Science And Truth
This article covers the relationship between science and truth.
The modern scientific approach is very far from finding out the truth behind existence and explaining it.
Truth is unchanging and beyond the visible world. Its relationship with the visible, changing world is like that of the spirit and the body or the Divine laws of nature and natural things and events. For example, the force of growth, which is a universal Divine law, is innate in living things. While this law is unchanging, a tree or a man undergoes incessant changes. Likewise, human beings, no matter how their dress or dwellings or means of transport have changed during the course of history, remain unchanged in respect of the essential purposes they serve and the impact of those purposes on their lives and environment. As human beings, we all share certain general conditions of life and value: we are all born, mature, marry, have children, and face death; we all possess some degree of will and common desires, we share also certain values—we all know the meaning of honesty, kindness, justice, courage, and so on.
See also: Divine Decree and Destiny
Main articles: What Is The Truth? and Science
Hunt The Truth
Modern scientific approach searches for truth in changing nature
Despite this fact, the modern scientific approach searches for truth in changing nature, and in its search it bases itself on the impressions of senses. However, these impressions are relative, changing from person to person, and deceptive. Also, people defer in respect of their capacity of reasoning. So, it is impossible to arrive at one certain conclusion by deductive or inductive or analytical reasoning of the data received by senses. It is because of this that the modern scientific approach resorts to experiment to arrive at facts. However, without pre-established axioms or ‘premises’, it is not possible to establish a fact through experiments. Since David Hume, it has been generally accepted that it is not inevitable that, because an event has happened twice or a million times in two or a million different places, it must happen again. For this reason, since the collapse of classical physics, Western epistemologists speak not of seeking the truth itself but only of seeking approximations to it. Karl Raymond Popper says that we consider the theories of both Newton and Einstein, as science…. both of them cannot be true at the same time; rather, both may be false.
Through empirical methods, science will not be able to find the truth, which concerns the essence of existence
Therefore, as Guenon puts it, science or scientists have two alternatives before them: either they will acknowledge that the findings of science are of no value other than as suppositions about truth and therefore not recognize any certainty higher than sense-perception, or they will blindly believe as true in whatever is taught in the name of science. Doubting the findings of science, modern scientists try to find a way out in agnosticism or pragmatism, thus confessing the inability of science to find truth.
Science should recognize its limits and concede that truth is unchanging and lies in the realm above the visible world
When it can do that, it will find its real value. Evidently, without the absolute, it is impossible for the relative to exist; what is changing can be possible through the existence of the unchanging, and multiplicity is impossible without the existence of unity. It is only when any knowledge reaches the point of immutability that it acquires permanence and stability. What is unchangeable and permanent is above the human realm. Truth is not something the human mind produces. Truth exists independently of man and man’s task is to seek it.