from Grossmont College @    http://www.grossmont.edu/johnoakes/s110h/Limits%20of%20Science1.ppt
It's a PowerPoint presentation.  You'll have to cut and paste the web address and follow the instructions on the screen to get there.

1

►The world is real.

►The real world is knowable and comprehensible.

►There are laws that govern the real world.

►Those laws are knowable and comprehensible.

►Those laws don't [radically] change according to place or time, since the early stages of the big bang.

►Nature is understandable.

►The rules of logic are valid.

►Language is adequate to describe the natural realm
►Human senses are reliable.

►Mathematical rules are descriptive of the physical world.

►Unexplained things can be used to explain other phenomenon (e.g. gravity is thus fare unexplained but it is used to explain the movement of planets and the bending of light.)
Observable phenomenon provide knowledge about unobservable phenomenon.

►True, physical universe exists.

►Universe is primarily orderly.

►The principles that define the functioning of the universe can be discovered.

►All ideas are tentative, potentially changed by new information.

►Nature is orderly, i.e. regularity, pattern, and structure.

►Laws of nature describe order.

►We can know nature.  Individuals are part of nature.

►Individuals and social exhibit order; may be studied the same as nature.

►All phenomena have natural causes.  Scientific explanations of human behavior oppose religious, spiritualistic, and magical explanations.

►Nothing is self evident.  Truth claims must be demonstrated objectively.

►Knowledge is derived from acquisition of experience empirically through the senses directly or indirectly.

►Knowledge is superior to ignorance.

5

►Assumptions are accepted without proof.

►They form the basis of all scientific thinking.

Science can't answer questions about value.  For example, there is no scientific answer to the questions, "Which of the flowers is prettier?" or "which smells worse, a skunk or a skunk cabbage?"  And of course, there's the more obvious example, "Which is the more valuable, one ounce of gold or one ounce of steel?"  Our culture places value on the element gold, but if what you need is something to build a skyscraper with, gold, a very soft metal, is pretty useless.  So there's no way to scientifically determine value.

Limitations of Science

Science can't answer questions of morality.  The problem of deciding good and bad, right and wrong, is outside the determination of science.  This why expert scientific witnesses can never help us solve the dispute over abortion: all a scientist can tell you is what is going on as a fetus develops; the question of whether it is right or wrong to terminate those events is determined by cultural and social rules -- in other words, morality.  The science can't help here.

Limitations of Science

Science can't help us with questions about the supernatural.  The prefix "super" means "above."  So supernatural means "above (or beyond) the natural."  The toolbox of a scientist contains only the natural laws of the universe; supernatural questions are outside their reach.

Just to make the point as clear as possible, these assumptions of science, like all such assumptions cannot be demonstrated to be correct as #5 correctly states.

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