Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Navigating by the stars isn’t science

Plotting  celestial bodies and using them to find one’s way about is no more ‘science’ than is using a road map – and can lead to constructs that are far from ‘scientific’

A great deal has been made by various commentators of the forebears of the Maori having navigated by the stars and that this is an instance of science. Not so.

The word ‘science’ is a bit of a problem. Until the late 19th century, the term as widely used by the educated classes referred to any systematic body of knowledge. It still does in French, hence we see names of university departments containing monikers such as ‘sciences historiques’ which strike someone steeped in modern English as oxymoronic.

Science as we use the term in the anglophone world today refers to an epistemological process – a style of reasoning that follows certain rules of engagement to determine what is true. In the case of modern science, the ground rule is that of empiricism – if it can’t be observed and/or measured, it ain’t science. Thus any assertions that invoke supernatural agencies are not treated as scientific claims.

The great philosopher of science Karl Popper enigmatically stated that, “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” His view was that all scientific truth begins as something rather unscientific, such as a widely held belief, or a hunch. However, the assertion must be empirically testable. If it fails the test, it should be abandoned; if it passes the test, it is on the way to becoming a scientific truth. This line of reasoning follows closely on the heels of the Cartesian approach (after the 17^th century philosopher René Descartes) which stresses the need for testable hypotheses when determining the truth or falseness of an assertion or belief.

In the case of lab science, this approach translates into the classical scientific method in which hypotheses are tested experimentally. The hypothesis takes the form of a prediction as to what will happen during the experiment. The classical scientific method has to be modified when dealing with events that are non-replicable such as we encounter in palaeontology, cosmology, evolutionary biology and the like. But the focus remains on empirical data: a hypothesis stands or falls on the basis of what can be observed and/or measured. There is no allowance made for gods, spirits, etc as causative agents.

Popper also proposed that any assertion claiming to be scientific must be falsifiable: it must be possible for a test of the claim to come up negative leading to a rejection of the hypothesis. To labour the point, here again we see the importance of the strictly empirical approach to scientific truth.

Where does all this leave the ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ domain? Scientific reasoning is not the only game in town – ethical reasoning, for instance, follows its own rules and they are not derived from empiricism. But what happens when scientific reasoning comes up against counterclaims arising from reasoning from other domains?

The doctrine of deism which emerged in the late 17^th century posited that a god/God had created the raw material of which the universe is made and the ‘laws’ that it operates by, and then stepped back and did not intervene in its workings. Deism’s big draw card was that it enabled people investigating natural phenomena to restrict themselves to purely natural explanatory models. However, because deism appears to limit the scope of action available to God, it was disapproved of by the Vatican and regarded with suspicion by continental European Protestant authorities; but it caught on strongly in Britain. Prominent deists include Newton, Davy, Watt, Lyell and Rutherford (and indeed the young Charles Darwin, although he identified as an agnostic in later life).

The deist mindset remains detectable in the conceptual dualism exhibited by many people who ‘believe in science’ as well as having religious beliefs: in Stephen Jay Gould’s words, the two involve “non-overlapping magisteria”. But as the term implies, this will only work  if each side respects the other’s turf. Once the religious attempt to impose their magisterial norms on science, science will kick up a fuss and retaliate. This is what happened with attempts to inject biblical creation myths into science in several Western countries over several decades, and is what is now happening here in NZ with zealots trying to inject Maori myths and superstitions into science. It is little wonder that people such as Richard Dawkins get a bit upset over this!

Science is not a set of ‘beliefs’ but a reasoning process that follows strictly empirical rules. This is why it is so wrong to compare the beliefs arising within an ethnoscience with scientific postulates as what matters is not what those current postulates are but how they were derived. Ethnoscience, incorporating as it does supernatural agents, does not meet the criteria of empiricism and falsifiability to be categorised as ‘science' as we understand the term in 21^st century English. Those who harp on about their ancestors using the stars to navigate the Pacific simply haven’t got a clue what science is.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a retired academic who taught at universities in Papua New Guinea, Botswana and Lebanon. He has conducted research on Melanesian ethnoscience and its interactions with science. Feedback welcome at bv_54@hotmail.com