Science and Faith

[tongodeon]

There are a few related comments that I keep coming across in various forms:

"Science requires faith (or is a kind or faith) just like religion. Everybody has faith in something."
"Science can't replace religion because it can't answer questions as well as religion."
"It's not a question of whether we have faith, it's what we have faith in ...

Comments

[anonymous]

A good descriptiopn except that science does not necessarily invole empiricism. The best example vbeing String Theory.

[tongodeon]

Science *does* necessarily involve empiricism, which is why many (including some of its proponents) say that string theory is not yet science. String theorists are trying to come up with a way that its validity can be tested, but until they do it's not even wrong.

[jakeinhartsel]

I think this discussion is largly semantics since it has no real effect on the World. But even as well an accepted theory as the Special Relativity intitially had no empherical evidence. To me I see no reason why a theory must involve emperical evidence to be considered a theory. And iot is counter productive to put it in a different catagory.

[mmcirvin]

It's true that, contrary to a cartoon picture of the Scientific Method, Einstein generally started out from considerations of theoretical consistency and elegance, not to explain some empirical anomaly. But he was trying to work with preexisting theories that themselves had observational or experimental support, and it typically wasn't long before he or others came up with ways to test the theory.

Einstein actually became a public celebrity not by publishing Special Relativity, whose popular significance increased much later when "E-mc2" became associated with the atomic bomb; but when General Relativity got what seemed to be its first major observational confirmation with the 1919 eclipse expedition. (In hindsight, the data were poor and it wasn't that great a confirmation--the clinchers came later. But this was the historical order of events.)

[flwyd]

I'll grant that dogs are using empiricism to infer that "sit" -> sit down -> treat. But I think your plant claim is much less tenable (or further from the common meaning of "accepts empiricism). If you raise a plant from seed in a situation where dirt is up and gravity is down, it won't be able to infer that gravity and dirt are opposing and will grow wonkily.

If you're claiming that plants qua collective genetics accept empiricism, that may be a valid way to explain things, but I think you need to do a lot more background work to support the assertion.

[tongodeon]

If you raise a plant from seed in a situation where dirt is up and gravity is down, it won't be able to infer that gravity and dirt are opposing and will grow wonkily.

The principle of uniformity says that general principles are generally true, not universally true. Dirt is generally, but not universally 'below'. Plants (and everything else) sometimes make incorrect inferences in unusual situations based on overly broad assumptions of uniformity. A dog might sit, expect a treat, and get scolded in the unusual situation where the person is just some neighbor kid who wants to mess with the dog. A person might incorrectly infer that a skeleton they've never seen before must be an animal that they've never seen before. Inference isn't an absolutely reliable method of acquiring perfectly reliable knowledge, it's just a principle of reward-driven adaptive systems

[flwyd]

I was taking issue with the claim that plants are capable of inference. Inference is a thought process, and plants are incapable of thought (AFAIK).

[tongodeon]

Inference is a thought process

Inference is a way to weight hypotheses with success heuristics using logic, which often but not always involves "a thought process". It's possible to write inference engines that discover knowledge without conscious thought

[gaping_asshole]

From the PZ Meyers post you linked above, referring to those who equate science with faith:

"I so detest that line of argument, that attempt at setting up a false equivalence, reducing all words to equal lies."

Says it very well methinks. PZ Meyers is capturing an even bigger problem with this approach than you call out: it strives to deprive humanity of the basic right to make distinctions or any sort. That should be offensive even to religious people who care about honesty, humility, service to others, or any other form of basic decency.

[tongodeon]

There's a guy I kind of know in passing who seems to be really into formenting exactly this kind of false equivalence. "Acupuncturists are wrong about some things but so are doctors." "People have killed for religion but they've also killed for political or tribal affiliation." No distinction at all between a country or population that clearly, demonstrably exists and a deity for which there's no proof at all.

He also opposes any sort of distinction between science-based interventions that demonstrably work, and traditional folk remedies that just as clearly don't. None of it is "crap", it's all just equally valuable "stuff that people do to help themselves". He wouldn't even say that truly, deeply nutty, demonstrably harmful folk remedies like endangered species aphrodisiacs (rhino horn, tiger penis) was "crap". It's all equally valid, equally valuable stuff that people choose to do to help themselves.