Science tells us very little, almost nothing, about reality

Why do existent things behave in predictable patterns?

Most people think that there are “laws of nature” which cause these patterns. In reality, this is just the unfortunate reification of an old metaphor. Whereas laws in the real world are prescriptive, in science they simply describe regularities. The “laws” of nature are not causal agents, but abstractions. Naturalism seeks to explain the world in terms of these regularities, but the regularities themselves are completely inexplicable.Science describes regularities in nature, and then imbues these mathematical formulas with casual agency, as if these equations were determining the behavior of things, like a god, causing them to act in a certain way, confusing a description for an explanation.


"That world, the world defined by materialist science, is as clear a projection as the world of angels"

 - Stephan Clark.

Science is descriptive, not explanatory. It doesn't explain why all atoms act the same way, to say "it just does" is magical thinking. Mathematical equations describe regularities, they don't, like a god, actually cause objects to act a certain way. Mathematical equations are merely descriptive not determinative.

To answer "why does the Earth revolve around the sun?" with "because it's obeying the law of gravity" is almost (or completely) a tautology. 

Or an illusion, read HERE

All too often, the proponents of “scientism” think that because they can write equations for “laws of nature” they therefore somehow possess explanations of physical things. But usually they don’t; usually they are simply confusing mathematical descriptions with essential explanations.

Bertrand Russell indicates how: 

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure... All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to – as to this, physics is silent. (1985, p. 13) 

Now if, as Russell emphasized, physics gives us the abstract structure of the material world but does not tell us the intrinsic nature of that which has that structure, then not only does physics not tell us everything about physical reality, but it tells us that there must be something more to physical reality than what it has to say. For there is no such thing as a structure all by itself; there must be something that has the structure. By the very fact that physics tells us that an abstract structure of such-and-such a mathematically describable character exists, then, physics implies that there is more to reality than that structure itself, and thus more to reality than what physics can reveal. 

“Capturing the observable patterns and regularities of the elements of reality, relative to each other, is an empirical and scientific question. But pondering about the fundamental nature of these elements is not; it is a philosophical question.

They have failed to see that the ability to predict how things behave with respect to one another says little about what things fundamentally are.”

-Bernardo Kastrop

Furthermore (and as other writers with no theological ax to grind have emphasized) the very notion of a scientific “law of nature” has a theological origin, and in Nietzsche’s view retains a merely metaphorical significance when the theology is jettisoned.  There cannot be a true “law” or “regularity” where there is neither a lawgiver nor a subject which literally submits to the law:

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses.  (The Gay Science, p. 168)

“Nature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though -- why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad “philology.”  It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning… (Beyond Good and Evil 22)

And again, in The Will to Power:

“Regularity” in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact.  In the same way “conformity with a law.”  We discover a formula by which to express an ever-recurring kind of result: we have therewith discovered no “law,” even less a force that is the cause of the recurrence of a succession of results.  That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a creature always acted thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the “law.”  (632)

Form, species, law, idea, purpose -- in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction, as if events were in some way obedient to something… (521)

“Laws of nature” need not tell us anything about the natures or essences of physical things - they don’t tell us WHAT a thing is, it’s essence or nature.
 Nietzsche gives atoms as an example.  This can lead us to think we’ve actually captured something of the inner nature of the physical world as it is in itself, but in Nietzsche’s view this is an illusion.  He writes, in The Will to Power:

To comprehend the world, we have to be able to calculate it; to be able to calculate it, we have to have constant causes; because we find no such constant causes in actuality, we invent them for ourselves -- the atoms. This is the origin of atomism.

The calculability of the world, the expressibility of all events in formulas -- is this really "comprehension"? How much of a piece of music has been understood when that in it which is calculable and can be reduced to formulas has been reckoned up? (624)

It is an illusion that something is known when we possess a mathematical formula for an event: it is only designated, described; nothing more! (628)

Mechanistic theory can… only describe processes, not explain them. (660)

Science presupposes the regularity of nature without explaining it, confusing the metaphor of “laws” of nature as literal, without a law giver, the Maverick Philosopher had a piece on Dawkin’s misunderstanding of just this critique HERE 

When one understands this, one realizes how ridiculous it is to say that Newton or any physicist "explains the world without God" when they develop a theory. It's not an "explanation" in the sense that God is an explanation. These theories quantify regular patterns. If one wants to use the word "explain" in its most precise sense, then physical theories don't so much explain the world, but describe it with precise accuracy.

What we mean by “cause” here in its widest metaphysical sense, namely, IS that which fulfills a need for intelligibility, which answers the question, “What is effectively responsible for this datum x, which has turned out to be non-self-explanatory?”

Laws tell us only that such-and-such a regularity exists, and not why it exists. That is to say, on this view a law of nature (or at least the ultimate laws of nature) don’t explain a regularity, but merely re-describe it in a different jargon. Needless to say, then, this sort of view hardly supports the claim that science can provide an ultimate explanation of the world. 

"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work — that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple."

 — John von Neumann (“Method in the Physical Sciences,” in The Unity of Knowledge, 1955)

Stephen Hawking himself once said,

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

Indeed, who breathes the fire ?

Science abstracts physical reality away, we now believe in an imaginary world, utterly superstitious & divorced from what’s real, as Morris Kline writes HERE :

“Contrary to popular belief, no one has ever explained the physical reality of the force of gravitation. It is a fiction suggested by the human ability to exert force.

The greatest science fiction stories are in the science of physics.

However, mathematical deductions from the quantitative law proved so effective that this procedure has been accepted as an integral part of physical science.

*What science has done, then, is to sacrifice physical intelligibility for the sake of mathematical description and mathematical prediction.

It bequeathed a mathematical, quantitative world that

What science has done, then, is to sacrifice physical intelligibilty for the sake of mathematical description and mathematical prediction. . .. The insurgent seventeenth century . . . bequeathed a mathematical, quantitative world that subsumed under its mathematical laws the concreteness of the physical world. . . . Our mental constructions have outrun our intuitive and sense perceptions.'

Kline, writing in the twentieth century, was looking back from a post—quantum theory world and saw the full import of Newton's basic assumption: "For I here design only to give a mathematical notion of these forces, without considering their physical causes and seats."

As of 1687, scientific knowledge was constituted in mathematics; "hypotheses" such as causality were no longer part of science. The full import was nor subsumed under its mathematical laws the concreteness of the physical world.

In Newton's time and for two hundred years afterwards, physicists spoke of the action of gravity as "action at a distance," a meaningless phrase that was accepted as a substitute for explaining the physical mechanism, *much as we speak of spirits or ghosts to explain unseen phenomena."
Scientific formulas ought to be studied for the sake of revealing something true about reality, but instead we have forgotten the reality, as Heidegger says, forgotten ‘being’, and study only the formal structures !

Logic, conceived on the model of mathematics rather than Logos, has stripped reality of reason; now stands a skeletal world of geometry, where once a living Cosmos throbbed with breathe.

So, if not by science than how are we to understand the world ?

John Médaille put it like this,

“The rose can be “explained” by reduction to its causes, but it cannot be understood in this way. The scientist or the rationalist philosopher can only explain the rose by ignoring its actual being.….the purchase of a rose does not have causes, but grounds.

When we look at the cosmos as a whole, we see order and beauty, and can only understand them through an aesthetic view. While the parts are governed by a strictly deterministic rationality and can be understood through knowledge of the causes, the whole is governed by order and beauty, and one that cannot be rationalized. The cosmos is cosmetic and like all things cosmetic, it escapes the purely rational in favor of pure contemplation. What it does not invite is some reduction of cosmic order to the four causes, the endpoint of all rational analysis. That is, the cosmos escapes rationalism.”


Please, read the whole thing HERE