Science and religion

Re: Science and religion


The problem with identifying science is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Science is successful on a basis of how well it describes the world. If the way it describes the world is not a way the world works, the science is no longer correct. This means parts of science are constantly in flux, being proven or disproven, adjusted to fit etc.

The other parts of science are stable across time and place (the correct theories and observations which are continually consistent.) and it takes no leap of faith other than trusting that our observations about the universe are correct (Like Fresco often calls into question, I so love citing you Fresco.)

That's just it. In science we have moved beyond the point where we act on beliefs. We see the world more as it appears to our intellect in stead of our hearts. If it works it works, you say. If not we move on to other things. The human spirit has conquered god in our minds. We no longer need god, and so we feel he is inferior to us. It's not that we don't believe in him. It's that we scorn him. What I am trying to convey is the conviction that lays behind all this. Science has a fearlessness at its root, along with the vow to uncover the truth no matter what. We are no longer waiting for god to give us the revelations. We are determined to find them ourselves, and so the drive behind modern science is the same primal force that is at the core of every religion: The desire to know and understand. In this sense I feel that science is only a new religion. But it has man in the high seat instead of god....

The science as religion claim is a Postmoderist argument that claims, all reality is a cultural construct, objective reality is unknowable, science is simply one among many "narratives". This argument includes a number of fallacies including but not limited to, disinterest in the rules of valid evidence, reliance of the subjective, appeals to emotion, persuasion through rhetoric and the abandonment of rational standards. It is basically a return to medieval thinking without the rigorous intellectual tradition of that era. For a critique of Postmodernism in my field, Anthropology see:

Perspectives on Culture: A Critical Introduction to Theory in Cultural Anthropology by H. Sidky, Prentice Hall 2004.

Science is not there to believe in, to use for arguments like these, or to be preached.
Science is there to find new medicine, to make that car go, to make dreams come true. It's just that.

truth
Relative, I understand your point about the self-evident validity of science. But I think you are focusing only on its "engineering" aspects. Science is also a theoretical discipline, resting on philosophically problematical metaphysical presuppositions. And, of course, the "new physics" is making revolutionary strides regarding epistemology.

The view based on science appears to be firm for somebody. However logical basis of mathematics is ungrounded and the phenomena beyond the visible universe are not described by science.
In the age when the visible universe was your village, you could believe you lived on the "flat Earth." If you lived when a round trip around the Earth was just attained, you could believe the Sun rotated around the Earth. And when you live in an epoch of the Hubble Space Telescope, you can believe the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating.
Many maintain that science is based on arranged human experiences/observations, but the observation is intricically limited to your neighborhood (neighborhood is the visible universe).
Through science you will never know where the human position is in the universe. But for some who cannot believe any religion, science is apt to replace the role which religion played formerly.

bookmarking

It were the engineering aspects that made science so successful in the first place. Philisophy of science hasn't made much of a progress since classical Greeks, compared to engineering.
It is the power of math that drives science, not philosophy.

truth
Right, Relative; it's the power of math that DRIVES science. But that power rests on philsophical presuppositions. Mathematical reasoning, like the foundational notion of "truth", is not the result of scientific discovery; it's the product of philosophical creativity. Science is not scientific; it is philosophical. The applications of science, e.g., engineering and medical research, are "scientific".

JLNobody :
I understand a bit and like a lot philosophy of science. But once again I must say : mathematics is not successfull because of philosophy, but because it works. A lot of physical theories that are philosophically great were rejected because they don't work.

I must insist that you support the claim
" But that power rests on philsophical presuppositions. Mathematical reasoning, like the foundational notion of "truth", is not the result of scientific discovery; it's the product of philosophical creativity. "

truth
Relative, I can accept that "mathematics is not successful because of philosophy, but because it works." I MUST accept it because it is tautological. Mathematics EXISTS because of philosophy. That's what I meant by "...that power RESTS on philosophical presuppositions...". Math was not GIVEN to us by some Promethean benefactor; it was created by philosophers like Liebnitz and Descartes.

While I understand that in the past, philosophy and mathematics were very much bundled together, this is also true for the whole of science.

Logic itself as a framework of math happened only recently - with set theory. Before that, geometry was the important factor in math work, not only logical formalism. And geometry comes from observation and experience, among others from Archimedes, Euclides, Pithagoras and so on. The ancients knew some geometry also. While philosophy was varied among these cultures, and varies with passage of time, the pithagoras' theorem remains. Because it works and you can try it. Math is not philosophy. Math is math.

truth
Agreed, math is math (not to be confused, I guess, with arithmetic); it just RESTS on philosophy. But not just in terms of its theoretical ORIGINS. So far as it continues to REST on those origins, my point stands. I will acknowledge that not only engineering, but some forms of philosophical inquiry use math. But I don't think this means that those forms of philosophical inquiry REST on math theory; they use math tools for analysis and exposition. But I may be wrong there.

In the beginning there is math for humans ..

satt_focusable -

"The view based on science appears to be firm for somebody. However logical basis of mathematics is ungrounded and the phenomena beyond the visible universe are not described by science. "

That is because we cannot have physical evidence for somthing on which we can collect no data. Our reach gets further as our knowledge progresses, and all that we have found so far points to consistency in the physical laws of the universe. It is not ungrounded, only unsampled.

"In the age when the visible universe was your village, you could believe you lived on the "flat Earth." If you lived when a round trip around the Earth was just attained, you could believe the Sun rotated around the Earth. And when you live in an epoch of the Hubble Space Telescope, you can believe the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating.
Many maintain that science is based on arranged human experiences/observations, but the observation is intricically limited to your neighborhood (neighborhood is the visible universe)."

It is limited to what we see - but if everything we observe has consistent laws, then those laws must be correct. We knew the earth was not flat by observing shadows at different points on the earth, and traversing it. That discovery is still correct - that the earth is not "flat." We know this because our viewpoint expanded. However, once our viewpoint expanded even further (hubble space telescope) we did not think the earth was flat again - we build off of our correct assumptions, and leave the incorrect ones behind.

"Through science you will never know where the human position is in the universe. But for some who cannot believe any religion, science is apt to replace the role which religion played formerly."

....Sort of. Science is simply observation of our world. There is no reason that it has to contradict with religion. Religion is a social phenomena as well as a way to explain the unexplained (myth - which doesn't have to be religious.) But people will always need collective social forces - they will always need to come together to bury their loved ones, bring new people into the world, find commonality. Religion does that for them - and they can hold both observational and mystical beleifs about the world.

The flat earth is sufficient for my daily life. If I would think about my positon in the world I might think about the round Earth. I think about the expanding universe for fun, though I know the view is limited within the cosmic particle horizon of the universe.
And if I think about the meaning of my existence then ..

truth
Satt_F. Wonderful statement.

Science is only a tool we use to investigate what we consider to be factual. Religion, on the other hand, has delineated what is fact.

Religion is to science as children's stories are to journalistic reporting. The latter may not be the absolute, last-word-on-the-subject truth, but it is an attempt to get at the truth, and conforms to rules of evidence. The former, however, is just-believe-it-'cause-i-said-so dogma, made up from whole cloth, and demanding acceptance without question. When someone tries to separate you from your hard-earned cash on such a basis, it is known as fraud.