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Is Science Just a Matter of Faith?
Hugh Pickens writes "Pastabagel writes that the actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote, 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,' he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?'"
Science is demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting. Most importantly: Science Delivers. Not understanding the intricacies doesn't make it "faith".
Faith is an idea with no evidence to back it up no matter how adept the 'experts'. Even more important, the 'experts' often don't agree on even the basics. Witness all the various religions and factions thereof.
Trolling is a art,
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
Even if both Science and Religion have their roots in Faith, however, their differences are staggering. Religion is only about Faith. There is nothing more to it than belief, and not only is there no way to systematically test what is taught, but it is discouraged as indicative of too little Faith.
Science is all about that very exploration. Challenging what is taught and verifying for yourself that it is true. It may, fundamentally, be a Faith, but then again, isn't our acceptance of our sensory inputs a Faith as well?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
n/t
1) We're far from done with quantum mechanics; of course no one can understand it at the present moment.
2) They're called theories. We don't know many things for sure. It's not belief and it's not reasoning because no one is absolutely certain that they're correct.
But it also requires doubt.
That's what makes it special.
I have no
or the big bearded man in the sky. If those are the two options, I know which one I'm choosing.
http://xkcd.com/808/
The difference between faith and science is that there are teams looking for proof of the higs boson, they aren't betting taking belief for granted.
You can't take the sky from me...
For "most" people, science is effectively another faith because they hear it and simply accept it.
But there is one huge and significant difference between science and religion -- objective testing and verification. If any one of the "faithful" have doubts, anyone is welcome to attempt to refute the findings with new tests and experimentation. And in most cases, you won't find yourself cut off from society if you do challenge "current scientific belief." (This has happened in various cases including global warming studies more recently.)
So because I don't understand nuclear physics, it is a matter of faith that, say, a nuclear power plant exists? Just because I can't explain a nuclear reaction doesn't make it a matter of faith that I know it to be a phenomenon.
It's a moot point, because much of what we know to be true is true because we trust that an expert has explained it properly. You could apply this across any number of subjects which one doesn't have intimate knowledge of.
Silly.
The key difference between science and "faith" is that heretics are burned.
There is no great controversy if someone decides to rearrange the human family tree. There will be no fundies burning you or your effigy in the street or causing riots that cause innocent people to get killed. There will be some discussion and that will be the end of it.
At worst you will be laughed at until the rest of the community comes around to your way of thinking.
Faith is immutable. Scientific "truth" is infinitely maleable.
The ultimate truth of Bosons does not bother me one way or the other. I need not base my life or my actions on whether or not Bosons are bogus.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Science is fundamentally different from faith in that science is reproducible. Faith is not.
What this question asks is if you are too lazy to learn the details yourself then you have to have faith in the person telling you about it. Which is exactly the same as most people who can't be bothered to learn the details of their own religion and its history, and instead just take on faith that the person telling them what god wants them to do is actually the truth of it. But that similarity is that people not wanting to learn themselves are putting faith in a person of trust.
The best definition of "Faith" that I've ever heard is "To be fully persuaded." As in, if you'd bet *everything* on a belief being right, then you have *faith* in that belief.
In that sense, "science" is a matter of faith. What is supposed to be different is /why/ and /how/ one becomes "fully persuaded".
dimension. Yes - we get our "knowledge" from experts just as people of faith do. But the difference is with science, everyone can test and observe the same claims. Maybe only one person ever has witnessed the described effects of that particle accelerator, but the process is fundamentally trustworthy enough that we don't need to bother to test his claims. That is not to say that we CANNOT test his claims. If someone else has enough funding and time he can do the same thing.
Scientific theories are supported by hypotheses that have been proved. Theists cannot prove the existence of god, hence their faith. You do not need faith where facts are involved.
Ah, it could be a matter of faith for many of us, until we use the science to MAKE MACHINES WORK. When was the last time any holy book told you how to build a telescope, a jet engine, a rocket, a car, a computer, or any of the other innumerable machines in our daily lives that were once only scientific concepts.
Hmmmm.... You mean like "scientific proof" and "backed by science"?
I think there is an element of "me-too"-ism, and sometimes people take "shortcuts" by accepting authority (we can't all be marine biologists, can we?), but we're willing to accept another authority when it comes a long, if they can convince us with compelling arguments. I guess it takes a little "faith" in some ways.
Then again, there's the actual scientific method, which is the exact opposite of faith.
The big difference is that when someone says they see a miracle, all they can offer is "Because I said so."
You may have to do a lot of studying and it may not be possible for you to learn enough to verify some things or the equipment is too expensive/difficult but it's at least theoretically possible.
Anyone with a high school education should be able to do things like verify Newton's laws for themselves. You don't have to take it on faith. Many things we do take on trust, but that is different than taking something on faith. Taking something on trust means that you have the option of verifying it yourself. Taking something on faith means that you simply believe and you have no option of ever verifying it yourself.
I mean, if you're gonna believe in something, WHY NOT believe in the thing that makes cars, go, planes fly, drugs work, farms more productive, computers work, metals strong, i.e., EVERY BIT OF OUR TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY?
I mean, if you're going to believe in something, WHY NOT believe in the thing that slaps you in the face with literally thousands of miracles a day? Oh, and yes, it's true that they stop being miracles if you bother learning how they work and understand it, and all the miracle performers (scientists and engineers) TELL you that.
*NOT* to believe in science would require an incredible denial of reality. I mean, you'd have to be pretty much insane.
Science == miracles on demand. *SHOW ME* anything else so worthy of my faith. SERIOUSLY.
--PeterM
People can have faith (believe, trust) in Science, but that doesn't make Science a Faith (recently developed synonym for a religion or religious belief.) This is just nonsensical word play, bereft of any real argumentative value; regardless of one's views on Science or Religion.
Demented But Determined.
Tim Minchin said it best. Storm
If nothing else, the idea that everything will continue the way it has in the past is faith-based... at least, a completely naturalistic view. There's no reason, aside from it having been that way for a long time in the past, to believe that laws of various scientific disciplines (physics, biology, astronomy) will continue to be the way they have been, is there? One might argue that the fact they haven't changed in observed history is evidence... but I don't see how one could "scientifically" prove it. It may be a reasonable explanation, a reasonable conclusion, a reasonable belief/faith, but proving something is more than something being reasonable or even "making sense."
The only power of theoretical models is in making predictions. If I can can consistently predict the outcome of a set of experiments, you can trust that my theories are not wrong. You can never prove a theory right, of course. But you can throw so many tests at it that you can be sure that it's not completely wrong - and any contradictory evidence that comes forward will only modify your theory, not expunge it.
You don't have to understand wave mechanics to believe that it works. You can ask a theorist to predict what happens when you put two slits in front of a laser. They make a prediction, and then you see it. You don't even need to see it yourself. You can trust people whose job it is to look at things, just as you trust that books and newspapers haven't invented whole continents out of fantasy.
We can make transistors. We can make them very well. This shows we understand the principles of transistor-making, which we call quantum mechanics.
This is either stupid or a troll - yet another attempt to build a false equivalency between proven methods of finding out the truth, and unproven magical thinking.
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing." Or, you know, BOTH. We did a lot of experimental stuff in the classroom throughout HS and grade school. We still had to memorize the big stuff, but anything we could verify in the lab we generally did.
Religious scholars argue vehemently over the interpretations of ancient texts (often haggling over ink blots that could change the meaning of words and translations) and then write books or long essays trying to prove their viewpoints. There is no evidence, no data, only opinion. Scientists argue vehemently over the interpretation of data and then do additional testing to prove their viewpoints. Because of the mentalities (and sometimes egos) of scientists, if someone is clearly wrong about their interpretation of the data, there will be a dogpile of experiments and work from other scientists to prove just how wrong they are.
The Wakefield vaccine study is an example of this: He faked data, made a controversial claim from the results of the faked data, and other medical researchers have proven time and time again that he was wrong. His followers, the anti-vaxxers, are relying on faith when they continue to believe in him even after he was proven to be a fraudster and a liar. However, scientists and interested parties who kept up with the research and came down on Wakefield for his lies are NOT relying on faith. They are relying on evidence. And that is why it is science and not a religion.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Science assumes its truth to be be valid and will be proven false at some point in the future. Religion assumes its truth to be valid and can never be proven false. Both rely on an inherent faith that their truth is true. "The argument is circular, it begins by assuming the truth and then proceeds to prove it." - Frank Herbert Please let the shit storm begin.
Yes. Yes, they are.
There are billions of people on this little blue marble. If we keep pandering to the ones who don't take the effort to understand the world around them, we're no better then the homo sheepiens. -W
...between science "faith" and religious "faith":
In science, the select few who have done the research and do understand and have to "dumb it down" for the rest of us, they aren't relying on faith. So, although they are a minority, those few have done the research and invested the time and study.
In religion, even those select few who may know the passages and scriptures the best, have no study behind them other than relying on the accounts of ancient text. So even the most "informed" in the religious minded folk are purely running on faith.
There's a basic, qualitative difference between faith and belief in science. Faith is, by definition, unconditional belief. To have your faith tested is to be given a reason to doubt your faith; to pass that test is to retain your faith despite good cause to abandon it. The core of faithful belief is wilful choice to believe, irrespective of the evidence for or against it.
Scientific belief, for both scientists and lay persons, is ideally 100% conditional. It is totally dependent upon the evidence, and if the evidence changes, so should the belief. That lay persons believe scientists when they say "it's quantum mechanics", without understanding but just trusting scientists, that doesn't make it faith because if tomorrow the scientists say "whoops, it's string theory", then people would say "okay, now it's string theory." Crucially, no one would be lauded for scientific thought if they held onto that belief in quantum mechanics despite the scientific world moving on to something else.
That faithful people dabble in proofs of God's existence, and scientists are frequently dogmatic about their pet theories, demonstrates only that humans are fallible, and neither perfectly faithful or perfectly rational.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Lets see about this. I woke up on my memory foam mattress (result of science), and drank a cup of coffee that was brewed 45minutes before I woke up (a result of science). Got dressed in my clothes that were, most likely, made on a computerized sewing machine (result of science). Grabbed my laptop, smartphone, and tool bag (results of science), and hopped in my truck (result of science). No, I really don't think I'm relying on faith to make my determination on how I feel about this.
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
When I hear one guy with a blog say that he can defeat theory of relativity with a train, car, and a fly. I do not believe it and it is not reasonable to believe it.
When i hear it from 20 people that spent 10 years collecting data and that can then that experiment can be retested and redone over and over with the same result is a little different than believing someone 2000+ years ago healed people with touch and he is the son of a god. (this is not just Jesus, hence the lower case god)
Reason is believing the test and outcome because it is rational to believe that because it happens every time you run the test.
Faith is believing with the absences or contradiction of a test that is repeated and only happened once that one person told another person that later wrote it down 100 years later.
To have absolute knowledge of the universe is a different question because if there is a finite amount of information then it is possible but with the universe being infinite who knows. I doubt this will ever happen and if that is what you have to compare against that seems to be an immeasurable standard which goes against what science is with that whole reason bit.
To reason with science is to be able to prove time and time again that your idea works or if it doesn't, then it much change. Faith seems to be very inelastic.
It is not about faith / understanding in science - science is not even the term that should be used. It is about understanding the scientific method - a very different thing. Understanding the scientific method is very possible for most people. From there one just needs to see that the scientific method is properly applied in order to accept the results (once peer reviewed.)
I do not have faith in Newton's mecanical laws of physics. I built it myself in high school. We actually used a device that drops a object with a electric pen that prints every x milliseconds over a rotating paper. After that we computed speed as a function of time then acceleration and show it is constant (ish) over time.
I do not have faith in that. I built it.
In that sense, what ISN'T a matter of faith? How do you know that Columbus sailed to America? I've read about it in a book, but have you ever met anyone who was actually on that boat? And if so, how do you know they weren't lying? You're just putting your faith in a bunch of books, just like in religion right? And in science, if you didn't personally conduct quantum mechanics research, how can you make any conclusions about anything without faith? Of course, you may have realized my point by now, which is that saying "X requires faith, and religion requires faith, thus X is no different from religion" is dumb.
Furthermore, since the scientific community is cutthroat, there are a bunch of under-funded scientists just waiting to prove big findings by big named scientists wrong. Thats a good tactic to get more funding and make a name for yourself as well. If anything, thats actually a strength of the truth in science that religion cannot match.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
If you want to feel like Galileo before The Inquisition, try scoffing about man-made global warming while working in the entertainment industry in NYC.
I'm just sayin'..
Only things the peeps in the check out line at Whole Foods in SoHo are missing to complete the scene are hooded robes and torches...
I prefer to characterize my acceptance of scientific results as 'trust'. There is a worldwide community of scientists reviewing and attempting to duplicate results. I trust that the system weeds out incorrect or inadequate hypotheses and what is left is science's current best model of reality. I may not understand most science but I understand how the system works. Faith, as applied to religion, is a mental illness involving the acceptance of ludicrous statements made by religious authority figures without evidence.
A lot of us cant understand advanced pure science but anyone can understand religion. I could go up to someone and ask them to bottom line Christianity for me and it would be something like 'This person could perform miracles and died for your sins, if you dont follow his teachings you will go to hell'. Now its just a matter of faith if you want to believe such a thing or not.
With science its just that one does not understand it and hence has no opinion about it.
Science allows us to make predictions, which can then be tested. When the tests don't come out the way we expected, we keep working to find a framework that does make correct predictions. At the extreme, it allows us to predict the behavior of things like transistors, and therefore build them. (Most) lay people aren't stupid; they can see that science gives them iPhones and religion does not give them anything tangible. Religious predictions tend to be things like "the world will end... eventually", because the religions that make specific, near-term predictions end up disproved in a hurry.
We don't have to accept it on faith. Mathematical proofs are either correct or not. Scientific theories, to the extent that they use things like wave equations and whatnot, can be accepted because we know the formulas have been proven rigorously. Furthermore, for a scientific theory to be accepted there must be no data that violates it. The current "standard" models of the world all work just fine --- if they didn't it would be obvious and they would be fixed. It has nothing to to with belief. If you study the foundations of Mathematics, you'll find that there are several different axiom systems at base, and one can accept one (or more) of several systems, some of which yield slightly different interpretations of certain results. (For example, you can accept the Axiom of Choice, or not.) That is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of choosing which tools you want to work with. All proceeds logically from there.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I may not currently grasp what the experts do. However, unlike religion or anything else that requires blind faith, I COULD know what they know. Sure I'd have to go to school for years, and do research for decades, but the collective knowledge exists and I can trace it.
I would most definitely agree with that observation. A great deal of generally accepted science is difficult to understand for those not in the field. The common-knowledge simplified explanations for things like the creation of the universe aren't that much different from the basic concepts of various religions. If you think about it, the major difference between scientific fact and the teachings of most religions seems to be the role of consciousness in the natural laws of this world (universe, plane of existence, etc). Functionally, there's no real difference between the big bang and genesis. They both are said to have been the source of our current existence. The only difference of any importance is that genesis involves a conscious being and the big bang does not. According to christianity, god's will is impossible for people to comprehend. The creation of the universe, by it's very nature, is impossible to comprehend beyond abstractions that humans create (how can you comprehend something with laws that didn't exist at the time of what you are trying to understand). Science and religion are both attempts to explain as much of the natural world as possible, though they both have to falter at some point. The one fundamental difference between the scientific and the religious explanation for everything is the the religious explanation creates a purpose. God's plan is inconceivable, but he has a plan. There is a purpose to the universe, there is a purpose to this planet, and there is a purpose for your life of suffering. If you eliminate the conscious source of everything, than everything is just an accident. Religion gives a sense of security and perhaps even self-importance. It's a safety blanket virtually necessitated by the emotional nature of human beings. In a perfect world, everyone would believe whatever they wanted and never tell anyone else about it.
Advanced math is way over the head of 99.9% of the population, so in the same spirit we could say that math is based on faith for that (majority) portion of the population.
However, I'm not sure what the point of making such an observation is though, especially using the emotionally-charged term "faith" rather than the more neutral and better applicable term "trust".
Science isn't the same as religion. Science is not based on faith (or trust), but it goes without saying that if you're not smart enough to reproduce an experiment or test a theory yourself, then you do need to trust the results reported by others who are capable.
"The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand"
Because of this, for its own protection, Science should be politicaly neutral in all things.
It is one thing for Science to say this is happening or that is happening. It's quite another for it Science to say that we should re-order our society because of it. That is not the place of Science. And because your average individual is not able to reasonably question the science without a considerable amount of effort, if at all, they are left in a position of being told, "do this becase I'm an expert".
Only when Science is perceived to have no stake in how the science is interpreted and acted upon, vis-a-vis public policy, can it be compeletely trusted by those who don't have the means to question it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's the engineers who design and build useful things often using theories developed by scientists. Engineers need to understand the basic science on which "things" are built. As an EE/ECE I took a year of solid state physics so I know how transistors work at the quantum level, and Yes some people do understand enough of basic science to make practical use of it.
Who the fuck is a Pastabagel and why would I give a fuck about what he thinks? If he doesn't understand something, he should learn it, and not whine about trusting the "experts" who have actually made the effort.
Malda, this is straight up trolling, and I am disappoint.
For that reason alone, we can say that science is "true". We can even use school-level science to make predictions and then test those predictions with school-level equipment. That is another thing that faith based views of the world cannot do. It's only when scientists start talking in abstract terms, about things that a person cannot see, touch, hear or taste that things get a little more detached from reality. However, for the average person who's only knowledge of TV is that when you press the button on the remote control - the set comes on is concerned, that's good enough and more satisfactory than other explanations.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?" ---> No I don't know what an atom is first hand. But to know everything first hand isn't practical either. There's just way too much information out there to experience, if one embarks on such a journey.
Yes, but to a certain degree science is based on a series of logical steps. Many of the earliest simple experiments that are the foundation for the more complex science are easy enough for the average person with a high school education to understand. Therefore, we can at least be confident in the groundwork that leads scientists to the larger theories and conclusions. Belief in a god has no logical basis and requires no concrete evidence at even the most basic level. There is a big difference between following a chain of logic and blind faith.
Science is the process of discovery of natural cause and effect through objective experimentation. We have to work hard to remove our human-animal subjective biases and subjective thinking from influencing the experiment. Double blind experiments try to eliminate experimenter biases so the real results show through.
Do some reading up on Facilitated Communication to see the real damage (false molestation charges) caused by sloppy, subjective research and poor evaluation.
The discipline of Science is the ultimate expression of the human animal, the ability to think and reason beyond our limited senses, limited experience, and communicate universal truths, thoughts and ideas.
but what is true is to say that scientists are human beings, and are therefore prone to the same psychological short cuts, the same hubristic fallacies of faith that any human being is prone to
for example: string theory. untestable nonsense, building castles in the sky. a mathematician's fantasy life, of no use whatsover to the real pursuit of science. why so much time and energy is spent wasted on this in academia is a story of faith, not of science
but perhaps the best example i can think of academic scientists acting with the same blindness, arrogance, shortsightedness, and folly as a bunch churchgoers in a pew, is the story of the resistance to two australian's path to the nobel prize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Warren
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
these guys were laughed at and heckled. because their hypothesis and data, that a bacterium can cause ulcers, counteracted existing dogma that it was just stress. yes, there is dogma amongst scientists... but not science. what is agreed upon, is not to be questioned, is dogma. even though, of course, in real science, anything can be questioned. science is not dogmatic. scientists are. because scientists are human beings, and we have our weaknesses and our psychological shortcuts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't think you understand the term "science"...
It's really that simple, and it works. Neither can be said of previous "popular gods" of the past.
To "understand" something means to figure out what "stands under" it. Like Newton figured out that the moon and the apple were both subject to the same force, he understood gravity on that level. It was still a mysterious action-at-a-distance, and Newton never got any further in his understanding. Then Einstein comes along and understands it as space-time curved by mass. But he didn't understand where mass came from (that's still up for grabs, and our best bit is the Higgs boson coupling mechanism).
So it's always the case that a physicist is going to say they don't understand something - otherwise their job is done or they are an arrogant idiot. So what Feynman was saying is that "yup, its a quantum world at very small scales, but we don't really know why below that. Maybe someone else will figure it out". Maybe it will be multiple universes interacting with ours via some unknown force, or multi-dimensional branes colliding. But there might always be something in science we dont "understand".
The circular logic to your comment is that science has given you a medium (Slashdot) to voice your concerns. I don't have the faintest idea where I would start if I were to try and understand the sciences you mention. However, I DO think that understanding science(s) is based on our own evolution in the way that some scientific findings are eventually accepted as "truths". For example, 4000 years ago, we had no concept of the number 0. Basic math which my 3 year old daughter understands quite fully. A few hundred years ago, our planet was thought to be flat. Once again, we learn very early in our lives that the Earth is flat. My expectation is this : Give us another 500 or 1000 years, and we'll have quantum mechanics in elementary school. You heard it here first.
I don't believe it is a problem with the way that we learn science, I think that it is a problem with the way we look at/ prioritize/ accept/ teach science as a culture. Science and mathematics need not be simply held by the faith of more studious analytically based people.
Math can be taught as more of an interactive universal language, instead of hard repetition numbers and examples, and children can be taught from an earlier age about science. We are taught that math and science are hard. They are not, we just need a more organic way of learning/teaching it.
Science, even for the layperson, is not merely acceptance of truth based on authority. Trusting experts must certainly come into play when assessing the rigor of an individual physicist or an individual scientific theory (e.g., as a biologist, I am not qualified to critically assess a particular theory about time travel). But the authority of physicists as a community is established by their ability to deliver results. A physical understanding of the universe has utterly transformed our world. I can post a comment on the internet because those experts came up with some theories about things like semiconductors. I don't believe alchemists because they still haven't turned lead into gold; I believe physicists because they have (or at least, turned hydrogen into helium).
Science is looking at empirical reasons and formulating a belief.
Religion is deciding what to believe and making up reasons for it.
Sure, they're both "beliefs" but that's an irrelevant technicality isn't it?
Maybe the only place where science and religion are alike is in the early classroom where kids aren't yet taught the scientific process, but are taught to memorize scientific facts. I know back in elementary the smart-ass kid in the back would keep asking "why" and the teacher would get pissed and say "it just is, stop asking" But then, that's still not the fault of science. :p
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Scientists have faith; they believe in the following two axioms:
1. There exists only one objective truth.
2. Any group of people can find the same objective truth (corollary: There is no Priestly Class)
Everything else follows. When someone says, "This is the Truth" a scientist, being a skeptic, says "Oh, Really? Evidence?" In our scientific journals not only is opinion expressed, but how the opinion was formed, and the procedures used to get at it. Many, many times in the past, a well believed scientific precept was waiting for someone else to say, "Now wait a darn minute..." and prove them wrong. In my field, chemistry, there was a very famous disagreement between two chemists, Olah (the new kid) and Brown (the highly lauded Old Guard). For years, Brown said most unflattering things about Olah, but the Truth was there, and as time went on, more and more chemists found the results that had guided Olah, and more examples besides. In the end, the Old Guard was shown to be wrong. This is how science works, and this is why science works.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Quite so-- omitting all other arguments, I'd prefer taking science as my religion of choice simply because of that element of 'miracles on demand'. I don't need to ask and wait until somebody gets around to separating all that darkness; I get light by poking that weird thing on the wall.
Trolololol
Sometimes, you can, you go to hell for the rest of your life! That's a true thing.
I think science requires "faith" on a more basic level than just complex ideas. Scientists rely on sense experience to interpret all their data and posit all their results. Whether it is empirical tests or mathematical proofs, they rely on the senses. It is purely by faith that we trust that our sense experience is accurate. Lest we all end up skeptics, humans have generally accepted that our sense experience is telling us the truth, but there is no empirical or mathematical way to prove this. Everyone, scientists or not, take our basic mode of interacting with the world, on faith, as true. Failing to do so leaves us without any means of understanding the world around us, scientifically or not.
So is having faith in our fellow person bad? Certainly the so-called religious people who routinely steal for the poor so they can live in luxury believe so. They hate humanism, because humanism threatens their life of hapless luxury. And faith in the creativity and honesty of our fellow people is faith in science. Scientist may work to push a personal philosophy, but they do thins within a framework that promotes faith in the process, and allows us to admit error. The Pope, for example, is boxed in with random trivia so cannot openly promote the use of condoms. This has nothing to with faith, but hubris and ego. Science, on the other hand, is faith in humanity and process, and allows us transcend the egotistical limitations that so often cripple other 'people of faith'.
So there is no reason not to have faith in science, faith that we are here to help each other make the world heaven on earth, rather that the cynical view that each of us must individual fight and claw our way to salvation, any damage that we might forgiven because we did so in the name of profit and the almighty.
I would also challenge anyone to find a person that does not have faith in science. Be it a person who uses a light switch, or shovel, or walks down a sidewalk, or builds a barn. Any human who has observed the world to create a tool or a process, any human who has come to the realization that we get along better when we treat others as we would have them treat us, or we may do as we wish as long we do no harm to other, used the scientific method and has faith in the process. What people do not have is enough faith to let go of their own hubris and ego. and realize that they cannot control the almighty with trivia or arbitrary rules, or, even, enslavement of the flock with fraudulent rituals and process.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This is typical of people who are deeply religious and distrust science. They try to explain science in religious terms as they have no fundamental understanding of it. It's easy for a devout person to try and relabel science as "faith", as that's all they understand.
The author needs to educate himself. I found taking a basic chemistry course was one of the most eye-opening experiences in my life, in terms of getting a grip on how much of the natural world we can explain with science. The author should try actually _getting_ an education before making weird statements about science that tries to paint it in religious terms.
Trust and faith or belief are not the same thing. I can trust people but still verify or need to verify the veracity of their assertions. Scientists rely on the network of trust among themselves but if something doesn't work they will call each other out on it. With faith, there is no need to verify. In fact, with faith I don't need trust because I'm not relying on the words of a man but my belief in the divine. This is different from following a demagogue, which is not faith but obedience.
Let's not confuse the two. Quantum Mechanics is producing Science but it's a field of research right now. Science is a field of study where we find laws that as repeatable and demonstrable.
Moreover, there is science you can do in your own home. Experiment and theorize why water turns to a solid when it sits in your freezer and not on the counter in the sun. Test your theory. You're doing science without having to take what someone else says about water turning to a solid on "faith."
I believe Einstein said that the only faith science requires is faith that the universe isn't lying to us. And that's a faith we all must share to merely to survive day-to-day, and so it seems a little silly to call it faith of the religious sort at all.
Science is not faith. Good heavens, no. The only thing you need to take on faith is that in our own little sphere the laws of reality, if there are such, are uniform enough that our tiny, human-sized experiments are testable and repeatable. And this itself has been tested and repeated so often that, while it MAY prove false in some distant time or place or circumstance, for us, for now, for here, it works fine.
There may be a God. It is almost certainly not Yahweh, at least as the vast, vast majority of the world knows him. If there is, we must face several facts:
1) This God did things through evolutionary processes. Think long and hard about what that means. All the pain, all the suffering, for billions of years. All of it.
2) This God is not very keen on making appearances any longer. Used to be, but isn't now. What appearances are made are trivial and/or explainable by other factors. My favorite is the image of the Virgin and Child in a used condom.
3) Following from 2), this God doesn't seem to care about the abused perpetrated in Its name, or that thee are literally hundreds of religions, almost all of which are mutex to one another.
4) This God , despite being supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent, doesn't lift a finger to stop the suffering in this world. Further, It created beings that suffer, knowing they would, able to stop it, and refusing to. Neither personalist nor Thomist (cf. "divine simplicity") apologetics can answer to this.
Our science is not based on faith anywhere near the extent our religions are. And we don't need to lie to get support. And we don't need to use fear or coercion to keep people in line. We offer the repeatability of our experiments. And most importantly, there is no dogma. Not really. If you find a way to KO an established theory, you will not be crucified; you will be REWARDED. Even if it takes a while you will be vindicated.
Slashdot, if I wasn't already terminally disappointed in you I would be disappointed. This is a load of trolling bullshit. You should be ashamed but I doubt you have the capacity for shame any longer.
The article is about faith.... not religion....
The general public just has faith that the scientists of the world know what they're talking about and then base their "scientific" view based on what they read/follow/hear......
Yes science is a matter of faith to the extent that most things we "know"are a matter of faith. If a friend tells me he was at a given place last night I accept it as a matter of faith. The difference between that and religion is that if I cared enough I could actually check if it was true.
my understanding of faith is that "this is correct, we can't prove it is correct, you just have to believe it is"
my understanding of science (or more specifically scientific theory) is: "this is not necessarily correct but, given the limits of our understanding, this theory models behaviour in the physical universe within the following parameters..... ".
Scientific theory that claims to be correct, to always be correct and to never be anything other than correct is hokum and closer to religion than it is to proper science.
How many different theories as to the structure of the atom have there been?
Am not claiming to have thought about or researched the answer, but each has been the result of the testing of a hypothesis and has been demonstrated to be correct within the limits of knowledge currently available. Then, when more knowledge becomes available a new hypothesis is created, tested and if found to be true (within the parameters of the experiment) a new, more encompassing theory is defined.
there are enough theories out there that quantum mechanics debunks and proves that they do not actually describe how the universe works. However within defined parameters it is still possible to model super-quantum level behaviour using these theories
When someone makes an extrordinary claim in science (i.e., cold fusion), many others must also reproduce and verify the claim before people have faith in it. If it can't be verified, then people won't have faith in it.
For real theories, even though we're trusting experts, the experts can continually provide consistent results that support the theories.
When someone makes an extrordinary claim in religion (i.e., cured blindness via prayer), it has generally not been possible to verify or reproduce the claims (or else a lucrative business would be starting blindness cure clinics where people pray for you until you're healed, right?). But people still have faith anyway. That's the difference.
With religion, even the experts can't reproduce or verify their own claims. (If prayer really worked better than western medicine, you would see a faith healer replace the surgeon general)
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Give it time. Eventually, we'll have evidence in front of us that quantum mechanics, dark matter, dark energy, etc. do indeed work as predicted by science-- because we'll have the products that rely on those phenomena in front of us. Does it matter that we can't prove that they are working such-and-such way? No, not really. If the dark matter propulsion system on your space ship is propelling you across space, either you admit that you have evidence of dark matter, or you believe in magic.
I'm not a lawyer and it takes years of pre-law and law school and experience to become a bonafide lawyer. I have a general understanding of the law but I don't know all the procedures and the depth of law. I trust my lawyer to handle those things just like people trust me to remove the virus or malware from their computer(s). Law isn't a faith.
Oh, and yes, it's true that they stop being miracles if you bother learning how they work and understand it, and all the miracle performers (scientists and engineers) TELL you that.
I have a degree in engineering and I have studied rather a lot of physics. I understand rather well the concepts of how an airplane flies, how a supertanker floats, and how a transistor works. If you fail to be astonished at those things, I'm not really sure you understand them. I'm MORE impressed the more I understand them, not less. A 747 flying overhead is a damn miracle no matter how jaded you might be.
Obligatory XKCD
Many have just said no and given valid arguments. I support them. These ultrareligious bastards and morons who call themselves "scientists" disgust me -- and they are bad for science. I am against organized religion and an atheist, but I fully understand religion and I am not against it in itself (nor am I against it within science) -- what I am against is stupidity, and this is just plain stupid.
Here's some of your science. Man is clay and clay is yay, wuppy now come a flood and store them all in a big large room. Bah.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Read some Karl Popper, then add in a dash of Thomas Kuhn and a soupcon of Stephen Toulmin for good measure. The post-modernist take on all of this starts with Lakatos and Musgrave.
The difference is that there is not currently any way a person can understand complex physics/astronomy/etc. phenomena. When Darwin started publishing his works on Natural Selection many people didn't understand them either, yet with current scientific knowledge and teaching it's relatively easy to get a basic grasp of how DNA, sexual/asexual reproduction and selection work to affect living organisms. First, natural selection was an idea for cutting edge radical thinkers. Then it became a topic for professional scientists. Now it is being taught in schools to teenagers. Cutting edge science may be accepted on faith now when only a few people really grasp it but give it time. Religion, on the other hand, is something that must always be accepted on faith and for the past thousands of years hasn't been definitively demonstrated or proven at all by anyone.
It's like a mythical island. When only a select few have been there, you have to accept on faith that it exists. Then someone invents this thing called the "aeroplane", which makes it much easier for people to get to and experience the island themselves, and then faith is no longer required. With religion, nobody has ever been to this mythical island at all and you just have to permanently accept it on faith.
The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand.
Just like plumbing, I suppose. Or farming. Or pretty much everything. This isn't a new issue, nor is it a particularly serious issue, and it doesn't require ponderous pontifications on faith and rationality. Just simple practicality, which truly is rationality at its finest.
This is a loaded question. First it is lumping all disciplines and theories into the broad generalized term "Science". Second the question is worded so as to demand as straightforward yes/no answer for a topic there is no straightforward yes/no answer to.
Science is based on empirical evidence and rigorous testing. Many of the "big" questions to life's mysteries however are still mostly theory because we are at this time unable to rigorously test and collect enough data to come to any definite conclusion, thus a lot educated "guesswork" is used based on what data we can collect at this time.
Regardless I have more confidence in the scientific theories than the vast majority of any religious explanation. At least scientific theory tries to put some work into understanding and explaining its conclusions instead of just throwing its arms up in the air and exclaiming a magic man in the sky did it.
How do I know that I am not reading this article as part of a dream - or for that matter, that I am not plugged into a Matrix-type reality? How do I know that the observations I make are accurate - I know for a "fact" (at least I think I know) that the mind can play tricks with visual illusions with e.g. parallel lines that do not seem parallel - knowing that perception is some times flawed, do I know when to trust my senses? Just because I have never noticed any object violate Newton's laws of physics (assuming non-relativistic etc.) - I cannot claim to have observed every object in the universe at all points in time, so can we trust even the most basic scientific "facts" that are taught in elementary school?
So of course science is based on 'faith', just as everything else. But at least science is based on a reasonably transparent system of observations, reasoning and scientific processes - which (apparently) can be reproduced. So it all somehow seems to make sense ... well, except the usual problems with greed, corruption, self-serving etc. in the scientific community, which you find with everything that has humans involved in it - so that is obviously a source of error.
Then again I might just be plain crazy. Or none of you actually exist so none of this really matters to anyone anyways.
Everyone is missing the point.
People who do not have the expertise and experience in any given area of science can only trust that those who do are providing accurate and reliable information. They could rig the experiments, fudge the numbers, etc. and your average person would not be in a position to know it. All they can know is that this/these guys are experts so what they say must be true.
That is pretty much the same thing as Faith.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I can't believe people actually buy this crap about how if they don't understand something it is just like religion and might not be "truth". The quote by Feynman is out of context and didn't mean Feynman didn't understand quantum mechanics. It meant it was an extremely complex subject. I am sick and tired of the intelligent design morons trying to get a foot in the door to discredit science so they can present their totally faith-based crap as how everything really is.
As a scientist you can get famous for discovering something new and/or by discovering someone else was wrong. That is a very powerful self-correcting mechanism.
Bert
Science isn't _just_ an "answer" that we can choose to believe or not. It's a process, it's a way of thinking. And if I get a cancer I'll go to the medic (trained in the learning and practice of science) to do their special voodoo that I don't understand but who's methods and processes that I do understand to get help. And I won't go to the crystal healing charlatan who's inability is because they don't "do" science.
The implication of the post is that all opinions on difficult questions are equally valid (especially if the explanation is complicated and beyond the layman). That is of course bullshit.
Science is based on skepticism.
Science is not facts. Science is a Method. Its the Method of making a guess and testing it. Then publishing your results. Finally letting others test your guess. It is the consensus that defines the truths of Science. All of Science is ready for you or anyone else to disprove. We learn by refinement. That is as time goes on we update what we believe to be true.
This Method is what makes Science different from things that people just say are true.
P.S. There are some that still go to the Church to get cured of disease. Do you go to a Doctor? I think most people go to a Doctor for there health. If so you believe the Doctor can help you. The Doctor's knowledge is based on Science. So I think you believe in Science too.
Yes, people do read scientific articles and believe the stuff that's written without looking into the actual studies or source material. But, the reason why they believe it is because they assume that it is indeed backed up by facts. Faith, on the other hand, is believing in something without having any proof or any possible way to back it up. I hear this science = faith argument pretty frequently from religious people trying to validate their own beliefs. However, the whole concept of faith is that religious beliefs do not need to be validated. It doesn't make sense to me.
Unwilling to take the claims of scientists (or, more likely, the claims reproduced in the media and attributed to scientists) just on the basis of authority? Simple solution: get a scientific education in the field of your choice, build a lab, run the experiments. See for yourself. That way you don't have to take anything on authority. Unwilling to take the claims of religious people (or, more likely, the claims reproduced in the media and attributed to religious people) just on the basis of authority? Simple solution: start attending church/temple/mosque in a tradition of your choosing, develop a meditative/contemplative practice, immerse yourself in the writings and artistic productions of the tradition. That way you don't have to take anything on authority.
Not understanding the intricacies doesn't make it "faith".
It's faith to you if you accept it without understanding it. To all people, the vast majority of science is "known" by faith.
This is why so many people persist in accepting the magic man in the sky. To them, it's not any less believable than some science that they couldn't possibly understand.
could write a lot more but what for? i'd be preaching to the choir here, wouldn't i?
It sounded too much like an attempt to equate science as a religion. I would like to point out a minor detail that religion demands faith without proof, while science attempts to find proof. Having a hypothesis or theory does not equal "faith".
I know a very large Science vs Religion flamefest is about to begin. Before everybody starts foaming at the mouth, I just like to point out that not all scientists are athiests, and even though they are spiritual they do not let religion dictate what they observe in the field.
Keep in mind that religious manuscripts were created, translated, diseminated, and interpreted by man. Since man is far from perfect and always has an agenda, I suspect that these documents are not perfect and were written using the knowledge they had a very long time ago. I prefer to believe that science doesn't disprove religion, but rather show the inaccuracies of the written record.
Religion and science are not mutually exclusive for those with an open mind. Okay, you can resume bashing other people's belief system.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Whether it's a faith-based reason such as "god says you shouldn't eat that raw pig because he think the pig's holy" or a science-based one like "some scientist told me not to eat that raw pig because of some bugs" --- it "delivers" just as well to most people.
Even today, religion delivers as well as science in some fields like social sciences. For one example, it's as easy to explain hatred in the oil-poor parts of the mideast as collateral damage of feuding jealous gods as it is with brain chemistry and MRIs. And it sure is easier to sell a war to mid-america with a faith-based argument (crusade against the infidels) than it is to sell it with any science/fact-based one (I guess derived the importance of control over natural resources)?
ISTM the line between science and faith is kinda a continuum, where as more and more dots are drawn because causes and effects it becomes more sciency and less faithy.
Epistemologically, everything is faith to some extent, so the word 'just' is kind of deceptive. Kudos on actually getting the word 'faith' properly defined though, so many today don't seem to be able to do that (ie: faith is trust, not wishful thinking). And, yes, science is largely faith in that you're trusting someone else, and there is only a certain amount you can know for sure. I also appreciated the admission of how it takes many years of specialized study to understand many of these things. I think people also need to respect that when they so quickly dismiss disciplines other than science, such as history, theology, etc. As a Christian apologist, my faith is also grounded in many years of specialized study and trust in the results of that study. Though, I doubt many will give me the respect they might give a scientist about the results of their area of study. This is a big problem with today's society in unwarranted bias towards only one discipline. Positivism and naive empiricism, long since discredited, are still alive and well today when it comes to attitudes towards science.
Seriously slashdot, wtf? This argument is old and stupid.
from the article. Go read the article.
The author is wrong in his assumption on why scientists use the word God in some of their description, but he is right in that people , non scientists, need to have faith in the experts.
He is wrong in comparing it to religion because scientific claims can be tested. Experiments could be verified. If religion was put to the same rigor, it wouldn't exist.
It's the difference between faith based on a history and blind Faith.
If I tell my son to make his bed, I have 'faith' he will do it. Thats because he has a long history of doing it when I ask.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Speaking only for myself, just about everything has to be taken on faith, I neither have the time nor the intellect, in some cases, to understand at a fundamental level what is occurring, but it isn't just science, it's almost all knowledge and concepts that have this "taken on faith factor" because we built what know/think internally from other peoples training and knowledge as we grew and were "raised" (programmed?) by our parents, so how much can we actually verify?
What if everything we learned growing up is just plain wrong?
If you think about it how much "original thought" do you really have?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
magnets!
No, science is not faith. Science describes repeatable patterns. If you heat water at normal pressure, it always boils at 100C. If you pray to God, your prayer may or may not be answered: we have no way of telling if an outcome was a result of prayer or not.
"Understanding" is not necessary to science. Understanding is a matter of being comfortable with something, and is always limited. At one level, I understand how things stay in orbit: gravity, MmG/r^2 etc. But at another level, I don't understand: what /is/ gravity? Where does it come from? Curvature of space, gravitons etc. maybe. But why does mass curve space? What actually us mass? I don't know.
All we can say about science is that it is uncovering repeatable patterns in the structure of the universe. And it is not faith to say the pattern is there, it is observation. Why the pattern appears is a deep question, since "why" is not a well defined word.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Science is like open source software and faith is proprietary software. Both types of software perform certain functions. The normal user just uses them and is unaware of how things work underneath. The difference is that science/open source allows you to see how it works and reproduce it yourself.
I trust science. While I don't remotely understand every bit of science, I understand the process and the results. If I doubt something, I know exactly how to go about either justifying that doubt or confirming experimental results. I trust that the scientific process works because the evidence is literally staring me in the face as I type this. I also know how the people who conduct science go about their work and I know that I could check their work any time I desire. I don't have faith in science, I trust science.
Faith is simply blindly believing received wisdom. You can't test it, you can't challenge it, you can't even argue it. Faith simply is belief and evidence never plays into it. I trust scientists because I can check their work even if I choose not to. I don't have blind faith in any of them because I know they can be (and often are) proven wrong.
"Faith is a fact" - George Oscar Bluth, Sr, Caged Wisdom
Not even close. Trusting people is *not* the same as faith in the religious sense. Not even close. When you trust an expert, you hold them accountable. If someone claims to be an expert and gives you advice that turns out to be wrong, you stop trusting them as an expert. In essence you use empiricism for evaluation which experts to trust.
It is ridiculous to conflate this with a blind belief in a supernatural entity with *no evidence*. There is *no* empiricism in religious faith.
For the science we regular folks don't understand, we don't take it on faith, we take it on trust. That's an important distinction. We accept current theories because we trust the people, processes, and establishments that produce them.
So basicly...it comes down to this...would you rather believe an expert scientist today..or one who threw rocks..and still threw spears....nuff said
Thank you parent. You hit the nail on the head. Further:
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is
No. We learn science by doing it. I don't know about american education, but generally canadian school isn't that different (barring certain issues with creationism). In high school biology, chemistry, physics, earth science we conduct experiments. (Labs)
I don't take on faith that atoms exist. In high school science we did the gold foil experiment. I saw the flashes where electrons were deflected or reflected by the presence of atoms in the gold foil. Did that singularly prove the existence of atoms? No. But it does a damn good job of being a brick in the construct of knowledge that science is. I've titrated solutions, precipitated solid matter out of a clear liquid. I've performed the miracle of transmuting iron into rust.
Oblig: XKCD: Science. It works, bitches
Story author is a troll. sigh.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Orwell examined why he thought the earth was round, and concluded that most of the reasons he had, reasons given by most educated english people of the time, were unreliable, and therefore his belief that the earth was round was just superstition.
however, orwell did find one good reason that every educated (5th grade above) person should be able to understand (scroll down)
pilots of ships and planes travel great distances, accurately, with a model that the earth was round. a plane flying from sydney AU to NYC USA would n't make it if the model wasn't accurate
You are describing technology, not science. People made everything you describe without using scientific theories.
When everyone involved in article is a idiot...and the previous posters don't notice it, giving everyone an fucking page of crap. It's astonishing how no slashdot readers KNOW WHAT SCIENCE IS.
Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?
Those things ARE NOT SCIENCE. Those are the result of science.
This entire article is incoherent nonsense. No one has to 'explain' science....science is trivial to understand. Here it is. Here is the entirety of all of science, stolen from Wikipedia. There are probably better ways to phrase it, but this is good enoug:
1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.
2. Form a conjecture: When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook.
3. Deduce a prediction from that explanation: If you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?
4. Test: Look for the opposite of each consequence in order to disprove 2.
That. Is. Fucking. Science. That's it. It can be explained and demonstrated in a day to anyone.
Oh, before anyone starts using your results, you have to tell other people what you do, so they learn what you have learned, and can repeat what you did. That is not, strictly speaking, 'science', but it's expected to produce output that way instead of just announcing it.
There is no quantum physics in it, there is no string theory, there is no Schroedingerâ(TM)s equation. Those things are what people have come up with using science. Those are the result of science, they are no more science than you are driving around in a Ford manufacturing plant or eating a kitchen.
As for the output of science? We don't accept it on faith, we accept it because it seems to work. Saying it's 'accepted on faith' is like saying we 'buy cars on faith in internal combustion'. Uh, not really.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I learned the other day that Agnostic and Atheist aren't actually seperate from each other.
Most atheists are Agnostic Atheists. Myself included.
Gnosticism has to do KNOWING
Theism has to do with BELIEF
As compared, someone who doesn't KNOW the existence of gods, but still chooses to believe there's a strong likelyhood they do exist, would be an Agnostic Theist. (i.e. Pascal's Wager)
Me, the lack of knowing, combined with the rigorousness of search for evidence, and not finding any, leads me to believe that gods probably don't exist. (i.e. Unicorns and Dragons)
If you don't know if gods exist, and go about your life behaving as if they probably don't exist. You're probably an agnostic atheist too.
___________________________
I find it relevant because it shows that even with secular things like particle physics, the ability to claim knowledge of something, and the action of belief in something are actually separate concepts but with a high degree of overlap and compliment each other.
Let's make it simple why: Science is not what scientific disciplines have found out. Science is a set of methods to further human knowledge.
To confuse the two is to misunderstand science so thoroughly that it pains me.
More precisely, science is a set of tools to guard against our individual fallacies (such as blind faith) contaminating the species' body of knowledge, by enabling each and every person to apply these tools and validate or disprove every piece of knowledge in existence. In other words, it doesn't bloody matter if you, the individual, believe in the tooth fairy when you can prove P != NP. Nor does it matter when you, the individual, don't even know what there is to prove, what the problem is. What matters is that someone else can verify or disprove either your proof of P != NP, or your belief in the tooth fairy. Or both.
To be fair, it's terrifying how people will take on an "expert's opinion" on blind faith. The answer to that problem, though, is to teach scientific process, so that people can make better choices in what to believe. The answer most certainly is not to suggest that science is little more than faith in a different set of beliefs.
The religious sense
There's a difference between faith and trust. I can't argue for the existence of Higgs boson but I can argue why you can trust the scientists. Just like I can't argue for the non-existence of god(s) but I can argue why you shouldn't trust the bible.
He Just said herp derp do you believe in math.
1: Trust is not the same as blind faith (trust can be subject to provisos, and is based on knowledge and understanding of motives)
2: Also, science encourages doubt.
3: Adding to that, most people know the basics of logic and/or maths. Many complex phenomena need to be explored and verified through horrendously complex methodology which can then explained through simpler logic, analogies and visualisation. If that logic adds up then blind faith is not needed.
And finally, science attempts to create predictions. Predictions can generally be tested. Some easily and others not so easily. Scientists then make predictions as to how electronics can be made to work and then put that specialist knowledge into practice by making something complex like a GPS satellite and GPS receivers THAT WORK.
Many of us nerds here think we know how a computer works, but we don't (or most of us don't). Not down below certain levels of abstraction, at least (miniaturizing processors needs more than hand-laying copper wires onto a ceramic plate).
That doesn't mean that computers work on faith... AND it proves the effectiveness of materials scientists and scientists who have worked on theories regarding electronics.
We trust science because it works. In particular if you learn more about it, you trust certain parts more than others because they are more proven, they've worked more.
I have a lot of trust in what is known about organic chemistry, even though I've never studied it myself. The reason is I've seen what it has delivered, I've seen it stand up to lots of falsification attempts. That tells me it is something worth trusting. Doesn't mean I believe it to be without error in every way, but in general I trust that it is right, though I do not have much knowledge of it personally.
Now string theory I don't trust hardly at all. While it sounds like it is all nice and internally consistent, there's been no demonstration of it, and indeed no testable predictions (meaning it is really a hypothesis, not a theory). As such I don't trust that it is right. I am not dismissing it as wrong, just not trusting it yet.
That is, as you point out, rather different than blindly having faith in something, saying "I believe this is absolutely right, even though I've no evidence."
Same sort of thing with interpersonal relationships. If my dad says he'll do something, I trust he will. I don't have faith, I have trust. The reason is he's demonstrated that trustworthiness in the past. No, I can't predict his future behaviour with certainty, but it isn't a blind faith thing. I've good reason to trust him.
Here's what talkorgins had to say about that:
(http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/may05.html#run)
"In a religious context, 'faith' and 'truth' are almost synonyms. And faith is automatically good. If an idea is considered truth in your religion, and you don't have faith in it, that's a reflection on your failure as a faith-holder rather than the idea's failure to be true. If you don't have enough faith on a given subject, you should work harder at it.
In the sciences, that kind of faith is not a virtue; it's a personal failing. Imagine a bridge engineer being invited to "have more faith" that a design has enough steel in it to keep his bridge from collapsing. His faith has nothing to do with it; either the bridge stays up, or it falls down. Faith in the sense of 'letting yourself be persuaded without adequate evidence' is morally wrong in that context. If the bridge engineer does so, and people die in the collapse, he's murdered them.
Scientists, or the good ones, feel the same way about their theories that good engineers feel about their bridges. It's their job to make them right, not to convince themselves for their own emotional comfort that they're already right, pretty much, close enough.
If a scientist says "I have faith this theory is true," he doesn't or shouldn't mean it in the religious sense of "I commit myself to this no matter what the evidence may say, forever. Don't try to change my mind, here I stand."
Instead, he means or ought to mean "I've tested this theory, and I've seen the results of other people's tests, and I'm as sure as I can possibly get on the available evidence that this theory is as close to right as we can get. Unless something else really radical turns up. Keep me posted.""
"At this point an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things.
In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this:--As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
http://www.relativitybook.com/resources/Einstein_geometry.html
---
It's amazing how many scientists and mathematicians conveniently ignore Einsteins's speech on this matter. It's almost as if they sweep it under the rug because it's too uncomfortable to face the fact that all math and science are based on axiomatic "a priori" knowledge, basically it's faith. I have no evidence that my brain is not floating in some vat somewhere with electrodes sticking out of it, but I take it on faith that it's not. My knowledge starts from faith that the world exists as I see it. I can't confirm that independently of my own experience.
I never realized Science and Religion were in a competition to see which could make planes fly first.
The question of whether a given person understands a certain theory seems largely irrelevant to me. This is about the philosophy of science. The details of any particular theory don't have any tangible impact on that.
The write-up makes some statements that seem a bit misguided given my understanding of the philosophy of science. For example, "The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood." I can identify no object that corresponds to scientific truth in modern science. Truth is a philosophical ideal and doesn't actually belong in the modern language of science. Our theories are models that are used to explain various observations that we make of nature. A model should not be confused with a truth. A model can be useful, but to mistake it for truth makes a serious misstep and a conflation of two very different things.
No matter how accurate the predictions of a theory may be, we cannot know whether experiments carried out under different conditions will yield unpredicted outcomes. In fact, it is these events that drive science forward. As Karl Popper has told us, falsification is the engine that drives science, not verification. We can never prove the truth of one of our theories. We can only demonstrate consistency with current data. However, a single counterexample can demonstrate the non-truth of a theory. By discarding theories that don't work and keeping those that do, we can improve the fitness of the candidate theories. However, it's impossible to arrive at a unique, true theory by this process of elimination. Science consists of a collection of falsifiable models. Where do I find the supposed scientific truth in which I should place faith?
People who talk about science as truth seem to be making an unconscious appeal to authority: "Because scientists know more than I do, the theory they are talking about must be true."
The fact that *you* take something on faith doesn't force other people to do so. The world doesn't care what you believe.
You may choose to believe what physicists say on faith, but the physicists don't. They actually check each others work, and the work has tangible results that can be measured. This is nothing like a religion, where nothing is falsifiable by observation.
Suppose I have two identical guns, except that one of them is loaded. Pulling the trigger allows you to tell them apart. If I choose never to pull the trigger, are the guns the same? Only because I choose not to take action to see the difference. If you take the guns and pull both triggers, you don't need faith to know which is which. If I didn't see it, your observation would be no less faith-based.
Your failure to check the experimental evidence for the laws of physics doesn't mean someone who did has to have faith to believe them.
Actually, I think we can take the question even further. For instance, does my cat, The Lord, truly exist? I remember having a cat, but how can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind? I couldn't tell you whether he actually exists or not, it merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat.
I imagine that I once devised a test to try and verify the existence of my cat: it consisted of putting the cat inside a box, to try and determine whether the cat's existence depended upon my ability to observe it. However, without observing the cat, it was impossible to verify the outcome.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to populate what appears to be a crossword puzzle with things that this book apparently tells me are words.
Bow-ties are cool.
We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history.
I think these statement are false. You don't learn "science" by reading an memorizing facts, you learn science by practising the scientific method. Didn't the author have any "lab" classes growing up? Unfortunately, the problem is that many teachers don't seem to understand the scientific method very well, and therefore focus on the learning facts part instead of the important part which is the method.
This is quite different from learning history, and I'd add that maybe this author has never heard of archaeology? Which is basically using scientific methods to make theories about history?
There are theories and phenomena that are well tested and understood with exacting scientific precision as you say. There is also a lot of stuff that falls under the general umbrella of science (as most people understand it) that do not adhere to this standard (or anything resembling it). A good example is the origin of life, which many say has been explained through science despite the fact that it has not been reproduced in a lab (or anywhere else) and is therefore not "demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting".
That is the practical problem. But more fundamentally, all ways of thinking about the world are acquired through a system of belief, and science is not above that. The thing that sets science apart is that you check your result against a formal definition to make sure it actually works. Rigorous introspection can be applied to any way of thinking. People who are concerned with the truth have been doing it as long as they've been thinking. The trouble is a lot of people don't care if something is true or not, and scientists seem to be as susceptible to that as anybody.
How can we belive in God when the bible is so long, and even the priests can't come to a unifying interpretation?
Science isn't that complicated at its simplest. Lets take the simple question, If you put a pope 20m in front of as steamroller running at 14km/hour how long does he have to get away.
The Christian answer: Noone knows the ways of God.
Science: x=t*v so t=x/v=5.14sec, or not even enough time for a good prayer to god to avoid the misshap.
As to whether the universe was formed in a big blast or by devine intervention, the scientific answer isn't that the first is the absolute truth, simply that we have more evidence to support a big bang then we have to support any divine beings (the latter being almost axiomatically none).
In my country there is a song in the churches they sing that goes rougly: "Take every king of any land and put them in row, and you shall see that not even one can put a leaf on even the smallest of plants". Well, screw the church the priests can't either, but science is actually getting close.
“But being a religious person, I would like to question the validity of everything for myself. That is the essence of religion, which is humility. Not to accept anything unless you understand the meaning there of, personally in your life. If you accept without understanding, you will be imposing upon the mind. And then you are neither true to the mind, nor true to the meaning. The essence of religion, which is humility, lies in uncovering the meaning of life, uncovering the meaning of every moment, learning the meaning for ourselves.” - Vimala Thakar
There are other modes of religion. Putting it as a faith vs reasoning misses the point (especially if done as trolling against science). Faith/devotion is a (psychological) tool for totally letting go of ego-separation (or: subsuming to god's will). To me, it's a sane opt-in. When used as the underpinning of ideologies and dogmas, it is not fully realized as there still is a separate believer which wants others to believe his truths. Separation all over. Criticising such harmful abuse of faith is quite necessary and adequate, however discrediting all faith-based forms of spirituality seems rather uninformed and badly researched.
The big difference is if I became doubtful enough, I could always visit Beijing. If I doubt the results of a scientific experiment, I can reproduce it. Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method. You can not reproduce magicians who supposedly walked on water, or parted seas, or turned water into wine, or resurrected people, or rose from the dead themselves. That you must take on faith.
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing." I disagree, in high school and then college, I had many science labs. True, we don't have the time and money to repeat every important experiment, but I've done enough to get the methodology if I want to do things myself. I learned how resistors and capacitors and breadboards and the like learned by my own experiments more than school.
Another thing is the times. In the 1930s, there were prominent left-wing scientists like Lancelot Hogben who felt it was important that working class people could understand math and science, which is why he wrote popular science books such as Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen. These were popular books among the poor, but intellectually active Jewish community who lived in the lower east side of Manhattan in the 1930s, many of whom went to CCNY and on to become scientists, mathematicians, engineers etc. In years past there was also a desire by working class people for education. I am quite confident a lot of the stuff coming out now in say biology could be written in layman's terms for popular science books and articles - and some of it is. But there is inertia on both ends - scientists are rewarded for indecipherable papers on obscure subjects and have less desire to write popular science, and anti-intellectualism is promoted among working people, in the USA anyhow.
Marvin Minsky once described how he perceived the brain's frontal lobe as solving problems - by considering problems from different viewpoints. One type of viewpoint could be rationality and the scientific method - and the corpus of knowledge built up from the basis of cogito ergo sum and the basics of math and physics. It is usually a very helpful viewpoint.
The original question is more of a social one than anything. I take classes at a college, and many professors there are familiar with complicated scientific concepts, and not only just in their own field. They don't take these things on faith, they learn them. That the average person in the US can not make heads nor tails from an integral says more about society and education than it does about faith and science. As James Watson says (paraphrasing): 'Very few Americans have rejected the theory of evolution, because very few who have been shown in detail how it works, and can show they understand what they have been taught, reject it. There are some people who know absolutely nothing about evolution and reject it, but they are rejecting something which they never knew anything about to begin with".
The religious sense
"For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith."
By that definition, almost everything is "faith", including history. I've never seen the Roman Empire. I never met Abraham Lincoln. Heck, I've never even seen modern-day China. Some "expert" told me these things existed. Accepting that history is "faith" leads to the erroneous conclusion that historical knowledge is no better than religious faith in tree spirits or Zeus. Perhaps the distinction is that I trust that history professors aren't lying and I trust their method for arriving at the truth (same for science). On the other hand, religious knowledge often has a poor foundation and different religions often contradict each other (meaning at least one of them, and probably both, is wrong about that particular point).
The main mistake here is choosing strawmen to represent all of science: fringe physics and cosmology.
Science has a solid empirical backing. You observe, make a model, use model to make predictions, validate predictions, thus confirm the model (with proper qualifications as to its limitations).
On the outer fringes of science, where new frontiers are being probed, there is an element of faith because of the lag between making hypotheses and being able to confirm them and, further, to finally apply them to something practical. Scientists working on something new do need some inspiration that they are going down the right path, but I would not equate that with religious faith.
It isn't fair to the original article to lump everything since Isaac Newton into one big heap called 'Science', and contrast it with religion. That's not the point at issue. The Big Bang and quantum chromodynamics are not connected in any obvious way to the practical miracles of technology. And although even the arcane reaches of science are subject at least to some extent to testing, the nature and validity of those tests are not comprehensible to lay people. Experts claim that their theories have passed experimental tests. Lay people believe this on faith.
Part of the right response is that popular science exposition still sucks too much. It could be better, but it's hard work to make it better. Too many lay people who think they are righteous science fans are in fact merely zealots cheering for their own team. They believe the right conclusions, but for the wrong reasons, because science is not any magic road to truth. It is nothing but hard-nosed common sense, plus a staggering amount of hard work. Too little of that work gets explained to the point where the hard-nosed common sense becomes clear.
The other part of the right response is that certainty is delusion, and so all belief has an element of faith that has to be recognized. Right reason is about concluding that a pattern fits the evidence to an impressive degree. There is a continuous spectrum between cases where only a fool would conclude otherwise, and cases where you have to take a deep breath and hope. The differences between how pattern recognition is exercised in science, and how it is exercised in religion, are of degree.
Science is a process. Most (young) people naturally do science. CSI is an example of the scientific process. This is different than faith. ... are factoids, or maybe just guesses. They are not science. They are some of the 'results' of the scientific process.
Higgs Boson, quantum mechanics, gravity,
The difference between science (scientific process) and quantum mechanics is the difference between playing basketball and knowing all the history and statistics of every basketball game played this season.
Although it takes a lot of effort, doing science is something everyone can do, and most youngsters do naturally.
It differs from faith in that science embraces questions and uncertainty and unknowns as key elements of the process
and faith tends to the opposite.
One of the best descriptions for how you can build your own ability to do the scientific process, to use it effectively in your daily life is:
http://www.scientificmethod.com/b_index.html
Another question that can bring about a bit of wisdom and help promote science to the mass that is being met with knee-jerk reactions and Slashdorks taking out of context so they can pat themselves on the back for being so "intelligent."
And Christianity asserts individuals can test its claims as well. (See New Testament, James 1:5):
Mormonism, in particular is even more specific (Book of Mormon; Moroni 10:4-5):
So they assert their claims are testable and observable. (And many have tested and observed.) What's your point?
Faith (or better, trust) in science is not exclusive of Faith in God. Nor is faith in God exclusive of faith or trust in science. Many trust science because they have faith in the divine creator, God, that designed things to work in the way that they do. There are many things that are touted as science that are merely theories that are not demonstrably repeatable. Is it fair to group "theories" into proven, repeatable, and demonstrable science?
No one can personally test everything science tells us. But it is nice, and fun to test some of them. Will magnets float above a super conductor? Does Saturn have rings? Does a drop of water have tiny living things in it, do different elements give of light spectra?
These are things I can personally vouch for.
Religion doesn't test the truthfulness of anything. Questioning is discouraged or even outright banned. It is true we have to take some things science tells us as true only hopping someone else tests the truthfulness of the things that are said. Science is constantly testing. If new facts come to light that contradict a theory the theory is modified or even thrown out. Religion just throws out the facts in favor of it's dogma.
Science relies of faith? Me thinks not!
Faith gave us jihad, crusade, and inquisition. Science gave us mustard gas, involuntary sterilization, and nuclear weapons. Faith gave us international charities that feed starving children. Science gave us clean water.
Gregor Mendel was a Christian monk. Muhammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was a devout Muslim. Oppenheimer did not think of the Bhagavad Gita by accident.
My point is, it's incorrect to characterize people involved in a community, or publicly claiming adherence to a certain way of thinking or doing things, as stupid, or evil, or blind. It's incorrect to characterize a way of doing or thinking as universally good or evil- it blinds you to the evil or good that exists in it. If your reaction to the above paragraph is to explain how these men advanced science in spite of having faith, then are you not interpreting the evidence to suit your assumptions? They were scientists. They had faith, and not inconsequential faith, in things many posters here evidently hate with a burning passion. Accept reality; for these men, at least, faith and science were not mutually exclusive, not demiurgic oppositional forces, but simply two ways. That doesn't mean you have to do the same, but maybe it means that you shouldn't dismiss faith as "magical thinking" that can't exist in the same mind as critical observation.
/me dons an abestos suit and waits for a response
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
Usually the worse the education the more that science is accepted as factual. Yes science is very useful and science does try to self correct. But what really happens is that those corrections are shifts to another belief which may or may not be more reality based. One can almost look at science like the frames in an analog film. Stop science at every certain time and ask if it is real or error. Is 1920s science real or error? Is 1990s science real or error? Now it is 2011 and our recent errors are not obvious yet. But just like the science of 1920 the science of 2011 will be error and does nothing to reflect the reality of existence.
The most troubling thing of all is that many, supposedly well educated people, fail to understand the situation.
In my view, the genesis of human understanding did not progress thusly:
(Apologies if I have these out of order)
If you have any respect for science (of which technology is the practical application), then all the stone age creation stories are at best implausible. The likelyhood that tribal peoples wandering around 4k-10k years ago worked out where everything came from is near nil.
Sure, no one may understand quantum mechanics now, but that will change. Every area of science has a point in time where no one understood it. That's part of the nature of discovery.
A theory can be consistent with current data but can never be proved.
There are two quotes about the universe that come to mind:
1: "The universe is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we CAN think".
2: "There is a theory that if mankind ever completely figures out how the universe works it will be instantly replaced by something even stranger. There is a second theory that this has already happened".
As long as your using the term "faith" as interchangeable with "due credit". They have faith in the system. Scientists have a tough gauntlet to traverse to publish in many fields. If the experiments prove to be unrepeatable, there is a withdrawal of the paper, which is pretty embarrassing, and make the gauntlet even trickier for future work. Scientists know that they have something mucked up to some degree, and that some better piece of work will probably eclipse theirs. However the average person isn't reading scholarly articles, they're reading some watered down version written by a reporter who can either make a readable article, or a factually correct one (often they miss both marks). People must have faith in others to maintain this lifestyle. I have some faith that the cement used in my building is the proper quality, that my Linux box isn't filled with malware at install. That the coffee I drink is always going to be non-poisonous.
Science is really in 2 parts.
Established/measured science is, obviously, not faith based at all. (Gravitational coefficients, certain laws of physics, etc).
But it's the discovery of new fields or questioning the established science that requires a certain amount of faith because you're essentially tilting at windmills until you find a test that works to prove your hypothesis (if ever).
Flying machines were faith based. Flying machines going faster than the speed of sound were faith based. Finding a cure for cancer was entirely faith based.
As you build on your knowledge you get less faith and more rationality to guide your "guesses" for the next batch of tests. But it still takes people willing to make possible fools of themselves to make that first leap of faith to study a field that may yield no benefits whatsoever.
In short, some of our best scientists were probably the best gamblers as well...
Whaddya wanna do with your life?
I am quite startled that this made it to the front page of ./ - you'd have thought we'd have worked past basic misunderstandings of the scientific method on this site, of all places.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
Who the hell is "Pastabagel"? How did this get onto Slashdot?
He has a Twitter feed, where you can read his blithering on other subjects.
I'm amused at the clueless person who wrote this story. They apparently consider something 'difficult to understand', so they then turn around and sooth their bruised ego, by claiming that their ignorance is as good as somebody else's knowledge.
Well, I've got news for you bucko. Sure, there's a lot to learn (get off your butt, stop reading Derrida, and do the study), but just because few people take the time to understand something, doesn't make the process that produced that knowledge any less valid (and by all accounts, the scientific method is one of humanity's greatest achievements). That process is extremely robust, and has produced everything modern that we take for granted.
Clearly, somebody here is very uninformed, and needs to learn much more about how the world works.
It is not Faith. It is trust. I trust the science we have so far about the solar system, so I know the Sun will rise tomorrow from the east.
Science is demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting. Most importantly: Science Delivers. Not understanding the intricacies doesn't make it "faith". Faith is an idea with no evidence to back it up no matter how adept the 'experts'. Even more important, the 'experts' often don't agree on even the basics. Witness all the various religions and factions thereof.
Actually faith is simply trusting a person or thing. Science is faith based, it trusts in human interpretations of observations. Your reference to self-correction implies that such faith/trust is sometimes found to be unwarranted or mistaken. For example consider the history of the current theory for the origin of the universe: the big bang. It was originally rejected by some eminent scientists of its day because the theory was developed by a catholic priest(*) and as these scientists commented: it smelled of creationism. Hardly a testament to open mindedness, more an expression of faith in the narrow religious sense you offer - merely an expression of the opposite polarity, anti rather than pro. To return to the broader and more accurate definition of faith, trust, many lesser scientists then had faith/trust in the opinion of these eminent scientists.
That said, I agree that we are better off that our faith/trust is based in the scientific process. I just recognize that using or acting upon fallible human interpretations does require a certain level of faith.
(*) "Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a priest from the Catholic University of Louvain, proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, he called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom". The framework for the model relies on Albert Einstein's general relativity and on simplifying assumptions (such as homogeneity and isotropy of space). The governing equations had been formulated by Alexander Friedmann. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the distances to far away galaxies were generally proportional to their redshifts — an idea originally suggested by Lemaître in 1927."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang
Science can reasonably be considered a Faith because at its very core it relies on an untestable hypothesis.
Hypothesis: My senses reflect some underlying reality.
I happen to believe that this is true but I can't prove it. Rene DesCartes tried to address this question in his "Meditations on First Philosophy" but does not, in my opinion, settle it in a satisfactory manner.
If my senses actually reflect some underlying reality then the scientific method will help me learn something about that reality.
However if my senses do not reflect an underlying reality then the scientific method is useless.
Science is a process.
Science is a way of thinking about problem.
Science is really the Scientific method.
The problem is people conflating the use of this very good, reasonable, practical process, and thinking this process can be everything.
The question of course is why would ever want to convince someone of some scientific truth? Why does it matter if someone trusts science? The answer is normally it doesn't matter. We can blab away, have a good argument and no one really cares. Just like I can have a discussion about a piece of art or a movie and no one really cares.
However, as science intersects with other domains in life... it does start to matter. in this respect science becomes more of a normal belief system.
You are trying to convince someone of the scientific truth of global warming so that you can have political and economic power over them. This aspect is really no different than any other *truth*. The church claims to have the truth so that it can hold political and economic power over power. As do kings, supreme councils...
Normally you hear *scientists* speak of science, they speak of the superiority of the scientific process (rational, evidence based, trials, peer review...).
Normally when any of other life's domain's speak of science, they are speaking of the religion of science... which basically means... trust these people and give them money and power.
Just because you have the truth, even if it is actually the truth (scientific truth) does not mean you should rule anything. That is a conclusion.
Science is a method. Science can tell you what happens when A, B, and C occur. Science cannot tell you what you should do about it. That is up to morality, which really is no different than religion.
Science does not tell you to stop Global Warming. Science only tries to tell you what will happen as the Earth warms. You do it because you are a moral person who wants to stop harm from coming to billions of people.
And as you wade into morality and goals, you find out that people's goals and moralities and sacrifices and costs are not all the same.
Science is something you can prove. Faith is something you can't disprove.
Science does NOT say how things "really are." Science provides a model that provides an approximation of reality; the most complex models can predict real events with a high statistical accuracy, but the the universe (or God if you want) is the only thing that knows what is really going to happen. If you don't know what an "atom" is, then you simply do not have a model from which to predict molecular events. When you read in a book about "atoms" you are just memorizing a model, giving you a framework that allows you to make some predictions. There is no requirement of faith in the model. If you make a prediction from the model that fails to realize, then you need to use a different model! That's all. Science is explicitly not a guarantee, but our modern models give very accurate predictions in many situations.
Faith on the other hand IS a statement of how things "really are". Faith is explicitly a guarantee and allows for zero prediction this side of death. And that's fine.
When a scientist tells you what a boson is, you DO NOT need to "trust" or "believe" them. The world's best scientists are in fact the ones who do not trust or believe in the models (even their own!).
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire
If you can prove a scientist wrong (often a difficult thing to do), the matter is settled. If you prove someone's belief to be wrong (often the easiest thing in the world to do), the matter is rarely settled. There's always the "You just don't have enough faith" argument or interesting self references, like "Jesus said, 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Light'..." -- how convenient.
It has nothing to do with faith. Even the dullest of retards can grasp science concepts at a basic level. Any idiot can understand that Gravity is real; he doesn't need to know the formula to determine gravitational acceleration of a near-earth body or the cosmological equations regarding gravity wells to understand that if he falls off a roof, something will likely hurt. This same concept exists all the way up through any form of testable science. For an explanation as to why it is so hard to explain simple intuitive subjects, I will let a far greater man than I take over: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
I don't think faith was ever intended to explain the world around us. People have just managed recently(last century) to interpret it that way. It was more intended as a method of defining social interactions. The bible has a lot of good suggestions in it on how to make society better. Science can have the same issues when people try to bend it to their wishes. I guess both run that risk, but science tends to have better methods of self correcting.
Funman?
Funnyman?
It's Feynman, at least get that part right.
This is stupid. Like, beyond stupid. Science is not faith. The question is posed by conflating different meanings or understandings of the word "faith" to try and argue that it is equal to science. "Faith" is not exactly synonymous with belief, or trust, or understanding. There are several meanings.
To take out the dictionary here: faith (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion, (3) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (4) : complete trust.
Of those FOUR, how many are anything related to science? (I omitted one about loyalty to friends and obligations). One. Complete trust. The others are about belief in religion, and "firm belief in something for which there is no proof," and this is where we have the problem. Science has proof. The whole concept of science is using evidence to prove things. We can argue about whether or not science disproves or can prove or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that there is evidence that is measured and tested and observed and that forms the basis of understanding. It has nothing to do with God and it has proof.
This whole freaking question is just like the bullshit ID one where they say "Well evolution is just a theory." Yes, evolution is a theory. It is not a theory in the way they are using the word. Confusing meanings like this is an obvious attempt to provide value to religion that it doesn't have and take away value and meaning from science. It is argumentation of the ignorant and lazy meant to confuse, because they can't argue it any other way.
This whole thing could have been solved by pulling out the goddamn dictionary. It doesn't matter if you don't know what a Higgs Boson is or how electricity works or even how your own finger moves. Someone does. Someone has tested and refined and figured out a theory. For religion, no one does. Everything is pure speculation, and thus this whole topic is fucking nonsense.
You are describing technology, not science.
Ok, fair enough. Technology is the application of science, I'll grant that there is a difference.
People made everything you describe without using scientific theories.
Wait... what? How do you think engineering works? Do you think it's just "well lets try it this way and see what happens" until it magically works? There is a reason that major inventions and discoveries are often made by two otherwise unconnected people, it's because science has advanced to the point that the application is there to be found. The Wright brothers practically invented the science of aerodynamics especially as it applies to propeller design. Without their scientifically derived understanding of the science of airflow they would never have gotten off the ground. Integrated circuits didn't just pop into existence, they were designed by some very smart people in a variety of labs applying very cutting edge theories about electricity and materials.
If you've ever heard a person of faith tell you that they do not believe in coincidence, it's because they have experienced and repeatedly seen what they believe to be God at work. I will confess to being a programmer that is one of those people.
I grew up as a disenchanted Baptist, spent about 6 years as a HARD core Atheist / Agnostic, and I've been a very imperfect Christian again ever since. The catalyst was the impossible to duplicate string of coincidences that led me to meet my future wife, understand the psychology that I needed to know to handle some complicated situations, and then finally marry my wife. I started to notice some things as we were dating of the "wow, good thing I experienced that" but the real crazy stuff happened after we talked about the little details of our lives up to that point. Some of the incredible parallels of timing of our own life experiences as a number of things that would have had to happen for her in order for us to have ended up together. Now that I've experienced it and have a small understanding of how God can work, I see it everywhere.
However, if I try to explain it to somebody on Slashdot, you'll assume I'm a religious nut case. In this case though, I experienced, learned, and see God's work on a daily basis. I don't feel like I have faith, I feel like I have understanding and if I didn't have that I would probably still be an atheist.
But I'm also fully aware that there's no way I could ever communicate that experience or communicate that experience to somebody else.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Physics (and so all of science) is mostly epistemology--getting along on imperfect information, e.g., quantum mechanics is a probability theory--and is pretty much based on functional models. It cannot describe reality in any ultimate sense, and all the hypotheses are interim rules. Faith is ultimately aimed at describing some ultimate truth in some enduring sense, i.e., describe the ultimate absolute nature of things. Relativity, with the ultimate speed limit being the speed of light, should probably be thought of as a sort of ontology, but it is really a statement made within the context of physical theory (epistemology) and would be dropped in a second if found false, hence the importance of falsifiability (at least in principle) to science.
...faith, however essential to your psychological well being, is not. That Fenyman stated he din't know all about a subject is normal- even Einstein said that we really don't know all it takes to get water down a garden hose. But allowing such statements to be tantamount to faith is to, ironically, take them at face value or on faith. Pause, ask a few relevant questions. Have an hypothesis in mind. Test. Verify. So starts the scientific method. Do whatever you need for your faith, just don't confuse it with science.
I think it's dangerous to be using the word "faith", however correct it may seem, because it gives the impression that science can be equated with religion, which it most certainly cannot. I may not understand what a Higgs Boson is, but if I have the desire, I can read and learn about it and with enough resources build experiments to test the theory. If you tell me god did it, I cannot do this, as there is no way to test for god. So I have to accept god on faith, no matter how much reading or learning I do. That is a huge difference.
Suppose "Science" delivers a finding to us that a certain chemical causes people to have a greatly increased risk of cancer, so much so that if not curtailed then hundreds of thousands of people in the US can be expected to die of it in just a few years.
And yet, you oppose the idea of the scientists who know this standing up and advocating with all (legal) force at their disposal, that the political process should act to ban the chemical?
I wish there were MORE science in politics! It beats the rest of the garbage that's there, like GREED, STUPIDITY, INTOLERANCE, UNINFORMED IDEOLOGY, BUSY-BODY-NESS, LUST FOR POWER, and on and on! How about we make decisions RATIONALLY based on DATA for a change???
--PeterM
... but to describe things in terms of other things. No one is asked to understand why the speed of light is what it is, it is a postulate which, together with other postulates and a fair bit of reasoning can be demonstrated to stick quite well to the world as we observe it. There is no faith in that, if an observation does not fit, it just shows that either the reasoning was wrong or that the postulates were wrong. Back to the blackboard then... That in fact is what makes science quite different to religions according to some: for something to be considered part of science, it must be possible to find experiments to potentially prove it wrong. If no such experience can be found, then it belongs to faith and is not generally very useful it terms of its predictions. It may of course still be very useful for one's peace of mind however.
People are interested in this it seems. There was an event at UCLA yesterday outlined at http://www.veritas.org/ucla, a debate between John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford and Daniel Lowenstein, Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA and people including myself got turned away from both the actual event location and an overflow location elsewhere on the UCLA campus.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Feynman's idea of "understanding" quantum mechanics is a much higher bar than implied by TFS. After all, he often claimed that if you could not explain a concept to a layman, you didn't truly understand it.
. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith.
That is a stupid jump of conclusions. The statement in question is akin to saying taxes are a matter of religion, because most people don't understand the math behind taxes and must entrust their filing to a tax expert, and since they are entrusting this accountant they may as well just have faith in the accounting and therefore call it a religious act.
Trusting a scientist is not the same as believing him, and believing is not the same as having faith. I can trust some one and not believe them, I can also believe some one I don't trust. Etc Etc.
Science is about trust, yes. But you don't have to blindly trust. If you do not trust a scientist, you can go to another entirely unrelated scientist and get an unbiased examination of the first scientist statements. This is also why before going public, all scientists peer-review each-other. You don't have to blindly trust any one scientist.
I recently rejected religion in part because of science, so this is a question related to something I just bet my soul on. The difference between faith and science is that science doesn't stop. Faith says, that's that, deal. Science demands to know why. More matter than antimatter in the universe? WHY? Existence? WHY? --and in science, if you have no way to test something, you have no obligation to believe anything about it. In religion, you believe it or go to Hell. I think curiosity is a far better drive to find truth than guilt, fear, and love.
Fsck, here we go again. Let's just stop this before it even gets started. The difference between science and faith is that science works, whether you believe in it or not and whether you understand it or not.
Nathan's blog
...faith is about non-falsifiable hypotheses.
Now, a lot of "scientific" navel gazing ends up living on the "faith" side, be it imagining wormholes, or time travel, or any number of science fiction tropes, but at its heart, the scientific method is about saying "this is my best guess at how things work, and if you see *this* or *that*, I'm wrong".
Science gains its power from a ruthless skepticism of ones' own ideas, and faith gains its power from a ruthless belief in ones' own ideas.
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history.
The school where science is taught by memorizing and not understanding is a very very sad place.
... well just faith. You may not understand it, your neighbor may not understand it, but there is the possibility and potential for understanding. Work hard enough, be smart enough and you can learn the secrets of Nature.
While I agree with what the article is trying to say, it is quite misleading in the things it implies.
First and foremost, the biggest difference between science and faith is that science can be understood, whereas things of faith are,
I think what you mean to say is:
Even Feynman was not a god, handing down tablets containing truths or demands which must be accepted. Maybe no one understands quantum physics, but lots of people definitely do understand every niggling detail of what Feynman said about quantum physics, and finding a mistake in Feynman, is a surefire path to fame (and frankly, money too).
If the word "faith" is really appropriate here (and I'm not sure it quite is), it's a faith that human nature is competitive. But surprise surprise, if you're really doubtful about that, you can actually use science to investigate that, and you won't need to trust experts; you can do the experiments yourself. And there won't be any hairy math either.
The only real faith that science relies upon, is the belief that what we observe is reality. If you think you're living in The Matrix then you can't trust science (for all you know, even gravity and light are totally made-up things which don't really exist). But thinking that is also going to require faith, too, because there is just simply nothing you'll ever perceive which will even suggest that it may be so.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
People made planes without physics? Many modern day integrated circuits wouldn't work without understanding quantum mechanics....
Reading the higher moderated stuff, like 3+ on here, I don't see any people discussing the actual problem posed, which I repost below.
"How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history.'"
The larger problem is that there is a large dearth of explainable science in the world and a larger vacuum of people able to explain how these sciences work to the layman. That's what's important.
I'm somewhat educated having a bachelors and being in law school. I read a large range of material from scientific studies (if I can do it for free) to magazines, to text books, and occasionally have to learn the basics of something to be able to argue about the law on it since I plan on doing intellectual property law. According to census data, education and reading habit wise, I'm above normal. I mean, I figured out enough tags to make my paragraphs and add italics. You might not think that's great if you're reading Slashdot, but that's advanced coding to a lot of people using the Internet these days. But....
I know that there will never be increased funding for science unless there is some kind of popular understanding that can create a demand for it.
Ready for the car analogy? People will soon want affordable electric cars because gas, even in Texas, is getting closer and closer to $4 a gallon. But people understand the concept of batteries, transmissions, etc. Or, if they don't know how a gear box works, they at least know it's necessary to drive a car. These are things that impact them and are relevant, and are also things they can understand to a certain degree. If people can't understand it, they (in my anecdotal and statistically worthless experience) become curious (minority), apathetic (majority) or scared of it (many, but not majority).
If you tell the average person that Climatology is complex, and that they'll only understand it with 10 years of research even if they read the studies where this data is supposedly being presented, then people will not try to find out the details. Instead, they want easily handled chunks of information, which is why this specific issue is so politicized now. People don't have time, resources, and - most importantly - the desire to wade into the weeds and figure out what's going on.
It also doesn't help that there is a very real disdain for the plebes who don't have doctorates or who don't just trust the scientists' every word because they're scientists, damn you! That's possibly an exaggeration, but you can look at the comments for yourself. A good majority of the comments above in this slashdot article are nothing but very literate trolls, trotting out pithy statements about how Science is good, religion is Bad, and stupid people need to stop being stupid. No one is ever going to change their mind by being insulted.
Instead, people need to work, train, donate, and hope for a future where we have professionals that can explain their science in such a way that it becomes accessible. Discover and National Geographic usually do a good job of that, but are restrained by the commercial interests of needing to be interesting. If anything, scientists need to add advertising and marketing to their skills, or hire people who have those skills to drum up more resources for explaining and making science relevant to most people. It is impossible for someone to care how many great discoveries and modern luxuries came out of the space ship project if the person doesn't know that's how it came to be. People on Slashdot know this, but the average person, and especially the average high schooler, have no idea. (I substituted for a public school district for a year. There's history and science classes, but they don't ever talk about science and history in the same sentence.)
Make Science popular, then people will know enough to not have to accept the statements of Experts on faith. Make the science common sense.
Science is about trust of the source. I don't have to understand all the minute details myself. I know that if I were really so determined, I could test and confirm.
Faith, like that manifested in religion, is about belief in something that can never be tested or confirmed or verified. Information is accepted with minimal question and no means of validation or review.
There is a very rational process in assessing the difference between the two. Mixing these two seems like an attempt to put religious and scientific belief on the same level when they are not.
Is the underlying purpose here to provide credibility to creationist teachings so they can be included in school science curriculum? Or is this just a continuation of the general anti-science leanings of the right wing in the U.S. today?
who said this? "We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing."
imagine applying that to mathematics. we don't "do" mathematics so we accept any theorem without "doing" the proof. that would be faith.
as an example, say i have a triangle in flat euclidean space with sides of length A, B and C. the angle between the A and B legs of the triangle is exactly 90 degrees. if you have such a triangle then A^2+B^2= 2C^2. believing this without a proof would be faith.
even if you don't "do" mathematics you may have by now caught wind of the fact that this assertion would be difficult to prove since in
fact what you can prove is A^2+B^2=C^2.
this is how science (and mathematics) differ from faith. if it were up to only faith, you probably couldn't balance your check book.
At least not the same way Religion is a "Matter of Faith", which is the parallel I think this article is trying to draw.
You don't have to accept the Authority of Science to understand it. You don't have to trust the word of the Authority. You can BECOME the Authority yourself. You can come to understand it as well as, or better than, any Authority.
Yes, you can accept what a Science Authority has to say on the subject via trust/belief/(small "f")faith in that Authority, but that does not mean you HAVE to. You can challenge that Authority, and if your challenge has merit, then that Authority has no choice but to accept your challenge and amend his/her understanding of the subject. That is what Science is all about.
The trust we place in scientists is based on reason, not "belief" or "faith". We trust that the person has integrity and is telling us the truth to the best of his/her ability, but that trust is rational. We know that, at any time, whether we have cause to challenge that person to back up his/her claims or not, we can. This kind of "faith" is completely different from that used for a Religious Authority, where there is no rational basis for belief, and no possible rational challenge. You either accept it as the absolute truth, or you don't.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Science doesn't require faith. What it does require is Trust. Suppose Scientist A postulates a Theory X which attempts to explain Phenomenon Q. Theory X's math goes way over my head, but Scientists B, C and D are his peers. They understand this math. They look over his math/experiments/methodology/etc. If they poke holes in the theory, the theory is modified or discarded. Let's say Theory X survives relatively unscathed. This is now accepted as the most likely explanation (at the moment) for some Phenomenon Q. At this point, I can say that science has shown that Phenomenon Q is explained by Theory X.
I'm not having faith that the scientists did their job right. Instead, I trust that they did their job right. How is faith different from trust? Trust is earned. If I were to say that I proved what dark matter really is, I would have an uphill battle. This isn't my field of expertise (dark matter's pretty far from web development) and, as such, my skills in this area are unproven. If my friends said this paper was true, it wouldn't help at all. They aren't anywhere close to experts on dark matter. Is there an outside chance I could be right? Perhaps, but I haven't earned the trust of the scientific community that would lend weight to my theories.
Similarly, people can lose trust. If Scientist A follows up Theory X with Theory Y that states that the Universe is a giant burrito about to be eaten by God... well, he won't be getting many follow up papers approved in scientific journals. He'll be regarded as a bit of a loon and his future theories will have to overcome quite a bit to be looked at. He'll have lost the trust of the scientific community.
Faith is something that is either there or isn't there. You don't earn faith. Trust, however, is obtained by hard work and can be lost if you don't keep working hard. Science is built on trust, not faith.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Science is like reality, and reality is that silly thing, which, even when you stop believing in it, is still there. Science isn't just a bunch of stuff that someone made up. Science is stuff which people wrote down, based on what they saw, tested, experimented. Some of it was wrong when they wrote it down the first time, and others fixed the broken parts. Some of the parts they fixed were broken, and so other people came along and fixed some of the broken parts. The process continued. This has been going on for about 2500 years or so. Universities (which means community of teachers and scholars) dedicated to scientific discovery and 'truth' based on what people saw and tested, have been around since the first one, the University of Bologna in Italy, founded in 1088. In 1988, 430 universities worldwide, celebrated the 900th anniversary of its founding. Its followed by the University of Oxford in England, founded 8 years later in 1096. Remember, only 3 institutions of the middle ages remain today: the Church, Parliament, and Universities. Science has been up against doctrine for most of that time. Currently Darwin's creationism is up against 'intelligent design'. In the past Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, and no doubt dozens of others have come up against church teachings, including torture and jail. In the end, people are just looking for answers. The problem is that we don't all agree on the answers we get.
The evidence for science and against religious origin theories may be obvious to us now. But thinking historically, how is the current situation for laymen different between listening to scientists today vs. priests and scholars in the Dark Ages? In both cases, the uneducated layman sees that every learned person seems to agree on certain basic facts about the universe, and s/he has to choose to either believe that consensus or not. In the absence of an alternative explanation, how is the medieval peasant to know that thunderstorms are *not* the work of God/Satan, or that any number of "miracles" are not caused by what the learned fathers all agree is the cause? After all, it's the best explanation being offered for the phenomena observed. And without a dissenting voice, those scholarly explanations can seem awfully convincing, especially when they get into impressive theological or natural-philosophy jargon that you can only half understand. For many people, the experience today is the same, only with scientists replacing the priests, monks, etc.
Of course to those of us with at least some understanding of science, the difference is obvious; "science works", hypotheses are tested, etc. But to Joe Sixpack who never had an interest, all he has is the consensus of scholars to go by. But of course that consensus now conflicts with the consensus of his peers and the leader(s) of his religious community, so in that sense it's harder for him to believe in science now than it was for our hypothetical peasant to believe in religious explanations back in the day.
very few non-scientists [who are not terminally lazy and incurious] can ever hope to understand
Eh ... The point of the GP is that Science can only demonstrate its claim via scientific principles, leading in a circular "demonstration" of its truth.
The three most vulnerable pillars of science are:
1. All events have causes.
This assumes determinism is the case. What's interesting about this is that the scientific community itself is attacking this pillar. I'm no quantum physics expert, but from what I understand there are certain events (spontaneous particle creation/annihilation, e.g.) that have no causes. Without this pillar, however, the scientific project is meaningless. The very project of scientific experimentation is to find the causes of events.
2. Inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning is not logically valid. That is, it does not necessarily preserve truth. To be logically valid, a logical move MUST preserve truth.
Classic example:
premise. All swans that we've seen are white.
conclusion. All swans are white.
It's clear that the conclusion can be false even if the premise is true. But these are exactly the types of claims that scientific research and inquiry make. They take the results of their study/research and make a broad, general claim through inductive reasoning. Without this, however, the scientific project is, again, meaningless. You want to be able to take the results of your study and have it apply generally. It's kind of pointless to simply study test group after test group if there's no impact on anything outside of the test group.
3. The future will be like the past.
This is where most of the circularity of science lies. Science assumes the premise that the future will be like the past, in that we can (somewhat) predict future events based on past experimentation. But this premise of science cannot be proven without appealing to circular reasoning:
premise. In the past, the future was like the past. (i.e., past predictions based on previous scientific studies have proven true)
conclusion. Therefore, in the future, the future will be like the past. (i.e., future predictions based on scientific studies will also prove true)
This is a logically invalid argument. You need a second premise in there to make it logically valid.
premise 1. In the past, the future was like the past.
premise 2. The future will be like the past.
conclusion. The future will be like the past, in that the future was like the past.
This is truth preserving. However, it's obviously a circular argument and clearly won't cut it if we wanted to logically justify science independently of itself or its premises.
This is what the GP means. Science cannot be demonstrated but by science itself. And that provides little independent, objective justification of any worth. It is only when we accept as truth all of the assumptions that science makes that science can be demonstrated to be true. This is why science IS a faith. It is a faith that the premises that are hidden within the scientific method are true, and IF they are true, then we can use the scientific method to show other truths about the world.
The issue that TFA raises is more a practical one. We HAVE to trust experts. We can't do everything ourselves. I trust experts to design my CPU. I trust experts to assemble my car. I trust experts to make my clothes. But that is not to say that I leave all of those things to faith. It's not a fundamental questioning of the truth of those things. I don't need to fully understand any of it for it to be true.
But what the GP is pointing at is that we should question science at a fundamental level. And when we dive deeper and deeper into what the scientific method is, what it relies on, and what it assumes, we find that the scientific method is not on as solid a footing as we first thought. This is a much more gripping and fundamental issue that merely whether or not we should trust experts.
We will call it faith since it's pretty complicated for one person to understand the whole thing. On that, I say it vaguely echos the Judo-Christian "you can't understand gods reason". BUT the part you have to have faith in is that some people REALLY understand each part that makes up the whole, where as the same CAN NOT be said for religion.
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
Finding the lowest common denominator, believers will equate everything with their belief... no different, they say. Just an opinion.
Science is not an opinion: it is a well formed conclusion based on rigorous discovery, generally demonstrated and always subject to revision but only based on rigorous discovery and inquiry.
Even to the farthest reaches of science, to string theory and worm holes and big bangs there are many hard won steps backed by much research. On the other side, there's just one step: god did it. QED.
The rationality of science under question by people who will have no truck with anything rational.
Skin heads, basically.
This brings up an interesting point about the language of science. String theory is not yet proven to be true. There may be some evidence that it is true but is there enough evidence to justify the term "theory". (I'm not qualified enough to say.) Certainly there is not as much evidence for it as Einsteins general theory of relativity. I think science has to invent a term for an idea that, although it is promising, is not adequately proven. Maybe postulate? It might be a good idea to come up with a gradient of terms to describe things (Starting with "stupid idea") and ending with theory. The term "law" is inappropriate because it implies that no further refinements are possible. Look what happened to "Newtons Law of Gravity" and how Einstein changed our thinking about that.
WHY NOT believe in the thing that makes cars, go, planes fly, drugs work, farms more productive, computers work, metals strong...
I'm not sure that I can fundamentally make the jump from matters of engineering - that rely on the fact that things are the way the are and do the things they do - to matters of the origins of the cosmos without a few steps laid out in between. If Henry Ford told me that the Earth was created by Martians, I am not required to believe him because I can't understand the intricacy of the internal combustion engine.
Science == miracles on demand
Not sure I've heard it stated so that I can take it on science or on faith that the creation of the universe is repeatable and demonstratable. (Though that doesn't mean it hasn't been stated, please correct me if you're more informed)
There are only two classes for human conceptions, the analytic and the synthetic. Analytic ideas are as they are by definition (like math), and synthetic ideas are those which are based on observation, perception and evidence.
Everything else is simply a matter of degree.
Putting science on a pedestal this way proves nothing. It is a false mode of thinking designed by people who find religious thought threatening. Thoughts are thoughts, plausibility is plausibility, tautologies are tautologies. Anything else is the product of the human ego and insecurity in one form or another.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
If you can't verify the claims not because its not demonstrable (as faith is) but because you and your friends are not capable of verifying the claims you can only place your trust in that of expert groups with the skills and resources ($) - this involves faith in sourcing your information. Realization of this is important as we continually have to battle against corporate propaganda trying to prevent science from benefiting society (global warming being an easy example.)
Science is a process and a philosophy and within that context there is a little faith involved. Inductive reasoning has its flaws and is a huge part of science. There are many people who treat science like a religion - I'd say that most people do this; but I've run into plenty of "low-brow" scientists (usually teachers) who have a style of 'faith' in science that is narrow and shallow which, at least to me, resembles christian evangelicals I've known.
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It was really only with the Reformation and the Enlightenment that certain Protestants and Freethinkers began to differentiate between faith and trust. The older usage is still reflected in some ways we use the term 'faith.' For example, making a business deal 'in good faith', being a 'faithful' spouse. In these contexts, faith and trust are equivalents. Moreover, in both cases faith is something earned by one party and given by the other only have experiencing the trustworthiness of the other party. But, beginning with the Anabaptists and extending to most of the Reformed sects, faith began to be redefined as something different. And by the time the scientific revolution got underway, Freethinkers had largely adopted the new dichotomy.
WVO Quine really gets to the heart of the matter: ``For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.''
In other words, scientific knowledge is ascendent over other forms of knowledge within a conceptual framework of the world that gives priority to science. One could contrive a testable worldview reliant on Homer (or any other religion for that matter) and find it adequate to describe the abstractions we consider to be facts. Why we generally do not do so is interesting. To do so is to violate the scientific method because Homer's pantheon of gods and goddesses is not parsimonious. But to say that, at a certain level, this makes it superior to other conceptual frameworks is to miss an obvious tautology. This tautology becomes apparent if we're explicit about what we're actually saying. The scientific evidence suggests that from a scientific point of view, the scientific method is the best warrant of scientific knowledge about the world.
But there are areas where science alone seems to me to be inadequate to describing reality. For example, from the view point of the scientific method, there is no good or evil. Hence, from the scientific point of view stating there can be no moral judgments. The assertion that taxation is theft (or that property is theft) are both vacuous from the scientific view point. Allegations of theft are contingent on "rightful" ownership. But science doesn't speak to that. To get to "rights" one needs to appeal to "self-evident truths" ala the US Declaration of Independence or the natural law or some deity, etc.
To steal a line from xkcd.
Which is the whole damned point. "Faith" doesn't work. It doesn't have tangible effects. Believe me, know about of "having faith" will cure my cancer. On the other hand, evidence-based science is doing _just fine_, thank you very much. It's not faith, as others here have said, because it has concrete effects in the real world. And as far as QM goes, some of those "concrete effects" are being taken advantage of in the electronics that allow us to communicate here.
While "faith" may have concrete effects in terms of why people do things, it doesn't directly effect anything outside of those people. On the other hand, a laser will handily burn a hole in your retina just fine, and no amount of "faith" will either cause or prevent it.
Once more, some fool is conflating "faith" and "confidence," which are two utterly separate things. Sigh.
You have identified things that are demonstrable and statistically trustworthy - hence requiring NO faith.
Faith is trust in something that cannot be demonstrated. A Miracle is me finding you just as you are with the above stated view and opinion, telling you about God, the Bible, how God wants a relationship with us, how Jesus died as our payment for what God calls sin, how the wages of sin are death, and that accepting Christ brings a change of heart and eternal life... and you actually trusting Jesus as your savior. THAT would be a REAL miracle. And yet this sequence of events occurs frequently around the world.
Faith in God is not mutually exclusive of trust in science. Most scientists coming out of the Enlightenment were Christians wanting to know more about Gods Creation. They believed they could use experimentation, inquiry, and observation to come to know more about what God created. What separates them from modern scientists is that they start with the supposition that all is created and hence will have certain characteristics, like purpose, elegance of design, complexity, where as modern scientists start with the supposition that one long Rube Goldberg style chain of events led to all things observable. Both do science based on observations. One revels in the joy of knowing their creator. The other wonders at the amazing complexity, elegance of design and purpose of the things they observe. Difference? Faith.
We believe statements of scientific fact because we trust the scientific method. It is evidence- and logic-based. All "truths" are provisional. Furthermore, it is productive: it leads to greater knowledge, not limitations on knowledge. Also, it explains our world well enough that as a result we phenomenal ability to manipulate nature. No faith required.
You are describing technology, not science. People made everything you describe without using scientific theories.
Really? Please tell me that Bernoulli didn't do the SCIENCE behind understanding fluids and buoyancy. Or the science behind technology. No offence to any of the engineers out there, but with out physics, chemistry and even biology as building blocks there would be NO technology.
Nature is a wonderful and amazing thing. Science helps us to understand nature. Technology uses science based on natural discoveries to improve our lives (mostly). Without science we could never build planes, combustion engines, skyscrapers, spacecraft, build massive bridges, drill for oil, and many many other things. Science is the foundation of technology.
Now, let me guess. People could have made those things without doing science, right? Do you think that the Wright brothers just built their plane and said "okay, no problem, this will fly" ? No, they experimented with different designs and test flights - they didn't necessarily know the mathematics or the "theory" but they began to understand by EXPERIMENTATION what works - that is science as much as sitting at a desk and doing math to describe some abstract concept (flight).
There is not a user on this board that does not have faith - at some level - in science and scientist. That does not mean that science is a religion.
The faith that we have is that the "scientist" are honest, diligent, and correct. We have faith that if they are wrong, sooner or later, the truth will come out and the "science" will be adjusted.
We *know* that if we want to, we can recreate experiments and "prove" that a previous experiment was correct (granted it may take a lifetime of learning, and it may take a ton of money, and tons of sacrifice - but the option is there). Or we can just have faith in the original execution (or faith in those who did the validation).
There are areas in "science" where all we have is faith. String Theory for instance. Maybe it will be proven correct. Maybe it will be replaced by a better (testable) theory. But if you believe it, it's only because you have faith in it. There are no testable experiments - just untested theories and hypothesis. Big Bang? Not currently provable. Absolutely science based. Absolutely takes faith to believe it's true. Might be a really good guess - a great theory - but not - currently - provable.
What we as scientist and science consumers must always remember - publications need to make money, man is not infallible, greed exists, prestige is desirable, misunderstanding are rampant, and most of all - it's okay NOT to believe what you read.
-CF
Is this article just a matter of trolling?
EOM
People made everything you describe without using scientific theories.
Wait... what? How do you think engineering works? Do you think it's just "well lets try it this way and see what happens" until it magically works? There is a reason that major inventions and discoveries are often made by two otherwise unconnected people, it's because science has advanced to the point that the application is there to be found. The Wright brothers practically invented the science of aerodynamics especially as it applies to propeller design. Without their scientifically derived understanding of the science of airflow they would never have gotten off the ground. Integrated circuits didn't just pop into existence, they were designed by some very smart people in a variety of labs applying very cutting edge theories about electricity and materials.
I am an engineer, so I'm not speaking of something that I'm unfamiliar with. IMHO, to a large extent, engineering and technology is based on using existing discoveries without regard to whether the theoretical scientific underpinnings are true or not, or even if there are scientific underpinnings. A few examples based on things you've mentioned:
Cars: developed based on motor technology, which was initially developed without any reasonable scientific theoretical basis. The initial motor development was of steam engines. Thermodynamics was developed as a RESULT of trying to understand why steam engines worked the way they did and how to make them most efficient. The technology came before the science.
Metals: bronze and steel making goes back literally millenia before the development of metallurgy as a science. By trial and error, accident, and building on things that worked before. No theories.
The airplane: developed by a couple of bicycle shop owners. Not based on fluid dynamics or an existing science of aerodynamics. Again, the science really followed the development of a technology. Maybe we're having a semantic quibble over scientific method here, but I see the Wright's efforts as technological implementation based on trial and error rather than a process of theoretical understanding of aerodynamics leading to wing design.
Integrated circuits: This was a technological development based on work to try to get multiple transistors fabricated on a single substrate. The invention of the transistor itself is much closer to the science->invention model, since the inventors were actively looking for a semiconductor replacement for the vacuum tube.
Drifting off the original topic....
Unfortunately, your argument works equally well for religion. From a religious standpoint all of the natural laws that form the basis for everything you mentioned plus all of the natural world that man isn't responsible for are the result of God's handiwork.
Or this
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109127/
Um... Yeah... This is one of the dumber trolls I've ever seen on /. Tell me when you've worked out how to make a faith-powered car or a cell phone that communicates through prayer.
Ask me about my sig!
You gather facts, you propose a theory with a test, that tests passes or fails.
Others can gather the same facts independently and verify your facts are repeatable by third parties. Others propose other tests.
That's science.
You can have "faith" in the scientific method because you know it's repeatable, independently verifiable (I did the optical slit tests myself and got the same results they got a century ago), and testable.
Since you know these things, you take on "faith" that they are true when a legitimate scientist says something is true. You don't gather all the data and test it yourself. But you know the method was followed. You know, you could verify or disprove statements yourself. And that there are thousands of people out there working to verify or disprove the statements- so why waste time repeating their work. You trust that enough of them would point out problems if there were problems.
Religion is not independently verifiable.
Religion is not testable.
Religion doesn't make testable predictions.
You can have faith in religion too. It's a little different tho. You believe without any repeatable verifiable testable statements of faith. There is no basis for your belief. You can't prove it. You just have faith.
I distinguish them this way (tho the words are close to synonyms).
I trust science.
I would have faith in religion.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You can't really understand science in depth unless you are a scientist; that goes for all its fields (as well as technology),
The problem isn't trusting in experts; it's fetishizing them and either relishing one' ignorance or denying it. It turns out that the world is not divided into infallible geniuses and complete retards, and one isn't born to become either a scientist who understands everything or an idiot who has to have faith in what the smart people say. With a little time and effort, most people can learn enough about a field to determine if something is bullshit or pseudo-science (so there is really no excuse for continuing to believe in it), and on the other hand even many years of study won't give a scientist knowledge of absolutely everything in their field.
Because even scientist have to have some faith in other scientists. No single person can independently judge the correctness of every discovery or invention; that's what peer review is for.
I'd say it's often more the fault of science reporters than scientists themselves. Nuances like "this is one possible answer based on the data we have" or "this could be an implication of this theory" don't make for nice, simple science articles and tv shows. So that nuance gets elided and what your left with is the true statement that "scientists say x" without the "but they also say that's just an educated guess".
The truth is that most scientists (there are of course exceptions) don't claim to have answers. They can say that the data points to this, or this is one possible explanation for why things are this way, etc. And then they adjust those statements when more data comes along which indicates things are not, in fact, that way. Faith, on the other hand, isn't predicated on data, it's sort of independent of data, by definition.
This might be a little OT, but could someone watch this video of a bunch of piranhas attacking a mouse in an aquarium?
http://vimeo.com/3389691
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dja54kUOnyQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYt668w1lGI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy4o7c0FGbI
Oh, please don't call it "faith" on your part. It stops being faith when you have "reason to trust". Faith and belief are blind. Trust is skeptical and can change.
When you see a paper from Scientist Barnaby from Oxford University and a conflicting paper from the Jesus Now! Journal of Anthropology, your bias against faith-based science may come out and you may, thus, immediately assume that the Oxford paper is more likely to be correct. But that's not faith in Oxford University on your part. You *trust* Oxford because of your knowledge and experience of the academic standards held there are significantly greater than the Jesus Now! That experience, logic, help you to form hypothesis. It's quick, it's decisive, and its prejudicial, but it's not faith.
Just the same, if you research Catholicism and find that they're miracles are most believable, that they're interpretation of dead sea scrolls are most accurate, and as a result, you decide to worship God in the Catholic tradition as a means to prevent fiery damnation and to increase the probability of an eternal state of grace, you're still not being faithful. You're hedging a bet.
Faith is the complete absence of the need of probably- or genuinely-correct information. It is belief without reason or NEED for reason.
wait is that how it works?
Mostly because I haven't studied it and the math required to do much with it, and I have no equipment with which to test.
But you could study it if you were so inclined and that makes all the difference.
And don't sell yourself short on the equipment front. You could reproduce some informative experiments with very little equipment. A laser pointer and some polarized lenses can reveal amazing things about the properties of light. Some of the most useful experiments are elegant ones that don't require much hardware.
Well, if global warming happens due to a mathematical model, change the model - problem solved! Wagging the dog by the tail isn't science.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I may have a belief in reason, the rational, and the scientific method but that has nothing to do with blind faith.
So while I might take on faith certain principles that I do not completely understand or use everyday, I know they are based on a very large foundation of science.
It is unreasonable to suggest that someone must know "everything" in order to know "something", were that the case, you might actually have some proof for a God! One can only understand so much, may specialize for whatever reason on several topics be it for interest, ease, or livelihood, and to suggest that because that is the case, one has to take on blind faith everything, such as religious zelots are wont do is perhaps one of the stupidest arguments I have ever heard.
Also a bigger Troll of a topic could only be either: PC or Mac? or MS or Linux? Etc... Talk about a comment whore of a topic.
The author doesn't seem to realize that in some sense science and religion are the same type of thing but not in the way he thinks. Both are maps of reality. The part the author misses is that they are different sorts of maps. Religion is about love, death, good, and evil. It is about how and why humans behave the way we do towards each other. Science is about the physical world. Science will not tell you how to deal with the emotions of a lost loved one. As xkcd puts it, "My normal approach is useless here." However religion will not tell you how to design and build a computer or an airplane. Religion's normal approach is useless there. They are both maps to the world and they are both important otherwise we humans wouldn't spend so much effort on them. However they are orthogonal maps. They do not intersect although some people try hard to fool others into believing they do. That is where the author makes his fundamental mistake. Faith != Trust. Truth is in the domain of religion and must be believed via Faith. Schroedinger's Equation isn't true. It is however accurate, although only in certain well defined situations. Schroedinger's Equation can be checked. You trust in it not believe in it. That those words sound so much alike is perhaps the cause of the misunderstanding.
Since you're already at +5 and you said it better than I could have, can I just tack on "me too"?
It's almost as if "trust" is an unknown concept to many people.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
People made planes without physics?
I do believe the Wright brothers did not derive their airplane designs from the science of physics.
Many modern day integrated circuits wouldn't work without understanding quantum mechanics....
This is more debatable than you probably think. Integrated circuits are largely based on field-effect transistors, the operation of which can be pretty clearly explained without resort to quantum mechanics: A larger electric field on a gate produces a higher barrier to charges trying to flow through the gate region. But the OP said computers, which were originally built on mechanical means before the invention of electronics.
research management , and peer review work.
However, when I ask questions like "What is gravity?" or "what is a quark?" the best science of our day gives me answers like "gravity is the force that makes free-to-move masses move towards each other" and "quarks are things that, when combined, produce subatomic particles."
In other words, science doesn't tell me what they are, but rather what they do. The best science of our day can't tell us what any of its axioms are, because definitions of scientific artifacts tend to be reductionistic. Once you have the "smallest thing," which cannot be reduced, the only definitions one can give are in terms of behavior.
So...the best science of our day doesn't know what any of its basic particles/forces really are. Or rather, all it can say is that we have seen some interesting behavior so we built a complicated model out of it. But really we don't know what anything is.
Since people always read more into these posts than are actually posted, I am not saying that religion is better, nor that idealistic philosophy is better, nor that there is any other sound approach to truth which could give us such answers. I am merely pointing out that, at the end of the day, science remains an axiomatic system with indefinable terms, and leaves us not understanding quite as much about the universe as we would like to. That's it.
You could study for a decade or two in order to attain the same knowledge and verify it for yourself... but until you do that, your only option is to place your trust (and faith) in those who have already done that.
Trust is not the same thing as faith. Trust is based in experience and evidence whereas faith is not. I trust scientists (as a whole) because it is possible to verify their results even if I choose not to. In fact no one should consider what they say as meaningful until someone can replicate their results. It's a critical part of the process. And you don't have to understand all the details to understand that it works. I'm sitting in front of a computer that could not possibly work if quantum mechanics was incorrect. (for the record I have studied enough quantum mechanics to feel comfortable saying that) I don't have to travel to China myself to have credible evidence that it exists. Conversely I do not have faith that the Loomaland exists just because I read about it in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
It entirely depends on what they are wrong about.
If "religious folk" are wrong about the existence of God, sure that may be catastrophic (depending on the religion).
But similarly, if "scientists" are wrong about the existence of God, that may be equally catastrophic (or at least would fundamentally alter so much of the underpinning of the science as to put it back at square one).
If, however, "religious folk" are wrong about the validity of the Book of Genesis, they would have to reassess their understanding of a number of aspects of their religion.
And if "scientists" are wrong about the Big Bang, they would have to reassess their understanding of a number of aspects of their fields of study.
It also depends on what the person is using their religion/science to "prove". I often find the argument between science and religion rather comical for both sides... trying to use science to "disprove" religion is like trying to use science to "disprove" poetry. And vice versa... poetry cannot be used to disprove science. Religion is FAR more akin to poetry than it is to science... Both religion and poetry try to give structure, meaning, and understanding to life. Science dissects life and explains how it functions, but says nothing about the fundamental "why" of existence. Each has its use and life would be less rich and enjoyable without either.
Science offers theories that are under the regime that "if it is wrong, it can be practically demonstrated that it is wrong" and of course wrong things are discarded. Everything else is window dressing in support of that. So scientific content is things that are true plus things that are so far indistinguishable from truth. The structure that follows from this content carries with it an understanding of the world around us.
Faith is hollow. Faith is not accountable to any rules of rationality whatsoever. Faith is what allowed the branch Davidians to stay in that compounds. It what convinces people to drink poisoned cool aid. Its what causes people to hope the Pope will have fix the rampant pedophilia being cultivated by the Catholic church. Faith is what convinces people to train to fly airplanes into buildings as if there were a higher purpose that makes that not an atrocity.
Science and faith have nothing to do with each other.
Certainly, there's a faith component for someone, like myself, who doesn't have any training in the hard sciences.
However, unlike religious faith, my faith in science rests on human beings, and human reason, and the conclusions they've drawn. Religious faith typically denies the human experience, and rests on the existence of something that is, by definition, inhuman.
But as an above post said. A person can stop being a layman. But no matter how much they study that can't see a Jebus.
Not so sure about that one. If you look at it from a strictly scientific point of view, you may well end up concluding that a person who dedicates themselves to religion hard enough may well end up having an experience that they can only explain religiously. There's plenty of strange psychological states that you can put yourself into if you go about it in the right way. Speaking in tongues, spirit possession, mysticism—there are plenty of people who will participate in these and take it as evidence of something akin to "seeing a Jebus."
Yeah, I know you and I can propose scientific explanations for what they experience; but do you seriously think it's unreasonable for a rural Haitian with no scientific education to accept the local explanation that those guys acting funny in the Vodou ceremonies were being possessed by spirits? What would you do if you had the same education and life experiences?
(And for the record, scientific understand of spirit possession is fairly spotty. The general shape of the theory I recall is that practitioners go into mental states that are similar to psychosis in Western societies, but in a culturally appropriate fashion according to local norms. I.e., from the point of somebody like you or me, these people have a mental switch that the priest can flip to turn the crazy on and off. There's also dudes who just fake it, however.)
Are you adequate?
The average person may not be able (or willing to take the time) to personally evaluate the mathematics and evidence that support scientific theories, but that does not reduce their second-hand understanding to "faith."
I know very little about auto mechanics, but I can tell the difference between a real mechanic and a guy who believes that automobiles run by by the will of God, because when my car breaks down, I can take it to the first guy and he'll fix it, while the second one cannot. Based upon that evidence, I conclude that the first guy has a better understanding of how cars work than the second guy, and therefore that the information he imparts to me on that topic is more likely to be correct. When I make such a judgment about whether somebody is an "authority," I am not making it based upon faith; rather, I am evaluating the evidence in the same way that I would evaluate the results of a scientific experiment. I am looking at the outcome to test a theory as to the level of knowledge of the repairman.
And of course, we are surrounded by such evidence. When we play a CD, we are testing the theory that physicists and engineers have sufficient understanding of sound, laser light, and semiconductors to be able to encode and retrieve music. When we use a GPS, we are testing (along with many other things) whether physicists understand gravity and motion.
It's called science because the scientific method is used to prove a particular hypothesis. A good example is the existence of gravity. We don't take it on faith that we will fall off a cliff, it is a hypothesis that has been proven many times (unfortunately for some). The fact that you don't know that you will fall off a cliff, or how the process of gravity works, will not prevent the fall. It is not faith in a fact that is important, it is only important that the method used to prove a particular fact is the scientific method (which itself has been deduced from logic). However, to the extent that the inputs to the scientific method are faulty, so are the outputs. This just means that the experts can be wrong or the measuring tools inaccurate. The validity of the experts and their findings is an issue of credibility, not faith. The accuracy of the tools is an issue of calibration, not faith.
I am willing to bet that you don't know much about quantum physics, but have faith that the theory has some true groundings.
I do know a fair bit about quantum physics (I have a minor in applied physics) but that is not the important bit. The important part is that I know how to go about finding out if a scientific theory is plausible or not. Furthermore I know EXACTLY what would cause me to cease trusting that a particular scientific theory was credible.
There is evidence that their claims are true (e.g., someone named Jesus did exist in the past, and there is significant evidence that he was executed by the Romans). You may dismiss this or believe that the evidence is not enough to believe in, but those who do believe it are a far cry from the strawman "blind faith" you describe.
You are setting up a straw man yourself. Their claim is not simply that Jesus existed but that he was the "son of god" come to earth and that he "died for our sins". Their claim is that he was a deity, for which there is NO credible evidence of any kind anywhere. Pure faith and nothing more. If they stopped simply at the notion that a man named Jesus lived 2000 years ago and he was executed then that is fine as far as it goes. But you know damn well the argument does not stop there.
You desperately need a better understanding of the word "science". It's not just people in white coats working in labs. In fact, throughout most of history, science was very practical, and only with the extreme specialization and depths we have reached during the past few decades has it become so largely theoretical.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If Jesus Christ or God wants me to know them, why do I have to work at it to recognize them? They should just come out a speak to me directly. If they want me to know them, I shouldn't have to work at it. To me, meditating or praying is like self-hypnosis, where you may eventually see what you want to see. But, that doesn't make it real.
Science is about reproducibility.
A side tale regarding reproducibility. My mentor in graduate school told me a story of going out for a beer with his mentor when he was doing his post-doctoral fellowship. His mentor stated to him that my mentor's work was insignificant. My mentor promptly quipped back to him that his was irreproducible. He was promptly thrown out of his mentor's lab, and was unable to get anything published in the one major journal at that time. After his mentor was no longer on the editorial board, he was again able to get articles published.
Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark -. Sir Rabindranath Tagore
A good example is the origin of life, which many say has been explained through science despite the fact that it has not been reproduced in a lab (or anywhere else) and is therefore not "demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting".
Many might say that but no (reputable) scientists do. I've never met a scientist who claims to know how life originated. I have met some who have some intriguing theories on the subject but the weight of the evidence does not yet point to any single theory and they will be the first to acknowledge that.
I do believe the Wright brothers did not derive their airplane designs from the science of physics.
And neither did they get the blueprints handed down on divinely inspired sacred scrolls.
Of course they derived the designs from physics. That doesn't mean that they designed the planes on a blackboard. Experimentation is very much a part of science, as is incremental improvements. Mythbusters, despite the obvious entertainment value and shortcuts they take since it's a TV show, is pretty much scientific - you formulate a hypothesis, you test it using a series of experiments in controlled conditions, you go back to the drawing board to see if the results verify or contradict your initial assumptions, you improve your concept, repeat until you're happy with the results.
And that's pretty much what the Wright brothers did.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
At least you don't go to hell when you don't believe in science.
If Gödel's incompleteness theorems hold, then science might well be based on faith all the way up, whether you think you understand it or not. And one thing more: FTFA: "If creationism could pass as science, then schools could teach it–creationism according to fundamentalist Christianity–uncritically as a fact they way they teach science." If schools are teaching science uncritically, then they aren't teaching science.
He's not a scientist, he's very naughty boy
It's always the non-scientists who most vehemently defend SCIENCE, not the working scientists.
disclaimer: I'm a [not computer] scientist
No human can ever know everything. That is why we put our trust in other people.
A fireman tells you to leave your house because the one next to yours is on fire. Have you observed fires spreading from house to house before? Probably not. Do you know for sure the fire will spread? No. But you rely on the fireman's experience, knowledge and training and you trust that he has made the right decision. Is this 'faith' or is it just being reasonable in believing someone who probably knows what they are doing.
What annoyed me about the original article:
"the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason."
Oh yeah? Maybe we should just say a benevolent space man has made all those things to make it more simple?
The concepts are hard to understand, but the scientific method is in place to ensure that someone with the same (or greater) level of expertise in the field can check whether a scientist is correct in his assumptions/conclusions. Things like peer review and recreating experiments, to see if you can come to the same conclusion, are what make science not a 'faith'.
This just seems like another failed attempt at shaking people's trust in logic, reason and science. "Why do you trust it if you can't understand it? herp derp Come to my church on Sunday, my pastor will explain everything in terms you can understand, forget that wordy scientific mumbo-jumbo."
If a scientist tells you something you don't like or you want more information about it can learn and get more information it if you care enough about the subject. If it becomes too hard for you...boo hoo.. If the bible tells you the earth was created in a week you can't well ask god for clarification of what he meant. TFAs tour thru the ideas of trust and authority is not particularly insightful or useful.
But it also requires doubt.
To be worthwhile, I assert religion does too.
Religion explicitly requires an absence of doubt. The moment you doubt the existence of a god for which there is not a shred of evidence, you no longer believe in that god. Religion cannot co-exist comfortably with doubt. You cannot simultaneously believe in something for which there is no evidence and also require evidence to be certain. You can't have it both ways.
There are scientists who believe in gods but they are making a partition in their brain. They are demanding evidence for everything except the existence of their god(s). In other words they are intentionally ignoring the reasoning they use in their professional lives.
IMHO, part of the problem is that professors are often economically and professionally invested in their pet theories. They derive grant money, consulting, and professional status from being an authorative expert on whatever it is. And authorative experts are "right".
It is taboo for a student or anyone who cannot match the peeing contest of academic credentials to question them. Even then, it often starts bitter battles that last entire lifetimes. Battles which have been known to fly in the face of logical, rational thought and mounds of evidence to the contrary. Why? Because someone has an absolute need to be "right".
During my academic career, I have often run into a great deal of trouble because I do question nearly everything. I don't care if it is printed in the text book. The book is often wrong and I have, in class, on more than one occasion been able to prove it. And in at least one case, the professor had written the text book :/
HDGary secures my bank
The basic premise seems to be that non-scientists can never hope to understand complex scientific concepts. There seems to me to be an important word missing there: "FULLY", as in "...non-scientists can never hope to FULLY understand...".
I am not a scientist (IANAS?!) but I AM very scientifically-minded and spend A LOT of time reading and trying to comprehend these admittedly complex ideas. I have no illusions about my knowledge: if I was very, very lucky, not tired and fully on my game I *might*, on my best day and he on his worst, be able to have a reasonable conversation about something like quantum mechanics with a real physicist. For a few minutes anyway :)
But that doesn't mean I have to take anything on faith. I can understand the broad strokes enough to be able to come to my own logical conclusion on whether something is right or not. No, I can't write up a formal proof on a chalkboard, nor would I be conversant on every last detail. But I can get the broad strokes, faith need not apply.
It's similar to programming... I'm a Java developer, but I also have some limited experience in .Net. A .Net developer who does it day in and day out could absolutely run circles around me, no question. But I can get the broad strokes and be able to draw a reasonable conclusion about the bigger picture, even if I can't give you ever last detail of the code. Same thing with science.
So no, faith isn't required, certainly not in the same way that it is an absolute necessity in religion where there's never any hope of understanding or proving/disproving anything.
So yeah, I'll still take science any day of the week :)
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
This gets back to the very roots of knowledge. How do I know that I am? I postulate/assume/take on *faith* that if I think, I must be, for example. TFA isn't some grand synthesis leading to the debunking of the scientific method, nor irrefutable argument for teaching Creationism. The author just doesn't understand that by the standard of faith being used, EVERYTHING is taken on faith, including that I'm typing at a computer, that there are people out there, that they also type at keyboards and post to /., and that TFA was even written by a sentient being (and, summarized accurately on /., which genuinely requires Faith, HA! ). I don't experience any of these things first hand, so how do I "know" that they are "true"? Experience and assumption. How do I know anything existed before my first memory? Faith that history books are assembled from facts with backing in empirical evidence and chains of logic.
Religious Faith (cap "F") is a whole 'nother matter. Anybody have direct experience with God? Not that they can share without unquestioning belief. Phenomena inexplicable from anything OTHER than God? Not yet, except at the very limits of knowledge. Maybe the origin of the Universe really is proof in a divine consciousness; maybe not. I'll take it on Faith.
with "Is Science Just a Matter of Faith?" and "Read the 666 comments" footer below it.
Yeah, OK. Whatever. At least this is mildly more entertaining than the thread (!?!?!?!)
Is science is more believable than fables/mythology...political/religious dogma and bullshit? Yes
If I paint a house red, it is red.
If I perform a task that has resulted in the same specific outcome, then it is a little stronger than belief. In fact, it is reasonable, which elevates it to actuality well outside the irrational realm of dogma and fantasy.
I reason that actuality exist. Dogma and fantasy may be a reality for some...; Hence, "Reality is self-induced hallucination." IOW: Political/religious... dogma belief/faith reality is proof of insanity in an individual/community. Often individuals/communities that regurgitate dogma and never question reality are TFNuts and malevolent (burning witches...mass murder of native people...gassing Jews...).
The manipulation of words always results in lies. Politicians, clergy, criminals, and horny boys need to manipulation words for much the same reason - fuck others up with the clear conscientious of a sociopath.
Science cannot manipulation words and must replicate results consistently.
Wave, particle, micro, macro... physics concepts are not that complicated, just sometimes poorly communicated or irrationally rejected by adelophobics.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Big bang is not debatable. Al Gore on Global Warming fraud: "The debate is over." Both Science and Religion are used by the elite to make $ and control the people. Simple.
Twitter: @dainsanefh
Most people just believe what "Science Journalists" (who are journalists, not scientists) tell them about science. The state of "Science Journalism" is generally pretty exasperating for those who know anything about whatever subject they're writing about today.
I have done the Millikan Oil Drop experiment myself. I did not get very good results, but I have no doubt that Millikan (or the graduate students working for him) got the results claimed. His apparatus was probably in better condition, with the optics not smeared with the oil from all the other students trying to get through that physics lab in the lab time allotted for it. (I'm reasonably confidant that the 1/3 charge I saw on one oil drop was experimental error.)
Science is a process, not a conclusion. That's how we can have various different sciences and yet they all be sciences.
Believing a specific conclusion that we don't understand may take belief in another person's work, but that doesn't make it faith (belief without proof). Because we can easily understand the concepts of science, the value of science. We have thousands of years of evidence as to whether or not this process produces reliable conclusions. We understand that just because we don't personally have the knowledge and resources to re-test a hypothesis, that somebody does--and probably will re-test it. We're secure in the knowledge that it can be tested and re-tested, unlike faith.
That doesn't mean that every conclusion will be correct; we have ample proof of that in our past. Nor does it mean that we should jump right into believing any new conclusion. But some things we have a pretty good grasp on. The longer hypotheses stand, the more supporting data turns up, the more secure we can be in their validity.
Science doesn't prove, it only disproves. If we keep that in mind, with knowledge of what science is and how it accomplishes what it accomplishes, what is there left to take on faith?
I prove faith every day.
Prove it then. Feel free to do it in a biblical manner if you will.
Maybe your problem is that you can't prove something you don't have?
Prove that too, while you're at it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just try disbelieving Maxwell's equations. Your cellphone will quite working right away.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm getting quite skeptical on the cosmology front. With holographic universes and string theory and the third dimension being an illusion and gravity as an information effect, I'm starting to think they're just fucking with us. :-P
You desperately need a better understanding of the word "science". It's not just people in white coats working in labs. In fact, throughout most of history, science was very practical, and only with the extreme specialization and depths we have reached during the past few decades has it become so largely theoretical.
Perhaps I'm desperate, but the original posting was about the use of science as an explanation for reality. This used to be called "natural philosophy" as opposed to the practical arts. Modern terminology would tend to call these "science" and "technology". Technology really has no particular use in explaining reality, while (parts of) science does. So, it is useful, rather than desperate, to make the distinction.
Science does not have the rigidity or inflexibility of religion. Science is our understanding of this world. It presents the world just as it is - Complex. It makes the world difficult to understand. All the answers difficult to learn. Brings up more intricate questions.
It is much different that faith. It is dynamic, not stagnant.
And it is very different than the religion crap. Why? Because it updates itself.
I may never travel to the top of Mt. Everest, but my understanding about how things work up there (ie. thinner air, temperature, etc) is not something I have adopted on "faith". It is *possible* that I could go up there to verify it if I felt that my understanding was contrary to how the world operates. That cannot be done with religious faith - if someone declares that they had a divine revelation, I have no way to verify or disprove their revelation, short of having one myself (and presenting it in a more convincing way).
I understand the point, and yes, most Science is so ridiculously over our heads that we must simply choose to agree or disagree with it -- but agreement with those concepts is not "faith" or "trust", as science is a PROCESS, not an INSTITUTION. I suppose you could say you have faith in the process of science, but that's sort of like saying you have faith in your ability to see. That I trust fellow scientists to not deceive does not mean I have faith in what they say -- trust is EARNED, not given blindly -- someone that has established their voice, put their career on the line with their publications, can be trusted as a function of their history of what they've produced in the past. One cannot publish an article in PNAS about something that came to them through revelation, no matter how many times the Discovery Institute may try.
Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel did a real scientific study of Dutch cardiology surgery patients. Recorded what happened to all the cardiology surgery patients at several Dutch hospital over a certain period of time. Found real scientific evidence confiming the existance of some kind of near-death-experience happening.
http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Pim-Van-Lommel/?isbn=9780061777257
"nobody can obtain to proficiency in the science of mathematics by the method hitherto known unless he devotes to its study thirty or forty years" -- Roger Bacon
Except, you learned all the knowledge in mathematics Bacon spoke of before finishing high school (or at least, you were supposed to).
As we develop better understanding of science, and better teaching methods for science, future generations will understand more of it.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." Sixth model cylon
It is also the loss of strength of the truth in science when studying things with no reproducible, testable methods: such as the origin of the universe or origin of life.
Science should never say "this is THE TRUTH". It simply says "This is a testable model with predictive power". Newton's Laws might be in the bigger scheme of things "wrong". But they are still a very good model which help us predict what happens at our everyday world. Similarly, quantum mechanics has been able to predict, with better success than Newtonian mechanics, what is happening in the world at atomic scale. Truth and belief do not come into it. Is it a good tool or do we have a better tool is more like it. Instead of saying "This is the truth" a scientist should say "With the current information available to me, this is the simplest model which explains a good part of the observables and lets me predict with reasonable level of success ...".
Origin of the universe has pretty good proof backing up some sort of big band, the details are being debated about it still however. Doesnt matter, fact remains the universe as we know it came from a singularity, what happened 10e-100 seconds after that is what is debated. As far as the origin of life, their is substantial evidence it was bacteria that spawned everything we know, but no one knows for sure where on this planet or in the universe the first bacteria came into existence. Bacteria evolved into cellular organisms by cooperating with eachother in a form of symbiosis. Then, these cells cooperated with eachother leading to multicellular life, and from there things became more complex.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Since this thread is nearly guaranteed to not being seen by the masses, let me propose a question to you.
You quote "Often individuals/communities that regurgitate dogma and never question reality are TFNuts and malevolent (burning witches..."
Lets say, that witches were capable of cursing, remote death, and other rather nasty things. Would their deaths be justified, knowing that they could do those things? Would their deaths be justified if they claimed to have done those things to certain, named, individuals?
Its clear that few people understand science at all. Science is the creation of models (usually mathematical) that describe the behavior of nature. They tell us nothing about the true nature of anything, just how objects behave (and not why). Example: electrons. No one really knows what an electron really is. There are lots of theories with sub particles and such. However, scientists have constructed very intricate mathematical descriptions of how these funny objects behave. We now have an incredible array of reliable electronic devices even though no one really knows what an electron is. We do not really know what the electron is, nor do we really need to know. These mathematical descriptions are however extremely useful. The better models are robust and explain more behaviors. The better models are simpler. The process of science is how we develop and test these models. No need for faith at all (at least with respect to science). There is lots of room for philosophers, theologists, and everyone else to participate. But when it comes to evaluating which models are better, science works.
I thought the whole point of quantum mechanics is that, while on a large scale, reasonably accurate rules are known that are largely reproduceable... at fundamental levels scientists have to describe reality in terms of potential and probability.
People who defend science as "verifiable" and "repeatable" behave the same as religious zealots. Their terminologies differ. Science is a tool. A tool that can be inappropriately applied. It is no more "correct" then a hammer. Holding science up as something "better" then religion is like comparing a belt sander to a punch awl.
Asshole are assholes, regardless of the color of shit they excrete.
Science only a requires a blanket faith in your 5 senses; a belief that the world around you is not some illusion designed to trick you. Someone without blanket faith might believe that empirically achieved test results are tampered with by unseen forces, and that the sky is not really blue but rather green with pink polka dots - that a blue sky is only an illusion put there by aliens to deceive us.
Religious beliefs require blind faith. You must accept as truth that which has not been, and can not be, empirically tested. That's quite a 'leap' from blanket faith.
This is something I consider one of the greatest downfalls in current society. The ability to make a point by taking 90% of an idea, and leaving out 10% because it doesn't fit (and yes the 90/10 rule is arbitrary for any of sticklers for detail).
In the case of the author, they literally define faith by stating aspects that people take from scientists, and then proclaim it faith.
Yes, Faith requires Trust.
Yes, Faith requires belief.
However, as my pastor taught me, with question, there is doubt, with doubt, there is no faith. Without faith you will always find fault with God.
And while I do consider myself a God-fearing person, I don't have faith in God, and I can't as long as I see the name of God used in such a way as to take away from someone else.
The point of science is that you question all, trust what can be proven, and believe in what you see. This are the principals of scientific discovery, and for anything to be considered a truth, they must pass these principals, and be confirmed by more then the original observer. Otherwise they are theories. And while it is fun for someone of faith to attack theories, the problem there is that until a theory is proven to be true or false, it is just a theory, and to be taken on believe, and only trusted as far as it can be thrown. It should never be considered on faith. Nothing in the scientific world is taken on faith. And every time a scientist does take something on faith, the community is ready to correct them.
Can you replicate evolution?
There is science, theory and faith. Faith is simply what you believe. Theories are guesses as to how things happen. Science is a testing tool used to test the validity of theories. Useful theories predict new behavior and understanding. We can use Einsteins theory to find astronomical objects, we can measure predicted time differences, etc. The same for evolution. We can predict/manufacture new plants/animals by manipulating the genetic material which explain evolution. Most people have multiple faiths. It is possible to see the results of science but not of faith. People know that science brings life saving medications, food, computers, etc. It works.
You just hit the nail on the head, so to speak.
Or
You are Correct Sir.
Yes, this is where your Skepticism has to start. If the facts are politically or socially movitated then look at other sources. Rules "like do not believe everything you read" apply.
Consider the totalitarian principle. I'll readily concede that the probability of a given non-forbidden event occurring is non-zero, what take faith is the acceptance of the assertion "if it can (with non-zero probability) happen it will", which is accepted constantly in particle physics.
Hell go on and look at any mathematical discipline (ZF or ZFC set theory anyone? Peano arithmetic? the list is infinite), they are all systems of reasoning that are consistent *from the axioms*. The truth value of the axioms *must* be assumed, and their proof is necessarily outside of the system, hence all these systems require faith in the truth of the axioms as their starting point.
As an interesting side-note consider Clarkian presuppositionalism, which readily acknowledges this from the "other side" of the debate.
there's no scientific justification for string theory
i'm certain all that mental masturbation has some use. its just not science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Faith" implies belief without evidence, or contrary to it. Science is not about believing something, its about what evidence exists for something. Whoever wrote this sounds like a sophomore philosophy student.
All of these questions and debates about science and religion are 100 years old. The topic is closed and has been for some time.
The cell phone in my hand and the Hiroshima bomb are two wildly different items yet they both are evidence that science is very real.
As I said; "Reality is self-induced hallucination." As I implied reality for TFNuts ain't actuality.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This is point that has come up for me before, the idea that Science is really just faith of another kind.
But its not the same.
Lets take a much more simple example than all the quantum physics and other examples that are really hard to understand much less demonstrate.
The Earth revolves around the sun, and is not flat.
Do any of us *know* this is true? Have any of us actually gone through the process of calculations and observations that prove this is so? I haven't. I accept that its true, but not on faith, but because it makes sense and because I know I could prove it if necessary. I rely on the fact that thousands of other people also think this, many of whom have proven it, and because nobody else has disproven it. You collect all that together to form your conclusion that its true.
Now, if I had read one book on the subject, a book that simply stated it was so without any explanation of how or why, a book that had not been revised except by language translation, and offered no method of proof, and in fact told you that to prove it was futile, then that would be faith.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
It seems to me that most topics in science are comprehensible, in their broad outlines, to someone with a high school level grounding in basic science. The theories that seem to be hardest to understand are theories that are in dispute among scientists.
Just thinking that I could take one or all of those books displayed at the beginning of the article and burn them.
And nobody would murder me or anyone else because I did it.
Just a thought.
I think it is often overlooked how important it is that scientific knowledge is expressible as formal logical statements stated about terms which are well-defined by their occurrence in multitudes of these statements. And scientific statements are constructed so as to be testable (knocked against the world in some carefully observed way) by some experimental procedure.
A logically and semantically inter-dependent network of statements and terms is built up as theory and experiment pile on top of and extend theory and experiment. this network of terms and statements is highly connected via strict logical dependencies. It is sensitive (like a house of cards) to having large sub-networks of the statements and terms demolished by one contradictory experiment.
It is the body of scientific knowledge's (the logical network of statements and terms)'s standing up over time to such experimental bombardment, and not toppling like the aforementioned house of cards, that gives it its strength, and its worthiness for belief.
It is true that the body of scientific knowledge consists of multiple, sometimes highly independent domains. There may not be many common terms between evolutionary biology and quantum physics. But where they DO intersect, the same mathematics and the same principles of logical inference work for both.
In any case each domain of scientific knowledge must be self-consistent (in a strict logical sense) within itself, even as it expands to cover observations
of more and more related aspects of the real world.) That is an onerous constraint, and one that, if met, lends a great deal of credence to a scientific
statement consistent with and expressed in the terms of one of those domains of scientific knowledge.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you want to feel like Galileo before The Inquisition, try scoffing about man-made global warming while working in the entertainment industry in NYC.
I'm just sayin'..
Only things the peeps in the check out line at Whole Foods in SoHo are missing to complete the scene are hooded robes and torches...
Really? I whole food staff member was immolated thus ending their corporeal existence? Wow, I'm surprised it didn't make the news, oh wait, local news... no not there... Can you please provide a link to this fascinating story? ...
.
.
I thought not.
Please take your troll stories out of this respectable web forum. Science does take a considerable amount of faith. Reading about something in a book is not the same as going out and recreating the experiments which lead us to believe the things written in that book to be facts. So, if you are a reader of science, a mere observer if you will, then yes, you must have faith to believe what is said there is true.
If you are a researcher, an experimenter, an advancer of science, then faith is required in a different way. The scientist must believe something with insufficient data to prove it to be true, before he can design an experiment and then either prove or disprove his theory. This is called a Hypothesis. Say it with me: Hi-Poh-The-Sis. In this way he must have faith in his own theory before proceeding on a sometimes expensive experiment that takes considerable time.
Faith also must be imparted in the case of a researcher seeking funding from those less versed in his subject of study but more heavily laden in wealth. He must sell his idea as ground breaking science, forward moving technology, or society changing paradigms, whatever he must do to get the money to build the machine that will test his hypothesis. That takes strong faith, and for someone to gift that money they must have faith in the scientist not squandering it on trinkets but instead staying in the lab, having no social life, and just running experiments until they complete the research in question.
But I think the main difference between science faith and faith faith is, when scientists come across new information that refutes many previously accepted claims which they put their faith into as being true, those scientists hold an open mind, repeat experiments, and if necessary change their view of what is now considered fact. When a religulous persons comes across something that refutes their faith, that person or thing must be possessed by the devil and is subsequently stoned to death or crucified. It even says so in the bible. Some one named Jesus I think. There is no investigation of the new information. There is no learning. The new ideas are heresy and must be stamped out, book burned, and destroyed before they spread to anyone else. Hewn off like cancer.
So please don't troll. This firehose is hard enough to keep up with just considering all of the useful information that's posted, let alone the rhetoric and nonsense.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Its not faith to accept the scientific consensus; what you are believing in is the process, not the specific conclusions. The process of how scientific hypotheses are tested is easily understandable to the layman, and knowing that it is being applied can satisfy you that the conclusions drawn are the best ones available.
People comparing science and faith are retards attacking the source of all our current worthwhile knowledge, normally for a particular agenda.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
People who trust science often do so through faith. People who trust (for example) religion also do so through faith (ignoring for example those who probably ate something they shouldn't have and then had a "religious experience").
What separates science is that it doesn't depend on it; if you have the time, the energy, the resources and the mental capacity everything in the realm of science is available for your testing. Most people don't have the time, energy or mental capacity to do this so they get by on faith instead.
That happens to be why I have a great deal of faith in science; I trust that when a scientist publishes a finding that others who do have time/energy/resources/mental capacity will check those results and will happily announce if they could not recreate them.
Most (even though they could) don't look through widely-distributed source code of binaries they run looking for malicious code for that matter either. They don't need to, getting by on faith works well enough.
Being epistemically responsible is admitting when you just don't know, rather than making up some random arbitrary untestable simple explanation and believing it, or believing the random arbitrary untestable simple explanation someone else insists is true.
I mean how can your wife possibly tell whether it was god or santa claus or the tooth fairy who created the world in 7 days?
Why doesn't she just say. I have no idea about that, and I don't have the time or patience to find out.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Science is based on self-correction. No fact in science is taken on faith or considered to be sacred.
That being said there are certain constants in science whose origin have not been discovered, but they have been measured, one example is Planck's constant another is the acceleration of gravity. Even these, however, are subject to constant study as to why these values are what they are. Indeed, even the nature of gravity is understood while it's effects are very well understood the origin of gravity is not known.
All of these things and many more are evidence that, while we don't know everything, there is no reason to think that anything is outside of the realm of understanding. Science is always seeking answers... always improving itself.
By contrast, faith encourages blindly accepting things without proof and also doesn't seek to self correct and asks a person to accept things as gospel without question. Examples of faith are religions which simply ask you to accept myths, such as creationism, and that there is some all knowing sky-father who, for some reason, created us all and suddenly just left and decided never to show himself for the ensuing two thousand years. All of which flies in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. Faith would have you ignore the evidence and simply accept what you're told like a good little sheep.
So, there is a stark contrast between faith and science. Faith doesn't self correct and expects blind acceptance. Science, constantly questions itself, self corrects and expects to be questioned constantly from every angle to disprove it's theories in order to improve them. Based on the observable fact that there are completely opposite things, they assertion that they are in any way the same thing is completely wrong.
Clear enough??
Yours, GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Science is *how*, religion is *why*.
It's a very simple separation, i just don't understand why people have to keep blowing it out of proportion with either a vicious hate against either or an entire book's worth of explanations that amount to nothing.
Faith is continuing to believe something even after it has demonstrated to be a fallacy made of pixie dust and unicorn farts. Science is the process we use to determine whether something is unicorn flatulence or not.
Let me try 3 definitions for science:
1. Trying to figure stuff out.
2. Whatever professors do at universities.
3. Whatever led to modern technology.
All the same thing?
In my opinion 1. largely part of 3., 2. used to be very much 1. but moved away from it quite a bit and into the direction of what clerics do at churches.
I can make two separate models that end up with the same result. They both can't be right.
The simpler model is more likely,
because there is less room for error in it.
This principle is called Ockhams razor.
For each extra letter in the description of the more complex model,
its probability about halves.
Since I've done a small bit of science in my time, I can trust, up to a certain limit, the 99.99% of scientific knowledge acquired by other scientists. I dont think this is the same as faith because there is direct experience involved.
Scientific principle relies on induction It would be good for hard core science fans to read about the problem of induction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction Ignoring it and its possible implications makes a you bad scientist, not a good one. In fact it makes you a rabid fanatic which just happens to use science as smokescreen. So science definitely requires a level of faith: Believe that the laws of physics will continue to behave consistently. We cannot actually proof that :-)
The whole science-as-faith idea was beaten to death long before any of us were born. Buy the books, take the philosophy classes, but please stop arguing. The author's a troll, and this is a classic troll topic. None of this is worth debate.
1,000 comments about whether or not people arrive at scientific knowledge by actually verifying every assertion critically and empirically or by simply accepting what has been established critically by others in whom they place trust and confidence. No chance. This constant hijacking of interesting issues and ideas has got to stop! These days you can't talk about cultural relations because everyone starts shouting about racial relations. You can't talk about about abortion because so many people polarize their opinion. Now we learn that you can't point out that 'faith' means pretty much the same thing as 'trust' and 'confidence' without 1,000 people letting rip about religion vs science.# Next thing you know people will be going to libraries and blotting faith out of thesaurus entries for Trust and Confidence. It's a synonym, that's a verifiable FACT for you. I think the OP raises a fair point. As a species we know too much to verify everything personally. We live in a time of hyper-specialisation. You focus on a very specific field of knowledge and trust that others will cover the rest. That's why we are learning so much and making so much incremental progress, as a species we trust each other. Can you imagine the disaster the scientific field would experience if scientists didn't trust each other enough to accept each others work and build upon it? Most of the 'checking' that gets done is to learn more about a phenomena, rather than simply to discredit or further establish the work of others.
Definition of FAITH (Merriam Webster's):
1
a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2
a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3
: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs
— on faith
: without question
So, faith is defined to be a synonym for belief by scholars. Yet, we say: "I have faith in you", "She did it in good faith", "My faith compells me", etc.
Clearly, if faith is defined narrowingly, then of course the end result will be ridiculous. It's sad how misguided religious people are even, when they mistake faith for belief, or complete surrender of their own logical powers and mind. The same trap all the so-called sceptics fall inside in.
In truth, faith is that which compells us, drives us, wills us, to our fate and destiny. You may say we create our own fate, but you may likewise say it was because of your faith. It is much more than mere belief and concepts, something undefinable, and therefore outside the realm of science. Ironically, without faith in one's prowess, the project's success, endurance and economical stamina, neither scientists or businesspeople can succeed. Ask any business innovator where they would be without faith..
Faith is such a misunderstood word, but it is also utterly impossible to clearly define and narrow down, however much many narrow-minded people try, fortunately ;-)
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
A lot of the trouble comes down to the terms. Many people aren't clear on the definitions of the words "theory", "faith", "fact", "truth", "science", and most especially "proof". "Believe" is another troublesome word. Anymore, I cringe whenever I see phrasing similar to "researchers believe that...", as if what they do really is faith based. There are many people who are too quick to read into the use of "believe" an admittance that it's all based on faith, that science is just another religion. They're in a terrible hurry to move past this point that they feel doesn't need more thought, and get on to the case that their religion has all the answers and the best answers, and certainly better answers than that fake religion known as science! When someone asks if I "believe" in Global Warming or Climate Change, I find they're trying to trick me. If I answer the seemingly straightforward question, they pounce. So the first thing I tell them is that "believe" is not the correct term.
For "proof", when someone asserts that there is no proof that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, or that species can change through Evolution, or other such denial nonsense, I often find that their standards of proof are so high that nothing can be proven, and I tell them this. Just the other day some missionaries came to the door, and I hit them with the question of how old the Earth is. Waste of time I suppose, but what the heck. Their answers-- non answers, more like-- were a) That's not important (what the Bible says is what's important), and b) No one knows, and we can't know, and c) Well, how old did I think the Earth was? When I answered that last with 4.5 billion years, they asserted that I actually didn't know! What did they mean I don't know?? I just told them! I didn't get to follow up on that and find out whether they thought I was making it all up or repeating what others had made up, or that because we haven't narrowed it down to plus or minus 1 year means we don't know, or what.
They refuse to understand what constitutes proof. And it's awfully convenient. Anything they don't want to believe can't be proven. But by their lights, they can't prove that they're over the age of 5 minutes, as an Omnipotent Being could have created everything 5 minutes ago, complete with humans who have memories from years ago and "believe" that their memories are largely accurate, but which are in fact all wrong. They can't even be sure that water is wet, or the sky is blue. How can anyone know that their eyes are working correctly, and work like everyone else's eyes, or that the sky is the same to everyone, or that there isn't a color filter hanging over their heads, or for that matter, even define what "blue" and "sky" is? They've heard of Occam's Razor, but they don't grasp it. "It's turtles all the way down!" Sigh.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
So what you're also saying is that all people, no matter how uneducated, can have faith and believe in the same religious ideals?
Or is it that no person, no matter how educated, is capable of testing or proving any part of religious beliefs?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The foundations of science, and as you pointed out - math - are universal. They are the same, no matter where you are. You cited ONE religious belief, which a very large portion of the planet wouldn't agree is 'fact'.
So if science does require some faith, it is a common one - and one that hasn't been used as a tool to manipulate and/or kill thousands upon thousands of people throughout time.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Science is a matter of faith even to many scientists. Science may be able to back up a theory to an extent, but scientists use belief to take it beyond what science can prove, and look on others who don't believe in the theory as lesser people. An always topical example is how "global warming skeptics" are treated as heretics, but there are other (perhaps better) examples of scientists sticking to theories even when they start to lose favour.
People are programmed to believe. Science may be vastly different from religion, but trust or faith in both probably use the same psychological mechanism in most people.
Ah, Professor Miller, we miss you. Please reincarnate soon*.
*Irony intended.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
No, science takes everything fundamental on faith.
For example:
1. The uniformity of nature. Can science PROVE that nature behaves the same here as on the moon, or on Mars, or in a distant galaxy? No, it is taken on FAITH.
2. The existence of other minds -- can science prove that we are not brains in vats or in the matrix? No, of course it cannot, thus it is taken on FAITH.
3. Science assumes the universe was not created 5 minutes ago with the appearance of age. Can it prove it was not? No, it is a FAITH statement.
Stop worshipping the tool (science) and worship the creator of science instead :-)
Dont posts have to pass some sort of test for NOT talking out one's ass? Really.
As long as you're referring to a Boston and a London on the same land mass (there are several cities of each name) you could indeed walk from one to the other. It would take you a while, but it's perfectly possible to walk from London, Ontario to Boston, Massachusetts.
If your point is that you can't *walk* from London, England to Boston, Massachusetts, as distinguished from travelling via other transportation or walking an equivalent distance, that's because there's an ocean in the way which will interfere with the process of walking.
Unless there's an equivalent interference with the processes of "micro-evolution" that prevents it from happening over long periods of time (i.e. prevents the genetic differences from accumulating) then it will become "macro-evolution" once enough genetic differences accumulate to make two populations mutually infertile and thereby fully speciated.
That's a positive claim, and just as you would have to demonstrate an ocean or something else that interferes with walking to say "it's impossible to walk from Boston to London" you would have to demonstrate that something prevents the "micro-evolutionary" changes from accumulating to that extent to say that "macro-evolution" is impossible, or distinct from "micro-evolution" in its process.
"Is your hypothesis testable?" If the answer is "yes", it's science, if the answer is "no", it's religion.
Sighting an angel is a testable hypothesis - you go and look for one. You might not find one on Earth today but the Universe is a BIG place. However I would not regard such a hypthesis as science. In the same vein string theory has hypotheses which are similarly incredibly hard to test given current technology but I would hardly regard that as religion (unless I was wanting to wind-up a string theorist ;-).
The big difference between science and religion is that science answers the question "how" and religion worries about "why". Religion gets into a huge amount of trouble when it tries to answer "how" and scientists get into just as much trouble when we try to answer "why".
Created Beijing just to fuck with you.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
http://www.itecusa.org/document_ends_of_the_earth.html
I do not think I have ever seen so many comments marked 5 or 4 in slashdot post!!!!
It doesn't matter whether I have personally done any particular experiment; science is not the sum of the results obtained, it is a way of finding things out; gather data, test hypotheses, form a falsifiable theory, design and perform experiments to either support the theory or require its modification or outright dismissal.
Religions, on the other hand, rely upon dogma. They posit a particular set of assumptions, but do not allow for their falsification, and frequently do not even allow followers to ask the question. If evidence arises that contradicts the assumptions, where science would toss out or modify the theory religions either flatly deny the facts, or they dodge and squirm and move goalposts to try and fudge the contradiction.
Science can be applied to religious beliefs. It can be tested, for example, whether being prayed for improves the outcomes of patients undergoing medical procedures. The true difference between science and religion is that when this is done, as it has been, and the results come in, if the scientists get an unexpected result (the prayed-for do significantly better, or indeed worse) they say "Huh, we should make sure this is right, and if it is we will have to adjust our theories."
Conversely, if the religious get an answer they weren't expecting (prayer makes no significant difference at all) they will cast about for excuses and insist that their original idea still holds true, as in "It seems like.prayer didn't make a difference, but that's because it's God's way of testing us, and He held back on the miracles because we weren't showing enough faith."
Just try disbelieving Maxwell's equations. Your cellphone will quite working right away.
Are you talking about James Clerk Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 unknowns, or Oliver Heaviside's simplification ("restatements") of the 20 equations, down to the 4 equations?
Maxwell was on track to figuring out how the 4 dimensions create gravity, but Heaviside thought the 4th dimension didn't matter so he got rid of it.
Everything that comes into existence leaves existence without exception. Seeing the world this way makes life a heck of a lot less stressful if you see the danger in clinging to beliefs of any kind. Clinging just makes it that much more painful to part from things when they inevitably cease, be they mental or physical.
Well over 1,000 comments and no one has made the expected, if not obligatory, reference to a well-known series of South Park episodes?!?!?!
sigfault (core dumped)
P.S.: And I don't mean the episode(s) about the Mormons. (If you're still clueless, think "Wii.")
sigfault (core dumped)
You can prove that a scientific theory is false. You do that by making predictions and observing that said predictions are not happening.
Meta-physical theories, faiths among them, make predictions that are not observable. Such theories are unfalsifiabe, and therefore not science.
Even if people do not understand a scientific theory, they do understand the difference between being able to make observations and not being able to make observations.
I see this argument crop up all the time. When you trust science you are not blindly believing what some guy in a lab-coat tells you. You are trusting a consensus of the scientific community. You trust it because you have seen the scientific method, we have a good track record, and the claims don't usually strain plausibility. And the best part is that you are ready at any time to admit the consensus was wrong based on new evidence (I'd like to see a faith-based organization that does that!). You don't necessarily need to understand the nuances of the discipline in order to trust that it's probably accurate.
or else!
Science is a method of discovery while faith is a justification. Can we even compare those? Using science as a nebulous quantity of facts discovered or verified through Science is just a colloquial.
I can remember the days I sat in school being taught many things in a science class and believing it. I was a kid, what did I know. I can equally remember finding out later that many things I was taught as true were only an interpretation of science, and most of those interpretations were false. When I actually made it to the science part may years later (not in school) I found that the facts of the science did not remotely resemble the interpretations I had been taught, and some science books were knowingly teaching things that were not correct, and to promote their own agenda. Even if you take the controversial evolution debate. All of this stuff I had been taught in school I found to be untrue. I read of people in the post saying science is facts and religion is only faith. I use to believe that also, until I started to look into the matter. I found more faith was required in evolution to believe certain things happened certain ways. I found that this reported science was neither factual or true but an interpretation of facts. Rarely in a evolution report do they tell you the facts, they tell you what they want the data to represent. When you actually dig to discover the data they actually refer to, you can usually see there is no connection, or the facts are contrary to the popular interpretation. When I looked into religion you can start to easily peel off the players, noise makers, fakers and I found a solid stable rational system. I found something, supported more by science than evolution. I found something with answers. In the surprise I realized that evolution is more faith and religion than science. They want you to follow and believe them, and what they say. They get really mad when you doubt, and really angry when they find out they were wrong about something. Yet I was betrayed and lied to for more than 12 years in school, and daily in the TV channels. They took advantage of my youth as a kid to pound the religion of evolution into us for years and called it science, pounding darwinism day in and day out. Then to find out there is more science in and about Bible than evolution. We get lied to in the news about the world. We get lied to about the food we eat. We get lied to about economy and taxes and politics. Why are we so surprise to find out we are lied to in the science class room? I constantly find more faith in evolution and more science in the Bible. There is more to life than what we taste, touch and see. We are more than just a bag of water with chemicals and static electricity. One of the things I like about a Creator GOD that loved you enough to die in your place, is He doesn't force you to believe in Him. He will let you choose Him, and He will equally let you reject Him. He will not force you. On the equal side there are consequences. So you can believe what you have been told for 12 plus years, and trust those teachers and speakers, or you can look into it and find out for yourself. If there true Science? Yes. But do not get true science confused with hopeful interpretations, many that seem to me to be to be on drugs of some sort. Know what you believe and WHY you believe it. Don't assume others have told you the truth, and don't thing why doesn't matter. Have a nice day.
Science is the practical application of self doubt, faith is the opposite
science, religion and politics are all genetic reflexes. they work like the game rock,paper scissors. they keep us evolving at the proper speed in our quest to adapt to a changing environment .
Science is a process. It has a research branch and an application branch. Technology is a result of scientific research. Unless I somehow missed the memo and we have planes whose engines are based on prayer or something.
When we speak of science, I agree we usually picture the researchers. But the engineers are as much scientists as the packaging is part of the manufacturing plant. Maybe some people don't consider it the interesting part, but it very much is a part.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Now Pastabagel was very bored
He was tryin to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll put some bleachers out in the sun
I'll bring belief, littlewink'll bring his nuclear gun
And we'll have it out on Highway 61.
It may be true that there is now too much science for any one human being to hold it all in their head, but any human being can go into whatever branch they wish and eventually understand those phenomena and form new hypotheses around them. The method itself is very simple and is quite explicitly the opposite of faith. You observe a phenomena, form a hypothesis of why it occurs and test your hypothesis through experimentation. Moreover, if you're curious enough about someone else's findings, you should be able to repeat their experiments (If they described them well enough.) "Faith" discourages the asking of such questions; you simply take someone's word for it. Someone who claims to be speaking for a higher power.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No it's not a matter of faith. Nor is Science a Meme - Truth is not a Meme. Any questions?
How about this:
If p then q
p, then q.
Do you KNOW it's true? Where's the proof?
All this stuff reminds me of this.
I tend to agree with the opinion article that essentially suggest that worshiping Darwin is fundamentally equivalent to worshiping Christ, or whatever.
Its all really ironic.
And it really is 'worshiping Darwin', even if some may think otherwise (ironically):
The theories that match observations do not fundamentally ever 'tell us what is going on', even if they match observation perfectly today. The theories only provide a model to help match and predict observations. Those theories are interpreted by scientists and communicated in the same way that Profits communicate what they believe is a theory for living. Newtons theory predicted many real-world scenarios, and is still in use today. Einstein proposed a new model that supersedes Newton's theories. It provides more accurate observations in different scenarios while also predicting correctly in the same scenarios. But the two theories are TOTALLY different, they are in completely different universes, one cannot even come close to the other in terms of the actual 'truth' of whats going on. Things get even more crazy in quantum land. So whats next?
Its ironic; those that do not agree with this opinion article are essentially contradicting their fundamental basis, as this opinion is nothing more than a layman's explanation of Godel's theorem; any mathematical system can always be reduced to at least one free variable; there are infinite possible interpretations and following one set of scientists' unified view is just one possibility, out of other sets of scientists, or anyone else.
So the meaning of time (or even the rate of time), the continuity of laws, and everything else, well, everyone is a believers with nothing more than blind faith!
I have a huge problem with feeding the anti science movement with this argument that science boils down to 'faith', of course just like 'religion'. Faith and data are each so definitive of religion and of science that each is mutually exclusive in the opposite domain. No data exists in religion and no faith exists in science. Science is not religion, science is not like a religion and science must always reject such attempts to assimilate the two.
In my view, it is the most important function of art and science
to awaken this [cosmic religious] feeling and keep it alive
in those who are receptive to it. (Albert Einstein)
In my view, it is the most important function of art and science
to awaken this [cosmic religious] feeling and keep it alive
in those who are receptive to it. (Albert Einstein)
Does Atheism Lead to Immorality?
Published by Steven Novella under Religion/Miracles,Skepticism
This is an argument that will just not go away – that atheism leads to the absence of morality. I was recently pointed to this YouTube video once again making this point. Yes – this is just some random guy (Jon Topping) on the internet, but he is trying to put forward a logical argument and he is making the standard argument – the same one I have heard from many religious sources, so it’s fair game.
His argument is fundamentally a false dichotomy – objective morality comes from belief in God (or some supernatural thingy) and if you are an atheist then morality has no objective basis and your morality must ultimately be subjective, which he argues logically leads to amorality. He dismisses many straw-man alternatives but never addresses the true alternative to his simple dichotomy, something again I find common.
First, let’s address his premises. He equates atheism with belief in evolution. This is not valid, but I will give him that most atheists accept evolution, because they have no reason to dismiss the overwhelming scientific consensus. Where he gets into trouble is in equating evolution with doing everything you can to survive and pass on your genes, even if it means stealing and killing. This is a simplistic and outdated view of evolution – of nature “red in tooth and claw.”
Evolution is not all about competition. It is also about cooperation, even self-sacrifice. Humans in particular are a cooperative social species. We derive survival advantage from taking care of our kin, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Evolutionary forces do not lead inexorably to competition and killing.
As a social species we have evolved a number of moral senses. These include notions such as reciprocity – doing good to others so that they will do good to you. Reciprocity has been demonstrated even in many animal species. While reciprocity may be a cold calculation of evolution, that does not mean that each individual is making a cold calculation. We actually feel that being good to others is the right thing to do, and we feel that those who do bad deserve to be punished. We have a sense of justice.
Evolving in a social group and being highly invested in a few offspring also means that we genuinely love our family and our children. In fact we extend this love to our “tribe”, whatever we perceive that to be. But there is also a downside to these evolved emotions in that we may dehumanize those we categorize as being “other” or in an out group. The point is that evolution leads to a complex set of moral emotions, taboos, and social connections – not murder and rampage.
Another core point of Topping’s is that without a supernatural source of morality, all morality must be subjective. If it’s subjective, then it’s just opinion – it’s just your opinion that murder is wrong. But we know instinctively that murder is wrong, and therefore there must be some moral fiber woven into the fabric of the universe – from God – and therefore atheism is wrong. Follow that? Perhaps we “know instinctively” that murder is wrong because we evolved that moral sense because having such a sense is a survival advantage in a social group. Therefore there is no reason for a supernatural cause of our instinct.
But Topping is also ignoring the other (and in fact primary) source of non-supernatural morality – philosophy. We have an evolved morality, which is in many ways particularly human, but in many ways also is probably just generic to any highly social species. Humans also pair bond, and so we have morality about that. And we raise few children, and so we have morality about that as well. But what if a technologically intelligent species arose and developed a civilization, and this species happened to not have evolved pair-bonding as a dominant practice. What if th
Feynman said no one understands - present tense - quantum mechanics. He never stopped trying to change that, to make it comprehensible. He figured it just wasn't understood - yet.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Sound waves are waves where whole atoms move. Electromagnetic waves are where only electrons are part of the wave. But science today has relativity and quantum which don't really make sense, because they are just a twisted way to get the right answer and not a real understanding of what is really going on.
Thanks for a well written commentary on the posts being made. I was quite saddened by the underlying ignorance in many of the highly rated posts. Many of them sounded as ignorant and hysterical as Jenny McCarthy telling us that vaccines cause autism.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Driving a car and understanding how a car works are two different things. I don't need faith to drive, I need abstraction. There is a clear difference between abstraction (understanding the BIG picture, but not the details) and ignorance (just accepting that things are the way they are and not understanding anything). Ignorance requires faith. Abstraction requires trust. Drivers trust car manufacturers. But saying it like that makes it sound like the "experts" are voodoo charlatans. Ooooo, who knows if the experts are right?!? Only other experts!!! They could all be lying to us!!!
I'm sorry, but I can sit down with a book on Quantum physics and understand it. I can watch reruns of Gilmore Girls and I don't have a freakin' clue what's going on. I'll trust you that the women aren't psychotic and you trust me when I tell you that the universe is mainly composed of dark matter and dark energy that you can't see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. As with most /. readers, my IQ is north of 130. I find it a bit unnerving that people who think this way are somehow accepted to be in tune with us as intellectual peers, as if saying that scientists themselves are clueless about cutting edge physics makes them feel less stupid. They are the type of people that quote Einstein's thoughts on gods, because it makes them feel less foolish for telling everyone how great their imaginary friends are.
If your brain is not evolved enough to understand these things, and you must put your faith in us to explain the universe to you, which you will never be capable of understanding... then we are your gods. Just like gods, you put your faith in us. We tell you why the world is the way it is. We tell you how it began, and how it can end. After all, is that not the first functions of gods in most religions, to explain the world, its beginning and its end? Feel free to pray to me. I also sell salvation via cash donations.
And therefore, you are not our equals. Waxing poetic on how science is really faith simply earns our wrath. When the gods of science are angry, we find something else to tell you about that causes cancer. And no amount of faith cures cancer, baby. Cold, hard, universe acting on the laws of the science gods. Faith on that.
I'm too late to this discussion, but I wanted to point out anyway that the words "faith" and "belief" are overloaded, as is the word "theory". When you start talking about this stuff you just can't throw them around without indicating what definition you are using. For laymen, theory can mean "wild-assed-guess". For a scientist, it means "a working model based on the preponderance of the evidence". Similarly, belief is overloaded. "I believe I'll have a beer" is not the same as "I believe the Earth is 6000 years old." Yet a lot of the discussion above is overlooking the fact that claiming science is "faith" is using several different versions of the word in trying to explain it. Ultimately, the person making the claim simply doesn't understand science. Or what words he's using.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Unfortunately, your argument applies to the druids who make the sun start going higher in the sky every winter solstice and the medicine man who cures your cold by waving his magic stick over you.
After all, the druids are very clear that you march around the standing stones precisely this way on the eve of the solstice, and of course the sun starts getting higher in the sky the very next day. You wouldn't avoid the dance to see what happens because the sun might just fall below the horizon permanently.
Engineers are very clear that you need to put oil and fuel in your automobile or it will cease to function. You wouldn't want to test these theories by taking the oil out of your engine or not buying fuel anymore, because you might have to buy a new engine or walk to the corner gas station with a gas can.
The engineers could be lying and the gods themselves push your car around town, drinking your offerings of oil and fuel, and cursing your engine if you skimp on the holy oil.
Many people treat science exactly like religious faith and it's very sad. There aren't enough tinkerers in the world who take the time to perform experiments and actually try to figure out how the universe works. Until you've taken an automobile engine apart and put it back together again and it *works* when you put oil and fuel in it, you've been worshiping at the altar of Science<TM>. After a significant portion of the population stops understanding how technology works at a fundamental level problems generally arise. We have people who don't "believe" in evolution reaping the reproductive benefits of modern biology and medicine. That's a recipe for disaster if I ever heard one.
I think your missing the point a little here. Science is just a faith, even to the scientists. It is a belief in a conjecture built primarily on experience and observation. There are very few absolutes in this world, our scientists of the day do the best to explain what they and we witness, be it Ptolemyian, Copernican, Newtonian or Einstienian view points. Higgs boson is a leading edge concept today; in 10 - 20 years it will be an accepted norm; in 50 - 100 years it will be shown to be an approximation of what we observe, but will have been superseded by a more accurate description. This is not to debunk science or scientists, just to accept that it is a description, in terms we understand, of something we still don't fully comprehend. But don't take my word for it, listen to comments from Prof Brian Cox's recent interview on BBC 'The One Show'
This is a quote from PZ Myers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U0MnBmSlhE .. is bogus. (..) This doesn't mean I'm close-minded."
"The kind of naive falsifyability that you hear from the philosophers of the Popper school
Religious people think the same way about Creationism. How can a debate be possible, if neither side allows for the possibility that they could be wrong?
Personally, I don't find the creationist argument persuasive so very early in my youth I chose to go down science path. Though back then I used to think it was a "reason" based decision, it is now clear to me that it was essentially driven by what I liked more.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Science is like Linux: It's complicated, but if you want to put in the time and energy to learn it, you can understand it and make changes. Religion is like Apple: It's simple, but you will never understand or change the decisions the leaders make for you.
Firstly monotheism != faith. It is of course a faith, but not the definition of the word. With many spiritual faiths there are ways you can investigate and verify them. This does not negate the fact that they are faith based or elevate them to sciences in the strict sense. Many of the people in this thread seem to also be confusing some pure theoretical ideal of science with the reality of what is going on in people's minds. Maybe you personally don't take science on faith, but many people do. That is the main point of the article. There are a lot of people who need some constant they can view as immutable as a psychological foundation. It is not possible for these people to view the world as the chaotic collection of infinite mysteries that pure science shows it to be. So they take scientific theories like those produced by physicists and use them as a foundation for their world view. When these theories are called into question these people often have a very strong emotional reaction, anger or or fear. This is because their faith has been shaken. It doesn't matter to these people about verifiability or evidence except in that it makes their faith stronger and more righteous. An idealised scientist, when presented with evidence that everything he has previously believed about the world is completely false, will react with curiosity and excitement at the prospect of new information. The science faithful react with fear and anger. I can see in many of the reactions here this same fear and anger, as though science itself were threatened by this article. Science is not threatened by any information except lies, and even lies are not a major threat. Scientific faith is widespread, and it is damaging to the correct practice of the scientific method. It is simple to tell if people are taking science on faith, and that is by their reaction to change. People who stubbornly cling to their current scientific belief, or react with fear and anger to the suggestion that it is false, are taking science on faith. People who react with curiosity to the suggestion that it is false and want to know more about how and why, are the real lovers of knowledge and understanding.
God is not an Atom. We can not see atoms (at least not with the naked eye) but we know through conclusive and backed up evidence that atoms are there. Just because God is not real that does not make faith any less valid. It can being people back from being on the brink of suicide or help them through hard times (which there are a lot of nowadays) but there is a big difference between faith and science. The whole idea of faith is that you believe in something that can not physically be seen or explained..that is why you have faith in something. If you go to church every Sunday then that is fine, good for you but when you start to say that faith is real which contradicts the whole concept of faith that is where I think problems are caused. We have evidence of the beginning of the universe plenty of it...If God had created the earth and all the animals then Humans and Dinosaurs would have existed at the same time and you must be mad to believe that (Sarah Palin). We have fossils that have been carbon dated...this argument alone shows that humans and dinosaurs did not co-exist. This alone blows the idea of "creationism" out of the water and into space. But in terms of faith and science you have to have a bit of faith in a theory but your faith will be backed up by some reason..then you confirm the theory so with science any faith is always because you know there is logic behind a theory...how much logic is there behind a book written ages ago and has thousands of different versions and interpretations. But I have believed in God..part of me loves all the Gods, hero's and damsels in distress but then the plain truth is just to obvious to ignore.
rationality is a fabrication based on belief and doubt.
necessity is a fabrication based on desire and hope/despair.
modeling reality completely is a wicked problem to crack.
http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2009/05/bus-rides-rationality-and.html
Hi,
Thanks for your comments.
However, I disagree that religion does anything to "discover truth." The so-called truth of religion is already present in immutable books (god's word).
So, your comparison with religion is not valid.
Perhaps some people believe scientific claims because they are presented to them by authority figures (teachers, professors etc). In that case, it's not really that different from religious doctrines imposed by priests (another authority figure). On the other hand though, an educated rational person, believes scientific claims, because they are based on reason and can be proven, even if he doesn't understand every single detail and equation.
http://l34rn.blogspot.com/2007/10/faith-in-science.html
"Faith is an idea with no evidence to back it up no matter how adept the 'experts'. Even more important, the 'experts' often don't agree on even the basics."
Like evolution. (?)
Evolution is at the heart of modern biology and has been demonstrated countless times. If you really believe evolution has no evidence simple postings on slashdot won't change your deluded mind.
Trolling is a art,
A lot of commenters have written -- rather defensively, I think -- that science can be proven, blah blah blah. That may be true, but it's not the point.
The point is that we, as individual listeners/readers/believers, have not *personally* done the experiments -- and in fact wouldn't understand them if we could. Further, each discovery is based on others that are only partly understood by those who follow.
So we have to simply have faith in the original experimenters when we attempt to leach meaning from science. That faith is *often* undeserved -- the level of observer bias in the sciences is enormous, and I don't have to tell you about how often scientific findings are discredited.
Does that diminish the scientific method? Not in the slightest. But we have to realize that we, as *consumers* of science, are basing our adherence largely on faith.
For the record, I write about science (mostly) as a profession, and am not a member of any organized faith.
cool
People like to point out excessively philosophical tripe like that gravity is a matter of faith. You have to have faith that gravity that works now will work tomorrow. That's bullshit. Gravity is a demonstrable fact. What you might have faith in is that the MATH we use to MODEL gravity. You would have faith that if you used that mathematical model, that it is adequate for what you're applying to. In other words, what you have faith in is the scientists who created the model and your ability to apply it properly.
You might also talk about the scientific method. It's not something we can prove. It's an axiom. Some of us have faith that the scientific method is a good way to discover things. Others of us have seen it work well so many times that it's no longer a matter of faith. Then all we're left with is having faith that other scientists are doing it properly.
I do not have or even need faith in "Science." I have faith in Scientists and their results. And sometimes my faith is tested, due to occasional incompetence.
And yet many of my neighbors don't believe in science or technology. They just take technology for granted so much that if you ask them if they use technology they will deny it. They believe in any fool thing their pastor says, or as they say their pastor "A Man of God". Yes, there are people that still use the coded language of their particular brand of Protestant Evangelical Christianity, even in most Metro areas of America.
I and my friends call these people "wind up toys" because such people seem to need a weekly or twice weekly winding and they just parrot whatever their pastor says in his rambling and disorganized (at least from my point of view) 2+ hour sermons. As someone that has nearly memorized Aesop, The Book of Solomon, and Aristotle, I can't imagine living is such a tiny simple world as they do.
What a load of mystical bullshit.
The fundamental premise of science is that the universe is understandable; there are many things not known, but none unknowable. That, of course, is a matter of faith.
But even that is not necessary. Just as the fact that humans eventually discerned that gravity is not universal did not change the meaning or usefulness of our previous understanding of gravity, coming across something deemed unknowable would not diminish the value of what we know. Neither would it satisfy everyone that something was in fact unknowable.
As for the future being like the past, a good example is the fact that we all (well, almost all, anyway) have faith that the world will keep spinning, i.e. the sun'll come up, tomorrow. Like the rest of your premise about science, the problem is that if or when we're wrong, nothing will matter. You cannot muddle through life for long thinking that the scientific method isn't valid because it is based on science; for as long as you do, you will be wasting air.
Grow up. Using terms such as 'science', 'demonstrated' and 'reasoning' implies that you understand their meaning.
Good. So why do your fellows go on about sex? Or how A&E were in some garden and talked to a snake with legs..? So far as I can tell, these haven't been really useful predictions.
And don't get me started on their rate of accuracy on hindcasting...
PS you could get the same dogma that has worked for you from any Humanist society. Where you don't have to read a religious book or say prayers or anything.
A world of Yes! I like this definition of faith:
"Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty".
Using this definition of faith, the kind of science that delves into the realm of the great mysteries of the universe absolutely necessitates faith! What's even more ironic is that it's the scientists who practise faith more so than the religious sometimes. I love this quote from a theologian:
"My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and black holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite".
Along the same lines, I'm rather horrified at the eagerness of some religious people to dismiss all mystery and be content that they're religion has all the answers. The fact that I can't even begin to understand the science that attempts to explain the mysteries of the universe is an excellent indicator of its validity. And visa-versa; the easily understandable, story-like nature of all religious creation stories tells me that they are human-made.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention... I think the person who wrote the article is writing it from the premise that faith and reason are mutually exclusive: "if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena... through the process of belief, not through reason". I don't believe this is true. For example, I understand the basic tenets of the scientific method, therefore I have faith in the more complex scientific theories that I do not understand. This is faith through reason. I absolutely do not believe the two are mutually exclusive.
People "trust" in scientists (i.e. science) has valid explanations to how things "work" and can be applied.
Scientists have "faith" in logic that things can be explained [abstractly].
The faith is not about science, but about human logic.
Hmmm... I see an elephant in the author's logic. Why would you need to understand the intricacies of a proof if you understand and trust the methodology? The scientific method, advanced calculus and linear algebra, the peer-review process, and so forth, are all proven and reliable tools for rooting out "truth" -- or at least for deriving models that have predictive value. I have a degree in Physics, but I haven't personally examined every mathematical step behind the conclusions of Einstein, Bose, Feynman, Schrodinger, etc. But I do understand the general methodology that they took and trust that the methods they used, although admittedly vulnerable to error, are fundamentally trustworthy. If that is faith, then almost everything that we don't confirm with our own senses -- from the reality of the Japanese tsunami to the way our cars work to our blood relationships to our parents -- is taken on faith. We rarely know all the details.
Such a definition of "faith" would reveal a basic misunderstanding of the difference between faith and science. One who proclaims that climate-change science is the product of an international conspiracy or that human beings were placed on earth fully formed ten thousand years ago or that we are all reincarnated after death can claim no trustworthy methodology to back up such assertions. Faith-based proclamations are logically circular, starting with a conclusion and cherrypicking facts that, taken in isolation, appear to support the desired outcome. In other words, faith-based methodology itself is inherently suspect. But models like natural selection and climate change science are based on enormous amounts of peer-reviewed research, corroboration from collateral fields, empirical observations, and objective confirmation of predictions made by the models. One need not know every tiny detail in order to trust the results.
And that's a real difference between faith and science. Yes, quantum electrodynamics -- or even Newtonian mechanics -- is not necessarily "truth." These are heuristic models that are useful because they have predictive value and because they help us us conceptualize difficult concepts in ways that we can relate to our own experiences. We trust them because we know that the ways in which they were derived were trustworthy -- not merely because we _want_ them to be "true."
I've understand your point and you really have a good one, but another thing that you must consider is that science is not an specific discover or theory which eventually could be under discussion.
science is in first place a way of thinking, everything is doubtable, and should be tested in some way to be confirmed, even in the case of confirmation new data could arise in the future related to new technologies and if that data contradicts the usual theory it must be revised again.
There is a very nice and clear graph for this.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oV6-1UZy_dA/S7EP0rsU0FI/AAAAAAAAAJo/q0mPWeulgVY/s1600/Science+V+Faith.jpg
Faith is steadfastly believing without any evidence or proof. If people have faith in science, fine. They don't have to be quite as skeptical, because they're not the scientists. The scientists don't have faith in every hypothesis; the very essence of science is that to practice it, one must be skeptical of oneself, as well as everyone else. This is what gives science is error-correcting machinery. Every idea must withstand the test of unbelievable scrutiny before it can even be considered as a plausible theory. Faith is something very different. In faith, particularly religion, practitioners believe everything an authority says, simply because they have "God-given" authority. But they are the very ones who have created the doctrine of "God-given" authority. So, essentially, to trust in science is to trust that scientists are being skeptical for you. To have faith, in the common sense, is to believe in circular reasoning.
I don't have faith in science . I accept it's theories as possibilities.
Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?
As much I understood from philosophy of science the science is set of models that describe universe we live in. Often the models are incompatible - an atom means different things to different people as there are different models (classical physics, quantum physics, etc.) to describe atoms and they are all right to extent. Right is even the chemistry teacher who uses tennis balls to describe atoms in a molecule.
While it might be difficult to understand the cutting edge of science it's easy to understand high school physics. There are plenty of appliances in kitchen that once belonged in leading scientific labs such as light bulb, refrigerator, boiler, radio, tv, etc. People don't just believe they work - they KNOW they work and often HOW they work.
...everybody has access to the proofs and if they want they can spend the necessary time to understand it.
Of course most of us don't do that to the very details. We understand just a part of it, same as most of us understand just a part of the Linux kernel for example.
The important thing is that the proofs are there available to everyone else who might want to review them and eventually somebody will find the potential mistakes.
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Really, what I meant to lead with was "don't conflate science with the models developed using the scientific method".
Science is a peer-reviewed system that can be used to refine models of the world. Science itself is easily understood, with a well-developed nomenclature that is easily discoverable. There is no need for faith to understand science.
BobN
Many presenters of science lazily use terms of faith in place of terms more relevant to science. For example, the concept of confidence in a scientific model is poorly presented as "belief" in a model as "true".
"Belief" and "truth" are meaningless to science and I think that when used in a science context, their use may lead to one of the faithful to think in terms of defending their faith.
When describing a scientific model, use the term "confidence", preferably with a description indicating a level of confidence.
BobN
Yet more b.s. on slashdot. Will wonders never cease? You're too stupid and undereducated yourself to make statements about the state of education, anywhere. After all, you were stupid enough to buy a Mac, for 3x the price of a PC, and that is as dumb as it gets, because Macs don't do 1/2 of what PC's can in gaming alone as just a single example. You're so stupid that you are "not penny-wise and definitely pound foolish".
Macs can run Mac apps, Unix apps and Windows apps, try that with a stock PC.
Oh, and good luck earning your living playing games. :P
In a way,we can say Science is based on faith.But the catch is: the demonstrated results deduced from the basic hypothesis by "logic".Though there are lots of results that hasn't been demonstrated.the logic is consistent and we can assume the results will be soon verified.
if we see religion,many religious claim that people go to heaven.but is it a demonstrated result?