When I took Mason’s class on the philosophy of the natural sciences, I was introduced to David Hume’s ideas for substantially the first time. For those who are even less familiar with him than I, he rejected deduction as a from of knowing. Just because dropping a pencil has resulted in it falling to the ground fifteen zillion times, he said, you cannot know that it will do so the next. I, in my simplicity and ignorance, rejected this. Common sense tells me that deduction is valid, that I do know that the pencil will fall.

Lately I have been reading Galileo’s Mistake, by Wade Rowland, which Ederlyn and Joe gave me for Christmas. This wonderful look at that sad time in our Church’s history provides me with the justification for my dismissal of Hume. Strictly speaking, he is absolutely right. For both the scientific realist and the Catholic, the value of deduction comes as an article of faith. For the scientific realist, or empiricist, it is faith in the rationality of the world, and, secondly, in the reality of math-based explanations of that world. Neither of those are, strictly speaking, provable. You cannot demonstrate in sound logic that our theories do in fact describe anything real. You can only, accurately, assert that they are useful. The pragmatist is satisfied with this (as I am not a philosopher, my use of all of these terms overlaps some naturally). For the Catholic, it follows that the God who gave us our minds intended us to use them to learn of Him through His works. It follows that God, Who is Truth, would not create a world to deceive us. For both then, science is a path to knowledge; for the scientific rationalist, the only path. The difference is that while the scientific rationalist professes that science produces no laws, only theories, the Catholic actually believes that. And understands that he can rarely know, without God’s aid, what the actual reality is. A practical example is Newton’s Laws of Motion. They are not really laws. They are not even really true. General Relativity does not augment them, it replaces them. General Relativity is not more simple, it is more complex, you cannot teach it to the high school student the way you can Newton’s Laws. But Newton’s Laws do not describe reality, they just happen to be useful, to provide sufficiently accurate results, in many day to day, real life situations. Thus science, which would have said it knew the reality of the universe before discovering that Newton must be at least partially wrong, is not and cannot be the final arbiter of what is. It does not know, it merely knows that this or that math equation “saves the facts” (using an ancient phrase), that is, it provides a useful and adequate explanation for the set of facts they wish to explain (or it does not, but it comes closer than any other, reference the struggle to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics). What science does give us is models of how things might work, that provide more or less useful results, but for all we can verify them, have no relationship to reality. What then does provide certainty about reality? What grounds our observation, and lets us find fact with it? It is our faith, our faith in the Church, in God, in His love for us in furtherance of which He has made an orderly existence that we might learn to know Him from His work. An existence whose design cries out that it must have been created by its precision, the incredible odds against our being here to observe it.

On a side note, this would also explain the incredible energy and success of science since the protestant reformation. Lacking any base, any certainty, science has searched unceasingly for a theory about which it could say “Yes! We can now explain everything,” because man is not built for the uncertainty in which they have left us. The need to make sense, to find order in the apparent chaos drives men forward down whatever path they think left to them, seeking for what God alone could provide. Perhaps this has benefited us as society, but I wonder at the tally sheet. We have more time saving devices, but less free time for friends and family. Longer lives, but still death comes too soon, finds us with things unfinished, undone. We suffer less from disease, but more from moral decay. At what cost our “progress”? Mind you, I have no answers. The life of the Middle Ages was no picnic, I would not go back to that time. I would not go back to the fear of loosing the wife I may someday have with each child God might choose to bless us with. Of loosing my life, the lives of children I may have, in wars closer to home than those we have today. Of seeing the devastation wrought by plague. Selfish of me, when war is on the front door step of many in our world, when things like AIDS ravishes a continent, but such is life, such am I.

“Hole Drilled to Bottom of Earth’s Crust, Breakthrough to Mantle Looms” reports:

Already the types of rocks recovered show that conventional interpretation of Earth’s evolution are “oversimplifying many of the features of the ocean’s crust,” said expedition leader Jay Miller of Texas A&M University. “Each time we drill a hole, we learn that Earth’s structure is more complex. Our understanding of how the Earth evolved is changing accordingly.”

Barbara John, a different scientists involved, continues:

“We need to evaluate all the data we have from the cruise and re-analyze the seismic data, to determine whether it’s better to deepen the current hole or drill elsewhere, or maybe even collect additional seismic data to better constrain where to drill,” John told LiveScience. “Our major result is that we’ve recovered the lower crust for the first time and have confirmed that the Earth’s crust at this locality is more complicated than we thought.”

I found this rather irate article/post off of Ederlyn’s blog. I have read about such people more than once, but never seen a real example of it before. Someone who really considers the pope to be “the man of sin.” While I agree that it is rather silly for Mrs. Bush and Ms. Rice to be wearing veils the way a devote Catholic might (which is not to say that every female who doe not is not devote, I simply mean that the ones who do tend to be), I think he is being more than a little prideful and/or deliberately obtuse not to realize that we kneel in prayer to God for the Pope John Paul II, not to him. However, protestants, and especially evangelicals, fail to understand our communion with the saints, and the conversation we hold with them, asking their intersession before Christ for us, so I guess it is not too much of a stretch to see this cluelessness.

On a side note, this article provides some timely proof that the “Separation of Church and State” here in the United States has been badly perverted. Do you think Washington or Madison intended that the President should not be able to kneel in Church?

I cannot help but wonder if the fact that Sony has obtained a patent on “beam[ing] sensory perceptions, like sights, sounds, and smells, directly into the brain” means it isn’t quite so theoretical as it is claimed to be. A number of articles deal with this, Ars links to several. This sort of thing really doesn’t phase me anywhere near as much the prospect of cyborgs, RFID tags, or biometrics do. If it becomes realistic, economically feasible, and pervasive enough to cause an issue, someone will no doubt be smart enough to find a way to block it, and as ridiculous as tin foil caps may seem to us today, I am sure society will adjust. After all, fashions from, for example, the 1600s seem rather nonsensical today also. And along the same lines, no doubt many from the 1800s would consider us all slovenly.

In the wake of yesterday’s good news, comes “Conn. Senate Approves Civil Unions Bill” to rain on the parade. New England is oh so horrid.

“>Several “>times now I have expressed concerns about how realistic the movie “Gatica” can look. “Labs selling DNA assessments” is perhaps the most compelling example of this yet. It is a short step from offering this sort of genetic testing to insurance companies requiring it and basing rates off of it. While the Senate ban on genetic discrimination (logged “>here but apparently no longer available on findlaw ☹) might help prevent, or at least slow, this, I think it likely that we will see it in other places and slowly introduced here as well.