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.
Schopenhauer on how we've let science falsify our reality :
"At bottom, [natural science] does nothing more than demonstrate the lawful order . . . which the appearances must necessarily take at this time, in this place. . . . Thereby, however, we do not gain the least information about the inner nature of those appearances: this inner nature is called the natural force and lies outside the range of etiological explanation, which calls the immutable constancy with which the expression of such a force appears . . . a law of nature."
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 Russellalso 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."
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
“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
Even Nietzsche , with no theological axe to grind, says,
"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."
It is considerations like these that lead Nietzsche to conclude that a man who managed to shape his mind into the ideal of scientific objectivity would be incapable of love “as God, woman, and animal” understand it because he would be unable to express the strong preferences and partialities that these kinds of beings demand from those who claim to love them. A model of scientific objectivity who tried to love deeply would “do what he can and give what he can,” Nietzsche says, “but one should not be surprised if it is not much — if it is just here that he proves inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and worm eaten. His love is forced, his hatred artificial.”
In his search for universal laws of science he grows so accustomed to thinking in generalities that he loses his ability to acquire the most specific kind of knowledge there is: self-knowledge. “Whatever remains in him of a ‛person’ strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often disturbing,” says Nietzsche, “to such an extent has he become a passageway and reflection of strange forms and events.”
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
Michel Henry, the French philosopher who studies the material phenomenology of life, says no, life is precisely what science DOESN'T know.
Henry notes that, in order to study nature, Galileo, and later Descartes, decided to bracket out all subjective phenomena - colors, feelings - anything he supposed appeared only in the mind.
This method, however, turned into an ontology, where only “objective” things, like physical measurements, abstracted from our actually experience of them, became “real” things, or at least they were privileged, whereas everything appearing in the mind, and even consciousness itself, became an effect of these physical processes, and epiphenomenon.
Well, strip the cosmos of its lived phenomena of life, then use this method to study life, and one will find only death.
For Henry, life is a form of knowledge. What does life know? It knows joy and suffering.
This form of knowledge is non-spatial, non-representable, but it permeates all that is undertaken.
Perceiving colors, handling an instrument, caressing a body, are all experiences whose phenomenal manifestation is a modulation of the two fundamental tonalities of life: joy and suffering. That is why all life is tinted:
“the blue of the sky, the green of trees, the serene or threatening character of a landscape, the sweetness of scents, the beauty of shapes of old cities or the dread in the monstrous suburbs of our time.”
From a normative perspective, Henry claims that the knowledge of life is the primordial knowledge. The evolution of modern scientific knowledge has inverted the orders of knowledge, until it reached a point where it tries to derive the lived experience from an objective third person perspective, of which the hard problem of consciousness is the ultimate expression: how can a phenomenal subject even exist if we start from the natural physical world as conceived by the mind?
In his short essay, What Science Doesn’t Know, found HERE, Henry writes :
“By dismissing the sensible qualities of the world, Galilean science actually abolishes this absolute phenomenological life (the immediate experiencing of oneself present in every fear, in every pleasure, in every sensation, etc.) from its research. And here one
clearly sees that two paths open up before the human mind and that, choosing one or the other is one’s destiny: one must decide between life and death.
*Regarding appearances as illusion is the supreme illusion."
As Richard Tarnas, in his Passion of the Western Mind, notes :
"The great irony...is that it is just when the modern mind believes it has most fully purified itself from any anthropomorphic projections, when it actively construes the world as unconscious, mechanistic, and impersonal, it is just then that the world is most completely a selective construct of the human mind...
From this perspective, it is the modern mind's own impersonal soullessness that has been projected from within onto the world--or, to be more precise, that has been projectively elicited from the world."
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 ?
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