Science is based on faith?
- Thread starter xPixelatedx
- Start date
Recommended Videos
That's not faith. Not in the religious sense at least. Faith, from my google search I just did, has two definitions. The second one is the religious kind, where the certainty comes from "spiritual apprehension" rather than proof. The first one is the kind EC is referring to which is "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something". I'd emphasise that first word there, "complete". We're never 100% sure in science, we have statistical measures in places so we can get to within 99.9999999% surety that something is correct but it's impossible to be 100% certain (because MATHS), therefore we cannot have COMPLETE trust or confidence in anything in science. Reasonable confidence, like 99.99% certainty, does us just fine. That's why we use the word theory a lot. It's not faith, it's just knowledge of the odds.
That isn't to say we don't have an element of faith in the lead up to science, that's how we generate a hypothesis, but a hypothesis on it's own can't be called science, and in fact has nothing really to do with science. I get huffy when people say "I don't believe in God, I believe in Science" because that's like saying "I believe 1 + 1 = 2". The problem is language really, there's no other appropriate word. It's why words like "theory" get so much unnecessary bloody debate.
Debate would be a lot simpler if we didn't have such a colourful bloody language with so much intrinsic emotion and history attributed to words. This is why I like science, because everything else seems like just arguing semantics.
That isn't to say we don't have an element of faith in the lead up to science, that's how we generate a hypothesis, but a hypothesis on it's own can't be called science, and in fact has nothing really to do with science. I get huffy when people say "I don't believe in God, I believe in Science" because that's like saying "I believe 1 + 1 = 2". The problem is language really, there's no other appropriate word. It's why words like "theory" get so much unnecessary bloody debate.
Debate would be a lot simpler if we didn't have such a colourful bloody language with so much intrinsic emotion and history attributed to words. This is why I like science, because everything else seems like just arguing semantics.
Actually the process you describe is basically the same that has created most of the present understanding of christianity.Darken12 said:
There is a reason why most "scientist" of the enlightenment was theologians. It was the only higher education that existed in Europe at the time and the people who became great theologians at the time was the people who could look at something (nature/scripture) and say if A is.. and B is... then there must be a C.
There is a huge difference between blind faith in something and well thought faith in something and you find that on both sides of the argument.
Most religious people who don't put their heads up their asses and go lalalalalala see science as another form of contact with the divine not something to work against. That is why they get annoyed whenever they are told that they are wrong because science says so. (I am well aware that that is not necessarily what science says but it is often used as such) Especially when the arguments that are used to use science like that is flawed.
NO.Jacco said:
That is not what the word Theory means in regards to the Theories of Evolution and Gravity.
I'm sorry, but I have no faith in doing my SDS-PAGE.
I know it works.
It worked before, not just once but millions of times.
It's results match the calculated and expected results all the time.
People who make the argument "if you don't do the tests yourself, you have to have faith he's right!"
NO!
The whole point of science is that before any of those tests are considered valid, is when someone replicated it.
AKA, the default position is "You messed up, or did something wrong!"
Only after the results can be replicated AND used as a model to predict a valid outcome, THEN it becomes a valid experiment.
And at that point I no longer needs faith, because it's not one person that did the experiment, sceptics did it as well, and had no other choice to agree.
I know it works.
It worked before, not just once but millions of times.
It's results match the calculated and expected results all the time.
People who make the argument "if you don't do the tests yourself, you have to have faith he's right!"
NO!
The whole point of science is that before any of those tests are considered valid, is when someone replicated it.
AKA, the default position is "You messed up, or did something wrong!"
Only after the results can be replicated AND used as a model to predict a valid outcome, THEN it becomes a valid experiment.
And at that point I no longer needs faith, because it's not one person that did the experiment, sceptics did it as well, and had no other choice to agree.
I like that. To anyone who cares, here's a quote that I like (and isn't as callous as you think):Da Orky Man said:
"Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child." - Frank Herbert, in Children of Dune
I've been saying this several times but I'll say it again, while most of science requires rigorous tests in order for a hypothesis to become an expected theory there are some fundamental ideas about reality that one MUST accept on faith not because we don't want to question it, but because it is impossible to engineer a test for. Solipsism is one of these where we must accept that the world outside of our mind is reality. (At this time at least) we cannot test if the outside world is a dream or not, we cannot know that our mind isn't being fed information to make us think we experience reality. All we can do is accept that what we see is real without evidence, or deny the outside world as real in which case nothing really matters does it?Ranorak said:
Not all of science has come about by faith, but there are some fundamental issues that we need to accept without evidence because they cannot be tested.
No, science is not dependant on or based on faith. Science is essentially the process of creating an ever more complex and accurate MODEL for how our universe works. All models are wrong, at least to a certain degree, so I doubt our models will ever be completely correct. That said however, a model's purpose is to provide a tool which can be used to measure and predict the response to a given change in a certain variable and for that purpose, science is quite good at finding relatively simple mathematical formulae which do a pretty good job of approximating and predicting what actually happens.
Basically all science is is a process that goes as follows:
1. Observe a phenomenon you do not understand.
2. Study the phenomenon and try to determine if it is consistent and repeating.
3. Attempt to determine reasons why the phenomenon is occuring.
4. Make some kind of mathematical model which will help predict the outcome if this phenomenon occurs.
5. Test the model to make sure it works.
6. Refine the model when new technologies arrive or higher accuracy is needed.
Remember Newton's Laws of motion that you probably learned in high school? Those laws don't hold true any longer on a quantum scale. An atom or electron do not obey Newton's Laws. Now you might say that that means that Newton's Laws are wrong and that we should toss them out now, right? Well, no because Newton's Laws provide a simple, elegant model that CAN accurately predict the movement of most objects, it just falls apart on a quantum scale, so we come up with new models to fit that part and let Newton's Laws remain.
No faith required. Move along.
Basically all science is is a process that goes as follows:
1. Observe a phenomenon you do not understand.
2. Study the phenomenon and try to determine if it is consistent and repeating.
3. Attempt to determine reasons why the phenomenon is occuring.
4. Make some kind of mathematical model which will help predict the outcome if this phenomenon occurs.
5. Test the model to make sure it works.
6. Refine the model when new technologies arrive or higher accuracy is needed.
Remember Newton's Laws of motion that you probably learned in high school? Those laws don't hold true any longer on a quantum scale. An atom or electron do not obey Newton's Laws. Now you might say that that means that Newton's Laws are wrong and that we should toss them out now, right? Well, no because Newton's Laws provide a simple, elegant model that CAN accurately predict the movement of most objects, it just falls apart on a quantum scale, so we come up with new models to fit that part and let Newton's Laws remain.
No faith required. Move along.
I'm a science groupie myself. I love the shit out of it. It's the best method to finding the truth (little t) since forever, and it's probably the reason I'm here right now instead of, say, my mother miscarrying seven times before she successfully reproduced and wound up with someone entirely different.
But, unfortunately, yes, science has its foundations in faith. It's an epistemological quirk that exists because we cannot prove with 100% certainty that we're not a brain in the jar or a computer simulation or a figment of someone's very good, very wild imagination. The upside is, it's a faith of the gaps. Science, reason, logic, philosophy and our own minds have done an excellent job of reducing the relevance of this fundamental uncertainty to the .1 after so many 9.9999999999999999 as mentioned in that deplorable video, and once you've accepted it, you can get right back to functioning in the 'real' world, with the full knowledge that you are genuinely interested in accepting reality as it is, not as you want it to be. So yes, reality might be an illusion, and you have to accept that it isn't in order to accept the notion that science itself exists or may provide useful results.
Beyond that, any hardcore solipsist, assuming there is such a thing, would have a hard time telling you what to do with this information even if we did meditate really hard and realize we were brains in jars. For all tents and porpoises, it appears irrelevant.
At the deepest reaches of instrumental physics, science itself doesn't even deal with deterministic causality. The core tenet of Quantum Electrodynamics is that, ultimately, the universe is probabilistic, not deterministic(cause and effect still apply too though). This, too, is something we probably don't have to worry about, because if you actually do the calculations, the likelihood that a grain of sand will jump out of a box of matches of its own accord is so low that it would take something like 6x10 to the ten times the current age of the universe. Phew!
By all accounts, Extra Credits still sucks. While technically correct, the last two episodes exploited that epistemological technicality for the sole purpose of appearing holistic and profound. It instead came off like a hipster doofus nodding his head in sage agreement with some hippie platitude. Solipsism isn't really that profound. It's merely a decent metric for gauging the veracity of other philosophies(ie, if it claims to overcome, or flat out ignores solipsism, you're probably safe to dismiss it). I say this because no one actually takes it seriously, not even those who use it to stroke their vanity, and within the scope of arguing, say, science v religion, it's about as relevant as Ralph Nader.
Someone quoted Tim Minchin's Storm earlier in the thread, but since they left out my favorite part, I'll leave you with it:
But, unfortunately, yes, science has its foundations in faith. It's an epistemological quirk that exists because we cannot prove with 100% certainty that we're not a brain in the jar or a computer simulation or a figment of someone's very good, very wild imagination. The upside is, it's a faith of the gaps. Science, reason, logic, philosophy and our own minds have done an excellent job of reducing the relevance of this fundamental uncertainty to the .1 after so many 9.9999999999999999 as mentioned in that deplorable video, and once you've accepted it, you can get right back to functioning in the 'real' world, with the full knowledge that you are genuinely interested in accepting reality as it is, not as you want it to be. So yes, reality might be an illusion, and you have to accept that it isn't in order to accept the notion that science itself exists or may provide useful results.
Beyond that, any hardcore solipsist, assuming there is such a thing, would have a hard time telling you what to do with this information even if we did meditate really hard and realize we were brains in jars. For all tents and porpoises, it appears irrelevant.
At the deepest reaches of instrumental physics, science itself doesn't even deal with deterministic causality. The core tenet of Quantum Electrodynamics is that, ultimately, the universe is probabilistic, not deterministic(cause and effect still apply too though). This, too, is something we probably don't have to worry about, because if you actually do the calculations, the likelihood that a grain of sand will jump out of a box of matches of its own accord is so low that it would take something like 6x10 to the ten times the current age of the universe. Phew!
By all accounts, Extra Credits still sucks. While technically correct, the last two episodes exploited that epistemological technicality for the sole purpose of appearing holistic and profound. It instead came off like a hipster doofus nodding his head in sage agreement with some hippie platitude. Solipsism isn't really that profound. It's merely a decent metric for gauging the veracity of other philosophies(ie, if it claims to overcome, or flat out ignores solipsism, you're probably safe to dismiss it). I say this because no one actually takes it seriously, not even those who use it to stroke their vanity, and within the scope of arguing, say, science v religion, it's about as relevant as Ralph Nader.
Someone quoted Tim Minchin's Storm earlier in the thread, but since they left out my favorite part, I'll leave you with it:
Solipsism is a philosophical thought experiment that really has no footing in science or any practical use to scientists. If its true that all of reality is an illusion or fake then it doesn't matter what the scientists are doing because they're all imaginary. Even still, this illusion of reality appears to have consistent laws and patterns that it follows which are testable. If it's not true and this reality is in fact real, then the scientists are still doing what they always do, making testable, predictive and repeatable models for reality.dvd_72 said:
Oh.. so that's why the Church publically shamed Galileo and forced him not to publish his work on Heliocentrism... they cared about truth SO MUCH that they couldn't allow him to rely on his blind faith to corrupt the masses... hey wait a second...Therarchos said:
That's why everyone demonizes Charles Darwin (who was a Theology major)...
The church only allows science to proceed unscathed if it doesn't attempt to usurp the churches established opinion on something...
But if science is based on observations, then one cannot do any science without taking it on faith that reality is... well real. If we cannot accept that on faith, then we cannot do science in any meaningful way. When you are dreaming at night, the rules for the dream vary between dreams. In some you can fly, in others you cannot. Sometimes the rules change within a dream! And you know what? From your point of view in the dream there is no test to show that the world in your dream is any more real than the waking world. It is, for all intents and purposes, annother reality, yet we all accept that what happens when we dream to be a dream (hence calling it a dream I guess). We need to accept reality to be real on faith in order to even begin to do any kind of meaningful science.Sight Unseen said:
As was talked about in the extra credits video even our basic geometry relies on certain statements that must be taken as true on faith. Many of these may be obvious, and others a little harder to see but without them much of our maths wouldn't work. Even parts of our maths have a basis in faith!
And how about some modern day examples? The Schroedinger equation comes to mind. It's an equation that can be used to extract any information about a quantum system you want, but there was no logic to its formulation other than "This seems to work in all the situations we've put it in and it accurately predicts various phenomena, but we have no way to derive it!".
Thinking about this topic for several days in an on-and-off manner, I've come to the conclusion that Extra Credits really failed to define what "Faith" actually is. As this undefined nature was amorphous, people instantly attached the concept to the religious type of faith that was discussed throughout the videos and thus the switch in the discussion from religious faith to the type of faith described in dictionaries didn't quite click with people. So yeah, EC failed to define a term strongly enough to disassociate two very different concepts that have been created.
Like I said before, science is essentially the process of creating models of our present reality and the only thing it requires is that the world we're studying be consistent and repeatable enough to create our models from (this is confirmable since experiments always have the same results). Models do not NEED to be theoretically derived. I'm in engineering, and MANY of the models that I end up using were actually derived empirically, with no theoretical basis, and they work absolutely fine (although they are generally only applicable for a certain range of conditions and require extensive testing to create) So Schroedinger's model does not need to be based on any theory as long as it can be experimentally shown to be valid for the conditions for which it is claimed to be relevant to.dvd_72 said:
About the dream thing, if I could spend long enough in a dream, and the laws of the dream world weren't constantly changing arbitrarily, I could use science to model out how my dream world worked (talk about a boring dream though). It doesn't matter if it's really *real* as long as the laws aren't constantly changing, but that is testable.
If anything philosophy is more important than science. And until we fully understand the nature of existence and the universe we can't truly know anything about the world..
"You have to take on faith that things which are demonstrably true are true"? Yeah, sure we could all be in the Matrix, or in the head of an autistic mental patient, or any number of other unfalsifiable pseudo-hypotheses. Thing is, with literally zero reason to think that's the case there is, well, no reason to think that's the case.dvd_72 said:
A lot of people make this epistemological mistake, that science finds out what is "true". For the most part though, the scientific process determines only what is false. Nothing in science is ever proven; by its logical underpinnings, nothing CAN be proven. Ideas can, however, be disproven, suhc as phlogeston or the Lamarckian idea evolution. In order for an idea to be scientific, there must be a potential way for that idea to be falsified. So the question of whether or not we're in the Matrix as a starting assumption is irrelevant to science because there's not any way we could ever determine whether or not we were. The assumption that science works under the conditions where science works is not a faith-based assumption, and that is the only base assumption that you need in order to accept scientific methodology as a whole.
I love that comic. And I'm sorry to be that guy, but science is also based upon written and oral transmission of past testimony. Scientific studies are based upon the research that has already been done, which is why we comb through journals for relevant articles.Scars Unseen said:Science isn't based on faith any more than religion is. Faith is simply belief without understanding. You can have faith in science, and you can have faith in religion, but science is based on observation and experimentation while religion is based on written and oral transmission of past testimony.
Laymen have faith(or do not) that scientists are conducting experiments properly and thoroughly before reporting their findings. Theists have faith that the testimony they take their wisdom from is based on true events and has been been transmitted accurately and without secular tampering. So no, science is not based on faith, but people put their faith in science everyday.
Additionally, scientists are placing their faith that the evidence of their senses is true, and that the evidence from their measurements is correct, and that the evidence given to them by others who were using rigorous methods is correct. These are very reasonable and basic assumptions, but in order to progress you need to assume at least some of these things. And if you are assuming something, you are taking it on faith that it is true.
I want to reemphasize that these are small and extremely reasonable assumptions[footnote]especially the "we can trust our senses" assumption. While it is impossible to completely prove 100%, it is a reasonable assumption because the world around us follows consistent rules and because it would be silly to NOT work under the assumption that what we see is real. As XKXD says, it WORKS, bitches.[/footnote], and that scientists do what they can to minimize the effects of those assumptions (double checking unusual data, repeating previous experiments, etc), but they are still making assumptions and still working on faith that those assumptions are true.