Eighteenth century natural philosophy - thanks to men like Hume and Newton - seemed to address the previous science's problem - that is the science of Aristotle - by avoiding messy speculations about causes and unobservable phenomenon. Instead it took more of a "just the facts, ma'am" approach to science. As Stokes writes: "By sticking to cool reason and sober observation, Newton and his colleagues...seemed to avoid dogmatic speculation while simultaneously eliminating the subjective influences of worldviews and biases." The thought here is that by taking the human factor out of science (i.e., subjectivity), true knowledge could be known, understood, and universally accepted. Oh, if it were only that easy.
For Hume (and the new scientists),knowing can come only from sense perception (what we can observe; Hume called this "matter of fact") and, he added, "relations of ideas"; for example, we can know that 2+2=4 without appealing to our sense perception. I can know that "bachelors are unmarried males" without checking the entire world and asking every bachelor; it would be true even if very male was married. This type of knowing is based on definition, especially related to math and logic. These two distinctions comprise "Hume's fork" which helps us - according to Hume and others - identify the limits of knowledge: "[beliefs] that don't make the cut - any that aren't either matters of fact or relations of ideas - aren't even candidates for knowledge."
One has to wonder, was there a "human" component to Hume's pursuit of knowledge? Why did he pursue science in this way? Was there a worldview involved? In his conclusion to his major treatise on human understanding, Hume remarked: "If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school of metaphysics...let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." So much for the pure objectivity of scientific exploration.
Later in the 20th century, a philosophical movement called "logical positivism" took up Hume's mantle, holding that a statement is meaningful only if (1) it can be empirically checked, or (2) it is a matter of definition. Sound familiar? Like Hume's fork, all beliefs - according to logical positivists - had to pass these verifiable criterion to be considered knowledge. For over 40 years, this approach to knowledge dominated the academic community, and, of course, dismissed any reference to God as literal nonsense.
But the death of logical positivism (or what should have been) ultimately was self-inflicted as there was a problem at its very core: its own verifiable criterion undermined itself. Stokes writes: "The requirement that a meaningful statement must be either empirically verifiable or else a matter of definition is itself neither one of these...[logical positivism] eventually imploded." Again, we return to something we noted earlier: Credo ut intelligam - "I believe so that I may understand." Logical positivists (like all of us) had to have belief as their starting point because they could not prove the basis for their philosophy using their own philosophical equipment.
The other major hit to logical positivism came from science historian, Thomas Kuhn, who noted that science and approaches to science often change - not through sterile, calculated, objective observations - but through very human shifts in worldview as we saw in Hume's motivation to discredit religion.
With all of this, Stokes is asking us to be careful and to hold a healthy skepticism about many features of science and the status of current scientific theories.
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