Now if the sun was to be given pride of place, if the sun merited a divine status in the hierarchy of visible things, then it was hardly possible for it to revolve about the earth. The only fitting place for so exalted a star was the centre of the universe. So the earth was bound to revolve about the sun. This Platonic idea, then, forms the historical background of the Copernican revolution. It [the Copernican revolution] does not start with [natural] observations, but with a religious or mythological idea.
Ibid.
The true systematic thought is already provided. All the scientific-method does is provide a critical and systematic means of testing thoughts that have already been generated in the systematic approach of religious myth. All the scientific-method contributes is a means to test religious hypotheses.
Not that this means of testing religious hypotheses is a small thing. It's obviously not. But to attempt to sneak the really heavy lifting, the true systematic thought, into the scientific-method, is to try to steal the life-blood of true science from its rightful owner: the hypotheses related to the high priests of the ancient religious orders and rites.
Throughout the Popper essay quoted above, Popper conflates the traditions contained in myth and theology with the scientific-method. But they are not the same thing. The traditions produced in myth and theology are the true systematic thought designed to bring a higher order out of nature and our natural observations. Anyone who's read Popper's
Conjectures and Refutations, in particular chapter 4,
Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition, is completely aware that more than ten or twenty times Popper dogmatically refutes the idea that our natural observations are the source for the theories that lead to scientific development and technological evolution.
On the contrary, it's what he labels "systematic thought" that quite literally questions what's otherwise accepted as obvious and true according to natural observation, therein erecting a dichotomy between natural observations versus systematic thought.
And it's undeniably systematic thought, in Popper's understanding, that provides the impetus for changing the nature of our world through science and technology. In that, systematic thought can't simply accept natural observations as the foundation and source for truth and reality, or else there would be no need to criticize, theorize, and realize, that our natural observations are not the end of the matter concerning reality, but that they can be thought in all truth to be unfaithful and to distort the true nature of truth and reality.
Which is precisely where the problem arises for Popper's personal, humanistic, ideology, since to speak of the nature of "truth," "reality," and thus the goodness of knowing the truth, as opposed to untruth, illusion, or a veiled truth, leads the agnostic, humanistic theorist, right into the theology that, in Popper's case, he's hoping he can use the scientific-method, and technology, to displace, replace, or even erase.
It is here that the part played by tradition in our lives becomes understandable. We should be anxious, terrified, and frustrated, and we could not live in the social world, did it not contain a considerable amount of order, a great number of regularities to which we can adjust ourselves. The mere existence of these regularities is perhaps more important than their peculiar merits or demerits. They are needed as regularities, and therefore handed on as traditions, whether or not they are in other aspects rational or necessary or good or beautiful or what you will. There is a need for tradition in social life. Thus the creation of traditions plays a role similar to that of theories. Our scientific theories are instruments by which we try to bring some order into the chaos in which we live so as to make it rationally predictable.
Ibid. p. 131.
There's clearly some disorder in Popper's words and theories since he's undeniably conflating the bringing of order into our perceived world (the world of our natural observations) by means of
systematic thinking, thinking seeking an order perceived to be higher, better, "good," and true (i.e., myth and theology), than what we perceive by means of our natural, genetic, accoutrements. He conflates the seeking of a higher good, a more perfect truth (sytematic theological thought), with the scientific-method, which, far from producing theories of good, order, truth, in truth, merely critiques existing ideas by means of experiments designed to see which theological theories of order, truth, the good, stand up to the scientific-method, i.e, are actualized through critical experimentation and logical examination.
The scientific-method is wholly about critiquing ideas and not producing them. It's a selection mechanism and not a creation mechanism.
Popper speaks extensively concerning Bishop Berkely and Kant as the perfect models of how religious thinkers, attempting to systematically order the natural world, the world of observations, by means of their theological theories of the good, and true, the real, come to shockingly powerful ideas that upon further experimentation turn out to in fact be true, good, and useful in the extreme, once justified by experimentation.
Popper friend and associate, Professor Bryan Magee, went so far as to state that Kant merely asked himself what the world would have to be like to be brought in line with his theological tradition, and in that questioning, came up with ideas that are the seed of the most profound modern scientific ideas of our day:
One thing that has always struck me forcefully about this doctrine of Kant's is that it legitimates important components of a belief which he had held since long before he began to philosophize, namely Christian belief. It is a standard part of the traditional Christian faith that time and space and material objects are local characteristics of this human world of ours, but only of this world: they do not characterize reality as such . . . But what he did, unmistakably (and unremarked on to an extent that has never ceased to astonish me), is produce rational justification for many aspects of the religious beliefs in which he grew up [Christian belief]. . . it is as if he then said to himself: "How can these things be so? What can be the nature of time and space and material objects if they obtain only in the world of human beings? Could it be, given that they characterize only the world of experience and nothing else, that they are characteristics, or preconditions, of experience, and nothing else?" In other words, Kant's philosophy is a fully worked out analysis of what needs to be the case for what he believed already to be true [according to his per-existing religious theory].
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher p. 249,250.
The picture of science of which I have so far only hinted may be sketched as follows. There is a reality behind the world as it appears to us, possibly a many-layered reality, of which the appearances are the outermost layers. What the great scientist does is boldly to guess, daringly to conjecture, what these inner realities are like. This is akin to myth making.
Popper Selections, p. 122.
It's not akin to myth-making. It is myth-making. Which draws a line of demarcation between Popper and Einstein, two humanistic scientists, versus Newton and Kant, both of whom, the latter, were using scientific theorizing, systematic theorizing, to prove, not to create, their theology, rather than allegedly (errantly) believing themselves to be producing their epistemological foundation through scientific theorizing, as though this backwards process might it might justify a latter-day humanistic theology.
Kant and Newton, both of whom Einstein and Popper claimed are the greatest scientific thinkers of all time (Einstein said his science is impossible without Kant and Newton's earlier ideas) used systematic thinking, and the scientific-method, not to produce their thoughts, or beliefs, or epistemological order/tradition, but merely to test them against their natural observations. That these tests proved Newton and Kant's otherworldly theology to be powerful, almost impeccably so, is, amazingly, never commented on by either Popper or Einstein.
Both Popper and Einstein had it ***-backwards in that they used systematic thinking, the scientific-method, not to test their worldview, their humanism, their theological agnosticism, against natural observations, but, in their minds, to establish their agnostic, humanism, as a counterpart to the theology of Newton and Kant.
The fact that Popper and Einstein's backwardness, so far as the truth of science is concerned, isn't pointed out, and the fact that egregious errors in their statements are not called out, suggests, to this observer, the damage and danger brilliant humanists can do to mankind's march toward the kingdom of God when because of their unquestionable brilliance, they're thought to be beyond repute. In some ways their great contributions are negated by the seeds they plant toward error. Nevertheless, their hard work and brilliance, does act as a buttress, or a bulwark, against the mindlessness of slothful persons blinded and drowning in their genetic dispositions and natural observations which they never lift a hand to oppose. As Descartes said about them, they're never in danger of questioning their natural observations, since to them things are just as they appear, and nothing in their world is in need of questioning, let alone critical examination.
John
