This is the third instalment in an ongoing series of articles on the history and philosophy of science. See here for the first and second articles in this series.

Religion is dogmatic. Science is not. So goes the common narrative.

However, science has various mechanisms in place to protect its theories from falsification. Science is resistant to change. Science is dogmatic. In order to enunciate this point further, let us analyse a comical incident in contemporary history.

The Newtonian model generated predictive power in a manner that is unrivalled in the history of science. Newton’s laws were applicable in all areas of the universe. However, for a while, there was growing unrest within the scientific community when peculiarities in Mercury’s orbit could not be accounted for by Newtonian physics. By 1859,  Urbain Le Verrier’s calculations had provided definitive proof that Mercury’s perihelion precession—the gradual rotation of the point in its orbit closest to the Sun—showed an advancement that simply could not be explained by Newton’s laws of gravity and motion. In simple terms, specific aspects regarding Mercury’s orbit couldn’t be explained by Newtonian physics.

Did scientists scramble to declare Newton’s theory of physics incorrect? What happens when anomalies are encountered by a scientific theory? Do scientists hang up the gloves and hasten to falsify a theory?

Quite the contrary actually.

Rather than attributing the flaw to Newtonian physics, in a desperate attempt to explain these irreconcilable differences, scientists resorted to fabricating a hypothetical planet between Mercury and the sun. Not only was this phantom planet theorised, there were even many searches conducted to try and find it. This actually then even led to multiple purported sightings of this phantom planet. One such claimed observation, by a French astronomer, led Le Verrier to announce that the long sought after planet, which he named “Vulcan,” had, at long last, finally been discovered. Accounts of an inter-mercurial planet were corroborated by experienced observers like Watson and Swift, who, between them, had discovered 20 asteroids and also had many comets named after them. In this way, Newton’s theory of gravitation was resurrected from the brink of certain death.

The search for Vulcan, which had consumed the minds of the scientific community for half a century, was ultimately rendered obsolete with the advent of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einsteinian physics could explain Mercury’s orbit without the need for Vulcan, this external inter-mercurial planet. Today, Vulcan as a planet has been ruled out entirely by scientific consensus—it had simply never existed.

But how could this be? What of all the purported sightings?

We’re not speaking of cells under a microscope or tiny subatomic particles. What we’re talking about is an entire planetary entity observed by multiple credible scientists.

Two pertinent questions emerge from this incident:

1. Met with irrefutable proof that Newton was wrong, why didn’t scientists come out and reject Newtonian theory in its entirety?
2. How did all of these scientists somehow manage to “see” a phantom planet that never existed to begin with?

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How to Revive Dead Theories: Epistemic Holism

The average person has been indoctrinated into believing that scientists just “follow the data.” They think that, as soon as said “data” contradicts the current scientific theory, the theory will be cast aside and rejected. This is simply not true.

This story is a demonstration of how epistemic holism can revive dead scientific theories.

Epistemic holism is the idea that a theory must be looked at as a “whole”; no single observation or empirical test, by itself, can falsify a theory. Scientific theory cannot be tested in isolation because it is embedded in an entire web of beliefs. The problem with this, however, is that it allows theories that should have otherwise died to instead be resurrected. This is because you can always resort to making a few tweaks in another part of your web of beliefs in order to prevent a theory from being refuted. Mercury’s orbit doesn’t make sense? It’s not because Newton was wrong—certainly not. There must be some other planet whose gravity we simply haven’t accounted for.

In this way, the scientist is able to stubbornly hold onto his fixed beliefs. In this way, science is resistant to change and is dogmatic. Only when a significant number of anomalies are accrued and a heavy enough assault is mounted against a given scientific theory, do we achieve what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “model crisis.” It is only in such a crisis that new theories will be constructed.

How to “See” Phantom Planets: The Theory-Ladenness to All Scientific Observations

Look at the following image and tell me what you see:


When I posed this very question to my brother, he said he saw a mosquito. Others report merely seeing a collection of grey blobs.

My eyes, on the other hand, see a neuro synaptic cleft between which two neurons are communicating. I see a complex system of neurotransmitters and neuronal vesicles.

However, there is an undeniable problem. Years of scientific education have thoroughly indoctrinated me into a certain theory of neurophysiology, language, and presuppositions about how this microscopic world operates. When I look at this image, I bring all these assumptions to the table with me. I do not peer with objective eyes. Rather, these eyes of mine are preprogrammed with meaning.

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Another way of saying this is that what I am observing when I look at this image is not a pure statement of fact. My observation is theory-laden. I see through the lens of the model of neurophysiology that is currently accepted. We can go further and say that all observations are theory-laden. Even something as simple as looking through a microscope in order to observe bacteria under a microscope requires trust in the microscope’s capacity to generate reliable images, and we can only do this if we presuppose an entire theory of light and optics, upon which the microscope is built.

This theory-ladenness to all observations will help us understand how scientists somehow managed to “see” a phantom planet that never even existed.

The popular belief is that scientists just “follow the data.” This view is patently false, because it assumes that the scientist is an objective observer looking into the universe. Our earlier exercise of looking at the image of the synapse demonstrates how this is impossible, because all observations are filtered through the lens of the dominant scientific paradigm. This theory-ladenness to all observations means that the eye of the scientific observer is simply not objective.

This is why it is possible to “find” anything you are looking for. This is how half a century of scientists somehow “saw” an entire planetary entity like Vulcan, which never existed. It would be incorrect and far too simplistic to conclude that they all fabricated their claims of seeing Vulcan. When Mercury’s peculiar orbit couldn’t be explained, scientists who were operating under a Newtonian paradigm presupposed that there must be an external inter-mercurial planet which was having a gravitational effect, in accordance with Newtonian law, that was not being accounted for. This presupposition was preloaded into all the resulting experimentation and observations of celestial bodies, and this culminated into the multiple purported sightings of Vulcan.

Conclusion

Last time, we took a look at the pessimistic meta induction argument in order to demonstrate the weakness of science as a method of describing reality. Mostly, we looked at examples of tiny ontological entities (phlogiston, aether, etc.) that scientists invent and abandon which are not visible to the human eye. The story of Vulcan is a particularly damning account of how entire planetary entities can be theorised, “observed,” and abandoned.

It is another demonstration of why pre-modern Muslim scholars, such as those in Baghdad, categorised scientific knowledge as ‘ilm al-ẓann (speculative knowledge).

It is quite impossible for the eye of the human observer to be truly objective. This is yet another reason why human rationality simply cannot be the ultimate criterion for determining truth; we need an epistemology sourced in true objectivity—we need the Qur’an and Sunnah. Only the knowledge of Allah can encompass absolute Truth and objectivity. If all observations, by nature, must be theory-laden, then our lens, i.e., the Islamic paradigm, is the one that is undoubtedly supreme. It is therefore quite ironic that we find some Muslims in the contemporary era who are overawed by science and abandon divine revelation in favour of secular atheistic scientific theories.

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