Model, Theory, Truth
A few definitions and observations:
A model is a scheme, that is, a set of explanations about nature.
If the model is speculation, it is called a hypothesis. If there is firm confirmatory evidence, it is called a theory.
The part of a theoretical model which reduces a part of observed nature to an equation, or a ratio, or a principle, it is called a law of nature. Example: Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Gauss’s Law.
Metaphysical principles that apply to all models, hypothetical or theoretical, confusingly enough, are also called laws of nature: the law of cause and effect.
Not all models are models of physics.
Aristotle’s scheme saying matter was continuous, versus the scheme of Democritus or Lucretius that matter is made of atoms and void, or Ptolemy’s scheme describing the motions of stars and planets in terms of cycles and epicycles, are all models.
Likewise for Thales saying all arise from water, or Heraclitus from fire, or Empedocles from love and strife: all these are models.
These are not, strictly speaking, empirical models. Aristotle and Lucretius were proposing natural philosophy. Ptolemy’s model was a mathematical model. The idea of natural philosophy as its own branch of learning with a strict epistemological theory called the scientific method did not yet exist.
The mockingly-named Big Bang theory is likewise a model, as is its opposite, the Steady State theory. These are scientific theories, and arguments for and against rest on empirical grounds, and on aesthetic scientific principles, such as Occam’s razor, as do all theories of physics properly so-called.
The Theory of Phlogiston, despite its name, is an hypothesis. The speculated substance that contributed negative weight during combustion was not confirmed by any other observation, and so the model is disregarded. There is no serious argument to be made in its favor. This is an example where the case is closed, the theory is exploded.
Please note that Darwinism is a hypothetical model, not a theory. No one has ever observed one species give rise to another, nor is it possible, even in theory, to confirm that Darwinian natural selection rather than Lemarckianism or Special Creation created any new species, should one ever be observed being created.
Hence there is no evidence of Darwinian natural selection giving rise to species, rather than some other cause. However, there is evidence against. The record of geology shows species enduring for long periods, and then exploding into new species suddenly. This contradicts the gradualism classical Darwinism demands.
The discovery of DNA, and the intricacies of the mechanisms in each cell, also raises nearly insuperable obstacles to the Darwinian theory. Humans have 46 chromosomes, whereas chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan have 48. The fusion of two chromosomes to account for this cannot arise from natural selection, even if natural selection could favor their reproduction once the fusion of genes arises. Neodarwinism proposes a mutation theory to account for this.
However, the explanation is unpersuasive: at the observed rate of natural mutation, if mutations are random, male and female humans could not have such fusions happen within the same tribe and generation to produce the first humans from an ape troop.
More to the point, certain explanations offered by Darwinism are merely special pleading, or ‘just-so’ stories. The peacock’s tail, for example, is large and unwieldy and offers poor camouflage.
The Darwinian explanation for this, at least what I was taught in school, was that only robust and healthy peacocks could survive predators despite the handicap of the unwieldly and uncamouflaged tail, which would attract peahens to seek out such prize cocks are preferred mats. This theory is called sexual selection.
The explanation explains nothing. If natural selection theory says that nature, by blind process, favors the traits which allow for survival and reproduction with the least handicap in any given environment.
Here is a case where the sexual preferences of the peahens overturn that natural selection, by selecting cocks most handicapped by a most enormous and colorful tail.
So the question then becomes, why the peahens who mated for more practical reasons of camouflage and fleetness of foot did not prevail statistically over their sisters, so heavily influenced by fashion? If the Darwinian selection can be overturned by sexual selection, how does Darwinian selection create organisms whose mating preferences are governed by sexual selection? Why do peahens select mates with gaudy plumage, but she-crows do not?
The Theory of Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming is likewise an hypothesis not borne out by empirical observations, based on computer modeling. There is more evidence in favor of Global Warming than there is of Phlogiston, but it is safe to say that the continued controversy is a political matter, not a scientific one. It is also an exploded theory and the science is settled, but, ironically, its advocates advertise that the science is settled to the opposite of its real settlement. This is, at best, an example of mass propaganda, at worst an example of mass hysteria.
Certain questions are considered settled because the remaining arguments against are frivolous: flat-earthers are the clearest example, and used as a byword for this.
Nonetheless, no settled question is ever absolutely settled. No empirical knowledge is known to be certain.
Empirical knowledge by its nature is contingent rather than necessary, hence a new observation or a more elegant model can overturn previously well-established theories: see, for example, the change from a geocentric to a heliocentric model, or from a Newtonian model to an Einsteinian.
Hence we speak of scientific “truth” in the weaker sense of the word, as a matter of well-established pragmatic opinion. Scientific theory is always open to doubt.
Please note that well-established doubt, such as the doubts cast on the Big Bang theory by advocates of the steady state theory, are distinct from poorly-established doubt, such as those cast on the findings of geology by young-earth creationists.
Poorly-established here means only poorly established by the available empirical evidence.
I can step outside at night and point at a star whose light left its source before 23 October 4004 BC (Bishop Ussher’s proposed date of creation). It is a theological argument, not an argument about a model of nature, to propose that the light rays were divinely created in transit, and never issued from the star whose image they convey.
No matter how persuasive the theological argument, the empirical evidence is silent on the question of whether the medium carrying empirical evidence has been falsified by divine intervention.
Likewise for dinosaur bones being created as fossils in the ground on the third or fifth day of creation. That is not an empirical model since its verification or falsification depends on a theological argument, not an empirical argument. Any argument about whether empirical evidence is admissible, by its very nature, cannot be settled empirically.
It is not an empirical model, but it is a model, just as Thales or Empedocles proposed models.
Truth in the strong sense of the word, truth beyond doubt, applies only to matters of geometry, arithmetic, formal logic, metaphysics and other purely logical statements which cannot be denied without a logical self contradiction.
Science is always open to doubt, with the one exception that metaphysical principles that apply to all models, if they are logically necessary preconditions of empirical knowledge, are certain. To doubt the law of cause and effect is logically incoherent.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
