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flexibeasti wish people wouldn't attempt to use science to support and/or defend their spiritual beliefs. On the one hand, it can be viewed as a backhanded compliment to the successes of science. On the other hand . . . . it most often seems to be done by people who don't understand where science does and doesn't work, who mistakenly believe they've got a good understanding of the particular area of science they're referring to, and with whom (ironically enough) one often struggles to have a rational dialogue. With idiots like these defending science, science doesn't need enemies (which it has in spades).
Personally, i would regard myself as a critical supporter of science. Over last few centuries, science has had many amazing successes; but it has also shown its limitations. Postmodernism has made some valid criticisms of science, but has (as far as i'm aware) failed to produce any epistemology which anywhere near as productive - at least in terms of describing, predicting and influencing the state of the universe - as science has1.
The most frequent pop criticism of science is that it's just as much a 'faith' or 'religion' as, say, Judaism, Islam or Christianity. Overall, i disagree with this: science refers back to, and is informed by, observed behaviours in the real world far more often and consistently than many religions do. (Liberal interpretations of religious writings - interpretations which involve a less literal, more allegorical approach - often seem to exist more on the fringes of religious communities than in the centre.) Scientists who defend their hypotheses/models/theories (hereafter, 'HMTs') are not necessarily being dogmatic; they might simply be sticking with them until, on balance, they no longer answer more problems than they pose, or until an alternative HMT is proposed whose exploratory and/or explanatory power significantly outstrips the existing HMT.
Having said that, there certainly are people who have rather naïve beliefs about the power and practice of science. Unfortunately, i encounter them all the time. These are the people who desperately need to read books like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or Chalmer's What is this thing called Science? They think that science is merely the process of induction; or that it's completely described by falsificationism; or that it consists of the application of 'logic' (the fact that there are various 'logics' - formal, modal, fuzzy, dialectical etc. - usually escapes such people); and so on. Basically, they view science as some sort of homogenous entity with fixed properties which directly reveals The Truth as soon as one uses it.
And so we come to the subset of this group that i referred to at the beginnning of this post: those who try to buttress their spiritual beliefs with 'science'. The specific form of this i most frequently encounter is people attempting to use quantum physics to push their beliefs. For example, such people might take the "observation collapses the wave function" part of quantum physics, extrapolate it to a macroscopic scale, and then put forward notions like "the universe only exists because we humans are observing it" to in turn support the belief that "the universe was created for us" - which strikes me as a rather hubristic claim about a universe that is billions of light years in diameter (where a billion light years is approximately 9.5 thousand million million million kilometres, and a million kilometres represents roughly 25 times the Earth's circumference!).
The fun part comes when one politely tries to point out to these people the errors in their understanding. This is when people start appealing to the mythological flaw-free "scientific method" based on "logic" that i described above (and often seem compelled to use CAPS, all the BETTER to ILLUSTRATE the POINT they're making :-P ). It's also when one is attacked for trying to force one's views on others, because until SCIENCE proves otherwise, all HMTs are 'valid'.
In high school, i wrote a short story in which the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by major nuclear conflict between two of the major dinosaur polities. As far as i'm aware, no-one has seriously proposed that this was actually the case. :-) But i can begin to think of ways in which to base a 'theory' on this fact, by explaining away the lack of evidence in the fossil record for such an event: suggest, for example, that the dinosaurs with human-like capabilities lived on the continent of Antarctica, so that any fossils are hidden under the ice sheet; suggest that the nuclear conflict was what wiped out dinosaur artifacts, and the ensuing nuclear winter was what wiped out so many species outside of Antarctica; suggest that those 'advanced' dinosaurs who survived the nuclear conflict then ended up succumbing to the plague that appeared shortly thereafter; and so on. If i keep going like this, i (supposedly) can keep claiming my 'theory' is 'valid' because science hasn't actively disproven it. For me, however, an important part of actual science is proposing tests which will (hopefully) indicate the likely accuracy of a given theory. In other words, i don't believe a theory is 'scientific' unless it can be experimentally proven - that is, with statistically significant confidence - to be "basically true" or "basically false".
As far as i'm aware, my spiritual beliefs don't directly contradict any well-established theories which have broad support in their relevant scientific community. That doesn't, however, mean that my spiritual beliefs are 'scientific'. They're not. For a start, they would be chopped into little pieces by Occam's Razor ("Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity" - in other words, assume as little as is necessary to adequately explain something). Additionally, i can think of no tests to either prove or disprove my beliefs (although i'm unwilling to rule out the possibility of such tests eventually being developed). My spiritual beliefs are essentially irrational, at least in terms of current scientific knowledge about how the universe works; in terms of my psychology, they may be a relatively rational way of comprehending and relating to the world. Or not. :-)
So basically what i'm trying to say is this: don't try to use science to buttress theology, because it usually just results in both you and science looking stupid. And it forces God to kill a puppy. ;-)
1. As per, for example, this (rather amusing) conversation between a male chemistry professor and his daughter.
Personally, i would regard myself as a critical supporter of science. Over last few centuries, science has had many amazing successes; but it has also shown its limitations. Postmodernism has made some valid criticisms of science, but has (as far as i'm aware) failed to produce any epistemology which anywhere near as productive - at least in terms of describing, predicting and influencing the state of the universe - as science has1.
The most frequent pop criticism of science is that it's just as much a 'faith' or 'religion' as, say, Judaism, Islam or Christianity. Overall, i disagree with this: science refers back to, and is informed by, observed behaviours in the real world far more often and consistently than many religions do. (Liberal interpretations of religious writings - interpretations which involve a less literal, more allegorical approach - often seem to exist more on the fringes of religious communities than in the centre.) Scientists who defend their hypotheses/models/theories (hereafter, 'HMTs') are not necessarily being dogmatic; they might simply be sticking with them until, on balance, they no longer answer more problems than they pose, or until an alternative HMT is proposed whose exploratory and/or explanatory power significantly outstrips the existing HMT.
Having said that, there certainly are people who have rather naïve beliefs about the power and practice of science. Unfortunately, i encounter them all the time. These are the people who desperately need to read books like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or Chalmer's What is this thing called Science? They think that science is merely the process of induction; or that it's completely described by falsificationism; or that it consists of the application of 'logic' (the fact that there are various 'logics' - formal, modal, fuzzy, dialectical etc. - usually escapes such people); and so on. Basically, they view science as some sort of homogenous entity with fixed properties which directly reveals The Truth as soon as one uses it.
And so we come to the subset of this group that i referred to at the beginnning of this post: those who try to buttress their spiritual beliefs with 'science'. The specific form of this i most frequently encounter is people attempting to use quantum physics to push their beliefs. For example, such people might take the "observation collapses the wave function" part of quantum physics, extrapolate it to a macroscopic scale, and then put forward notions like "the universe only exists because we humans are observing it" to in turn support the belief that "the universe was created for us" - which strikes me as a rather hubristic claim about a universe that is billions of light years in diameter (where a billion light years is approximately 9.5 thousand million million million kilometres, and a million kilometres represents roughly 25 times the Earth's circumference!).
The fun part comes when one politely tries to point out to these people the errors in their understanding. This is when people start appealing to the mythological flaw-free "scientific method" based on "logic" that i described above (and often seem compelled to use CAPS, all the BETTER to ILLUSTRATE the POINT they're making :-P ). It's also when one is attacked for trying to force one's views on others, because until SCIENCE proves otherwise, all HMTs are 'valid'.
In high school, i wrote a short story in which the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by major nuclear conflict between two of the major dinosaur polities. As far as i'm aware, no-one has seriously proposed that this was actually the case. :-) But i can begin to think of ways in which to base a 'theory' on this fact, by explaining away the lack of evidence in the fossil record for such an event: suggest, for example, that the dinosaurs with human-like capabilities lived on the continent of Antarctica, so that any fossils are hidden under the ice sheet; suggest that the nuclear conflict was what wiped out dinosaur artifacts, and the ensuing nuclear winter was what wiped out so many species outside of Antarctica; suggest that those 'advanced' dinosaurs who survived the nuclear conflict then ended up succumbing to the plague that appeared shortly thereafter; and so on. If i keep going like this, i (supposedly) can keep claiming my 'theory' is 'valid' because science hasn't actively disproven it. For me, however, an important part of actual science is proposing tests which will (hopefully) indicate the likely accuracy of a given theory. In other words, i don't believe a theory is 'scientific' unless it can be experimentally proven - that is, with statistically significant confidence - to be "basically true" or "basically false".
As far as i'm aware, my spiritual beliefs don't directly contradict any well-established theories which have broad support in their relevant scientific community. That doesn't, however, mean that my spiritual beliefs are 'scientific'. They're not. For a start, they would be chopped into little pieces by Occam's Razor ("Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity" - in other words, assume as little as is necessary to adequately explain something). Additionally, i can think of no tests to either prove or disprove my beliefs (although i'm unwilling to rule out the possibility of such tests eventually being developed). My spiritual beliefs are essentially irrational, at least in terms of current scientific knowledge about how the universe works; in terms of my psychology, they may be a relatively rational way of comprehending and relating to the world. Or not. :-)
So basically what i'm trying to say is this: don't try to use science to buttress theology, because it usually just results in both you and science looking stupid. And it forces God to kill a puppy. ;-)
1. As per, for example, this (rather amusing) conversation between a male chemistry professor and his daughter.
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Date: 2007-01-14 12:00 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-14 12:16 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 00:21 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 04:46 (UTC)Dawkin's definition of the various 'isms' are rather interesting; i consider myself to be both a panentheist and a theistic Satanist. By the former i mean, as my Oxford Dictionary of World Religions defines it, By the latter, i am referring to Diane Vera's definition (http://www.theisticsatanism.com/varieties/FAQ-TS.html): More specifically, i believe that Satan / Baphomet / Lucifer etc. are anthropomorphicisations (er, if that's a word!) of energies that exist in David Bohm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm)'s characterisation of an 'implicit order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_order)'; and it's this 'implicit order' that transcends our universe.
So given all that, i'm not sure how Dawkins would characterise my beliefs: 'sexy' naturalism, or delusional? :-)
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Date: 2007-01-15 05:12 (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-01-15 05:57 (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-01-14 17:58 (UTC)I always joke that the those who hold science in the same blind regard as fanantical religion should work as a scientist - it will clear that up immediately ;-) Of course, not everyone has this opportunity. I so love my job.
As a physicist (well, my actual Ph.D. is in materials science but trust me, it's all surface physics and my undergraduate degree is in physics) the old Quantum Mechanics supports my Woo Woo Theorem thing has been under my skin forever. I'm happy people are interested in QM and other areas of physics, but I wish they'd learn enough to realize that QM isn't all that (nor is String theory.)
I find it interesting that the Dalai Lama has said where science and Buddhism conflict, science wins (I'm paraphrasing.) To me, this is a sign of commitment to knowing reality.
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Date: 2007-01-14 17:59 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 05:11 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 05:10 (UTC)*laugh* Indeed.
:-D
Indeed. The straw that broke this particular camel's back, and inspired me to write this post, was someone claiming (a) that his theological 'theory' of the universe, which was (supposedly) based on string theory, had not yet been proven to be invalid by science, and was therefore just as valid as any other cosmological theory; (b) that there are no challengers to string theory whatsoever, and that string theory will soon prove to be the Theory of Everything (presumably with his additions, of course :-P ); and (c) that i should not be trying to force my views of the universe on everyone else (i had written that ""dark energy" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy ), which effectively acts in an 'anti-gravitic' manner, is being seriously considered by a number of physicists as a way to explain the increasing acceleration of the expansion of the universe", which this person read as "dark energy is real - scientists say so, nyeh!" :-P ). So i pointed out loop quantum gravity as at least one alternative to string theory, provided links to articles about the views of Peter Woit, Lawrence Krauss, Sheldon Glashow etc., and recommended that people check out the gr-qc section of arXiv.org. :-)
That's interesting; that's pretty much my perspective as well: in case of conflict between science-supported-by-broad-consensus and my spiritual beliefs, the former wins. :-)
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Date: 2007-02-10 03:49 (UTC)They think that science is merely the process of induction; or that it's completely described by falsificationism;
For me, however, an important part of actual science is proposing tests which will (hopefully) indicate the likely accuracy of a given theory. In other words, i don't believe a theory is 'scientific' unless it can be experimentally proven - that is, with statistically significant confidence - to be "basically true" or "basically false".
Aren't you basically saying here that a theory is only 'scientific' if it's falsifiable?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 11:56 (UTC)So in summary: yes to falsifiability, no to strict falsifactionism. :-) i wonder how many strict falsifactionists have refused to give up their belief in it despite the presence of contradictory data? ;-)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 22:36 (UTC)I hadn't realised there were people that strict about falsification. To me it seemed obvious that attempting to modify the existing theory to include new data would be an obvious first step, rather than abandoning the theory completely...