I’m going to say no, but let me explain before any philosophers (armchair or otherwise) jump on my answer.
Metaphysics is philosophy. Science is, well, science. At one time, these two fields were not far apart. It could be argued that the divide between them didn’t really come until the last few hundred years. In ancient times, knowledge was knowledge. Knowledge might be about different things but there was a sort of seamless blending of knowledge about one thing with knowledge about other things. Aristotle, the father of philosophy who wrote on almost everything, is sometimes cited as the “last person to know everything”. This was possible not only because the amount of knowledge was more limited but also because the methods and domains of knowledge were not distinct. The same methods used to address problems in philosophy could be used in biology or physics. If one understood the methods, one could apply them to any field.
Metaphysics itself is a branch of philosophy . It “is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality”. Metaphysics works using logic and reasoning to deduct an understanding of the world. In Aristotle’s time, this was the method of philosophy and it was the method of science.
Science in our time, of course, needs to use logic and reasoning too, but it works primarily by measuring relationships in the world and inducing an understanding of the world from the relationships. Let me repeat this again. Science measures and discovers relationships. It creates models to understand the world through induction with the relationships it discovers. The measurements and relationships are not subjective but are shared within a community of other scientists that are theoretically able to make the same measurements and discover the same relationships because common measuring techniques are used.
Where is science on the question of the “fundamental nature of reality”? Most people without hesitation would say science is materialistic or physicalistic. Many scientists would say they are materialists. For most of them, materialism is the opposite of the supernaturalism, the opposite of believing in things that can’t be measured. Most idealists think modern science is materialistic. Bernardo Kastrup, probably one of the leading idealist of this time, sees the connection.
The popularity of materialism is founded on a confusion: somehow, our culture has come to associate it with science and technology, both of which have been stupendously successful over the past three centuries. But that success isn’t attributable to materialism; it is attributable, instead, to our ability to inquire into, model and then predict nature’s behavior.
Kastrup has this much right. What contemporary science is about isn’t the fundamental nature of reality. It is about measuring and predicting. Calls for a post-materialist science, such the The Manifesto for Post-Materialist Science, or Phillip Goff’s calls for new scientific methods, as in Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, are off the mark. But so is any scientist who think that a materialistic worldview is the only possible scientific worldview.
Science is anti-metaphysical. It doesn’t care about the ultimate nature of what it is observing and measuring. Its models, its particles, forces, and fields, are not models of fundamental reality. They are useful abstractions that provide a common language for discussing relationships and measurements nothing more. They are useful until better ones come along but they are not descriptions of the reality.
Some may object that a sort of anti-metaphysical, pragmatism is a form of metaphysics. Well, perhaps, it is. But, if it is, it is a metaphysics that doesn’t care about the fundamental nature of reality, that maybe considers it a pointless question.
Broad Speculations 