Science trapped by religious thinking?

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I agree, but I disagree. So many people (Platonists) think these laws exist outside of human experience, and it's so obvious that they don't. WHAT they try to describe does, but there's a big difference. We can say a^2 + b^2 = c^2, but the very notion of a triangle is completely circumscribed by human experience, and the notion of abstract notation is also a human thing. To say such a relation exists a priori is where I believe rationalism runs off the rails into a kind of metaphysics of "belief" as opposed to empirical science, and where empirical science mistakes itself for reality.

We ARE creating the laws, but what we create them ABOUT is something we do not have control over. The universe and human evolution rolled those dice aeons ago. Yes, you COULD write a law that says gravity doesn't exist, IF the law you write permits the kind of observations we make regarding objects in space/time. In fact, this is an interesting example. The Einsteinian view is that gravity (in and of itself) doesn't exist. It is our perception of how objects behave in curved space time. In the other ring, you have physicists who are bound and determined to shoe-horn gravity into some grand design of particle physics, and are on a continuous (and IMHO, quixotic) quest for the Graviton.

So, you grab a brick, hold it out. Let go. It falls. The effect of it falling on release we can call "gravity", but whether gravity exists as a REAL force in the universe, or just some weird effect of space/time warpage is another issue. So, yes, you CAN write a law that says "gravity doesn't exist" as long as your law accounts for the behaviour exhibited in the test of your dropping the brick.

What is insightful about your brief post is the point that what we call "Scientific Laws" are merely descriptions of nature. The laws are Scientific, and are therefore, tentative. They will remain "true" only as long as they can be proven to be true. Once some genius comes along and disproves it, or, more likely, incorporates it into some larger understanding, it will cease to be "true". Science is not based on absolute permanent truth. Scientific truth is ALWAYS provisional. It is so, as it is a product of language - a tool of our species.


Science supposedly supplanted religion in the mind of the enlightened with regard to explaining the natural world. The one thing that many scientists have still not abandoned is that notion there is some supernatural force at the center that has decreed the way the world works. Early Christianity placed no limits on God and wrote off the investigation of the outside world as meaningless because it had nothing to do with spirituality or the next life. Later Christianity attempted to prove that God's mind was ordered and reasoned at that recurring patterns in natural phenomenon were a result of the dictates of God. The investigation of theologians/early scientists in the era was to "Discover the Mind of God."

Today, most scientist or at least those who purport to believe in science hold just as firmly as any fundamentalist Christian in the faith of a natural and mathematically precise order that is just waiting to be discovered once sufficient empirical evidence has been gathered an analyzed. While it may be impossible to ascribe the relative accuracy of Newtonian physics (something which is technically wrong, but still precise enough to work relatively well) to mere coincidence, it seems a bit arrogant or perhaps naive to think our tiny evolved brains can understand the Universe as we would a self-contained geometry problem.

For science to truly progress, we need to abandon our faith in a non-living, non-sentient, rationality laying down precise and discoverable laws governing the universe just as many have abandoned the idea of a living, sentient, rational being laying down precise and discoverable laws governing the universe. Scientific findings are great and often useful, but the irrational belief that each new empirically discovered law is "The Truth" leads us down false paths like (in all likelihood) looking for the GUT or gravitons.