Louisville Process Theology Network

Positivism and Scientific Knowledge

Dec 18, 2007

Ask a scientist whether or not there is a God and he or she will probably answer that science has found no evidence of God. This is indeed the scientifically correct answer.

It's derived from the positivist philosophy which holds that scientific knowledge can only come from positive affirmation by means of the scientific method.

This philosophy was originally developed by Auguste Comte about 1856 and first explained in his famous book "A General Veiw of Positivism." Comte reasoned that scientific method was gradually replacing theology and metaphysics. Among the fields of science, he saw a hierarchy of knowledge beginning with mathematics and progressing to sociology.

Put simply, Comte believed that science was replacing mythology with hard knowledge verified by rigorous scientific observation and testing.

In practice, positivism has relied largely on the reductionist approach to scientific observation and testing. It's reasoned that all entities and phenomena are best understood by studying their parts or segments. So, scientific experiments tend the focus on the details.

During the 20th Century, however, the building block approach of positivism encountered some limitiations.

Biologists began to discover that new chararacteristics emerge seemingly out of nothing as living things become more complicated; meanwhile, physicists were discovering randomness in the movement in Quantum mechanics. Nature appears to be alive and spontaneous.

The reductionist approach was not seeing this "big picture."

A new philosophy organism soon developed in the life sciences based on dicoveries like these. Thus, the 20th Century interpretation of Evolution would eventually leave behind the deterministic assumptions in Darwin's original concept.

Holism is supplementing reductionism in science today as probabilistic modeling and simulations are added to the detailed observations and testing. It looks like Aristotle famous reflection on nature is correct after all. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."

In this spontaneous world, it seems to be impossible to acquire knowledge by positive affirmation in each and every instance.