Every science has limitations

Every science has limitations.

Take, for instance, physics:

1. The enterprise of physics is to explain physical states in terms of other physical states. It is outside the remit of physics to explain why any physical states exist at all. (1/)

2. Physics explains physical states in terms of other physical states by recourse to "laws" of physics. But it does not explain what these so-called laws are; nor why the cosmos follows these laws (rather than other laws or no laws at all). It takes laws for granted. (2/)

3. Physics expresses the physical states it seeks to explain and explain by, and its laws, in the language of mathematics. It takes mathematics for granted, not explaining what mathematics is, not why the cosmos is mathematically describable. (3/)

4. Physics observes, describes, and explains universals: eg 'force', 'mass', 'acceleration', 'electron', 'spin', etc. The existence of universals is taken for granted. What universals are and how the cosmos possesses them is beyond its remit. (4/)

5. Much of physics concerns things which are not directly observable (eg subatomic particles, fields, etc). Physics works by abstracting out of reality its quantitative features, and then developing mathematical models to describe and explain these features. (5/)

When physics does this with things which are directly observable, there's no problem.

If eg the heights and masses of the persons sitting in a plane are abstracted out of them and employed in an engineering model, no one would think what is "really" in the plane just the (6/)

heights and masses and not the people themselves, even though the model only makes reference to these heights and masses but not the people.

But when it comes to things which aren't directly observable, we often just assume that the objects of the mathematical model (7/)

are the objects themselves and not just abstractions of certain features of them.

This problem is compounded by the fact that physics often deals with structures rather than entities in themselves. (8/)

We confuse a description of how (quantitative abstractions of) entities interact with each other for the entities themselves. (9/)

6. Physics assumes it is analysing mind-independent features of an external world. That there is a mind-independent external world, and that we can have veridical access of it, and the nature of that access are taken for granted and not explored. (10/)

There are many more things that physics, given the very nature of its objects of enquiry and the perspective by which it analyses them - by which it is *definitionally* physics and possesses the questions, methods, and answers it does - must take from outside of itself. (11/)

The same can be said for every other science.

(Of course, the boundaries between sciences might not always be stable: but that doesn't defeat the point.) (12/)

Every science takes as assumptions what other sciences establish as their conclusions: metaphysics and mathematics supply their conclusions to physics, which physics takes as assumptions, and then the conclusions of physics are taken by engineering etc as assumptions. (13/)

We can draw a distinction between ontology and epistemology.

In the the order of ontology, classical theists posit that there must exist an entity which explains all other entities whilst explaining itself, in order to have any entities and any explanations for them at all.(14/)

Could something analogous be said for epistemology? That, in order to have any science (and therefore any substantive knowledge) at all, there must be a science which supplies the requisite principles all other sciences take for granted whilst supplying its own principles? (15/)

Perhaps a hierarchial system, in which one science at the top is able to justify its own principles internally, and from there derive conclusions which serve as premises for the next level down of sciences, and so on all the way down? (16/)

If so, what would the relationship be between the order of ontology and the order of epistemology?

Would the self-explanatory science correspond to the self-explanatory entity (ie God)?

If such a science exists, this seems likely: (17/)

Metaphysics is almost certainly the most fundamental science, and it is the science which (inter alia) studies God.

Allahu 'alam. (18/18)