Louisville Process Theology Network

Is Science Unnatural?

Feb 27, 2007

Biologist and author, Lewis Wolpert, writes in "The Unnatural Nature of Science" that we probably wouldn't have scientific reasoning and methodology today if not for the ancient Greek philosophers.

It all began with the philosopher Thales, says Wolpert. He was the first who "tried to explain the world not in terms of myths but in more concrete terms; terms that might be subject to verification."

Ancient cultures had explained what they saw in nature with mythological stories up to this point. After Thales, Western civilization began searching for "logical consistency" while the rest of the world continued pretty much as before.

What most cultures have discovered is technology, not science. "The technological achievement of ancient cultures was enormous. But whatever process was involved, it was not based on science. There is no evidence of any theorizing about the process involved in the technology nor the reasons why it worked."

Indeed, "natural thinking, ordinary day-to-day common sense, will never give an understanding about the nature of science. Scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive ...common sense is prone to error when applied to problems requiring rigorous thinking; lay theories are highly unreliable."

Scientific reasoning "is not only unnatural", Wolpert writes. "For most of human evolution it was unnecessary, since, as will be seen, technology was not dependent on science."

So, Wolpert concludes, the discovery of science was not an inevitable outcome of human evolution. We might never have found it, if not for Thales, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers.

What do you think?