How Science Fails at Empirical Materialism
by Asa Boxer
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As I pointed out in “What is a Scientific Fact?”—our sciences impose figurations, models and paradigms on the phenomena they study. In ignorance of the basic trouble this imposition represents, science promises a Truth that is already articulate and awaiting a matching articulation—the articulation that science provides (as mirror of Nature). The absurdity here is that the heuristics that science uses are not in themselves the phenomena, they are meant to help account for the appearances and that’s it. So if truth is not teleological: if it’s not a singular, monolithic Truth that exists objectively and independently of our researches, what, then, constitutes truth? How do we know what’s real?
What we consider to be the real world is that collection of phenomena that we can all verify with our five senses. This assumption is the cornerstone of empirical science. It’s what makes materialism appealing. Science promises that its concerns are with the physical world we can all agree upon.
On the surface this position satisfies our sense that science gets things right, like black holes and cancer. Upon investigation however one discovers that science is not that simple, not as empirical as advertised, not as anchored in materialism as it seems to claim. This problem is owing in large part to the instruments, the measures, and the mathematics employed in the formulation and the interpretation of data. Problems arise at all those levels, and they have little to nothing to do with empiricism: they are indeed the flaws inherent to materialist processes.
For materialism to have any purchase on the real world and for it to have productive value, it must transform all material into immaterial quanta. And this is where the distortions get in because the models and paradigms are fundamentally immaterial, abstract, and conceptual. Descriptive mathematics manages to remain grounded. But with the mathematics of models and math about math we’re no longer in the realm of the real, empirical or material. And then there’s the problem of investigating things like atoms and evolution that we cannot observe directly. So what sanctions things invisible as legitimate areas of “scientific” investigation—as empiricism?
To make matters worse, we often reify our models into technologies like clocks, speedometers and bridges. Then we confuse the fantasy-made-real with reality because we’ve peopled the world with our own phenomena.
One is tempted to lower the bar and say, Okay, reality, truth and fact are whatever works. Now we’re likely a lot closer to understanding the metaphysics of science. As far as what works, it has to be empirical in the sense that we can all reap a benefit, measure and assess the instrument, technology, system or organism that is said to work. If we all agree it works well enough, and, say, airplanes do indeed fly and don’t crash too often, then we’ve got a win for science.
But now we’ve narrowed the field of science to engineering. No doubt that with engineering we can all agree that we’re dealing with science. But once again, if we investigate closely enough, we discover that there, too, too much goes on that is not about what works, but instead about how things might work. In other words, the engineer’s perspective gets taken up as a model and imposed upon all reality: it becomes a way of doing and seeing things, a paradigm. And we’re back to square one. Even though a clock works, for example, it is not really how time works. It soon becomes clear that science just isn’t what we hope it is and what it advertises itself to be: i.e. our guide and guru to the good, true, real, grounded life.
In short we cannot untangle materialism and empiricism from the inner world. That new atheists and followers of TheScience™ believe they have managed to untie this Gordian knot is the root of their trouble and the root of ours, too, as a society that buys into that myth, for as we’ve seen with the probability cult, those archetypal energies from within find ways of seeping into the material world by influencing the way we view life and reality.
Idolatry, the archetypes of Psyche and Love, of Abraham and Christ, of revelation and millenarianism—these inner forces assert themselves no matter what we do. To these inner forces, the paradigm or model active in a given society presents not a barrier but a means of expression. It is all too easy for these skeletons to put on new flesh and appear to the analytical mind as unprecedented. The analogical mind, on the other hand, catches them out right away.
As I’ve already stated I’m a science lover, so I’m not arguing us into relativism. Quite clearly not everything works, and as a poet I can confirm that not all conceits and analogies apply. Some poems don’t work and we call them “failed” or “bad” poetry. Similarly, ideas and technologies—things imagined and brought to reality through human agency and artifice—emerge only when something works. Next week, I’ll take up the thread here and get into what makes poetic conceits work and how that understanding can tie into our assessments of reality.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
That "these inner forces assert themselves no matter what we do" is an insight that seems counterintuitive at first. How can science be a means and not a barrier to the expression of archetypal stories that nurture the human spirit? Does science tell those stories in a vitiated, distorted way, bereft as they are of a spiritual element? But I'm missing the point. I suppose my initial resistance to such an insight reflects how totalizing the separation between the so-called humanities and the sciences has become in our age. I've just been conditioned to think that telling stories and doing science are two irreconcilable, mutually hostile activities. Maybe such an insight could help inspire a paradigm shift in the way society thinks about the role and value of religion and the spiritual life that we desperately need. How does one become open-minded to such an insight that, when uttered, tends to be universally dismissed? I mean, meditating on this insight I swear I can feel the geography of my inner world changing, expanding; but to talk about this stuff with loved ones is another matter, because they tend to greet such ideas with casual dismissal or outright hostility. It's remarkable how often the truth that science and religion are tied together is greeted with contempt, almost like it's a personal insult.