The Danger of Thinking Science Alone Leads to True Knowledge

A Dangerous Idea

It's extremely important to realize that the idea of science alone produces true knowledge is very dangerous. We give people authority to act in public because we assume they have the relevant knowledge. Dentists cannot put their hands in our mouths, but not insurance salesmen, because we assume the dentist does not just have a bunch of very deep emotional beliefs about molars, we assume that he actually knows something about molars.

These are questions that can't be answered by science because they're normative questions.

We give people the right to write our contracts, to sell houses, to operate on us, and so on because we attribute to them not a bunch of beliefs, but knowledge of the relevant subject.

If you limit knowledge to science, then you must see if all of the important questions of life can be answered by science—questions like Is there a God? Is there a soul? Is there life after death? Is there right and wrong and what is right and what is wrong? What should the state do and what should be out of bounds for the state to do? Who ought I vote for? What should education be like?

These are questions that can't be answered by science because they're normative questions. That means that if science is the sole source of the knowledge we have of reality, then all the things that matter to us most are left in the area of emotion. It will turn out, then, that the makeup man is more important than the speech writer.

J. P. Moreland (PhD, University of Southern California) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He is an author of, contributor to, or editor of over ninety books, including The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters.