Note to the reader: I wrote these two essays as assignments for an online course in philosophy of science. There was a pretty strict word limit, which is why these works are rather packed with ideas and arguments. I decided to leave them here just as they were written, especially since both got a pass and overall good review by the markers. The first essay has to do with science and pseudoscience in evolution/creationism debate; I was familiar with Ruse’s arguments before, and as we read his essay, I knew well how to respond, and where his argument was weak. In the second essay I decided to deal with Hume’s problem of induction – a much more nuanced topic, especially since I hadn’t read Hume before. Unfortunately, we had only covered Laudan’s (textbook author) summary of Hume, so I decided, for better or worse, to read Hume’s relevant chapter myself. Based on the review I got, I might have misunderstood or underestimated Hume’s argument to some extent, but I leave it to you to figure out the details. In general, the essay was good enough, and the main thrust of the final argument would stay unchanged.

Essay 1: Responding to Ruse on the Definition of Science

In his article “Creation-Science is not Science” [1], Ruse raises some concerns with regards to the practices of advancing certain interpretations of scriptures as scientific theories. He rightly insists on such criteria as falsifiability and testability, while arguing that the practices of creationism (as defined above) tend to have serious problems in all of these domains. Some valid counter arguments are raised by Laudan [2], who notes that Ruse’s criteria are too strict, at times excluding genuine scientific endeavors. Living up to its name, the demarcation problem, through careful questioning, appears to undermine many attempts at drawing the line between science and pseudoscience.

However, I believe that there is a line that Ruse clearly, though not immediately obviously, pushes too far. Ruse argues that “science looks for unbroken, blind, natural regularities (laws)”, that it “involves the use of law to effect explanation” (possibly with the aid of specified initial conditions), and that “a scientific explanation must appeal to law and must show that what is being explained had to occur” [1].^a Yet science (especially historical science)^b often provides explanations in terms of causes, not laws. The mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago is not explained by appealing to the laws of gravity, atmospheric physics, and population dynamics, even though they are assumed to hold true; it is explained in terms of a specific event (the falling of an asteroid). Simply adding certain initial conditions, such as the location of the asteroid, is not sufficient, because we cannot demonstrate (contra Ruse’s point) that the mass extinction had to occur in the manner that it did. That would require possessing inconceivably more information than we have. It is an actual cause, an event, and not simply a set of initial conditions and laws, that we invoke to explain the effects from that time period (such as the layer of iridium found worldwide and the Chicxulub crater) [3]. In a manner inspired by Lipton [4], one could argue that, since a wide variety of conceivable scenarios are consistent with natural laws, the laws alone are insufficient to explain a phenomena, and therefore additional rules and modes of explanation are at play; namely, explanations referring to specific events and causes.

However subtle the difference between explanation via natural law and via cause and effect, it reveals Ruse’s second mistake. Scientists often seek explanation in terms of causes that they know can produce the effect in question. Intelligent beings are causal agents that have the ability to leave certain (often distinct) effects in the natural world. The scientists at SETI, or the scientists examining the possibility of laboratory origins of coronavirus [5], are not pseudoscientists for testing explanations that are not in terms of “unbroken, blind, natural regularities”. In fact, they are looking for signals, whether from outer space or in a virus’ genome, that would precisely indicate the operation of something other than blind natural processes, namely intelligent agents. Similarly, the role of an intelligent agent in, say, the origin and evolution of genetic information throughout life’s history on Earth is a question of argument and scientific research. Ruse, by virtue of his definition of science, rules out that possibility from the very beginning. Ironically, it is Ruse’s approach itself that can possibly be subjected to the charge of pseudoscience, as it artificially limits the range and freedom of scientific inquiry before any evidence is even discussed.

^a In what sense Newton’s laws explain the shape of cannon ball’s movement (according to Ruse), as opposed to merely describing it, I do not have the space to discuss, though I believe it plays into Ruse’s mistake.

^b Here I mean natural sciences studying the past (geology, evolution, etc), not the discipline of history.

Bibliography

[1]. Ruse, Michael. Creation Science is Not Science, Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 no. 40 (Summer 1982): 72-78

[2]. Laudan, Larry. Commentary: Science at the Bar – Causes for Concern, Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 no. 41 (Fall 1982): 16-19

[3]. Alvarez, Luiz W. Experimental evidence that an asteroid impact led to the extinction of many species 65 million years ago, Geology, vol. 80 pp. 627-642 (January 1983)

[4] Lipton, Peter. Inference to the Best Explanation, New York (Routledge, 1991), 6-12[5]. Andersen et al. The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2, Nature Medicine, 26, 450-452 (2020)

Essay 2: Metaphysical Presuppositions and Hume’s Problem of Induction

“But I, the Lord, make the following promise: I have made a covenant governing the coming of day and night. I have established the fixed laws governing heaven and earth.” Jeremiah 33:25

While the problem of induction is a well-known topic in philosophy of science, Hume’s reasoning is hard to dissect, as he raises a range of both epistemological and ontological questions. Based on Ladyman’s presentation of the problem of induction [2], as well as my own reading of Section IV of Hume’s “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” [1], there are three main points as I see it – the way we discover the regularities of nature, the ontological status of the underlying causes, and the question of the uniformity of nature. The first one can be dealt with briefly, for here I agree with Hume: the regularities which occur in nature have to be discovered through experience, not by apriori, purely analytical reasoning. The second and the third points require deeper analysis.

Hume’s attitude towards the status of causation is not very clear, perhaps due to Ladyman. On one hand, Ladyman says that “all we ever see is that events are conjoined” [2], as does his presentation of the Humean analysis. On the other hand, he says that Hume rejected necessitarian causation, and that our inductive reasoning is invalid since “it is always possible that a causal relation will be different in the future” [2]. So is it the case that there is no cause-and-effect at all (and only correlation) according to Hume, or that cause-and-effect may work differently in the future? I will proceed assuming the former first. Ladyman notes that since all we see is events being conjoined, and we don’t actually experience the alleged connections, there is no reason (per Hume) to believe that there is anything like cause-and-effect in Nature. Hume’s hypothesis (that events are simply conjoined in our experience) and the alternative hypothesis (that there is an underlying causal network) both account for what we observe. As Ladyman writes, “Hume points out that there is nothing that can be found in our experience that will tell in favour of either one of these hypotheses over the other” [2], and that therefore, by the principle of Occam’s razor, one can adopt the Humean hypothesis by dispensing with the unnecessary metaphysical baggage. However, surely this is untenable. Occam’s razor works on the basis that when two hypotheses can explain the same data equally well, the simpler one is preferable. But is the Humean hypothesis as reasonable as the alternative? The probability that events would be conjoined in a similar fashion over and over again given that there is some causal connection is much higher than if these events were completely independent. In fact, the Humean analysis does not appear to provide any explanation at all as to why a billiard ball has always moved (event B) when hit with a cue (event A). It simply reinstates that, well, it has done so in our experience, – a statement which has, seemingly by definition, no explanatory power to compete with the alternative hypothesis of causal connections. 

Even allowing for the existence of some causal network, Hume’s argument against induction holds nonetheless. “If there be any suspicion, that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless”, writes Hume [1]. It is important to note that while Hume’s objection raises epistemological questions as to whether we can understand the underlying causes, his primary question is whether they are immutable. It is not that we are unable to predict the future (or the present that is beyond our experience) because we lack understanding of the regularities of nature, but that nature itself may one day operate differently. That “there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers” [1] is not so much a comment on our inability to understand why bread nourishes our bodies, as it is on the fact that bread (while having the same taste, colour, shape, etc) does not have to nourish our bodies simply because it has so in our experience, and consequently may not do so in the future. Hume argues that, although we develop our ideas of cause and effect from the sensible qualities, causes are manifestations of the secret powers, and the changes in the latter would ensue changes in the former, without our being able to rely on sensible qualities as proxies for anticipating those changes or lack thereof.

Here, there is another point on which I agree with Hume. While our descriptions of regularities have to be derived from repeated experience, the uniformity of those regularities cannot rationally be derived from the aforementioned experience. The question as to whether Nature will always behave in the same manner cannot be answered affirmatively by observing that it has so far, except via the assumption that uniformity holds true. For this reason, I find most of the solutions that Ladyman presents [2] unsatisfactory. To some of them, Ladyman provides a solid response himself, while a couple others I cover briefly here. 

That induction can be rational but we simply do not know yet how to justify it seems, if anything, to concede Hume’s point; it can hardly be called “a solution”, as it admits that one is yet to be found. Moreover, Hume himself had nothing against using induction pragmatically. Kant’s argument that we have an apriori knowledge that all events have causes does not appear to present a response either, not for the reasons Ladyman provides,^a but simply because the question is whether similar events will continue to produce similar causes in the future. On the other hand, some have argued that we can discover certain necessary causal connections – which could not be different,^b – and understanding them would give us sufficient grounds for expecting the future to operate identically. The key point here appears to be that not only is the principle of cause-and-effect necessarily true (that all events must have a cause), but so is its specific nature (i.e. that there is a set of natural laws and processes which could not possibly be different, and must always be the same). The argument essentially states that Nature’s behaviour will not change because it cannot; uniformity of nature is a necessity, which appears contrary to Hume’s assertion that there is no point in pretending to have learned how bodies function, since “[t]heir secret nature, and consequently, all their effects and influence, may change” [1]. There seem to be differing metaphysical presuppositions at hand, which brings me to the final part of this essay.  

    Since science depends on the notion of uniformity, and cannot therefore justify it, the answer must lie in the metaphysics that one holds. I was surprised to see that Ladyman did not present, even if he may have disagreed with it, the answer that appears to have been laying at the foundations of modern science. As philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead notes, “the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles” was crucial for the rise of modern science [3]. Its origin, Whitehead argues, “must come from the medieval insistence of the rationality of God” [3]. World-leading sinologist Joseph Needham reached a similar conclusion, noting that one of the reasons why modern science did not explode in China, despite its excellent track-record in inventions, was the lack of belief in a single Creator, with no room for laws of nature in the absence of a Law-Giver [4]. The historicity of the argument is not a guarantee for its philosophical truthfulness, but its role in the rise of modern science at least warrants it being addressed. The objection that it requires a prior commitment (or at least openness) to Theism is no more grounds for rejecting it, than would be the objection that an argument for necessary connections in nature heavily implies Naturalism, i.e. the view that the natural world is primary, and not contingent. Hume’s challenge appears to me to require a metaphysical response, whether it is that Nature is and has, by itself, a necessary order which cannot possibly be altered, or that it has been created to operate according to unchanging laws by a Creator, who has endowed us with a capacity to explore it and “think God’s thoughts after Him”, as Kepler put it. 

It is clear that an argument in preference for one or the other of these metaphysical presuppositions cannot be properly developed in such a short essay.^c Hume correctly analyses that the assumption of uniformity cannot be simply based on our past experience of it, leaving us to take the other path. Whatever our answer to Hume (if there is to be a satisfactory answer), its basis depends on the metaphysics that one ascribes to the universe and human reasoning, for it is their nature that Hume fundamentally questions.

Footnotes

^a Perhaps wrongly, but it seems to me that Ladyman’s argument is a complete non sequitur. The fact that Newtonian physics has been superseded by Einstein’s has nothing to do with whether we know a priori that all effects have causes, but simply with the specific nature of the cause-and-effect relationship. The primary issue is not even whether we can know apriori how gravity operates, but whether it will operate the same way in the future.

^b At least that’s how Ladyman presents it.

^c In my view, the former subjugates our thoughts to necessary natural causation, leaving no room for free, rational inquiry and discourse in the first place, – an argument developed in Chapter 4 of Miracles, by C S Lewis (1947).

References

[1] Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Section IV. Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding, 1748. Accessed at https://davidhume.org/texts/e/4 

[2] Ladyman, James. Understanding Philosophy of Science. Chapter 2. The problem of induction and other problems with inductivism, Routledge, 2002. pp. 31-62.

[3] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925. p. 17.

[4] Needham, Joseph, and Ling, Wang. Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 3, Cambridge University Press, 1959. p. 153.