There are limitations in contemporary science that are often undervalued.

It is commonly accepted that science is the only valid method for explaining reality.

Falsification principle

If a certain claim cannot be falsified, the subject of that claim cannot be proven. According to this view, stemming from the work of Karl Popper, there is only one reality existing: material reality.

Let me explain: The falsification principle, in short, claims that scientific theory should make predictions that can be tested, and the theory should be rejected if these predictions are shown not to be correct. Even though Thomas Kuhn opposed this principle with reason, it was Popper who won, at least for now. This principle, strictly speaking, subsumes a single reality and a single linear path towards the truth of that reality. Such a reality should be finally solid, unbreakable, because it is falsifiable. It is because we never know 100% what this reality is, such a reality is stable, material. There is no place for spooky spiritual inconsistencies in such a reality.

Reductivism

Another claim of contemporary science is that whatever we perceive can be finally reduced to the laws of physics, and physics deals with cosmic stuff that is matter, that is, energy.

Matter/energy is all that is, and is not only described in full by the laws of physics, be it Newtonian, explaining human-size reality, the theory of relativity, upgrading Newtonian physics for cosmic sizes, or particle physics, upgrading Newtonian and electromagnetic physics to particle-size reality. Reality is reality only if something can be ultimately reduced to matter.

They know, but…

However, it would be wrong to accuse science or scientists, all of them, of being such reductionists.

It is, namely, inevitable that those who push their research, and especially thought experiments, to their limits will bump into the dead end of reductivism. All of them, from Newton to Hawking, come to the point, to phenomena, that cannot be explained by the theory that they have developed to that moment. It is true that only a few of them openly admit the possibility that reality cannot be reduced to physical reality, and even fewer then run such a premise further into some kind of non-materialistic physics; the majority of them take non-explainable phenomena as something that will eventually be filled up by some new, upgraded version of reductivist physics. Even Einstein, who declared himself an agnostic or even a pantheist, wrote:

“…But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive…” (Einstein, 2013, 33)

My point is that serious scientists must believe in the scientific method, which can work only on the reductivist premise, but at the same time know that reductivism fails. They believe, thus they are religious, as Einstein concluded; however, they cannot go against reducibility, since that would disprove the very method upon which science rests. As believers, they are true scientists. As rational beings, they belong to scientism, fake science.

We should thus separate science from scientism. The latter are reductivists. The majority of them come from other fields, not from physics; many of them come from social studies and the humanities. As much as it is hard to imagine a philosopher reductivist, they exist. But more on that in other posts.

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Einstein, A. (2013). The Human Side. Princeton University Press, Princeton