Page 25 - Ruminations

23. Logic versus science and theology

After a temporary halt by the Dark Ages, science has steadily
deprived theology of explanatory power. It has done this through the
methodology of empiricism, a rigorous standard of verification
minimizing human error and bias from conclusions about the natural
world. The scientific enterprise reached two self-imposed—but
correct—limits of inquiry within the past century, and thereby left an
opening for theology to claim some credibility.
By discovering and establishing the microcosmic and macrocosmic
boundaries of what science could investigate, empiricism effectively
took itself out of the role of denying truth to the existence of
supernatural entities. If we cannot objectively perceive or theoretically
predict the behavior of anything smaller than the smallest known
particle or larger than the observable cosmos, then theology need not
rely upon easily falsifiable assertions concerning the natural world: it
has been given two realms out of which it cannot be driven by
science. And physics has compounded that gift by going beyond its
writ and proposing real discontinuities between what is knowable and
what lies beyond (perhaps those unjustifiable ideas are in harmony
with latent religious beliefs in the scientists making them). Who is to
say if an undetectable deity is not at work either within allegedly
elementary particles whose behavior cannot be predicted, or outside a
“universe” which is finite and originated out of nothing?
Logic can and should take the baton from empiricism and
complete the task of putting theology squarely in the category of
falsehood. Science, indeed, cannot claim to be a source of truth; it
provides levels of certainty never quite reaching absolute. Logic is the
real competitor of theology for truth, because it deals with the basic
issue: metaphysical dualism. Logic, reducible to the tautological
*
certainty of a real continuum, establishes substance monism and
shows that any spatiotemporal limits of perception are not real
boundaries; therefore, what is on one side of them is not really
discontinuous with what is on the other.
In short, scientists cannot be atheists; logicians must be. Einstein,
largely responsible for establishing the limits of empiricism, was
disappointed by the results. He should not have been.

*
See Boundedness Revisited (2018), by this author.