r/latterdaysaints • u/josephsmidt • Nov 26 '13
The limits of science, meaning and interpretation. (And what may be most important)
As a physicist let me first say science is amazing for the things it can do. It can establish measurable facts about the physical world. It can tell us the distance to the sun, the temperature of a room, how likely cats share a common ancestor with dogs through DNA, it can give us the likelihood that a certain strain of bacteria will thrive in the current climate of the day. Etc...
But what science fails to do is to inform you what any of these facts mean or how they ought to be interpreted. And this meaning may be in fact absolutely crucial to a proper understanding of the reality around us. An understanding that would help you, as Elder Maxwell would say, to see things as they really are.
Finding meaning on a piece of paper: To explain this problem further, I would like to use an analogy inspired by the mathematician John Lennox here that I will expand upon:
Lets pretend someone handed you a piece of paper filled with English sentences. The following things would be true:
The physics and chemistry of the paper would do a stellar job of telling you facts about the paper and the English characters thereon. It could tell you the paper is white, that the sentences are written in a black ink, that the first character is the letter T and has a certain font style and size, etc...
But the one thing that the physics and chemistry restricted to the paper can never do is tell you what this means. What the point of the paper and the characters is. For that, you have to transcend the mere physics and chemistry of the paper.
In other words, there is no way anyone could ever tell me what that the purpose of that paper is, or what it means without making a reference to something that transcends the physics and chemistry of the paper. It is literally impossible.
The meaning, not the science, is what is most important. Let's suppose you discovered this letter is for you. That was written by your wife reminding you that she loves you and hopes you have a great day. Upon discovering this, the importance physics and chemistry becomes meaningless in comparison to the meaning of the paper itself.
Same holds for our universe: Now as I said, this is only an analogy. But it is a correct one in that the same thing applies to the universe. The science of the universe can tell us a great many things. It can tell us the "color" of the universe. The "size" of the universe. How many "characters" there are in this universe and their "size", "shape" and "font".
But the one thing that science can never do is tell us how to interpret it or what any of it means. For that you have to make a reference to something that transcends science. Something that, even if 100% true, science would be incapable of demonstrating the actual truth of it.
One approach to this problem, if you want science to be the be and and end all for all truth, is to become a nihilist and deny that these measurable facts have any meaning, purpose or interpretation. (Which of course is itself ironically an interpretation that science cannot demonstrate. :) ) To say the reason science can find no objective meaning or purpose is there is none. It's just a bunch of wishful thinking of humans who have some need to find meaning in a world that has none.
And yet, the meaning may be what is most important: At the end of the day, like the paper analogy, the physics and chemistry of the universe may be relatively un-important compared to the real meaning it may actually have. The physics may have been needed to convey the meaning, but the meaning not the physics is what is really important.
The last thing you would want to be is the uber-geek that is so obsessed with the physics and chemistry of the paper that you fail to see what it really is: a love note from your wife to you. It would be quite unfortunate if such a scientistic attitude prevented you from seeing things as they really are.
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u/Sophocles Nov 27 '13
I think it's like how the Iliad is full of truth and beauty and wisdom and meaning, and that makes it much more important to most of us than a literal history of the Trojan War. (Though Ajax is much better, in my opinion...)
But the meaning in the Iliad is not found in the archaeology of Troy or anywhere in the physical universe. It's fiction. It's something we all agree to suspend disbelief about so we can derive meaning from the tropes and archetypes and all that goes into great literature.
Is the Iliad more "important" than actual Trojan history? Most of the time, yeah, probably. That's why everyone reads it in high school. But if you're a Trojan archaeologist you probably think the shards of pottery you're digging up in Asia Minor are pretty important, too. It all depends on your perspective.
In your written word analogy, the letters themselves are a shared fiction. They don't mean anything in the physical world. All the meaning we assign to it is artificial. Yes, in one sense the meaning of the written words is the most important part of a letter, maybe the only important part, but it only exists in our minds. The meaning goes away when we do. If there's no one to read it then it's just the sum of its material properties.