When I took Mason's class on the philosophy of the natural sciences, I was introduced to David Hume's ideas for substantially the first time. For those who are even less familiar with him than I, he rejected deduction as a from of knowing. Just because dropping a pencil has resulted in it falling to the ground fifteen zillion times, he said, you cannot know that it will do so the next. I, in my simplicity and ignorance, rejected this. Common sense tells me that deduction is valid, that I do know that the pencil will fall.
Lately I have been reading Galileo's Mistake, by Wade Rowland, which Ederlyn and Joe gave me for Christmas. This wonderful look at that sad time in our Church's history provides me with the justification for my dismissal of Hume. Strictly speaking, he is absolutely right. For both the scientific realist and the Catholic, the value of deduction comes as an article of faith. For the scientific realist, or empiricist, it is faith in the rationality of the world, and, secondly, in the reality of math-based explanations of that world. Neither of those are, strictly speaking, provable. You cannot demonstrate in sound logic that our theories do in fact describe anything real. You can only, accurately, assert that they are useful. The pragmatist is satisfied with this (as I am not a philosopher, my use of all of these terms overlaps some naturally). For the Catholic, it follows that the God who gave us our minds intended us to use them to learn of Him through His works. It follows that God, Who is Truth, would not create a world to deceive us. For both then, science is a path to knowledge; for the scientific rationalist, the only path. The difference is that while the scientific rationalist professes that science produces no laws, only theories, the Catholic actually believes that. And understands that he can rarely know, without God's aid, what the actual reality is. A practical example is Newton's Laws of Motion. They are not really laws. They are not even really true. General Relativity does not augment them, it replaces them. General Relativity is not more simple, it is more complex, you cannot teach it to the high school student the way you can Newton's Laws. But Newton's Laws do not describe reality, they just happen to be useful, to provide sufficiently accurate results, in many day to day, real life situations. Thus science, which would have said it knew the reality of the universe before discovering that Newton must be at least partially wrong, is not and cannot be the final arbiter of what is. It does not know, it merely knows that this or that math equation "saves the facts" (using an ancient phrase), that is, it provides a useful and adequate explanation for the set of facts they wish to explain (or it does not, but it comes closer than any other, reference the struggle to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics). What science does give us is models of how things might work, that provide more or less useful results, but for all we can verify them, have no relationship to reality. What then does provide certainty about reality? What grounds our observation, and lets us find fact with it? It is our faith, our faith in the Church, in God, in His love for us in furtherance of which He has made an orderly existence that we might learn to know Him from His work. An existence whose design cries out that it must have been created by its precision, the incredible odds against our being here to observe it.
On a side note, this would also explain the incredible energy and success of science since the protestant reformation. Lacking any base, any certainty, science has searched unceasingly for a theory about which it could say "Yes! We can now explain everything," because man is not built for the uncertainty in which they have left us. The need to make sense, to find order in the apparent chaos drives men forward down whatever path they think left to them, seeking for what God alone could provide. Perhaps this has benefited us as society, but I wonder at the tally sheet. We have more time saving devices, but less free time for friends and family. Longer lives, but still death comes too soon, finds us with things unfinished, undone. We suffer less from disease, but more from moral decay. At what cost our "progress"? Mind you, I have no answers. The life of the Middle Ages was no picnic, I would not go back to that time. I would not go back to the fear of loosing the wife I may someday have with each child God might choose to bless us with. Of loosing my life, the lives of children I may have, in wars closer to home than those we have today. Of seeing the devastation wrought by plague. Selfish of me, when war is on the front door step of many in our world, when things like AIDS ravishes a continent, but such is life, such am I.