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elfsUSA Today is running an article this morning entitled How to Honor Science and Religion, by Henry G. Brinton, and the basic idea of his article is a tired and old one: non-overlapping magesteria. Science answers the "how" question and religion answers the "why" question.
The problem with this idea, usually put forth by members on the religious side of the discussion, is that science answers one set of questions, the mechanics of the problem, while religion attempts to discern the "meaning behind existence," as if we could possibly know it. This idea is incoherent because it presumes there is absolutely no overlap. But there's a third questions both religion and science ask, and no one ever wants to look at that one too closely because it destroys the non-overlapping argument. That question is "did."
In science, a theory is a well-reasoned statement describing a collection of phenomena in such a way that it embraces all the known phenomena; we call such a theory robust. A theory that also suggests future lines of investigation, and when those investigations continue to affirm the theory, the theory is said to be "reliable." Newton's theory was robust, but not reliable; Einstein's theory, which replaced it, is robust and reliable. Darwin's theory of descent with modification by variation and natural selection has proven both robust and reliable, but his theory of vertical lineage has been tossed out in favor of a theory that embraces horizontal gene transfer and evironmental factors and a whole host of other purely naturalistic tricks evolution has crafted out of the chemistry and physics available.
A theory can find itself completely discarded by one well-described counter-example. It rarely happens that one is enough to discard a well-established theory, but it happens all the time at the level of individual experiments. A scientist crafts an experiment or field observation to demonstrate some principle he wishes to affirm. He collects mounds of data. And then one day someone just as bright-eyed looks at his data, comes up with an equally plausible explanation or, worse, finds a subset of data that shows that his explanation is even more plausible overall, and that theory is thrown out. The steady-state universe, plate techtonics, even medical hygiene, are historical examples of this at work. It doesn't happen overnight; Thomas Khun documented the idea of the "paradigm shift," and how it can sometimes take a generation for the previous body of knowledge to be revised in the face of evidence only the young are willing to examine closely.
At its bedrock, however, all science investigation requires that the universe itself be robust and reliable. Cosmologists usually use the terms "mundane" and "regular," but they mean the same thing: a mundane universe is one where the laws of physics as we understand them are the exact same everywhere and everywhen for everyone; a regular universe is one where those laws don't change, ever, for anyone, for any reason or no reason. The universe must be this way: otherwise, any observation is suspect, and can be challenged, and we have no reason to trust our senses, our observations, and our conclusions.
Intelligent Design is a threat to science not merely because it encouraged deception and despair in the face of hard problems; it is a threat to science because its adoption in one science, biology, would taint all of science with the suspicion that the world is truly contingent upon the whims of the tinkering designer, and at any moment our expectations of a robust and reliable universe could be betrayed. It is not just that we have no reason to believe that Darwinian evolution is true; we would have no reason to believe the Earth orbits the Sun or that airplanes aren't held in the sky by fairies.
Brinton's "religion" is probably the abstract, parallel-universe religion of high-end theology, where "God" is so far removed from daily life he may as well not exist, except as the guideposts to a better life of some kind. Most people seem to want an interventionist God, one that does stuff. They want a God that sends people wandering in the desert for 40 years, rains fire from the skies, and created an unwed teenage mother in Galilee. The problem is that a God that does stuff violates the regularity of the universe. When someone says, "did it?" science has to say no, and without reservation. Anything else is incoherent. There can be no counter-example accepted as fact, because one counter-example destroys all knowledge forver.
Scientists have already told states that adopt ID teaching that they're taking their convention dollars and going home. Louisiana has lost two contracts with science groups this year looking to book convention space in New Orleans. Sometimes I can't help but wonder if it isn't the mercy and humanity of scientists that keeps them all from giving up.
Someone (not me) ought to re-write an Atlas Shrugged but with the religious impulse as its source of evil. Screw John, Hank, and Dagny. A truly interesting book would feature Yochiru Nambu, Yves Chauvin, and Günter Blobel.
The problem with this idea, usually put forth by members on the religious side of the discussion, is that science answers one set of questions, the mechanics of the problem, while religion attempts to discern the "meaning behind existence," as if we could possibly know it. This idea is incoherent because it presumes there is absolutely no overlap. But there's a third questions both religion and science ask, and no one ever wants to look at that one too closely because it destroys the non-overlapping argument. That question is "did."
In science, a theory is a well-reasoned statement describing a collection of phenomena in such a way that it embraces all the known phenomena; we call such a theory robust. A theory that also suggests future lines of investigation, and when those investigations continue to affirm the theory, the theory is said to be "reliable." Newton's theory was robust, but not reliable; Einstein's theory, which replaced it, is robust and reliable. Darwin's theory of descent with modification by variation and natural selection has proven both robust and reliable, but his theory of vertical lineage has been tossed out in favor of a theory that embraces horizontal gene transfer and evironmental factors and a whole host of other purely naturalistic tricks evolution has crafted out of the chemistry and physics available.
A theory can find itself completely discarded by one well-described counter-example. It rarely happens that one is enough to discard a well-established theory, but it happens all the time at the level of individual experiments. A scientist crafts an experiment or field observation to demonstrate some principle he wishes to affirm. He collects mounds of data. And then one day someone just as bright-eyed looks at his data, comes up with an equally plausible explanation or, worse, finds a subset of data that shows that his explanation is even more plausible overall, and that theory is thrown out. The steady-state universe, plate techtonics, even medical hygiene, are historical examples of this at work. It doesn't happen overnight; Thomas Khun documented the idea of the "paradigm shift," and how it can sometimes take a generation for the previous body of knowledge to be revised in the face of evidence only the young are willing to examine closely.
At its bedrock, however, all science investigation requires that the universe itself be robust and reliable. Cosmologists usually use the terms "mundane" and "regular," but they mean the same thing: a mundane universe is one where the laws of physics as we understand them are the exact same everywhere and everywhen for everyone; a regular universe is one where those laws don't change, ever, for anyone, for any reason or no reason. The universe must be this way: otherwise, any observation is suspect, and can be challenged, and we have no reason to trust our senses, our observations, and our conclusions.
Intelligent Design is a threat to science not merely because it encouraged deception and despair in the face of hard problems; it is a threat to science because its adoption in one science, biology, would taint all of science with the suspicion that the world is truly contingent upon the whims of the tinkering designer, and at any moment our expectations of a robust and reliable universe could be betrayed. It is not just that we have no reason to believe that Darwinian evolution is true; we would have no reason to believe the Earth orbits the Sun or that airplanes aren't held in the sky by fairies.
Brinton's "religion" is probably the abstract, parallel-universe religion of high-end theology, where "God" is so far removed from daily life he may as well not exist, except as the guideposts to a better life of some kind. Most people seem to want an interventionist God, one that does stuff. They want a God that sends people wandering in the desert for 40 years, rains fire from the skies, and created an unwed teenage mother in Galilee. The problem is that a God that does stuff violates the regularity of the universe. When someone says, "did it?" science has to say no, and without reservation. Anything else is incoherent. There can be no counter-example accepted as fact, because one counter-example destroys all knowledge forver.
Scientists have already told states that adopt ID teaching that they're taking their convention dollars and going home. Louisiana has lost two contracts with science groups this year looking to book convention space in New Orleans. Sometimes I can't help but wonder if it isn't the mercy and humanity of scientists that keeps them all from giving up.
Someone (not me) ought to re-write an Atlas Shrugged but with the religious impulse as its source of evil. Screw John, Hank, and Dagny. A truly interesting book would feature Yochiru Nambu, Yves Chauvin, and Günter Blobel.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 08:44 pm (UTC)If you think of human knowledge (by which I mean scientific and other fact-based knowledge) as a curve on a graph approaching some line representing "we know everything", I see it as asymptotic. We can continue to learn, but we will never know "all". This is axiomatic for me.
I see G-d as the line we approach. "G-d" =[the set of all knowledge] while science is the set of knowledge we have mastered.
When the Torah was written, there was a much larger gap between knowledge and the asymptote. Some of what we've learned makes some of what was in there seem silly. Cook your pork and don't eat shellfish during the red tides. Duh.
But some of what is in there seems to me to be useful concepts for interacting with the world in the areas we have NOT yet closed that gap. For example, I science is just beginning to explore how observation affects reality. It's rather famous in Physics, but we don't really yet have any idea what this might mean for daily consciousness affecting outcomes. Who is to say 'praying' doesn't turn out to do something entirely explainable, when our knowledge encompasses more of that gap -- specifically the parts having to do with consciousness on a broader scale than observing the experiment.
It makes sense to me that way. G-d is the asymptote of perfect knowledge, and religion is an attempt to infer rules to navigate the gap until science can help us actually map it out.
But, axiomatically, I believe we'll never CLOSE the gap, so science can never make G-d obsolete.
(BTW, I obscure the name specifically to remind myself that it represents something inherently outside my ability to comprehend.)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 10:42 pm (UTC)While you may see "g-d" as a label for "the totality of reality", most people see Deities as being anthropomorphic super-beings a la Zeus or Odin or Yahweh... super-beings who can create a universe, yet who also have an extreme interest in our sexual habits, our choice of days off from work, etc.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 09:07 pm (UTC)As a scientist, I accept that my conclusions are only as good as the instruments I am using. That's why one can't scientifically disprove the existence of ghosts, to use an extreme example: just because we can't craft an instrument to measure something isn't ipso facto proof that something doesn't exist, merely that we don't have the instrumentation to be able to measure it. Measurement also tends to assume that the thing we're measuring isn't actively messing with the measurements, which works fine for inanimates, somewhat less so for measuring sentients (one of the reasons I consider social science actually more interesting, but that's another topic). So, science has its limitations, as well, and I don't think answering "absolutely NO!" when the answer should be "not as far as we can tell" will help science's case any: matching overreach with overreach isn't a good response, either.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 10:36 pm (UTC)IMO, it doesn't make any sense to say "our instruments can't measure ghosts" until and unless we can actually substantiate that the word "ghost" corresponds to a phenomena which actually exists, and that said phenomena has characteristics such that we can say "we can't measure it" with some sort of evidential support to back that up.
Science's limitations are (a) the self-imposed limitation known as "methodological naturalism", and (b) the limitation that the phenomena we wish to model must be algorithmically compressible such that we can compose a description of the phenomena which is simpler than the phenomena itself. We have yet to run into this limitation.
Within these limitations, science continues to give us better and better models of aspects of reality. Some Theists have tried to claim that their Deity lurks within whichever areas of reality we have yet to model. Those areas, those "gaps", continue to shrink. Indeed, I'd say the only gap left is "What happened before the end of the Planck epoch?" Some would point to abiogenesis as well, but I'd say we know enough about how that could have happened such that, while an area of serious questions, it no longer qualifies as an actual gap.
Historically, reliance on said "gaps" has been a losing proposition.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 01:46 am (UTC)But there have been more than a few occasions where a "consensus" has formed around ideas to the point where further examination was deemed pointless by the larger community, only to discover later that the consensus was wrong. One can take comfort that eventually the consensus was overturned by further inquiry...or take pause that the consensus was reached in the first place, and that indeed many things we take as scientific "truth" now will probably be laughed at as barbaric stupidity a century or so from now, much as we view the flat-earth perspective now. I'd certainly hope so, even if there isn't a way to know now which are the points that we're wrong about, since the alternative is a stasis which doesn't serve humanity well.
IMO, it doesn't make any sense to say "our instruments can't measure ghosts" until and unless we can actually substantiate that the word "ghost" corresponds to a phenomena which actually exists, and that said phenomena has characteristics such that we can say "we can't measure it" with some sort of evidential support to back that up.
My point being is that we're limited by our instrumentation, and just because we can't quantify something with the tools we have doesn't mean it therefore doesn't exist. The evidential support may be there to be found, but we may not yet be at a level of technology, sensory perception, etc. to be able to perceive or measure it at this time. To take another example, I think we're still in the formative stages of understanding how the human brain-mind interaction really works, even with all the progress that's been make in the last half-century on that front. That's one area, psychotropic drugs, where I expect our current state of affairs will be considered hopelessly archaic even within most of our lifetimes.
Indeed, I'd say the only gap left is "What happened before the end of the Planck epoch?"
But the "first causes" issue is a big one. As I understand it, it is the problem of energy and matter appearing where none existed before, a violation of e=mc^2. Unfortunately, exactly what "before" consisted of may be unknowable, although I expect we'll get a much better understanding as our ability to view deep space improves.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 07:22 am (UTC)The point is that science doesn't stand still. Every conclusion is taken as being tentative, and subject to revision pending new information, or a re-examination of old information.
Old conclusions are sometimes replaced by new ones... but it doesn't follow that old conclusions can be accurately referred to as "barbaric stupidity." Newtonian mechanics, for instance, is neither barbaric nor stupid just because it turns out to be a limited case of a greater general theory. Also, new theories still have to be coherent with old data.
My point being is that we're limited by our instrumentation, and just because we can't quantify something with the tools we have doesn't mean it therefore doesn't exist.
Likewise, just because we can imagine a thing, or someone asserts that they saw a thing, it does not follow that it actually exists. In other words, "That which I cannot detect" and "That which does not exist" look exactly the same... until and unless you can, in fact, detect it.
But the "first causes" issue is a big one. As I understand it, it is the problem of energy and matter appearing where none existed before, a violation of e=mc^2. Unfortunately, exactly what "before" consisted of may be unknowable, although I expect we'll get a much better understanding as our ability to view deep space improves.
It could be that the entire universe is the result of a quantum fluctuation, and that the entire energy content (including gravitational - which counts as being negative) is exactly zero.
Our understanding of physics does not give us a coherent understanding of how the universe worked before the end of the Planck Epoch... that's one of the driving forces behind string theory, the resolution of the different answers we get from quantum mechanics and general relativity under certain extreme conditions - like the beginning of the universe.
How did the universe begin? The simple answer is "We don't know... yet."
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 03:21 am (UTC)I have found that far, far, far too many people do not want to know about physics, or chemistry, or biology, or geology. They want an Official Pronouncement from the Source of Truth that supports their own particular belief. Because the models from the natural sciences have spawned such useful and beneficial technologies, people see it as that Source of Truth. It's certainly produced the goods more than any of the men with personality disorders waving the mistranslation of some 1600+ year old book.
But, in the end, people want validation, not knowledge. If science doesn't provide that validation and the megalomaniac misinterpreting the mistranslated Greek does, then people will gravitate toward the latter.
When I was a grad student, back before the dawning of Eternal September on USENet, I'd browse the physics-related newsgroups. I had to unsubscribe to all of them. 30% of the posts were basically attempting to have someone else do their homework. Ignoring those, 40%-60% of the rest of the posts were crackpots looking for validation of their sciffiesque beliefs and the patient, exasperated responses from the actual physicists, trying to explain the actual models and the data they're based on.
Things have only grown worse since then. The level of technilliteracy has risen to staggering heights. I turned to my Sweetie,
Some days, I really think that those of us with scientific knowledge and training should, "take our bat & ball & go home," should just give up on using our scientific knowledge, and let the rest of humanity go back to wallowing in its own shit.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 07:48 am (UTC)That said, I also recognize that while I'm more intelligent most people I know, most of my *atheist* friends, even the ignorant ones, continue to call me an idiot, a moron, stupid and someone uh "wallowing in [my] own shit". Thankfully, I have more patience for their dull-wittedness than they do for mine.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 03:26 pm (UTC)That's not an insult, mind you, or at least not one that I'm not also leveling at everybody else on the planet, including myself -- I think pretty much everybody applies double standards to some aspect of their worldview.
Anonymous Blog Reader #127
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 10:29 pm (UTC)2. Your response is riddled with assumptions about the nature of my experiences and belief. Here's a hint: if my experience and understanding of the divine is something unique to me, that I have no interest in commending to others, then perhaps it's not the least bit important to me if they find my evidence compelling or convincing?
You may feel quite strongly that you have discovered, through whatever methods you have, the finest yellow mustard that exists. I absolutely abhor mustard; therefore, I don't really give a fuck about your methodology or experience of mustard. Mustard is not for me, and that fact remains whether you analyzed mustard at the molecular level, or simply tasted every mustard you could find. Is there any point in discussing your methodology, if I don't care about the result? No matter how wifty or scientifically rigorous your research and results are, they have no value to me.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-18 02:48 am (UTC)So long as people are talking about purely subjective phenomena there's no reason to argue.
However, many a Theist out there is making truth claims as to the nature of reality - the age of the Earth, the origin of life on this planet, the evolution of life, etc. Those truth claims are not supported by the evidence, or are even contradicted by evidence. Further, they seek to supplant science with non-science in our science classrooms. This is where the line is crossed... this is where I stand in opposition to some Theists.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-18 09:23 am (UTC):-)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-18 09:28 am (UTC)PPS: And for the rest of yall, I'm not talking about data points proving the existence of the divine, yah dumb bunnies. Read the thread. For that matter, go read some Aquinas and then we'll talk.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 01:19 pm (UTC)Unless Religion is actually about the fight for and exertion of Power, in which case Religion is a fraud.
Just saying. :)