That’s the part you disagree with !? Come-on, man, can’t you take a joke? I thought it should be obvious that when I say “trust me” or “take me on faith” in this context, I’m not serious!
OTOH, if you really think scientists don’t lie, you’re being terribly naïve.
I accept your correction. Thanks.
Not identical, no. But I can’t see a reasonable scenario that will lead the scientific community to announce: “we have concluded the universe is not consistent, and hence we will no longer try to find universal laws”. They will find more and more fine points to “force” a theory upon the empirical observations. (A good thing, IMO).
Right, that’s why I gave this example. OTOH, natural sciences work under a single axiom.
I think you’re confusing me with someone else, here. I do not defend religious beliefs.
Not so. If everything is random, any outcome is possible, even one that is totally consistent with reality (small chance, but nonzero).
In a way, it will match reality even better. Ever did a simple experiment (say, measuring g) and came up with a false result? Could be bad equipment, bad setup etc… Or, it could be one of them random glitches.
Excellent summery of the difference between science and religion. But, methinks that apart from the first five words (“Science is not about belief”), not addressing the question.
Of course, religion is much more based on belief, as it expects believers to take quite a lot on faith. But I think that at the bottom of things, you’ll find two core assumptions:
Religious: “There is a god, and his words are written in the bible.”
Scientific: “The universe is consistent, and we can formulate this consistent behavior into rules and formulas”.
Just to expand on something I pointed out before: science requires no one to believe that its basic principles are, in fact, true.
Take causality. Ever since Kant and Hume, most scientists have been fairly comfortable with the idea that causality is just something we cannot fundamentally prove, not for certain, not deductively. It’s an assumption. An assumption that no person could function without, but one nonetheless.
The thing is, you can do science, and talk about the results of science and even scientific fact, all without believing in causality. You can do it all the while fully acknowledging that causality is just something we are assuming for the sake of discussion. If someone denies causality, then we need not say “well, you are wrong, heretic!” or even “but here is why you must believe it!” but rather, “okay, then we can’t get anywhere then.”
Compare that to a real belief system. Do you often hear religious believers running around admitting that God maybe doesn’t exist but that we are just assuming it for the sake of discussion?
I think this sums it up about as best as I could, Man from Monkey (Woman from Monkey?)
Given our world, neither can I, since we have done what amounts to billions of experiments over hundreds of years. But again, remember when the usual laws were found not to work at the quantum level, they were quickly abandoned.
There are many ways of testing randomness. A truly random universe is far different from one in which a few experiments fail. Statistical tests can give the probability that randomness, instead of the hypothesis, accounts for a given result. It’s understood that one can always be fooled. But by this point, if you decided to test the probability that the world is really random and is fooling us, it would be 1 in about a google.
The cool thing is that science takes all this into account already.
Hell with that. I’d be happy if religion as an institution would make a set of testable predictions, and live with the consequences. Young religions, like the JWs, do it all the time, and keep making excuses. Older religions, like the Catholics, have given up making predictions entirely.
I wonder how many years we’ll be right on the edge of the Rapture before the fundamentalists give up.
** Voyager**,
I think we agree on just about everything. I do argue with you about most of the points you make. Yes, science is good. Yes, the scientific method works. Yes, scientific theories have built-in watchdogs, and ways to correct / discard flawed theories.
The one point I keep raising, is that the scientific method is build on a basic premise. We assume that the universe is consistent, and that we can find the laws that govern it.
You are right in saying the science can, and have, abandoned theories that were proven wrong. The motivation, IMHO, was that basic belief. When we found Newtonian physics doesn’t give a good world view, we did not assume the world is unpredictable – we added correction for extreme cases. Because we (myself included, BTW) believe that it is possible to find these laws.
As an example, I think that quantum mechanics is hard for some (maybe most) people to grasp, because it contradicts this POV. All of the sudden, things aren’t totally predictable. Suddenly, science introduced randomness into the process. The laws are now statistical.
Note these are still laws, complying with the basic “consistent, law-abiding universe” premise. But even this small change seems to throw people off their balance.
One final note. Let’s try (at least when debating with me) to leave religion out of the debate. I am not a religious person, and do not defend religious beliefs. I firmly hold that the scientific method is more solid and more rational way to look at the world than other ways. Taking the words of an age-old book on faith defiantly does not compare. It’s just that I think even this basic world view is based on a belief, that’s all.
You haven’t demonstrated even the slightest understanding of how or what I think and your joke wasn’t funny simply because while it all the subtle shadings of secondary meaning might be “obvious” to you, I’ve seen numerous examples on these boards and elsewhere of people who were dead serious when they said “Believe me when I say you can’t trust group X.” The value of sarcasm and satire is in the exaggeration, not simply taking an established (if irrational) viewpoint and claiming it as your own to people who don’t know you from Adam.
The fact that you keep jumping to false dichotomy (“Bryan doesn’t agree that scientists can’t be trusted, therefore Bryan believes scientists are saints”) doesn’t help you, either.
By the way, I’m quite fond of the scientific method, though I acknowledge the need for heuristics and axioms (principles that are accepted largely because they’ve been around a long time and haven’t been demolished by counter-evidence) to get through the day in a reasonably efficient manner.
Of course, and it probably has to be, but the beliefs that allow us to apply the scientific method also happen to be the beliefs that any normal human being must be able to accept to even survive. If you toss concepts like reproducibility and causality, I don’t think it’s possible for a mind to function in a coherent fashion. If I can’t be confident that if I step off a cliff I will fall, and if the height is great enough, I will die, then I’m pretty well screwed, aren’t I? So, yeah, I probably really believe that those things will happen. Quite ironically, moving forward with this belief has led us to the bizarre conclusion that initial conditions do not always yield the same results, even when those initial conditions are exactly the same, and while causality certainly holds, retrocausality may as well, since the laws of nature do not seem to respect the “arrow of time” at the micro-level. Worse, it looks as if the past, present, and future are all extant in a grand scheme and our perception of the passage of time in a particular “direction” might be psychological phenomenon emerging from the tendency toward disorder in that direction of time. Hence, much of what we are more-or-less forced by experience to believe about the world, and those beliefs were crucial to the development of the scientific method, is shown to be only valid in aggregate probabilistic terms. In sum, the application of the scientific method, founded on a purely determinisitic and classically-mechanistic world-view, has more-or-less destroyed that view as an absolute “truth”.
It may be that we need certain beliefs and biases as human beings to even think, but we find the world does what it does regardless, and we are forced by the data to acknowledge that, even when we might not be even capable of grasping what we learn on an intuitive level. That’s a pretty amazing development.
I accept. Sorry.
So, what do you feel WRT scientists? Do they lie? Can they be trusted? Sometimes? Always?
You say “accepted”, I say “believed”. Other than that, we’re in agreement here.
Well sure it threw people off balance. Newtonian physics was about as much of a certainty as anything in science could ever be - and all of a sudden, it was incomplete.
What I think you’re missing is that laws get defined because they work, and if they didn’t work there would be none. Maybe mathematical models of reality would be a better term than laws, since these include statistical models. If they didn’t work, the very idea of laws would be discarded. As I said, not likely since science does work, but I would like to think that if some weird change in nature caused this premise to be false, and thus make science no longer useful, scientists would be the first to kill science as we know it. There would be kicking and screaming, no doubt, but in the long term science accepts what observations tell us, even if that were to be that science no longer works.
The reason that relativity is such a good example is that at the beginning of the 20th century, I’d suspect scientists as a whole would have had a much easier time accepting ghosts and ESP than that time is not constant. Yet they did.
My comment was kind of a throwaway comment about religion, not really directed at you, but I can see why you thought it was, so my apologies. So here is another comment on religion, not directed at you - would religious leaders be as willing to discard their bedrock principles as I think scientists would be? It looks like the Dalai Lama would be. I read that the new Biblical commentary from Reform Judaism accepts that the Davidic Empire was not as big as the Bible said - that’s kind of close. But I suspect for the most part, no.
Here’s where you demonstrate your lack of knowledge of the method of Science. Yes, some scientists lie and cannot be trusted. That’s one of the reasons that the scientific method is the way it is. To successfully pull off a false report would require a huge number of scientists controlling every related experiment in the world. And that control would have to extend beyond the deaths of those who perpetrated the fraud. The cloning case in South Korea is a good example of bad scientific experimentation.
Science is not a religion and “accept” in the scientific sense and “belief” in the religious sense are not synonyms.
For some Science is a belief system. That is Science with a capital S, of course. It is a hierarchical academic structure, with authority tending to be granted to the senior Scientist in proportion to the number and prestige of his degrees and his research grants, although not in that order. In these cases there is little that can be said about the difference between it, and a religion, or fraternal organization.
However, science is a method. It is a very particular method that can be used by anyone who is willing to follow it restrictive structure to record examinations of observable phenomena. Once it is understood, the authority of the community using science is reserved for those who most ardently adhere to the method itself. That is not because their opinions are more suitable to the scientists, but because their observations are more likely to be repeatable, and reliably predictive of real world events.
Oddly enough communities of science and communities of faith both fail most drastically when they rely on the same false premise. Authoritarianism is antithetical to both, and yet avidly pursued by many in both communities.
“Don’t follow leaders. Watch parkin’ meters.” ~ Bob Dylan ~
[QUOTE=Puzzler]
So, what do you feel WRT scientists? Do they lie? Can they be trusted? Sometimes? Always?
[/QUOTE]
If scientists could always be trusted, we wouldn’t need peer review, would we? It is really not to guard against lying, though it does, it is more to guard against conclusions not driven by the evidence, and mistakes. And letters columns are to guard against stuff that even gets through that. People do make mistakes, and sometimes even admit them.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
What I think you’re missing is that laws get defined because they work, and if they didn’t work there would be none.
[/quote]
Sure, the laws, and the ways to test / verify them are all fine – once you accept the basic consistency premise.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Maybe mathematical models of reality would be a better term than laws, since these include statistical models.
[/quote]
But model can only describe something that (at some level) is predictable.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
If they didn’t work, the very idea of laws would be discarded.
[/quote]
I disagree. If they didn’t work, new laws would be formulated, as several examples have shown.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
As I said, not likely since science does work, but I would like to think that if some weird change in nature caused this premise to be false, and thus make science no longer useful, scientists would be the first to kill science as we know it. There would be kicking and screaming, no doubt, but in the long term science accepts what observations tell us, even if that were to be that science no longer works.
The reason that relativity is such a good example is that at the beginning of the 20th century, I’d suspect scientists as a whole would have had a much easier time accepting ghosts and ESP than that time is not constant. Yet they did.
[/quote]
Maybe, but it would have to be a pretty extreme demonstration to cause it.
Relativity is a nice example, but note that while it changed some basic assumptions regarding physics laws, it did not touch the underlying assumption. The alternative relativity suggested is another deterministic set of laws.
Quantum mechanics mat be a better example. Once more, traditional physics didn’t cover all of the observations. A new theory, QM, was established to handle things on a very small scale. (Note, BTW, that QM is the second most-tested theory in physics. All tests indicate it works.) Now, QM tells us something disturbing: at a very fundamental level, the universe is unpredictable. Quantum particles behave in a random manner. Unlike traditional science branches, where statistical models were employed due to difficulty of deterministic calculation of every particle, QM relies on statistics at the single particle level.
So, if you accept QM, the universe is not totally predictable. There is, for example, a small, but non-zero chance that I will be tunneled the next moment. I certainly give science credit for embracing this conception. But note how laws were “weaved” around it to maintain our present universal laws premise.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
My comment was kind of a throwaway comment about religion, not really directed at you, but I can see why you thought it was, so my apologies. So here is another comment on religion, not directed at you - would religious leaders be as willing to discard their bedrock principles as I think scientists would be? It looks like the Dalai Lama would be. I read that the new Biblical commentary from Reform Judaism accepts that the Davidic Empire was not as big as the Bible said - that’s kind of close. But I suspect for the most part, no.
[/QUOTE]
I find it hard to believe they will, and for a reason.
Let’s look at your example. I must stress, though, that I have never studied “biblical history / archeology”, so a lot of what follows is conjecture.
Why assume that Davidic Empire was not as big as the Bible said? I think it’s due to lack of evidence of its existence (correct me if I’m wrong).
Allow me to try to detail the trail of thought leading us to the conclusion that the bible was wrong. I will put inherit assumptions is square brackets.
Here is how a religious person may think:
I hope it’s clear which trail of thoughts I find more reasonable. But do note how the difference in core belief can result in two different interpretations of reality – both of which self-consistent.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
If scientists could always be trusted, we wouldn’t need peer review, would we? It is really not to guard against lying, though it does, it is more to guard against conclusions not driven by the evidence, and mistakes. And letters columns are to guard against stuff that even gets through that. People do make mistakes, and sometimes even admit them.
[/quote]
Not really an important part of the thread, but I’m talking more about “deliberate mistakes”. I will expand some more in my reply to Monty.
[QUOTE=Monty]
Here’s where you demonstrate your lack of knowledge of the method of Science.
[/quote]
You’re the second or third person in this thread to accuse me of not knowing what science really is. I really don’t want to publish my CV here, but I feel now that some details about me may be in order. Feel free to ignore this part, as it has no impact on what follows.
I have a PhD in Physics / Engineering. I was engaged in active research for some years, both at a local level, and as part of multinational consortia. In the past few years I’ve been managing several research projects. All of these are in fields of exact science. So I think that to a level, I do know what science is, and maybe even the method of science.
[QUOTE=Monty]
Yes, some scientists lie and cannot be trusted. That’s one of the reasons that the scientific method is the way it is. To successfully pull off a false report would require a huge number of scientists controlling every related experiment in the world. And that control would have to extend beyond the deaths of those who perpetrated the fraud. The cloning case in South Korea is a good example of bad scientific experimentation.
[/quote]
And here is where you demonstrated your lack of knowledge of what science is.
Science is not all about Earth-shattering, Nobel price winning ideas. In fact, most science is done away from the eyes of the public, being published in specialized journals, and is being advanced in very small steps. Quite a few of these “steps” are merely meant to demonstrate another option of doing something.
I’m not saying Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, or any other major figure got to where they stand using lies. I’m not saying that fundamental theories are based on lies, either. OTOH, when I say some scientists do lie, I’m not making a conjecture (“scientists are people; people lie; hence scientists lie”). I’m reporting first hand witnessing.
Now, on retrospect, “lie” may have been a too strong word to choose. Cases of actual forgery are, I believe, rare (although I have seen one). But many scientists will “beautify” their results. They will choose to depict the best looking figure. They will conduct 20 experiments, and attribute the two that didn’t match their theory to experimental glitches. If you do these manipulations delicately enough, it becomes next to impossible to call you on it.
[QUOTE=Monty]
Science is not a religion
[/quote]
No, it’s not. Have I said otherwise?
[QUOTE=Monty]
and “accept” in the scientific sense and “belief” in the religious sense are not synonyms.
[/QUOTE]
No, they’re not. But they are not far either.
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
For some Science is a belief system. That is Science with a capital S, of course. It is a hierarchical academic structure, with authority tending to be granted to the senior Scientist in proportion to the number and prestige of his degrees and his research grants, although not in that order. In these cases there is little that can be said about the difference between it, and a religion, or fraternal organization.
[/quote]
In my experience, that view is held more by “common people”, not by the scientific community itself. The scientists that I know would respect a senior, reputable scientist. His words may be given a little more weight. But he will not be taken on faith.
One particularly amusing and educational story in this regard is that of the discovery of the Poisson’s Spot.
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
However, science is a method.
[/quote]
No it’s not. You’re confusing science with the scientific method that is just a part of science.
cite
Emphasis added.
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
It is a very particular method that can be used by anyone who is willing to follow it restrictive structure to record examinations of observable phenomena.
[/quote]
There is a vast difference between taking observations and doing science. If science was all about observations, you would see massive volumes full with observations of every aspect of nature. Instead, what you do see is a bunch of formulas. Science is also about trying to understand the basic rules governing the universe (assuming they exist) from the observations made.
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
Once it is understood, the authority of the community using science is reserved for those who most ardently adhere to the method itself. That is not because their opinions are more suitable to the scientists, but because their observations are more likely to be repeatable, and reliably predictive of real world events.
[/quote]
Not really. I could work all my life doing everything “by the book”, and no one will hear about me. The respect of the community is reserved for those who have made significant discoveries / advances, while using the scientific method.
Puzzler,
Your response to me is filled with complete dishonesty. You falsely asserted that I made a statement that I did not. And from where I sit, your behaviour in this whole thread isn’t a shade better than in that post.
You also played fast and loose with “switching definitions” in your comment to Triskadecamus.
As to your cv, this is the Internet. Why should I believe it?
[QUOTE=Monty]
Puzzler,
Your response to me is filled with complete dishonesty.
[/quote]
Where?
[QUOTE=Monty]
You falsely asserted that I made a statement that I did not.
[/quote]
Where?
You said:
I said:
The scientific method is an essential part of science. Accusing someone of not knowing what is the scientific method is the same as accusing him of not knowing what science is.
[QUOTE=Monty]
And from where I sit, your behaviour in this whole thread isn’t a shade better than in that post.
[/quote]
Really?
From where I sit, I see you hurdle allegations. Please show me where I was dishonest and asserted false statements or retract.
[QUOTE=Monty]
You also played fast and loose with “switching definitions” in your comment to Triskadecamus.
[/quote]
Please explain.
[QUOTE=Monty]
As to your cv, this is the Internet. Why should I believe it?
[/QUOTE]
I guess you shouldn’t. Frankly, at this point I don’t care.