How would you tell the real thing from a fake? In all seriousness-I’d really like to know.
I think you may be looking at it the wrong way around. Many scientists were devout theists. But instead of saying, “Oh, the Invisible Pink Unicorn did it!”, they asked, “What has the IPU left for us to find?”
Well you shouldn’t blame “scientists” - in reality most real scientists don’t claim the scientific method is the only means of understanding the world.
It’s really just a minority of radicals, few of whom are even real scientists touting this, usually associated with the secular Humanism ideology.
Not an expert, but this ideology seems to have had its origins with the “positivist philosopher” Auguste Comte after the French Revolution, who created the “Religion of Humanity”, which was the forerunner to secular Humanism and intended to be a ‘secular religion’ as a replacement for Christianity, with the Western scientific method its core doctrine, seemingly inspired somewhat by the notion of the Catholic Catechism.
Well again real scientists usually don’t try to comment on this, since the scientific method was a tool designed only for understanding the way the natural world works, not the ‘whys’ or ‘hows’ of why it’s here.
Kind of like how a mechanic’s job is just to take apart and understand the inner workings of a car, not explain “why” the car’s designer built it the way he did, or how it was built, etc.
As far as the Humanists go, well again since their ‘religion’ or ideology states that the Scientific Method is the sole basis of human knowledge, it simply goes against their belief system to bother trying to understand anything other than the physical sciences (such as the formal sciences like logic, aesthetics or mathematics, which some formal scientists have argued provide logical proofs for the existence of a creator).
If you want to read the Humanist statement of “faith”, you can read it right here
We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
They don’t like to call it a ‘religion’ (even though the ideology comes from was originally Comte’s Religion of Humanity), but regardless it would be like asking a Biblical literalist to consider evidence for something that isn’t found in the text of the Bible.
In reality though most scientists are not Humanists and don’t hold this ideology, and only a minority of extremists hold the militant views toward other knowledge systems such as formal logic, which you outlined above.
For that matter I don’t think most atheists are members of the Humanist ideology, though I see Humanists such as Richard Dawkins or those in the “New Atheism” movement often just using “Atheist” and “Humanist” as interchangeable terms, even though ‘vanilla’ atheism is just a lack of belief in God, while Humanism is a specific ideology with its own statement of belief as I showed you above.
Actually that’s dishonest, because of course scientists who study the physical universe aren’t trying to figure out “why it’s here”, simply “how it works”.
And by definition it would be impossible to figure out “why” something is here by looking at the parts its made of.
Just as you couldn’t discover “why” Steve Jobs invented the Mac by opening up a Mac computer and looking at its internal parts.
So actual scientists who are honest will simply say that it’s not their job to try to figure out the “whys”, if they’re claiming to be able to do that then of course they’re lying, or they’re not really scientists, just Humanists trying to squeeze their belief system into actual science.
Well, indeed you are not an expert.
And clearly Comte did try to make it a religion of sorts, but virtually no one nowadays does follow the peculiar faith he had in mind.
I would say that not even that, you are describing a fringe of a fringe that is likely to not to be followed by the vast majority of the scientists of today.
Actually you did not shaed anything, other that a philosofy that virtually no one follows.
The innuendo was an attempt to make many scientists to be followers of a dogma or a religion of sorts, but as Tim Minchin pointed out in the short animation I cited already:
It would be a far less convincing belief system if anyone else could provide any basis for knowledge that works anywhere near as well. Lord knows I’ve looked. I keep asking people, often christian apologists, which demonstrably functional epistemology exists outside of empiricism, or which empirical epistemology works better than the scientific method. The answer, thus far: crickets.
To date, there is no demonstrably valid epistemology not based on empiricism, and the scientific method is pretty much the most effective method of empiricism. You can call this ideology if you’d like, but to date, it’s simply a fact. If you’re going to reject that the scientific method is the sole basis of human knowledge, then I’d like to ask you to demonstrate that you have a different method. I don’t think you do.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this humanist dogma: if you prove it wrong, people will stop believing it. Find us a method that works as well or better than the scientific method, and we’ll switch to that. But barring that, we’ll stick to what demonstrably works.
See, look at your comparison for a moment, and you might see the problem. Asking a secular humanist to look outside empiricism (which has expanded our knowledge beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, and has built virtually every element of our modern world from the ground up, and indeed is pretty much the only way we have to know things) is like asking a biblical literalist to look outside the text of the bible (an old pre-scientific fairy tale, of which many parts have been shown to be completely wrong).
Notice the problem?
It makes perfect sense to limit yourself to empiricism. Empiricism is how we observe the world around us. When you burn your hand on the hot stove, how do you know not to touch it again? Because we fundamentally expect reality to more or less work the same… and it does. Because empiricism works, and because we know if we touch it again, we’ll likely get the same result.
It makes absolutely no sense to limit yourself to the bible. It literally makes no sense - if all you have to work from is “the bible”, how did you learn to read? And how do you know that that big metal thing coming at you is a “car” and that if you jump in front of it it will run your ass over? That’s not in the bible. The bible is necessarily incomplete. It’s also really wrong in a lot of aspects.
The religious minded that could not ever understand that Lightning is a sudden electrostatic discharge that occurs during an electrical storm were honest when they told us they believed that the “prince of the power of the air” was responsible.
Their beliefs were wrong for thousands of years.
But then some guys like Franklin decided to see why and where that power was coming. And then managed to make tools to make even churches safer than before.
Well sure … but that’s a bit of a tautology aint it? After all the bar of being “demonstrably valid” is the empiricist bar itn’t it? 
Wow you’re either lying or your reading comprehension is poor.
I said that real scientists don’t pretend to ‘know’ the whys of existence, since they just study how things work, not ‘why they’re here’. The “whys” questions are the job of philosophers, aestheticians, philosophers of logic, etc.
The Humanism ideology is just the modern heir to Comte’s ideology, and most scientists aren’t part of it. In fact other than maybe Richard Dawkins, or Lawrence Krauss, or others who were a part of the “New Atheism” fad of the early 2000s, there aren’t many notable scientists who share the ideology.
So my attempt isn’t to make science into a religion no, and neither are most actual scientists. This is what the Humanist ideology does, as their own statement of faith above pretty much clearly states.
Well, like Tim also said:
Jack, I think we’ve been over this before. It is expressly against the rules to accuse another poster of lying or to insult another poster.
This is a warning. Please don’t do it again.
Not so, otherwise then we would still wonder about what is lightning or why is there.
Going to the big picture cosmologists and other physicists are also working on why the universe in here and why.
So as I said, you did not show anything, really.
As pointed already, and even you are telling us that, virtually no scientist follows the Humanistic faith you are reporting that they have.
Some of us are. My research output went down quite a bit when I left off teaching residents, but I did get a paper out last year. It’s not groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it did require employing the ol’ scientific method and all. And revealed some previously unknown stuff about disease prevalence in prisons. So I think I still count as a scientist. Just not a very talented or accomplished one. Which is why I don’t do much of it.
But a lot of other FM docs affiliated with teaching hospitals and training programs do a lot more, better stuff.
I was reading an article today, and it had a quote that i thought was lovely.
(Regarding the determination that Tut’s dagger is of forged meteorite)
Well…let’s look at you question scientifically.
Question: Is there a force or entity directing events that does not fit within commonly held models for how the universe works? How would it be observed or detected?
Hypothesis: If an event happens that is of such a statistical abnormality as to imply “divine intervention”, it stands to reason that it should be difficult to impossible to alter the outcome of that event.
Prediction: A group of test subjects who have participated in a “miraculous event” are more likely to continue to be at the receiving end of good fortune than control group.
Experiment: In a “miraculous” event like Flight 1549 water landing on the Hudson River, immediately put the passengers and crew onto another Airbus A320. Have them recreate the landing, along with a “control” consisting of an identical Airbus A320 full of random people. Over enough experiences, the “miracle” group should show much greater survivability (although not necessarily 100% as some of the original “miracles” may have been dumb luck)
Analysis: In reality, “God’s Will” is indistinguishable from “random fortune”.
I wouldn’t characterize a lot of science as logical, or at least not intuitive. Forget quantum physics. Evolution is so simple a child can understand it, but wasn’t discovered or widely understood until fairly recently in human history. Many still find it violates their most basic common sense understanding of how the world works. Spontaneous organization from chaos may as well be magic to a lot of people.
What does the OP think of scientists like Georges Lemaître, or Gregor Mendel? I wonder if he realizes how many great scientists were able to SEPARATE their religious beliefs from their scientific efforts, and make great accompliments because of that?
Well, how should we check it? Or should we just accept the validity of an epistemology with no means of checking whether or not it’s valid? Seems like it would rather defeat the purpose of the exercise, wouldn’t it?
They’re like scientists, but extra scary.
Steve Jobs didn’t “invent” the Mac. Jef Raskin came up with the concept, and Burrell Smith designed the hardware. The Macintosh was a covert project under Jobs’s radar for amlong time while he was facing about on the “Lisa” nonsense.