Science=religion and the meaning of life

Great Debates
1

I have been doing a lot of lurking over the past year but I haven’t seen this brought up recently.

I am an MD/PhD student, now in 2nd year grad school getting a PhD in molecular genetics. Most of the people I work with are either agnostic or atheist, and I am definitely heading more that way as my training goes along.

I have heard the view that science is a religion. I recently heard this view from my boss, an avowed atheist molecular geneticist. That struck me, and got me thinking (what we like to do in grad school). So, I field this to you all (or as we say around here, y’all). This is far better than reading from my qualifying exams, believe me.

We all live on assumptions about the world. Relgion and science both give us frameworks to develop these assumptions and make predictions.
Science is based on a very few assumptions, one being that if a = b, and b = c, then a = c. We assume that to be true always. If it is not, then science collapses, and I lose my job.

Religion is based on more assumptions than that, namely (for Judeo-Christian-Muslim-etc) that there is a God in heaven and he created the universe. He gave us the bible, and His word is true.

We can thus formulate predictions. Granted, with fewer assumptions about the way things work, science is more powerful at making predictions about the world around us. But, as soon as we can’t observe data, we lose all ability to predict. Religion, on the other hand, can predict all types of things about non-observable phenomena, and given that the assumptions are correct, the predictions will hold true : If you are righteous, you will go to heaven. Atheist molecular geneticists will have all eternity to debate the existence of God in Hell.

So lastly, my view of life. I think it is really hard to live your life taking very few things for granted. It is much, much easier to have the framework of the universe fed to you in enormous detail and then told that it must be true (due to your ground assumptions). That is why I think it is such an uphill fight for science. We, as humans, want to be able to have definites in our life – steady things that will not change. Science can give us a handful. Religion can give us an eternity’s worth.

Granted, I know next to nothing on the philosophy of science. I’m just a genetics grad student. A junior one at that. I was raised Jewish, and was always taught that debate about the word of God was a good thing.

Whaddya think?

2

I don’t know about that God gave us the Bible thing – but, keeping with the OP…

In some ways science is a religion, because if everyone was a pure scientist, I strongly suspect, it would take a lifetime and a lot of very expensive equipment (telescopes, electron microscopes, back-hoes, etc.) to actually test and confirm for yourself everything “science” holds to be true. So, ultimately, you either have to be dilligent over many years, or you have to take some things on faith. So in that respect, science is sort of a religion.

3

Science is based upon evidence.

Religion is based upon faith.

Faith does not require evidence. Science does.

Ergo, the entire philosophy of the two forms are predicated upon vastly different starting points.

So, no, science is not a religion. Though one may certainly follow science with a religious fervor, IMHO. But you can follow ANYTHING with a religious fervor for that matter.

Yer pal,
Satan

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4

science is a method/tool, not a religion. theories are accepted or not based on evidence, not believed in regardless of the evidence. theories are adapted to the evidence. dogma, revelation, etc. are not a component of science.

science does not offer an ultimate answer to the meaning of life, it describes how the universe works.

peer review, publication, & re-experimentation eliminate the need to accept everything on faith. I agree, jmullaney, that a scientist can’t test everything for him/herself, but that is not necessary. If you’re studying genetics, you need only focus on the scientific background of genetics.

the body of scientific knowledge, good or bad, right or wrong, has brought us this far successfully (as evidenced by our technology & understanding of nature)

anyway, the only thing accepted on faith is the belief that the universe/nature is understandable.

5

I think it depends what you mean by religion.

I think of science as a philosophy. It is a philosophy that stems from the notion that humans are fallible; most philosophies recognize this, but few truly incorporate it into their standards of truth. Certainly the world’s religions that I am familiar with do not.

The philosophy of science contains a methodology for finding truths. Truths are defined as things that can be confirmed through that methodology. It’s tautological, but self-consistent.

The only thing that makes science as a philosophy better than any other philosophy a priori (including religious philosophies), is that science is self consistent, adheres to the rules of logic, and is truly committed to the idea that humans are fallible in their thinking - and takes common sense steps to deal with this. I think it’s the best damn philosophy the human mind has produced yet, and leaves all others in the dust.
All this is quite apart from technology, i.e the application of science to manipulations of the world, which has been so successful and which most people think of when they think of “science”.

The very things that make science stand out as a philosophy are the things that differentiate it from religion, to my mind. The only way I’ve ever heard science equated with religion (that wasn’t stupid) is to equate “religion” with any idea that is not provable in terms of some more basic concept. Usually this is expressed in the simplistic phrase “requiring faith”. But just as in any axiomatic system you have to have basic concepts that cannot be further defined within the system (the axioms), any system of belief must have concepts that are similarly not defined in more basic terms. So in a certain sense everything that can produce belief is a religion, including science. That’s true, and it’s not stupid, but it does seem a little trite.

6

Wow; I just knew someone would post while I was typing, but three people!

7

Arguments about the foundations of science typically take whole books to discuss, but here are a few ideas.

Reasoning from assumptions, or axioms, is typical of deductive reasoning, which may be used in the sciences, but is more common in logic and mathematics. The example you bring up; if a=b and c=b then a=c, was first written down by Euclid, and is implicit in most matematical systems.

Science relies more on inductive reasoning. If I see an event happen alot, I am more or less justified in assuming it happens all the time. If I see the sun rise in the east every day, I can assume it will rise in the east tommorrow. If I see water boil at 100 degrees C at normal atmospheric pressure, I can say that this is the boiling point of water. The underlying assumption here is that the world follows regular laws, but Science doesn’t so much reason from this assumption as take it for granted.

The goal of science, as I understand it is to produce fruitful theories that explain a variety of phenomena and can be tested either through experiment or observation. For instance Isaac Newton showed that the force keeping the moon in orbit is the same as that causing apples to plummet. Classical field theory describes how electricity and magnetism interact, and how light is a result of this interaction.

Sometimes, the test of these theories doesn’t follow the simple high school model of the scientific method. Creationists often denounce evolution as “not being proven in a lab.” Although this statement is dubiuous, it is also irrelevant. Evolutionary theory is proven by being the best explanation for the distribution of life on earth. In a sense the Earth is the laboratory.

A scientific theory is overturned when it ceases to be able to explain phenomena, when to many inexplicable anomolies arise. For instance it was observed in the 19th century, IIRC, that Uranus was not obeying the laws of Newtonian mechanics. Rather than throw out these laws, Scientists reasoned that an unseen planet was influencing Uranus’s orbit, and discovered neptune. This is an example of how a Scientific theory is fruitful. However, it was impossible to explain subtle discrepancies in Mercury’s orbit, and a new theory of gravity was required.

From this oversimplified model, a number of fundamental differences with religion can be seen. Religion does not rely on empirical tests. Religion does not explain phenomena. Rather than answering specific questions, Religion offers an explanation of the entire universe, based on divine revalation. Religion does not change with time. Religion may use deductive reasoning based on sacred texts or assumptions about God, (Witness Calvin reasoning his way to predestination), but it almost never uses inductive reasoning. Although Science relies on a fundamental assumption that the world is lawful, anything over this assumption is open to question. No religious assumption can be questioned by those of the true faith.

Hope this helps

8

I thought of an acid test for science vs. religion.

Assume some mechanism of reasoning is defined, xing. If through xing someone reaches a conclusion, and that conclusion is shown to be false (by some agreed-upon standard), then science holds xing to be a flawed mechanism; religion does not.

Example: The discovery of truth through an experience of divine revelation. Christians and Jews reject Islam, although the ultimate authority of the truths of Islam was an experience of divine revelation. Christians assume Mohammed was wrong about his experience, and by extension that the human mind is capable of producing mistakes of this type. But arriving at truth through divine revelation is not rejected: the ten commandments are taken as the true word of God by Christians and Jews because they were revealed in an act of divine revelation. The fallibility of the human mind revealed in Islam (from the Judeo-Christian point of view) is not extended to all humans. The religious observer’s beliefs are somehow priviliged against the possibility of such errors.

Science is completely different. A mechanism of thought must work in all branches of science and for everyone, it can’t be wrong in one application but right in another. Mathematics, for instance, is not taken as valid for physics but not biology.
It’s hard to think of examples for science of mechanisms that parallel divine revelation in the example above. They tend to get weeded out pretty fast. But if someone, say, claimed to be able to learn new laws of nature by haruspicy (reading the entrails of slaughtered sheep) and produced some law A, then law A would be tested. If law A was proven to be incorrect, then haruspicy as a method of finding natural laws would be rejected. Laws B,C, and D produced this way might be tested if someone though the results for A were a fluke, but even if one of them turned out to be legitimate, entrail-reading would still not become part of scientific thought. The success would be thought a fluke, because the known failure disproved the method.

This universality is why science is much more catholic than religion, and has been taken up by nearly every culture on earth voluntarily. Religion on Earth, despite many aggressive forced conversions over thousands of years, remains fractious.

9

But still –

I’ve never performed an experiment to prove the world is round.

I’ve never observed the perhelion of Mercury.

I’ve never collided atoms and used a bubble tank to trace quarks.

I’ve never gotten out my stop watch and checked the speed of light.

However, I take all these things on faith, because a lot of other people have performed experiments and come up with what seem like reasonable theories to explain all these things and more.

I’m sure there are people who’ve run every possible experiment to give every possible evidence to support current scientific theory – and they don’t have to take things on faith, but the rest of us do to some extent. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Heck, believing in the koinos kosmos in and of itself is and act of faith, hence I think it might be called a religion.

10

This example is flawed. If it was divine revelation, then it must be true. If it was not true, then it must not have come from divine revelation. This does not disprove divine revelation as a source of truth, only the the revelation, if not true, was not divine.

If I have what I call a “divine revelation” that my coffee cup is god, that does not prove divine revelation is untrue (presuming my coffee cup is not in fact god), only instead that I am wrong about the divine rev in the first place. (and, yes, probably nuts. well, off to sacifice cream and sugar…)

11

Even if everything that is accepted as true based on a certain degree of evidence–but not personal experience–is “faith”, an acceptance of the validity of science need not be “religious”. (And accepting the validity of personal experience is “faith”, too.) The fact that I have seen enough evidence to convince myself that China exists does not seem like a religious belief to me. Faith is a necessary component of religion, but not a sufficient one, IMHO. The best definition that I can think of offhand for a religion: a comprehensive metaphysical belief explaining the purpose for the universe and humankind, encompassing a complete worldview and generally a moral code and supreme creator. I think this encompasses most things that we consider “religion” and excludes the things we generally do not consider religion. So a belief in imperceptable fairies, although wholly faith-based, is not sufficient for a religion. Nor is a rigorous system to test theories against the actual world a religion; it is a philosophy, perhaps, but not a religion.

12

I’ll play a little devil’s advocate here. Or journal reviewer if you’d prefer. :slight_smile:

Religion = philosophy. Science = philosophy.

In my book, there is no qualitative measurement of how good or how bad a philosophy is. Science may be really good at predicting worldly phenomena, but if War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death come marching down the street tomorrow, it is gonna lose a lot of that glamour really quickly.

The point is that science and religion both give us a framework for making predictions – they are both philosophies. In this case a = b, and c = b, so we can say in some respects, a = c.

All deductive or inductive reasoning falls within the assumptions we make for science being correct : the same phenomenon in the same situation, if observed again, will be the same. (Water boils at 100C at standard pressure, always). Also, we assume that the fact of our observation isn’t flawed : we observe water boiling, and it is indeed water boiling.

Religion doesn’t necessarily live by these laws. It lives by another, bigger set. It works well in that bigger set. Faith and observation are by-products of the assumptions we start with. We don’t take things in science on faith, and we don’t observe religious phenomena. They are in separate, parallel universes.

It is like saying that 6000 years ago (or for that matter 6000 seconds ago) we were created from nothing, with the photons en route from the Andromeda Galaxy and the dinosaur bones in their strata. Mixing the two does not make sense and leaves us with no usable view of the universe.

It just puzzles me why humans are so attached to religion. I have come to the conclusion that more, rather than fewer, assumptions about the universe give comfort and stability to life, and humans more readily choose those.

Maybe I’m talking out my ass. I’ll stop now.

13

Well, the more mystical a religion have fewer assumption. Taoism, for example, assumes there is a Tao, or balance, and being one with that balance is a good thing. The rest follows from there. Christian mystics are the same way: God = Love, therefore love is good, therefore man should love to be one with love/God. And everything flows from there or is almost pointless overhead.

And the assumptions of science, which are very few (I think even the above believe “reality is real” aka koinos kosmos), perhaps only that the laws of the universe are constant, that there are a few fundamental laws, and all else can be explained by them. When they figure out the Grand Unification Theorem, they’ll have one law which predicts almost everything.

So, I think saying ultimately both are philosophies is very valid.

14

1st 3 definitions:

science == pursuit of TRUTH about physical reality
spiritualism == pursuit of TRUTH about meta-physical reality, if any
religious power game == propagation of ritual and dogma which claims to be THE TRUTH, often opposed to science and/or spiritualism.

saw a tv program a few years ago which said in the 17th century french peasants were telling scientists that rocks could fall from the sky. of course the scientists said they were ignorant peasants that didn’t know what they were talking about. now the scientists expect us to BELIEVE that a rock fell from the sky and wiped out the dinosaurs. like we’re supposed to believe in dinosaurs! what do they think we are, ignorant peasants? LOL!

noone has time to duplicate all the scientific experiments. i don’t think we should accept something claimed as scientific ON FAITH, i think we should evaluate it in terms of PROBABILITY OF ACCURACY. it would be nice if we had 2 words for know. then we could say “i know(1) because i tested it myself” versus “i know(2) because i learned it from a source i regard as reliable”

the religion angle gets more complicated. most people (IMNSHO) hold their religious beliefs as a result of childhood indoctrination and many get defensive if disputed. there is a history of conflict between science advocates and religion advocates in european culture. science has been winning on the basis of visible results. does this mean religion is bullsh!t? i never liked the idea that religion was just evolved superstition so i became an agnostic at 12 not an atheist. sometimes an apatheist when the nuns got on my nerves. but, started reading occult/mysticism in 1974 (play theme from twilight zone) and now suspect there is an underlying basis for religion. it has often been corrupted and distorted for various reasons. there is a book:

     OLD SOULS by Tom Shroder (c)1999

it claims to be documented cases of children with memories of people who died so recently that people who knew the deceased can still be found. so the question is, if there is a God how would he/she/it run the universe? and if humans have free will, that means we are free to lie and cause confusion. hence, RELIGIOUS POWER GAMES.

                                              Dal Timgar
15

The words you are looking for are know and believe. There are also glean (figure out), ween (hope to be true, imagine), grok(know completely), etc. Heck, and me without my thesaurus…

16

jmullaney said:
This example is flawed. If it was divine revelation, then it must be true. If it was not true, then it must not have come from divine revelation. This does not disprove divine revelation as a source of truth, only the the revelation, if not true, was not divine.

but you are ignoring the earlier post about islam vs. christianity. you say “if it was divine revelation, then it must be true”. however, there is absolutely no way for a human to tell if something is divine revelation or not. for example, a local psychic declares that she knows who the survivor of “survivor” is, and claims that god told her so. if she is right, that is still no proof that any revelation took place. she could have just made a lucky guess.

and if there is no way for a human to tell what is being revealed divinely, then such revelation can just as easily be said not to exist. belief in the revelation is a matter of faith. but since so many traditions have articles of divine revelation, and only one set of those can be true (usually) it is a blind faith.

the difference between this reasoning and deductive reasoning is as follows. i can usually make a prediction armed with a good theory. if the prediction is wrong, my theory is probably also. religion does not have such predictive power. for instance, i claim that something will happen because of my reading of the bible. if it does not happen, i don’t reject my theory; rather, i attribute the outcome to ‘divine will’ or ‘god’s plan’ and say in wonder, “Oh the mysterious ways of god”. do you see the difference? one is falsifiable, the other is not.

and that, i believe, is why many people hesitate to say that science is a ‘belief system’ or an article of faith. not because it is not, but because it is a fundamentally (no pun intended) different animal.

17

Actually you don’t need to make any assumptions about the nature of reality to do science. All you really need to believe is that there are phenomena (in the most limited empirical sense) and that phenomena are more or less common for all observers. The first is undeniable. I mean, whatever your view of reality something exists. The second is confirmed by all experience. Fire is hot, fur is soft, etc. etc. Exceptions can be explained (Someone wearing a sophisticated flame-retardant suit might not feel fire as hot, but that’s because of the suit, not because fire itself suddenly became cool.)

All science attempts to do is give provisional, testable accounts (theories) for various specific phenomena. These theories should explain why we see what we see, should suggest avenues for research and testing, and hopefully will link diverse phenomena under a few overarching laws.

As an example, Newton’s theory of gravity explained why planets follow the elliptical orbits they do, suggested research programmes where other planets (or binary star systems, etc.) could have there orbits predicted, and linked planetary orbits to the tendancy of heavy objects to plummet.

Again Darwin’s theory of evolution explains the distribution of life on earth, suggests research programmes where more complex fossils will be found in more recent rocks, and links the history of all life on earth together.

In both cases you don’t have to make any metaphysical assumptions other than there’s a bunch of stuff out there, and it’s doing something. The very success of science is its own metaphysical justification

18

What Satan (and others, but he said it in the fewest words) said.

jmullaney: Just because you haven’t done the experiments yourself doesn’t mean you have “faith” in them. You can accept something based on the evidence and it is not a “faith” decision.

For example, I was not in Nazi Germany during WWII. But that does not mean it takes “faith” on my part to accept the Holocaust. There are many pieces of evidence, all of which converge to the conclusion that the Holocaust happened.

The same is true for evolution.

Faith means believing in something for which there isn’t objective evidence. It is the opposite, not the same as, science.

19

not to be snippy or anything, but what Satan said was an assertion, not an argument. (It happens to be an assertion I agree with, but that’s not relevant.) “Faith” “objectivity” and “Science” are complex concepts. Simply asserting that the difference between Science and Religion is that one relies on faith and the other on objective evidence doesn’t really address Edwino’s OP, Which calls for a more detailed answer.

At least I find these things interesting. I Grant more pragmatic people would find David B’s and Satan’s responses sufficient. I used the OP to post some off the cuff thoughts on the foundations of Science, and hoped that this would generate some responses. The success of science goes alot deeper than a reliance on “objective” evidence, whatever that means.

I’d especially like to hear from some of the more thoughtful religious posters, like Polycarp or Libertarian.

20

Though I do not consider myself to be religious, not even one iota, I will honor your request for my opinion, as follows:

Deductive reason itself is a house of cards, standing as it does on the question-begging assumption that it is indeed a valid epistemology at all. All definitions are tautological. Definitions consist of terms that have definitions that have terms that have definitions that have terms that have definitions, and so on. And alas, some terms are necessarily left simply undefined: for example, Peano left “natural number” and “successor” undefined in his famous proof that 1 + 1 = 2.

All axioms are taken on faith (i.e., without argument). These axioms (like when a = b and b = c, a = c) might be accepted as true in one metaphysic, but not another. One example is Lobachevsky’s discovery of the fatal imperfection in Euclidean geometry, “namely, the failure to realize that the fundamental axioms in any mathematical science are assumptions.” — The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, Edna E. Kramer, 1982, Princeton Press.

I agree with the point made that (most) science is inductive rather than deductive, but induction has problems of its own, not the least of which is its nature as an epistemology of uncertainty, hanging, as it does, by a thread that will be snapped upon discovery of a single counter-example.

Every conclusion drawn from premises that are drawn from axioms that are formed around tautological definitions and undefined terms is a faith-based conclusion. Every conclusion drawn from experience is equally faith-based, contingent upon some counter-experience.

In the end, we weigh the evidence we ourselves have seen, and make a decision about what we will believe. That last step is always an exercise in faith.