The Epistemological Science vs. Religion Score Card: Science [RIGHT]Religion[/RIGHT]
What is knowledge?
The entire collection of provable or probable [RIGHT]Understanding of a book(s) and [/RIGHT]human understanding of the universe. [RIGHT]applying it to modern life.[/RIGHT]
How is knowledge acquired?
Hypothesis, experimentation, evaluation [RIGHT]Reading the book(s) closer
[/RIGHT]
What do people know?
That which we can prove. [RIGHT]What god chooses us to know.[/RIGHT]
How do we know what we know?
Same experiment will have same results [RIGHT]Faith[/RIGHT]
Why do we know what we know?
A near bottomless history of human effort [RIGHT]God grants it to us.[/RIGHT]
If I’m being unfair please educate me.
No, I’m shaking my head and asking about an experiment. Ideas are cool. The reason I stay employed, I think, is that I have more ideas than almost anybody. But the next step, and the one lots of people don’t get, is to be able to recognize which of your ideas are totally garbage, and filter them out. And lots of my ideas are total garbage. If 10% make it to the paper stage, that’s doing great.
The scariest thing, and this has happened to me, is to have an idea get taken up by other people, because it would be great if it turned out to be true. I wonder how many religions and cults have been maintained because the cult founder was so persuasive, and got so many followers, that they didn’t feel able to say “never mind.”
Going back to science, it is important to distinguish opinion pieces from things backed by experimental evidence. Famous scientists get their opinion pieces published - and appealing to this as true rather than to their peer-reviewed papers is appeal to authority in the worst way. Journals clearly distinguish these, but the layman might not understand that quoting something from Science doesn’t have any validity if that thing is in the letters page.
I’ve edited a column of 500 word opinion pieces in a journal in my field for the past 13 years or so. It’s great fun, but at a workshop someone presented a talk based on one of the columns (not one of mine.) That was embarrassing.
Actually the test was very simple to understand. Classical physics said Mercury should be here, Einstein said it should be there. When Einstein turned out to be right he became the very embodiment of genius, even to those who had no clue about relativity. It’s a great example of a testable prediction, which relativity has many of.
if your claim is that most people are too stupid or too lazy to do anything more than believe in something than say that since Authority X says so, it must be true, I’m right with you. What I’m saying is that you don’t need to know differential equations to get this stuff. Understanding falsifiability is a philosophical thing, which requires no math, just a different mind set. For example, experiments don’t verify theories (which implies correctness) - they just support them by not falsifying them and perhaps falsifying alternate explanations. Sorry to nitpick, but no authority, just thought, is required to understand. Again, for the big results, the layman can understand it through understanding the predictions the theory makes. Where you can get into trouble is subtle statistical evidence - but scientists get into trouble here also.
Oh, you’re so right. Penzias winning instead if Hawking is kind of like the people who did “Hard out there for a pimp” having more Oscars than Martin Scorsese. I’ve presented to Penzias several times, so this is a first-hand opinion.
Please explain the scientific principles these things are not in accord with. You really can’t learn the philosophy of science from watching Star Trek reruns.
I see a chart with “GHz” on the x-axis and “Energy Density” on the y-axis, and the caption is: “SCIENCE. It works, bitches.” Is this “a good piece of evidence”? Evidence of what? Cosmic microwave background radiation?
If you think that the graph is evidence, then you and I have very different ideas of what evidence is.
Nope. You said “they’re falsifiable”. Am I supposed to accept your claim just because you said it? Should I kowtow to your authority as a scientist?
No, who is on first.
This thread is about personal beliefs and the role of authority, so it is relevant who decides that a theory is scientific. Is the non-scientist able to determine whether a theory is falsifiable, without relying on the scientist’s input?
Seems like you’re suggesting that there’s only one way that X can happen.
The event was considered a triumph of the accuracy of science, which the comic celebrated. That science makes accurate predictions that are verifiable is proof of it’s accuracy (that it works, bitches), and the most important part of the scientific method. The difference between a hypothesis and a theory in fact.
I don’t think they are arguing against falsifiability per se, just Popper’s worship of it. Falsifiability means that a theory can be falsified, not that it has been. There are plenty of falsifiable theories which are wrong, after all.
The problem is that most scientists wouldn’t even propose a theory which can’t be falsified, since the first thing you do is to try to figure out an experiment to disprove it. It’s as natural as breathing.
Strictly speaking, creationism, of the 18th century variety, was a falsifiable theory. And it got falsified, and the real scientists moved on. The variety of creationism you hear about today is designed to be unfalsifiable, with its proponents buying into the proposition that if the evidence disagrees with creation must be discarded.
It has everything to do with it. You are creating a false dilemma by insisting that the most important and obvious evidence doesn’t count. Science works; religion does not; and that’s easy to see for even your “Joe Blow Liberal Arts Graduate”. He doesn’t need to know the math.
This isn’t a competition between two authorities that the average person isn’t qualified to choose between; this is a competition between the best and the worst humanity has produced. You asked "So, on a personal level, how are such beliefs any different than espousal of (say) transubstantiation, reincarnation or karma? "; and I answered. The difference is that the latter can be dismissed out of hand, because they are religious claims and religion is ***just that bad ***when it comes to being right.
Let me expand. Around 1964 there were two hypotheses, Big Bang and Steady State. The Big Bang theory made a specific prediction of the existence of CBR, there was no reason in the Steady State theory for any such thing, and I suspect it would be difficult to explain. I don’t know what predictions Steady State made - I’m sure there were some.
The appeal to authority method would be who’d be more convincing - Gamow or Hoyle. In science who is more convincing has no bearing. Penzias and Wilson inadvertently did the crucial experiment, and confirmed the prediction of the Big Bang theorists.
The scientist is the one who provides the prediction that should come naturally from the theory. Anyone can tell if the prediction has been confirmed or falsified. The prediction needs to be about something we don’t know yet. If a theory produces results at odds with facts, it won’t make it very far. It seems like physicists spend a lot of their time eliminating pesky infinities from their equations, because if a theory predicts infinite energy it almost surely has a problem.
One more thing that distinguishes science from other disciplines, which is convergence. In science disputing authority is highly encouraged - so long as it is evidence based. Despite this, if you collect all the authorities on a subject, you will find agreement on a large body of knowledge. You’ll also find massive disagreement out on the fringes. Pick, for example, relativity and string theory. Everyone buys into relativity, so pick any authority and you’re safe. String theory is in dispute, so accepting it based on the writing of a string theory proponent is invalid. Of course acceptance of even the basic stuff has to be provisional to some extent.
Now consider religion. Disagreement on the fringes is still okay, but disagreement on the basic stuff gets you kicked out (or killed in the good old days.) Find a bunch of authorities on God from around the world, and they will disagree about even the most basic things. So, which authority are you going to believe. Usually the one you were brought up to believe.
Why does science converge? Because people on all sides of a fringe issue still accept falsifiability, and eventually you’ll get the evidence to falsify all but one position. It’s not so cut and dried that fervent supporters of one position will switch, but over time they’ll die out and there will be a consensus. Since religious claims don’t get tested against the real world, there is no reason for anyone to accept one or the other besides personal preference or upbringing. So, Zoe’s idea, whatever it is, is just as supportable as the millions of pages written on Catholic dogma.
I think you mean something other than accuracy, but I get your point.
Hmm … the most important part? Are you saying that as a scientist or as a layman?
Yes, Foghorn, I get the joke. But, the graph on its own is not evidence of anything (other than for the existence of a graph …) unless you understand the underlying research, the interpretation, and the conclusions.
Also, the basic premise, “It works”, is hardly the criterion that distinguishes science from non-science. Many approaches “work”. In fact, I’d say that most of what we do is not science, but it still works, most of the time, or some of the time, or often enough that we keep doing it.
Now we’re getting into more concrete questions, perhaps I can answer this bit:
The law of attraction - if you take it as meaning what it appears to mean, and not try to think of cop outs* - is easily testable: just think of something inconsequential, specific, but fairly improbable, and follow the “rules” for, say, a week, to make it happen. Then think of something else that’s equally improbable and do the same. If after 3 months none of those things have come true, the law of attraction is a bunch of crap.
Or more easily: if the law of attraction was true, and it’s obviously not a secret, everybody with just a bit of thought could have what they wanted just by basically wishing for it. Since people are still starving all over the place, it’s crap.
As for vaccination, even if it would cause whatever it would cause by whatever means that’s currently fashionable, the opponents would still have to show that that’s more damaging to society than no vaccination at all, otherwise the best they could hope for is something “less damaging” that still provides adequate prevention of some very serious diseases. We’re not banning cars because people are killed by them, for the very good reason that motorized transport helps our society much, much more than it harms it.
As far as the OP is concerned: in areas where science is new and/or debated, the layman has no real way of knowing the what’s more plausible. But most of science isn’t new and debated. Anybody can understand the scientific method, and understand that it does lead to pretty accurate theories. The only thing you have to take on authority is that scientists are actually interested in finding out where the current theories are wrong. And even that is pretty obvious.
ETA: the same thing goes for most religions, by the way.
But “it works” is the best reason to keep doing something. The “law of attraction” doesn’t work. Praying doesn’t change the world - though it might make you feel better. Astrology makes no useful predictions. etc.
It does distinguish science somewhat, since science works so much better than other methods that also work ( like trial and error ). And puts science in a completely different category than things that don’t work at all, like faith and revelation.
