Does science stand alone as the path to knowledge?

Last updated on: August 16, 2020 at 11:44 pm by Dan Peterson

Does science stand alone as the path to knowledge? 2020-08-16T23:44:28-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Queen’s College, Cambridge, where Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne presided for eight years

Sir John Polkinghorne, now in his ninetieth year, is both a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) and a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society (founded by, among others, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Isaac Newton). Sir John was a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge until he resigned his professorial chair in order to study for the Anglican priesthood. He was ordained a priest in 1982 and, thereafter, served as the president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.

Here is a passage from the text of Sir John’s 1996 Terry Lectures, which he delivered at Yale University and which were published as John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). It’s a bit dense, but it will repay careful attention. It implicitly addresses folks who imagine that some monolithic thing called Science represents the only legitimate path to knowledge:

Second, there is the recognition of the personal character of judgement that is involved in acquiring scientific knowledge, rendering the practice of science incapable of being encapsulated in a single methodological formula. This gives science a kinship with other forms of rational enquiry, for it is no longer perceived as possessing a unique means of access to reliable knowledge, unparalleled elsewhere. Its impressive success in answering questions to universal satisfaction is then seen to derive, not from the possession of utterly distinctive epistemological and ontological techniques, but from the comparative tractability of its subject material, an impersonal physical world open to repeated experimental manipulation, in contrast to the more subtle realms of unrepeatable experience which correspond to personal encounter and to the transpersonal meeting with the divine. The difference between science and its cousinly disciplines in the search for motivated belief is not of a fundamental kind but it lies in the degree of the power of empirical interrogation which these various investigations enjoy. The philosophical acknowledgement that there is no foundationally certain guarantee of scientific knowledge serves not to diminish the claims of science to verisimilitudinous success, but to encourage other modes of enquiry to comparable acts of intellectual daring in trusting the understandings that they attain by making sense of their experience.

Disciplines with restricted empirical access will have to depend more heavily on non-empirical factors in the assessment of the interpretations they propose. Coherence and comprehensiveness are factors of the highest importance in the search for metaphysical understanding. The fruitfulness to be appealed to in defence of such a strategy will, for theology, be more than simply the . . . development of doctrine. It will also embrace the transformation of life. “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt. 7:16). (113-115)

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