My recent paper, “Getting Lost with the Menataculus,” (available on the writings page of this website) makes some points about the relevance and irrelevance of appeals to contemporary science in philosophical discussions. I point out that the mere fact that beginningless, naturalistic cosmological models exist is irrelevant to determining whether the scientific evidence supports the thesis that the universe has a beginning or not. Only scientific theories that have made confirmed empirical predictions are admissible evidence in the court of best explanation.
But in my paper I included two very different sorts of arguments under the term “appeals to authority.” Really, appeals to science can be one or the other of two different sorts of argument. Such appeals can be relatively strong abductive arguments, that is, arguments to the best explanation. To the extent that a scientific theory has made empirical predictions that are later confirmed by experiment and observation, it has strong abductive weight. And the more confirmed empirical predictions it has made the stronger its weight. Appeals to science in philosophical discussions can only have strong abductive weight when they are appeals to strongly confirmed theories. And the various appeals to beginningless cosmological models that Linford makes in criticism of theistic cosmological arguments are not of this kind.
The other kind of appeal to science is an argument from authority in the correct sense: scientists who are at the top of their field are smart people and their opinions should be given serious consideration. An argument to scientific authority carries more weight if there is a consensus among scientists on the topic. Most of Linford’s appeals to contemporary cosmological models do not meet this requirement.
But as the great logician Boethius said, argument from authority are the weakest form of argument. Even when there is a consensus among scientists it is often just due to an intellectual fad. Anyone who spends time studying the history of science and of thought in general will be convinced of the weakness of arguments from authority. But I say “weakness,” not “invalidity,” for such arguments are not of no value. Rather, they have a very small value.
One might worry about my own appeal to the GRW theory of quantum mechanics later in the paper. This theory has made empirical predictions but so far they have not been confirmed. That would be a misunderstanding of my argument, but I should have been more clear. I have no attachment to GRW theory or the Diosi-Penrose theory, or any theory in particular. Nor am I even making an abductive scientific argument at that point in the paper. Rather, I am considering the current state of empirically confirmed quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Conceptual analysis shows that the only plausible philosophical interpretation of the current state of science is that wave function collapse is objective. I am making a philosophical, conceptual argument that some form of objective collapse is necessary. GRW theory and the Diosi-Penrose theory are just two specific proposals out there for objective collapse, and they have value as illustrations. I am not making a scientific argument with them, neither an abductive one nor an argument from authority.