THE BOUNDARIES OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

29 March 2019

Science alone cannot provide answers to life’s most important questions. Scientific knowledge must pair with other forms of knowledge in order to form these answers. Even then, those answers are disputed and vary widely.
Denis Alexander, Ph.D. in neurochemistry from St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University spoke at the Baylor Science Building on Monday about science’s relation to other forms of knowledge. People from both science and humanities backgrounds gathered to listen to Alexander’s position.
“Obtaining different kinds of knowledge is like fishing with different sized nets,” Alexander said.
Science doesn’t catch all knowledge. Other types of knowledge exist to help the world make sense. Ethical, personal and religious knowledge exist to complete a person’s understanding of the world. Scientific information alone will always be insufficient.
“It’s not obvious why we have such an orderly world and mathematically elegant universe,” Alexander said. “Why does such a thing exist?”
Early philosophers and mathematicians had a religious world view. They believed God made the world possible for humans to understand. For these early philosophers, religion and science did not conflict, but rather complimented each other, he said.
“Just as God has established moral laws in the universe … he must also establish scientific laws,” Alexander said. “Any sort of idea of a law is like a lost continent, you go and discover it.”
This religious frame of science gives a certain answer to a big question. This perspective says science is discoverable because God intended for it to be discovered. This 17thcentury world view assumes God’s hand in every part of the universe.
The perspective of an atheist rejects this assumption; however, science alone cannot support the opposing argument. Saying that science exists in place of God would not satisfy the mind of a 17thcentury church member.
“When we talk about the laws of nature we are really saying, ‘I think that something has been measured much over time and always behaves that way… so we can call it scientific law,” Alexander said.
Alexander fully explains scientific knowledge to show the audience where other knowledge fits. Proven tests seem to be only part of the truth and there is still much left to be discovered in other ways. Life’s biggest questions cannot be answered definitively, because the missing knowledge is different depending on who is being asked.
“God is beyond our understanding. The Bible says, ‘My ways are higher than your ways,’ and that’s really beyond our normal human understanding,”  Ed Morrison, retired physician, said.
Morrison says he agrees that God created the entire universe, but what science cannot answer may not be within the human realm of understanding.
This notion can be frustrating as people want to understand the universe fully. Alexander says the idea that knowledge will be obtained with time is a faith statement. This means whether or not God exists or created science, scientists do have faith.