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[Sigh!]

Here we go again. Scientists are justly upset with people who have no experience or knowledge in their field nonetheless presuming to lecture them on science. For some reason, scientists who have obviously never put much effort into studying philosophy think themselves competent to babble on about it.

The latest to fall victim, in a rather spectacular way, to this syndrome is the physicist Sean Carroll, who is admittedly uninterested in philosophy, but who does not let that stop him. He gets off on the wrong foot (the one with the bullet in it) by claiming that, on the issue of what sort of questions science is competent to answer:

... one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question [is]: first, attempt to distill the essence of "science" down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been "the Baconian scientific method" or "logical positivism" or "Popperian falsificationism" or "methodological naturalism." But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures.

I'm quite sure that the generations of philosophers (and scientists interested in philosophy) who have formulated, studied, critiqued and attempted to improve on those systems of thought through many generations, would have been, and are, quite surprised to learn that they've only been working on "punchy mottoes."

I'm afraid that it doesn't take any great skill in prediction to surmise that anyone who thinks those philosophical systems are just popular mottoes, unsuitable to cover the "hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures" of science, is getting ready to boil science down to some cut-and-dried procedure embodied in something very like a motto. Carroll does not disappoint the prognosticator, even if he disappoints those who hope that scientists might be a bit more cogent and self-aware thinkers.

Carroll sweeps all those mottoes aside by first presenting an example:

Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let's ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? ...

... The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.

Let's just stop here and note that Carroll is appealing to induction as a process that delivers "truth." But how does he know that? Over 200 hundred years ago, one of those motto producers, David Hume, pointed out that anyone who looks to empiricism cannot justify the truth-delivering qualities of induction because the only possible empiric evidence on the subject comes from experience -- in other words, from induction. We "know" induction produces truth because, in our experience, induction produces truth. That itself is an induction and trying to justify induction by an induction is circular reasoning, a logical fallacy. No one has solved this conundrum in the time since Hume but that doesn't bother Carroll, probably because he is unaware of it and ignorance is bliss.

Carroll continues:

[S]cience does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data. The definition of "better" is notoriously slippery in this case, but one thing is clear: if two theories make the same kinds of predictions for observable phenomena, but one is much simpler, we're always going to prefer the simpler one.

This is, of course, Occam's Razor, which is far closer to an empty motto than the Baconian method, logical positivism, falsificationism or methodological naturalism. In fact the razor is a rule of thumb for making a first approximation (less formally known as "a guess"). Carroll cites to the replacement of determinism with quantum uncertainty as an example of science appealing to "the inference to the best explanation." I'd dearly like to know by what metric he determined quantum mechanics to be "simpler" than determinism. In any event, what guarantee of truth does the razor deliver even if you can manage to wield it rationally? As Samir Okasha's Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction states:

The idea that simplicity or parsimony is the mark of a good explanation is quite appealing, and certainly helps flesh out the idea of [the inference to the best explanation]. But if scientists use simplicity as a guide to inference, this raises a problem. For how do we know that the universe is simple rather than complex? Preferring a theory that explains the data in terms of the fewest number of causes does seem sensible. But is there any objective reason for thinking that such a theory is more likely to be true than a less simple theory? Philosophers of science do not agree on the answer to this difficult question.

Simplicity is surely attractive to those who want to think simplistically but does it have any truth-delivering capability? After all, it is the inference to best explanation and Occam's razor that the Intelligent Design Creationists appeal to. As Carroll notes, the IDers, like Carroll, don't see methodological naturalism as standing in their way:

There's no obstacle in principle to imagining that the normal progress of science could one day conclude that the invocation of a supernatural component was the best way of understanding the universe. Indeed, this scenario is basically the hope of most proponents of Intelligent Design.

Carroll may not understand, or may not care, but, if his account of science is correct, then ID cannot be barred from American public classrooms. It is, under his version of science, a valid attempt at science and, even if he thinks it is wrong or unsupported, it cannot be barred from public classrooms just because it has religious implications. Nor is there any basis under our law to bar it just because it is "bad" science. Of course, simply because it will have bad consequences doesn't mean that Carroll's definition of science is wrong but, if your version of science includes something so clearly not science, it may be time to reexamine your definition.

But Carroll isn't done with the razor. Based on it he declares:

In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena. No virgin human births, no coming back after being dead for three days, no afterlife in Heaven, no supernatural tinkering with the course of evolution. You can define "religion" however you like, but you can't deny the power of science to reach far-reaching conclusions about how reality works.

In short, Carroll is maintaining that philosophical naturalism is a scientific result. I wonder when he will be publishing this in the scientific literature? I'd suggest he try publishing in a philosophical journal but I think philosophers would take him even less seriously.
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