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The trouble with trusting complex science (pg. 9)
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| Fledz |
Faith in the possibility of an unknown higher being because there are simply things we cannot (yet?) understand, while trusting in modern science as long as the theories hold true is fine.
Faith in any old scripture or tale, most of which can often be disproven by the simplest of scientific minds is not acceptable.
Absolute belief in all things science with categorical denial of any possibility of change and/or a higher being is not acceptable.
While I'm happy for people to continue on in their deluded ways, it's when they start negatively impacting society and others around them that it no longer becomes acceptable.
Structured religion is to a degree something that humanity should have long outgrown. Faith in an abstract and truly unknown higher power is fine, but that's about it.
EDIT - Ok, so for some reason I started thinking about the absurd notion of declaring the earth is roughly 6000 years old (4004 BC or there abouts). I came across a page which then led to this other one, talking about mutations.
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/mutations.html
Really? Reaalllllyyy???!!!? I mean seriously, for crying out loud. I'd like the author to take even Introduction to Molecular Biology for one semester, then come back and tell me that "mutations are always a loss of information".
To make things worse, and I quote...."For example: If you scramble the letters in the word "Dinosaur", you can never spell words like "lion", "zebra" or "queen"." :rolleyes:
I really don't understand how humans can be such idiots in this day in age. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
I'll just link this old article again (another review of The Demon-Haunted World):
| quote: | Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge, although it is not clear to me what he made of the unimpeachable scientific credentials of our opponent [a creation scientist with a real PhD], except perhaps to see him as an example of the Devil quoting scripture. The struggle to bring scientific knowledge to the masses has been a preoccupation of Carl Sagan's ever since, and he has become the most widely known, widely read, and widely seen popularizer of science since the invention of the video tube.
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The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education.
This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.
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Carl Sagan, like his Canadian counterpart David Suzuki, has devoted extraordinary energy to bringing science to a mass public. In doing so, he is faced with a contradiction for which there is no clear resolution. On the one hand science is urged on us as a model of rational deduction from publicly verifiable facts, freed from the tyranny of unreasoning authority. On the other hand, given the immense extent, inherent complexity, and counterintuitive nature of scientific knowledge, it is impossible for anyone, including non-specialist scientists, to retrace the intellectual paths that lead to scientific conclusions about nature. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand. Anyone who has ever served as an expert witness in a judicial proceeding knows that the court may spend an inordinate time "qualifying" the expert, who, once qualified, gives testimony that is not meant to be a persuasive argument, but an assertion unchallengeable by anyone except another expert. And, indeed, what else are the courts to do? If the judge, attorneys, and jury could reason out the technical issues from fundamentals, there would be no need of experts. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fledz
I'd like the author to take even Introduction to Molecular Biology for one semester, then come back and tell me that "mutations are always a loss of information". |
I'm astounded by the fact that they did quote an actual crank with a PhD.
| quote: | Originally posted by Fledz
To make things worse, and I quote...."For example: If you scramble the letters in the word "Dinosaur", you can never spell words like "lion", "zebra" or "queen"." :rolleyes: |
:stongue: |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| There are a number of cranks out there with real PhDs from respected biology and biochem programs. Just shows you that being exposed to lots of evidence does not always compel belief. If people want badly enough to persist in denial, they will, PhD or no. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
There are a number of cranks out there with real PhDs from respected biology and biochem programs. Just shows you that being exposed to lots of evidence does not always compel belief. If people want badly enough to persist in denial, they will, PhD or no. |
True that, but I still didn't expect him to be an actual person. |
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| Chimney |
| quote: | Originally posted by Capitalizt
I think it's pretty much inevitable. I agree with Richard Dawkins that science is corrosive to religion. The more you learn about the natural world, the less plausible supernatural explanations become. Halcyon said something earlier..that God is becoming "smaller and smaller" as our gaps of knowledge are being filled, and this really is the case. It's impossible to cling to ancient supernatural/biblical explanations of the origin of the universe and our species once you understand how science so thoroughly refutes those ideas.
"Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural." - Robert G. Ingersoll |
There is no shortage of controversial questions and pretentious answers, however I've always tried to keep a neutral position on such things. My personal opinion is that many seek religion as a way to find themselves, having something to turn when having problems and not having someone or something to comfort them. Unfortunately, there is also a vast majority of people that bluntly deny facts and simply stare into dark ignorance living their lives, and even more dangerously, trying to make others conform their lives to their believes which do not suit a modern society.
Without a doubt, people want to believe there is more out there - more than just a 9-16.00 job, bills to pay and eventual vacations here and there, so I don't think most religious people seek to know how man is built by believing in God, as much as they want to comfort themselves with the idea that this beautiful thing called life has a better, meaning, one we can't understand. |
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| woscar |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
There are a number of cranks out there with real PhDs from respected biology and biochem programs. Just shows you that being exposed to lots of evidence does not always compel belief. If people want badly enough to persist in denial, they will, PhD or no. |
And then there's the cranks that only get university degrees in order to give their mind-numbingly stupid ideas a certain degree of credibility. Take for example this quack, Jonathan Wells. He is the author of the book "Icons of Evolution", which focuses on attacking 10 "icons" of evolutionary proof like the Miller-Urey experiment, peppered moths, Darwin's finches, etc, etc, etc. He has a Ph.D in Biology from the University of California at Berkeley. Yet, in his own words he only went to college to get that degree in order to "destroy Darwinism".
| quote: | | Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle. |
SOURCE
When he speaks of "Father" he is speaking about Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (commonly known as "Moonies"). |
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| Lira |
| But, you know what? I don't think that's bad within the scientific community: Theories need naysayers as much as they beget suporters. The problem is when the non-scientific community thinks that's enough to dismiss what everyone else is saying. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
Some more stuff to think about :
| quote: | ...in order to map a territory, you have to go out and look at the territory. It isn't possible to produce an accurate map of a city while sitting in your living room with your eyes closed, thinking pleasant thoughts about what you wish the city was like. You have to go out, walk through the city, and write lines on paper that correspond to what you see. It happens, in miniature, every time you look down at your shoes to see if your shoelaces are untied. Photons arrive from the Sun, bounce off your shoelaces, strike your retina, are transduced into neural firing frequences, and are reconstructed by your visual cortex into an activation pattern that is strongly correlated with the current shape of your shoelaces. To gain new information about the territory, you have to interact with the territory. There has to be some real, physical process whereby your brain state ends up correlated to the state of the environment. Reasoning processes aren't magic; you can give causal descriptions of how they work. Which all goes to say that, to find things out, you've got to go look.
Now what are we to think of a scientist who seems competent inside the laboratory, but who, outside the laboratory, believes in a spirit world? We ask why, and the scientist says something along the lines of: "Well, no one really knows, and I admit that I don't have any evidence - it's a religious belief, it can't be disproven one way or another by observation." I cannot but conclude that this person literally doesn't know why you have to look at things. They may have been taught a certain ritual of experimentation, but they don't understand the reason for it - that to map a territory, you have to look at it - that to gain information about the environment, you have to undergo a causal process whereby you interact with the environment and end up correlated to it. This applies just as much to a double-blind experimental design that gathers information about the efficacy of a new medical device, as it does to your eyes gathering information about your shoelaces.
Maybe our spiritual scientist says: "But it's not a matter for experiment. The spirits spoke to me in my heart." Well, if we really suppose that spirits are speaking in any fashion whatsoever, that is a causal interaction and it counts as an observation. Probability theory still applies. If you propose that some personal experience of "spirit voices" is evidence for actual spirits, you must propose that there is a favorable likelihood ratio for spirits causing "spirit voices", as compared to other explanations for "spirit voices", which is sufficient to overcome the prior improbability of a complex belief with many parts. Failing to realize that "the spirits spoke to me in my heart" is an instance of "causal interaction", is analogous to a physics student not realizing that a "medium with an index" means a material such as water.
It is easy to be fooled, perhaps, by the fact that people wearing lab coats use the phrase "causal interaction" and that people wearing gaudy jewelry use the phrase "spirits speaking". Discussants wearing different clothing, as we all know, demarcate independent spheres of existence - "separate magisteria", in Stephen J. Gould's immortal blunder of a phrase. Actually, "causal interaction" is just a fancy way of saying, "Something that makes something else happen", and probability theory doesn't care what clothes you wear. |
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gv/outside_the_laboratory/ |
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| Capitalizt |
| quote: | | Originally posted by Chimney Without a doubt, people want to believe there is more out there - more than just a 9-16.00 job, bills to pay and eventual vacations here and there, so I don't think most religious people seek to know how man is built by believing in God, as much as they want to comfort themselves with the idea that this beautiful thing called life has a better, meaning, one we can't understand. |
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| woscar |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
But, you know what? I don't think that's bad within the scientific community: Theories need naysayers as much as they beget suporters. The problem is when the non-scientific community thinks that's enough to dismiss what everyone else is saying. |
I take it you haven't read his book. :p It's all based on embarrassing (intentional?) misconceptions of evolutionary theory.
Interestingly enough, I have never read any serious scientist using Wells's embarrassing background and motives to dismiss what he is saying. Some might have their fun with it, but ultimately they are smart and serious enough to know that ad hominem attacks prove nothing and they resort to scientific facts, literature, experiments, etc.
Things like Wells's religious background and his twisted motives are not enough to prove that what he is saying is wrong but they do give you an indication of from what type of mind they are coming from and why you should be highly skeptical. And in this case, those suspicions are correct. He is a quack, saying things with the intention of misleading people who do not have the tools or the knowledge to discern. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by woscar
I take it you haven't read his book. :p It's all based on embarrassing (intentional?) misconceptions of evolutionary theory.
Interestingly enough, I have never read any serious scientist using Wells's embarrassing background and motives to dismiss what he is saying. Some might have their fun with it, but ultimately they are smart and serious enough to know that ad hominem attacks prove nothing and they resort to scientific facts, literature, experiments, etc.
Things like Wells's religious background and his twisted motives are not enough to prove that what he is saying is wrong but they do give you an indication of from what type of mind they are coming from and why you should be highly skeptical. And in this case, those suspicions are correct. He is a quack, saying things with the intention of misleading people who do not have the tools or the knowledge to discern. |
Indeed, I haven't. But I think it's important within the science community to have these debates and misconceptions fiercely debated because it show what the possibles misunderstandings could be and how to fix them.
Like I said before, hell breaks loose when journalists try to see what is going on and get it all wrong. |
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