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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?
But it also requires doubt.
That's what makes it special.
I have no
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.
Well, when you use your sarcasm wand to paint the topic of spiritual belief like that I am totally won over to your side of thinking. Obviously anyone who believes in God believes in a "big bearded man in the sky" how silly of us not to have realized how silly that is. Thanks for your insight!
/see what I did there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
mod parent up.
This is how I've resolved this question to myself every time someone brings this question up. If scientists who believe and scientists who do not can get closer to agreement on, for example, the way our neurons operate than "P" or "-P", I'm comfortable choosing to believe what I read in Science than The Book.
There's a (relatively) riveting Neil DeGrasse Tyson lecture that I like to direct folks to: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-102519600994873365# Its long but every second is worth it.
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.)
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".
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
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.
I am not trolling. I am pointing out that if you want to use debate, reason and logic to sway someone or groups of people to your way of thinking using the approach YOU did rather than the parent's is more effective. "The big bearded man in the sky" is not what most people who believe in a deity have believed in for centuries now. Belittling their Faith is hardly going to make them receptive to your more reasonable and fact based arguments.
I could go on about how Faith in a deity and Faith in science are not mutually exclusive but that is beside the current point.
Mod this up. Religion - Science comparisons and debates suck. Every person is just too unique in his beliefs to reach an objective conclusion to this argument. And yes, it's a completely pointless, highly opinionated discussion.
The point of the poster was that the average person is not in a position (either through lack of education, or lack of time, or lack of funding) to be able to perform the independent testing and verification you speak of. Hence, they must trust that what the science masters say is actually correct. And that is faith.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
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.
You want to conflate being burned at the stake with a little social discomfort?
Really. This is precisely the sort of conflation nonsense I am talking about.
This is precisely the stupid sort of crap that leads to the modern notion of false-martyrdom by American religious fundementalists.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
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.
There is another huge difference. The argument outlined in the summary is only thinking at the level of individual people, especially lay-people (who are most disconnected from the endeavors). What happens if you think at the level of society as a whole? Well, then the difference between evidence-based belief and faith-based belief become more obvious.
... not building jets), and logical participants can thus decide between which worldview is a better match to reality, even though they don't fully understand all the cogs and gears in all the competing worldviews. So the participants don't need to rely on faith, they can use logic and inference to decide what is true.
Think first about how even an "expert scientist" knows certain things are true. They've studied their field, done a bunch of experiments, and so they've witnessed first-hand certain persuasive empirical facts. Yet, the scientific knowledge they have goes way beyond their personal research. They have in their minds a bunch of results and proofs from other scientists, that they accept as valid. (They are also aware of findings that they don't agree with.) They draw upon knowledge in other domains of science that they know little about: they trust the experts in those other fields. Calling all of this "faith" isn't quite right. It's more like "outsourcing" certain parts of your knowledge-discovery to others: delegating information-tasks to people you trust and then amalgamating the results into your worldview. Of course your final view of reality is only as good as all those inputs (plus your own experiments and reasoning)...
Now jump up to the macro/societal level. Although no individual scientist fully understands all of science, society as a whole understands a heck of a lot. And society as a whole is able to apply that knowledge to making useful, testable predictions and to making useful, tangible products (cars, jets, computers, etc.). This is a variant of the old "no single person knows how to make a pencil" thing. Although no individual scientist, or lay person, can fully understand all of the knowledge that we've accumulated, they can easily see outputs of that knowledge, and they can test sub-sets of that knowledge as much as they want, and so they can develop confidence in the overall knowledge-base and associated worldview. In a loose sense, you could say that although no individual understands science, the human race does.
By comparison, a faith-based description remains faith-based and without evidence even at the largest level. If you amalgamate all of society's evidence for a particular faith-claim (say, the existence of an unseen force/spirit/god), it's actually no different than a single-person's evidence. That is to say, even at a high level the argument remains faith: "you just need to believe this is true". So at the level of the human race, there is no understanding/knowledge, just faith.
The difference in how knowledge scales between the two cases is what gives rise to the operational differences (e.g. building jets versus
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.
Actually Galileo was just confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life, and publication of scientific findings were prohibited.
That being said, it's still not even in the ballpark. Trying to compare a lifetime of imprisonment to a group of people smarter than you telling you that you're full of it just shows that you weren't paying attention in history class either.
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.
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.
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."
Aren't there bigger teams of people looking for the second coming; and more money invested in controlling holy lands in the mid-east.
Not sure that teams is solid evidence in which field is more disciplined.
"Faith is a fact" - George Oscar Bluth, Sr, Caged Wisdom
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
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?
Peer reviewed science won't burn you in eternal hellfire if you don't believe.
I'd ask global warming enthusiasts about this.
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.
Questioning christianity because you're a jew is way different than questioning AGW because you're a denier.
1) I'm not sure you're right, because i think i'm right. We both have exactly the same evidence supporting us.
2) I'm sure that 90% of EVERYONE ELSE, including 90% of experts are wrong, even though I have little to no evidence to support me and you have quite a bit.
Higgs Boson Deniers don't exist in bulk, but the ones that do are still out there trying to test their hypothesis instead of going on TV claiming that CERN shouldn't exist.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
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".
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.
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
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".
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'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.
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 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
Science assumes its truth to be be valid and will be proven false at some point in the future.
Actually, it assumes no such thing.
There are some assumptions built into science. Probably the most important one is that science assumes that the laws of the universe do not change over time. If someone observes the universe behaving in a particular way a lot of times, science generally assumes that it will continue to do so. For instance, science generally assumes that if you drop a bowling ball off the Tower of Pisa, it will eventually hit the ground, because that's what's happened every time we've tried it.
At the same time, it most definitely does not assume its truth to be valid. Scientific truth is merely the best description of the universe we can come up with, and is always aware that it isn't quite right.
I am officially gone from
...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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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..
The whole of Christianity hinges on the Resurrection: whether that tomb really was empty the Sunday after that Passover.
There's pretty good reason to believe that, at least, something unusual happened -- Paul wouldn't have used the argument "Some of you were eye-witnesses to these events" in his letters if he didn't think "these events" supported what he was preaching. (He was writing his letters for particular people at the time, not for us 2000 years later.)
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.