
Good luck with that, but anyway… Nicholas Maxwell, author of The Metaphysics of Science and Aim-Oriented Empiricism: A Revolution for Science and Philosophy, blames Newton and the focus on evidence as self-justifying when scientists don’t really behave that way. He offers physics as an example:
If physics, in particular, persistently accepts unified theories only, even though endlessly many disunified rivals are available that fit the available facts just as well, or even better, this must mean, whether it is acknowledged or not, that physics makes a big, highly problematic assumption about the nature of the Universe. It means that physics makes the big assumption: the Universe is such that all disunified theories are false. There is some kind of underlying unity in nature. This assumption is implicitly accepted as a part of scientific knowledge since theories that conflict with it – those that are disunified – are rejected (or not even considered) whatever their empirical success might be. This assumption of underlying unity is, however, accepted independently of evidence, even in a sense in violation of evidence (in that it clashes with endlessly many disunified theories even more empirically successful than the theories we accept). That contradicts what I have called ‘the Newtonian conception of science’, standard empiricism.
The conclusion is inescapable: science cannot proceed without making, implicitly or explicitly, a persistent metaphysical assumption of unity – ‘metaphysical’ because it is too imprecise to be verified or falsified by evidence. The current orthodox conception of science, inherited from Newton, and still taken for granted by scientists today, that science must appeal only to evidence, and must not make metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the universe independently of evidence, is untenable, and must be rejected.Nicholas Maxwell, “Natural Philosophy Redux” at Aeon
He offers further analysis and some alternatives but he is certainly right about one thing. Cosmologists do not like the universe the evidence suggests and they often don’t want to admit that the infinity of the multiverse is philosophically preferred to, say, fine-tuning and the Big Bang as a unique event.
Beyond that, though, many have complained about the stupid attacks on philosophy sponsored by, for example, the late Stephen Hawking. You’d think smart people would realize that everyone always proceeds from a philosophy, whether they acknowledge it or not.
The main disadvantage of not acknowledging the philosophy from which we proceed is that we assume it to be “the correct view of all right-thinking people.” That’s almost a definition of narrow-mindedness. It’s worth considering that the many Darwinians who can’t get with the times about problems in evolution may in fact have precisely that problem: They have never asked themselves why they are attached to a picture of the world of life that does not appear to be correct or complete.
See also: Stephen Hawking’s views outside science were more noted than notable
and
Cosmos Host Tyson Announces That Philosophy Can Mess You Up
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