*!"Do You Believe in Science?"!*

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I officially claim Earth's moon as my own! Sure, it's not as interesting or massive as Mars, but it's a heck of a lot closer! And think of the fun I could have with its low gravity! "Air Jordan", eat your heart out.
I'm particularly looking forward to tossing pizza dough 30 feet into the air while making my dinner!

Ok, after some thought elsewhere, ( on thread "God(s) Once Spoke to Most of Us? The Bicameral Mind"), I now believe in science's importance as a force for increasing complexity. And as till now the most complex social organisations appear to have succeeded where less complex ones have not i have to acccept that science appears to be on the side of the winners at least.

This does not mean that i think it is necessarily a "good thing" in itself, nor that it does not come without a cost, nor that it has anything to do with greater understanding of the world, but only that it ( science) is an interesting development, a powerful tool for creating social-organisation of greater complexity than at any time in history, as was language when it first emerged.

just had funny thought!

what if science's pursuit of objectivity, like the Catholic Church's pursuit of goodness, etc, in creating/constructing dualities, ( eg; objectivity-subjectivity), is like a stage of reproduction, separating/dividing up into two new strands for a new mixture.

This may have already been posted, but there are quite a few pages to read so, before I lost my train of thought I would post my initial reply to your post.

Science is not something you can believe or not believe. It is.

Descartes once said "I doubt, therefor I am"

This was deduced from his reasoning on what is real and what is not. We cannot be ultimately certain that there is a material reality, that our dreams are not also a separate reality(aside from proving by a process of deduction of possibility) or that a horse is a horse and not an apple. That our experience of the world is determined by our senses, which can be corrupted or altered. He determined that if you remove all of our sensory input what we are left with is reason. The ability to doubt.

This also re-enforced the nature of an absolute truth regardless of sensory perception. The truth that 1 + 1 = 2. The truth of Maths.

Science, is the observation, description and prediction of the world we percieve through our senses. Science is the act of having a theory that both describes what something is, and how it will react in future situations.
The most basic of these being, the 1 + 1 = 2 principle.
If you have one marble and another marble, you have 2 marbles.
If you have 2 marbles and another 2 marbles you will have 4 marbles.
You could use any type of marble, or exchange the marble for any other object, but the result will always be the same. So you could say that we know without any doubt that 1 + 1 = 2.

It has been proven regarding the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, that observation does not alter the measurement. There should be an article on this if you google it. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle being that you cannot know the velocity of a particle if you know its location, and you cannot know the particles location if you know its velocity. This may be hard to understand, but it is basically the statement that Particles can act randomly, completely random. The foundations of our material world, can act randomly. Most modern mathematics and physics take this into consideration when positing theories or creating new technology, as they need to accommodate possible "options" or "possibilities" in their formulas to allow for the random motion of the particles.

Some have said that this undermines the theory of determinism, or fate, and is proof of free will on a fundamental level. But going to that extent requires belief.

Science, is constantly in motion, evolution. If a theory is undermined, it is altered. If a better explanation is found, it is used. But it is all based on the ultimate truth that as humans we can reason. That 1 + 1 = 2, regardless of sensory perception.

Religion, as opposed to science, does not explain the way things are and the way things will be, or how things will react in future situations. Religion is more of a explanation as to why we reason, why we still exist outside of sensory perception. Where did our self-realisation come from? Because none of this can be measured, described or predicted, it is a matter of faith, of belief.

To say you don't believe in Science is to say you don't believe in the world around you. It is to say that your gift of reasoning, is not a gift, is of no use and cannot be relied upon.

Science has proven that light travels at a speed. It is not instantaneous. Something that happens on the Sun happens 8 minutes before we witness it. The vision we see takes time to get from the Sun to us. This is not something you believe in or not. It is something that just is. It is through observation and description that we know this.

Why do objects fall to the ground? Is the world flat or round? These are things that Science has proven the answers to through, description, observation and prediction. We know that if we keep walking in a straight line around the world, we will return to the place we started. This is a fact. It is not an issue of whether you believe it or not, it just is. It is an issue of whether you believe in the world around you.

Regarding climate change, given our past as a civilisation it is not unreasonable to assume that we are slowly killing our planet, or altering it to a point where it will no longer be sustainable. Science has used description, observation and prediction with these factors to determine that we are directly contributing to the state of our planets future.

Whether you believe it or not is a personal choice, but according to the nature of truth, its a fairly certain one, and if it is proved wrong will be revised and not upheld. However I would rather believe that our world is slowly dying and that we should change to prevent this, than ignore it all and go about life as we are now and just hope for the best.

I think i've drifted off the topic, but what i'm getting at is Science is not a belief system. It is a description of the world around us, and the pursuit of determining the ultimate truths about who we are as beings, how we got here and how our universe works. Refusing to believe in Science is like refusing to believe in your own capacity to reason, and is refusing to believe in understanding yourself and your environment, in some ways living ignorantly. But some people like living ignorantly, they don't have to worry or think about whether the universe has crossed the threshold of expansion and will now expand into infinity. Thats ok too, i just think its taking for granted our ultimate gift of living, our ability to reason and think for ourselves.

Many religious people hate Science and refuse to believe it, yet will watch their televisions and drive their cars, turn on their lights, and use their electricity without for a second wondering why it is possible in the first place.

The real problem is that the word "observation" has been used in a confusing way making people think that it actually means just looking, as you expect that word to mean, whereas quantum physicists are using the word to refer to particle interactions. In that sense, observation does have an effect, obviously.

Also, you have to be careful about words like "proven". Nothing in science is ever proven (unlike in math), because there is always a possibility that new information could come along and change our understanding of how things work.

WurdBendur:

Granted. Sorry, I sometimes get a bit carried away. However there is an article about "observation" not influencing the particle re: the uncertainty principle, and when I said "observation" I did mean shooting the particle with photons and measuring it through a specific microscope.

I found some items on this just quickly, yes I know its only Wikipedia:

Wikipedia -

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/fr ... 639AAGh0Gw

I'll see if I can find more, but you get what i'm saying anyways.

I'll apologise if any part of my post seemed a bit condescending, I sometimes get that way when i get worked up. hehe

Science as we know it is very much the product of the last 300 years.

Until 350 years ago, for example, not many people thought that you could find things out by experimenting. They believed that you found out truth by using reason, words, logical arguments; that by placing one statement after another in accordance with certain rules you would arrive at a true description of reality.

Even alchemy did not experiment ( as we are taught to think of it, at least..! objectivity etc )so much as keep trying over and over again to make something work, ( turn base metals into gold, etc, with the Philosophers stone, /egg etc, ) and keep failing, which they always blamed on their material, or the presence of women in the lab/building, or unconfessed sin on the part of the researcher..... what does this remind me of? ! !

Science is an approach, an attitude, and I don't know that i agree with what it believes in; that by eliminating the subjective you can arrive at a correct understanding of the world.

As twoshots put it so well, earlier in thread
That definition of science i like. I can believe in science like that. But I don't notice much of it admitting that. Modern divination. I don't know this. I don't KNOW that "if I keep walking in a straight line around the world i will return to the place i started". How on earth could I KNOW this? All sorts of other things might happen. Wrong. The very fact that there have been such battles about how to pursue it, about what is permitted, about what counts and doesn't, etc, is indication of how much it iS a belief system. Nope, it's like refusing to accept a value judgement, because science is always a philosophical position. And if i do not entirely believe in its precepts that means that i accept only some of its conclusions.

I think that it is possible that, like language before it, emerging in stages as a new approach to reality, it may be very effective at creation of an increasingly complex social-organism, and it seems to promise dizzying expansions through space, etc, aswell a sort of "species-brain" arising from increased connectivity of all human-units across the globe, etc etc.

But it is not certain that this growth is not "cancerous", that it does not take its complexity from the rest of the planet, reducing it to a kind of large industrial agricultural plant.

I'm familiar with that term, but I've never heard 'molar' used in the plural. I would refer, for instance to a 2.6 molar sucrose solution, not a solution of 2.6 molars.

Can science be known to yield truths?

Humans are limited beings: to suppose that humans can know that the system they have found/invented gives them truths... is this not more than a bit of "Munchhausen temerity", pulling ourselves out of the swamp of ignorance by our own hair? If science required no component of belief, it would be just another language game. It is the subjectivity at science's core - the interface of the human system with reality - which gives it its charm, its teeth.

Induction is an assumption - it is something we naturally do, but no amount of reasoning can validate it. The human animal has a nature which it uses to understand the world - but this substratum of thought has been given to it. It cannot be found.

You could also say, "the sucrose solution has a molarity of 2.6". It's been a couple years since I've dealt with that aspect of chemistry though, so "molar(s)" may not be correct. That's more of a linguistic issue however and doesn't effect the concentration.

Very well put.
I also like this version; "He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that god maketh from beginning to end".( Eccles. 3.11) Of course this was written about 2500 years ago so it may be a bit out of date! But I enjoyed finding it.

Scientists (reasonable ones anyway) aren't presenting their conclusions as truth, but as the best understanding we have. Then they make every effort to improve their understanding. The point is not to preach truth, but to seek it out and inch ever closer to it. We may never be able to find the ultimate universal truths that religions purport to have but never deliver - no one is denying that. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. What if we all give up trying because you say it's impossible? Let's just give it up. Science is over. Everybody go home. You can say goodbye to all your modern technology or any further technological advances, but it's okay because deep down, you know you have won the argument. You were right, and that is far more important than understanding the secrets of the universe.

On the contrary - I know very well that there is inherent uncertainty in scientific conclusions. It is in fact my philosophical position that if it were otherwise science could not be telling us anything about an external reality.

The problem comes when we try to make the bridge between science and external reality: this is a philosophical position. At best, I would argue, attempts at validating science do little more than show that science is consistent its own presuppositions about knowledge, truth etcetera. (I'm talking about the methods here rather than the conclusions). To validate the methods that a human uses to understand the universe, we would require a meta-perspective which, being only human, is unattainable. Or perhaps even nonsensical?

And deconstructing science does little to show it is a worthless endeavor - I rather had no respect for it before I had dismantled it. Saying that just because we had exposed flaws we would need to scuttle the whole thing would be rather like "throwing out the baby with the bathwater", no?

y'know i'm pretty sure that whether i believe in science or not it still exists.

Is this in fact the only good thing that Christianity has done for us? Provoked/oppressed people so much that they came up with science in order to refute/repudiate its claims , and thus reduce its stranglehold on people? ! !



NB: Christianity = Cult at: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt67507.html