STEM
STEM shrinks our imagination-- both in science and in the real world.
In a blast from the past, I had an interchange on X after posting a response to the statement: "STEM isn't a thing." My response: "Science and Math= the study of Natural philosophy, natural history, and Mathematics (a field of philosophy). Technology and engineering= Techne (Greek for craft) which are sophisticated blacksmiths and watchmakers. Two different realms of knowledge jammed together unnaturally."
For me, this was another offhanded post about education. The volume of the responses caught me by surprise. I have a little background in both science and engineering, even though my professional work has long been in business. With this post, it seems I've rejoined friends I haven't seen in 25 years since I worked as an engineer in a tech company. I'm a bit out of place among the science and engineering crowd these days, but there's something familiar about it. Many of those who responded were on board with what I said-- the physicists and mathematicians for the most part. Others were not convinced. Some seemed to think philosophy was siloed in the humanities. Others thought engineering was just an extension of physics.
In college, I had to read "The Odyssey" and some other classics as part of my core. This experience comported with my scientific viewpoint: People were really primitive back then and reading this stuff seemed irrelevant. Science, on the other hand, was eminently relevant. It did things. It revealed things. It made real things happen. There were many similar responses to my X post. I bumped along with this view until about 7 years into my professional career. That's when a group of folks challenged me. They were classical Christian educators.
When considering STEM as a primary source of truth, I'm reminded of an old joke about a drunk looking for his keys under a street light.
A passerby stopped to help. After a while, he asked "Where did you lose them?"
The drunk replied "Down the street."
"Why are we looking here?" inquired the passer by.
"Because this is where the light is" said the drunk.
Somewhere in the mid 1990's, I realized that I was looking to science for answers because it could illuminate things well. The things it illuminated, however, tended to be as shallow as they were concrete. Imagination is the fruit of education. STEM’s fusion of philosophy and application stunts what we imagine to be true.
Classical scholars see knowledge in three spheres: The natural, the intellectual, and the divine. Each of these spheres have a philosophy and a history. Science, in the strict sense, serves only to provide knowledge from nature, and in one limited way, using the scientific method. The scientific method is only a sliver of the discipline of logic.
In Battle for the American Mind, Pete and I described the thought experiment: What is a sphere? One might describe a ball. Or a planet. Science might describe that a sphere based on experiments with and observations of real-world spheres. Euclid described a sphere as "a solid figure, all the points on the surface of which are equidistant from a given point, the center." Notice, this is not derived from the scientific method. Nor is it a math problem. It's logic, in the domain of philosophy. And, it's ideal-- no sphere in the real world could approach the perfection of Euclid's description. "All points" means an infinite number. This definition is as unobtainable as it is precise. Theoretical physics now often enters this realm with its description of, say quantum mechanics. Or string theory. Each uses mathematics, or the primary language of logic, to describe what Euclid would have described with words. Much of the work of Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Newton, Pascal, Kepler, and other "scientists" are part of intellectual history. Most of these men would not have called themselves “scientists” at all. They drew conclusions in the natural world, but they did so from the ideal "forms". They were philosophers who left us a base of knowledge from their work on which we can now build.
Nature may be divided into natural philosophy and natural history. Natural history involves human classifications and observations about nature over time. A bear is in the genus Ursus. Igneous rock is rock that was once molten. Again, this does not use the scientific method. It's human classification and observation. Then we have Natural philosophy. This involves hypothesis. Or a before-thesis. Even the scientific method cannot escape the rhetorical art that it descends from. In the ancient art of rhetoric, you defend a thesis after you've amassed an argument. In science, you defend a thesis after you've hypothesized and experimented to amass an argument. So, the scientific method is really a descendent of the liberal art of Rhetoric! The scientific method, however, is but one narrow form of argument based in uniformitarianism and experimentation in the natural world.
Finally, we approach divine philosophy, sometimes called moral philosophy. The materialist told us we needed to relegate all questions that can't be answered by science to "faith." This is the fallacy of materialism. Divine philosophy and history is knowable, it's just hard. I’m reminded of the drunk and his keys. What is the nature of God? In one respect, logically, we know He's the uncaused cause. What ramifications does this have? One of them is that He cannot be eclipsed by his own creation. Proofs for this are scattered throughout antiquity. And, the reality of divine philosophy is no less real than natural philosophy.
Sometimes, the natural and divine cross. Some time ago, a famous scientist tried to explain string theory. He wasn’t sure it was even science, since its hypothesis was the result of math and the only way to really prove it was to experiment in extra-dimensional space— something we cannot, by definition, really do. If we can’t experiment with it, can we call it science?
So, with the philosophy and history covered within the three spheres, what has science to do with engineering and technology? These are crafts, as I said. They are not about apprehending knowledge, they're about doing things. A watchmaker 200 years ago would be called an engineer today. I'm sure that's what Rolex calls those who design their mechanisms. If an engineer is called upon to build a bridge, math and a knowledge of physics and materials are part of his skill set. This is like a theologian vs. a pastor. Pastors need to know theology, but most pastors reject the idea that they are theologians. The pursuit of knowledge and its application are two different things.
In the case of Archimedes, we have an ancient example of a scientist who applied his knowledge. Archimedes famously invented a mechanism to elevate water. He was a natural philosopher who used his discoveries to build some impressive tools. But, does this automatically mean that one is the extension of the other?
The danger of making STEM "a thing" is that it turns Science and Math naturally into handmaidens of Engineering and Technology. We start to see science as primarily a path to application instead of knowledge. We start to see math as a tool for technologists and engineers to apply rather than to increase our knowledge. The departments get intermixed. And, math and science are enslaved to application.
If you go to Europe today, you will find natural history museums. If you read a book about Newton, you'll find he thought of himself as a “natural philosopher.” If you ask a tour guide who designed Chartres Cathedral, or Notre Dame Cathedral, you will be told "we don't know" because the tradesmen who designed it were not named. Who built the Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal? Even that late in history, the Army Corps of Engineers are credited. Why the army? Because engineering has historically been a martial art. The idea of STEM is foreign to the historical divisions between knowledge and application. These divisions are part of why the West is as successful as it is.
The whole STEM debate is a telling outcome of a world narrowed, confined, and abbreviated by a utilitarian culture with a very small vision. I pray we will someday return to knowledge (philosophy) and application (craft) as they served the West, in separate categories, for more than two millennia.