THE SCIENCE STORY – CONCEPTS AND THEORIES
Some pages back, we did a reality check on concepts, especially in relation to things like God, soul, mind, heaven, hell, and so on. The same principle applies to all human concepts, including those of science.
It doesn’t matter how complex the mathematics and the ideas, scientific theories are simply descriptions. That’s why they work. If we observe some phenomenon, and describe it in mathematical terms, that doesn’t mean that the description is the phenomenon itself. The two are fundamentally different. Tasting an orange is an experience, and all the descriptions in the world, no matter how complex, will fail to convey the experience of the taste of an orange. You’ve got to put it in your mouth to know its taste.
So even if we think we’ve found some universal principle, like a mathematical description of gravity, it’s still only a description. We can’t then say that this is a ‘law of nature’ that all phenomena must obey. It’s only a description of nature – a human concept. Why should nature obey our descriptions, especially when we are prepared to admit that our conceptions and descriptions are incomplete? Gravity worked just as well before Newton and Einstein as afterwards. In any case, scientists have yet to provide a fundamental, all-inclusive description of gravity, integrated with descriptions of other natural phenomena, such as electromagnetism. And no one claims to know what gravity and electromagnetism – or anything else for that matter – really are. A verbal or mathematical description can never be the thing itself.
We have such well-developed and intellectually enticing concepts and descriptions of things that we mistake our concepts for the reality. And in the understandable and laudable attempt to construct one all-encompassing description or theory, we confuse our different conceptions, too. Like trying to integrate partial descriptions of the universe such as Big Bang theory, subatomic physics, the origins of matter, evolutionary change among the species, and the origins of life and consciousness into one glorious, all-embracing theory of everything. While these are entertaining ideas that appeal to us, it is easy to forget that they are just concepts. Just a perspective on things, just a viewpoint and opinion. Not the whole deal.
But let’s take things one step at a time. Let’s take a look at how the scientific fraternity sees things, and then examine some of the basic concepts by which they describe physical reality and the origins of existence.
