It should seem obvious that science cannot speak about anything in metaphysics.
Right?
One can perform the scientific method on an atom under conditions X and Y, etc.
But that line of investigation can never answer for us why the atom exists in the first place.
Does that atom have objective worth? Does it matter? And how do we know it matters?
It makes you think though…
What precisely is the role of education in modern western culture (bankrupt of foundational ethics/meaning)?
Therefore, he says, in thinking about education, we must choose between the two generally possible pictures of Man, that offered by science and that offered by religion, more particularly Christianity. And if we opt for the scientific picture, we shall soon find ourselves at sea, since “to ask what is the nature and the destiny of man”—I assume that the invocation of Niebuhr’s recent book of that title is deliberate—is to attempt “to draw from [science] a kind of metaphysics,” which runs contrary to the nature of science. The theoretical result would be “a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight”—that is, a metaphysics that claimed a scientific warrant without the power to justify itself scientifically. Even worse would be the practical result: “a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state.”
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
