In the philosophy of
science there is something called the miracle argument, which argues
that the “predictive success of science” implies that scientific
theories must mainly be true, or else this “predictive success”
would be a miracle. But is it correct to claim that mainstream
science has done very well at predicting discoveries about life, mind, and
nature?
How good is the "crystal ball" of mainstream science?
Things Mainstream
Scientists Failed to Predict
First, let us look at some
important discoveries about life, mind, and nature that mainstream
scientists failed to predict. One such thing is the fact that we live
in an expanding universe that apparently began in a Big Bang billions
of years ago. I have never heard of any materialist scientist who
predicted any such thing prior to 1920. Scientists around 1900
preferred to believe in a universe that had existed forever, an idea
that removes any problem about how to explain a universe's origin.
Even until 1931, Einstein believed that the universe was static. And
in 1931 a leading cosmologist named Arthur Eddington stated, “The
notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to
me.”
Another important
discovery about the universe is that its laws and fundamental
constants seem to be very fine-tuned, having a long set of
“coincidences” necessary for the existence of intelligent life.
Slowly emerging between the years 1970 and 2000, this discovery was
not predicted by any scientist that I am aware of.
Another cosmic discovery
was a set of observations showing that ordinary matter and the laws
of nature as we understand them are insufficient to account for the
behavior of galaxies. This discovery was not anticipated or
predicted by any scientist that I know of. Playing “catch up
ball,” scientists tried to account for this discovery by
introducing the idea of dark matter, and the claim that about 25% of
the universe's matter is this mysterious unobserved type of matter.
But nobody seems to have predicted dark matter beforehand, and dark
matter makes no appearance at all in the standard model of physics.
A recent scientific paper has stated the following:
Nothing
in the pre-existing model (ca. 1970) pointed toward the need for dark
matter or dark energy; the observations that motivated these
hypotheses came as a complete surprise. Nor was the mass
discrepancy—acceleration relation anticipated before it was
established observationally.
Then in the 1990's there
came the discovery that the expansion of the universe was
accelerating. This came as a total surprise to cosmologists, none of
which (to my knowledge) had predicted any such thing. To account for
this fact, cosmologists came up with the idea that most of the
universe's mass-energy was some mysterious thing called dark energy. Such a thing had not been previously predicted by cosmologists. The only relevant
prediction that had been made was the prediction of quantum field
theory that the vacuum of space should be filled with something like
dark energy, but more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 denser than what we
observe in our universe. So there was a prediction of
“denser-than-steel dark energy everywhere,” something radically
different from what we observe, but not any prediction of dark energy
like we seem to have.
Scientists did a poor job
of predicting that airplanes would be invented. The famous scientist
Lord Kelvin said in 1895 that heavier than air machines were
impossible. Eight years later the Wright Brothers made their first
flight. But even after the Wright Brothers had made quite a few successful test flights of airplanes,
Scientific American published a report trying to provoke
skepticism about whether the Wright Brothers were really flying.
Scientists also did a pretty poor job of predicting space flight. Some mainstream scientists ridiculed the
idea that men would one day travel in space, and before World War II very few scientists predicted that manned space travel would happen.
Years before Einstein
wrote a letter to President Roosevelt suggesting that nuclear bombs
might be created, he stated in the early 1930's that there was “not the
slightest indication” that nuclear power would be obtainable. At about the same time the leading nuclear scientist Rutherford said, "Anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine."
Turning to the mind and
life, we find some important things that mainstream science
failed to predict. During the past 50 years many astonishing cases
have been discovered in which minds somehow keep on functioning well
despite enormous brain damage. Such cases (sometimes described as
cases of brain plasticity or brain resiliency) were not predicted by
mainstream scientists. The phenomenon of near-death experiences was
not predicted by any mainstream scientist before it was reported.
Exciting discoveries have
been made in recent years about the epigenome, suggesting that
in rare cases certain acquired characteristics can be inherited through what is called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Far from
predicting such a thing, mainstream scientists told us countless
times in previous decades that the inheritance of acquired
characteristics could never occur.
Things Mainstream
Scientists Predicted That Didn't Happen
Now let's look at some
things that mainstream scientists have long predicted, but which
haven't come true.
It was predicted in the
nineteenth century by scientists that innumerable transitional
fossils would be discovered, showing the evolution of one species to
another. The number of such fossils that have been discovered is a
matter of debate, but it seems that there have been far fewer such
fossils found than predicted – so few that it is often claimed that
very few transitional fossils have been found. The same
scientists predicted that we would find a tree of life showing a
tree-like progression from the simplest forms to modern forms. But
current attempts to map such a tree run into great difficulties, and
the latest versions of attempts to create this “tree of life”
show some weird shape that does not resemble a tree.
It was predicted by
scientists that fruit fly experiments covering hundreds of
generations would show evidence of a new species emerging, or at
least evidence of some kind of evolutionary improvement. Despite all
kinds of artificial help to increase the likelihood of something
dramatic emerging, such experiments have not shown any new species
emerging. One scientific study covered 600 fruit-fly generations,
and reported nothing more dramatic than a 20% shorter gestation
period, which isn't even an improvement. The study's abstract
concludes by stating “unconditionally advantageous alleles rarely
arise, are associated with small net fitness gains or cannot fix
because selection coefficients change over time,” all of which is
disappointing for someone hoping to find good evidence for Darwinian
assumptions.
It was predicted
repeatedly by biologists that most of human DNA would be found to be
worthless “junk DNA.” But contrary to such a prediction, the ENCODE
project found that at least 80% of human DNA has some functional
purpose.
For decades astronomers
made it sound as if radio communication with extraterrestrials would
succeed by our time. In the 1960's and 1970's scientists such as Carl
Sagan were making it sound as if we could expect that radio contact
with extraterrestrials would occur within a few decades. It's now 2017,
and no such radio contact has been made.
For at least 60 years, scientists
have been speaking as if solving the problem of the origin of life
was just around the corner. It's now 2017, and it now seems more
difficult than ever to explain how life originated.
Mainstream physicists
predicted that the Large Hadron Collider would produce evidence for
the popular physics theory known as supersymmetry. But the results
from the Large Hadron Collider have done no such thing. Mainstream
physicists also predicted around 1980 that evidence for
grand-unification theories (GUT theories) would be produced in a few
decades. Such evidence has not turned up.
Mainstream scientists also
repeatedly predicted that the Human Genome Project would produce a
huge bonanza for medicine. As the project was going on in the 1990's,
we were told countless times that the project would produce enormous
progress in fighting diseases and cancer. Such a prediction followed
from the reductionist assumption that DNA is not just one secret of
life, but the secret of life, and that our biology can be
almost entirely explained in terms of DNA. But such assumptions are
wrong, and the predictions of a gigantic medical bonanza did not come
true. The medical benefits from the Human Genome Project have been
surprisingly slim.
Scientists predicted that
the Human Genome Project would identify about 100,000 genes in the
human genome. But the actual number of genes found was only about
20,000.
Another wrong prediction
repeatedly made by mainstream scientists is the prediction that
computers would become as smart as humans by about the year 2000 or
2020. Page 12 of the paper here gives a graph showing that 8 experts
predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by about
the year 2000, and that 8 other experts predicted that computers
would have human level intelligence by the year 2020 (something
incredibly unlikely to happen in the next few years).
These failed predictions
are due to mistaken materialist assumptions about the mind-body
relationship. If you mistakenly believe that the human mind is merely
the product of chemistry and electricity, you may make absurdly
overoptimistic claims that a mechanical system can reproduce
something like human mentality. The paper cited above has an example of an absurdly
wrong prediction made under such assumptions. A committee in 1956
predicted that 10 men working for 2 months could produce major
progress in mechanically reproducing human mentality, something that
the entire global community has made little progress on in the
subsequent 70 years. Here was what the committee said:
We
propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be
carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover,
New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the
conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence
can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can
be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make
machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds
of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We
think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these
problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together
for a summer.
Conclusion
Mainstream science is good
at making small-scope predictions, such as the prediction that a
particular asteroid will pass a certain number of kilometers from
Earth on a particular day, or the prediction that a certain
biological or chemical reaction will occur if a person ingests a
particular substance. Mainstream science is also fairly good at
predicting future outcomes when there is a known trend such as global
warming which can be simply extrapolated into the future. But when it
comes to predicting what new discoveries about nature are down the
road, it seems that mainstream science is not particularly good. The
crystal ball of mainstream science seems very cloudy indeed.
In the philosophy of
science there is something called the miracle argument, which argues
that the “predictive success of science” implies that scientific
theories must mainly be true, or else this “predictive success”
would be a miracle. This argument is invalid, because the predictive
success level of mainstream science isn't particularly good, and
mainstream science has merely been mediocre in predicting novel
phenomena.
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