predecessor) himself also considers science a
“non-essential” (see “Why isn’t science deemed essential?”, Hank
Campbell, USA Today, 15 October 2013).
Despite all that, however, science is indeed important as it provides us
an avenue to arrive at absolute truths. As pointed out by philosopher
Fr. Cecilio Magsino in his blog Viatores (“The limits of
science,” 18 October 2013): “Science does provide us with absolutes, if
by absolutes we understand definitive statements. Take the formulas
everyone knows: F=ma, E=mc2. Science does give final answers. Doctors
know that finally we have cures for certain illnesses. I understand,
though, what he is trying to say: that science always moves forward so
as to present new theories to better understand the world and nature.
That is true. But what we cannot say is that science does not arrive at
truths with great certainty.” But there is a caveat: in the end,
however, the thing about “science is that its truths are always valid
within a context, that in which the conclusions were arrived at.”
So, we’re clearly not belittling science (or scientists). Quite the
contrary. But as Fr. Magsino points out: “Science is the great endeavor
of the human race and, in a way, it has united the world. But like
anything that is the product of human work it needs philosophy or wisdom
to make sense out of it.”
Or as Pope John Paul II more poetically described it in his magnificent Fides et Ratio: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
