A Rational Cosmology: The Errors of Empiricism-Positivism

Essay I

This is Essay I of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

Contemporary science is often mired in a terrible superstition, which forms a glaring breach between its findings and the conclusions and observations ubiquitously available to any man whose five senses function properly.

This superstition is not a belief in witches or cosmic spirits, but rather a new form of denying the evidence of man's most common faculties. It has been nurtured by a long line of philosophers, but its greatest emergence was seen during the twentieth century, as modern science increasingly succumbed to subjectivism, unverifiable theorizing, the dominance of "intuition," groupthink, and ultra-specialization which detached scientists from any findings or interactions outside their bizarrely narrow fields.

This superstition can be called many names, but its most comprehensive, and the one that shall be used throughout this treatise, is empiricism-positivism.

Very mildly put, empiricism-positivism holds, as its fundamental tenet, that any assertion, no matter how general, depends on some particular observation. The empiricist-positivist will claim that one cannot make any conclusions about space or time without first studying advanced quantum mechanics. He will claim that one cannot make any generalizations about human nature independent of the historical context of any given time period.

As a corollary to this inseparable attachment of empiricism-positivism to some specific observations, this doctrine holds that man cannot be certain about anything, since, because all conclusions depend on specific observations, some future observation always has the chance of refuting one's present appraisal of anything whatsoever!