Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
but you can. thats the bigger point.
you can go and reproduce it, and if not that, you can go and check out how they do it at the labs.
i have yet to see somebody reproduce "blind people seeing again by the touch of a hand" or any other things like that.
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.
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
Guess what my Faith offers many "theories" that are useful. For example, my Faith tells me that I will be better off if I forgive those who wrong me. Guess what, in the last 50 years, psychologists/psychiatrists have done studies that show that people who carry a grudge have more health problems than those who don't.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Actually, it's equivocation, which is a logical fallacy.
Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
By this logic if I can walk from my house to the store, I should be able to walk from Boston to London. They're just at different scales!
Well, there are people who have walked across America and other continents, so the distance is not a problem. You're only making it more difficult/impossible by adding water, whereas the original argument does not have any significant hurdles to overcome.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
As I've explained in a post above, science does not work by directly observing phenomena. Science works by examining evidence and seeing if it is consistent with a hypothesis. The big bang hypothesis makes certain predictions about the cosmic background radiation and the distribution of matter in the universe. If our observations are consistent with what the big bang hypothesis predicts, the observations confirm the hypothesis. This simple explanation is the basis of all scientific experimentation. You can read more about the scientific method.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.