Читать книгу Limits of Science? - John E. Beerbower - Страница 33

In addition, and certainly more corrosive to the classic view of scientific methodology, it may be that science in a fundamental sense is inherently culturally or species based, with only a tenuous or, even, coincidental connection to truth. It may be that our efforts to create theories that provide explanations tend more to reinforce cultural prejudices or simply to reflect the structure and operations of our minds than to uncover objective truths. This critique of science resonates with doctrines that emerged and flourished in the last third of the twentieth century in areas ranging from law to literature to political theory, as well as to philosophy and ethics, and to investigations that explore moral and cultural relativism and questioned the existence of objective truths and fundamental values.

An example might help make the underlying point that science is at least influenced by culture. Certain propositions set forth or assumed in such theories are often called scientific laws. Such “[a] law is not a cause; yet it is more than merely a description. It is true because it is beautiful and simple; yet it is never quite true at all.” Gleick, Introduction, in Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1994), p.ix. It has been argued that the progress of science in the Western civilizations was facilitated by the Judeo-Christian tradition which made the concept of notion of laws nature available to the Western mind, as an expected implication of a Supreme Being. For example, the concept of God as the Lawgiver can be said to imply natural laws that have been dictated by Him. Barrow, Theories of Everything, pp.12–13, 27. Perhaps, a pantheistic or holistic Eastern religious tradition would not only not have suggested the existence of laws of nature, but could be viewed as inconsistent with the existence of such laws.