4 ms·

"It hinges on a gut-level judgment about what sort of universe we inhabit." The thing is, I don't think a gut-level judgment is the best course of action here.

by jabelk 12y ago

"It hinges on a gut-level judgment about what sort of universe we inhabit." The thing is, I don't think a gut-level judgment is the best course of action here. Similarly, I don't make gut-level judgments about whether I believe in gravity, or whether I believe in evolution. In my mind, the nature of the universe falls squarely under "science."

ohsnap 12y ago
That was a confusing sentence by the author, but I think he was referring to the metaphysical quality of the universe - e.g. perceiving the universe as being made by a creator (or not)
waps 12y ago
TLDR: Science is inconsistent, and so is faith. "Gut-level judgements" are all we have, both in science and in faith. Can people please stop ignorantly claiming otherwise ? The laws of mathematics actually prohibit anything other than a "gut-level" judgement. Let's take one problem (but go ahead and take 5 books about "constructivism" out of the library and you'll get to 50 problems soon). Godel's theorem, because it's the most generic, but there's plenty of them. Assuming you believe in any science that uses natural numbers, rational ones, or real ones (ie. all of them), then there's 2 possibilities : - you're not convinced that there are no contradictions. In this case, what do you have that faith doesn't ? - you're convinced that there are no contradictions. In this case you can be sure : you're wrong. Either because you don't realize there are contradictions, or because you've got a wrong theory. So how exactly is science better than faith ? It's not. Here's how this argument evolved : 1) Faith does not follow reason ! It kind of does, or rather we can't find good examples of obvious inconsistencies. (the bible was written by people who had studied under Greek philosophers, so it really is quite consistent. It's not perfect, but compared to say, the quran or the vedas, it's bloody hard to find conclusive contradictions. Whereas the quran simply says that it has inconsistencies and you shouldn't care about that, for example, and points out a specific inconsistency in itself. But this was not a real argument at the time) 2) oh-oh the vatican claims they do follow reason. They have some good arguments on that too. But they don't follow reason entirely ! 3) oops ... science doesn't actually follow reason either. We don't actually have proofs of consistency, and worse : we don't even construct most arguments. Let's fix that. 4) (~100 years later) we give up. This is not possible. Let's be brutally dishonest and at least look for a proof that we could write a constructivist science and do that. (this is brutally dishonest because it would be a non-constructivist proof that constructivism could work without actually making it work) 5) (~10 years later) okay, that can't be done either. We can't have a science without pulling new concepts out of thin air without any real reason to assume they work other than that we haven't found any mistakes ! 6) (~20 years later) This idiot "Godel" comes on stage and claims if you have a proof that a scientific theory is consistent you can rewrite that into a proof that that theory is wrong ! Prepostrous ! Let's pelt him with tomatoes ! 7) (1 day later) "Say guys ... I've been looking through that proof of Mr. Godel and I can't seem to find a mistake" ... followed by 1 month of doing nothing but looking for errors in that proof. 8) (1 month later) Success ! Godel made a mistake. 9) (2 days later) Godel writes an article fixing the mistake 10) (~2-20 years later, depending on who you ask) Okay, we give up. Science is not consistent and can never be consistent. "We cannot pull ourselves out of the mud". Given this history, can we please drop the argument that science is consistent and faith is not ? (Christian faith, because it is the only one that claims and tries to be consistent, not saying you couldn't create others, but no-one did) Science is inconsistent, and so is faith. Can people stop claiming otherwise ?
- danbruc 12y ago
  I have to disagree, science is not inconsistent. Science, more precisely natural science, is in the business of building models of our world and if the model is any good it is consistent with our world. Some models are precise to 10 digits, some models only describe the behavior of a school of fish on average. If a theory is found to disagree with reality it will get modified or maybe get abandoned and this is no problem because natural science never claims to provide any truth but only a good model of our world that may have to change in the future. Religion is similar in the regard that it provides a model of our world but a very poor model under scientific standards like verifiability, predictability and falsifiability. While science constantly challenges its own results and even methods religion is far, far more in the eternal truth corner. Finally mathematics is a very different thing and comparing it with physics or religion may be misleading. Like religion but unlike natural science mathematics is in the eternal truth business but unlike religion and natural science it is not in the describing the world business. Mathematics is used to describe the world but does not so on its own. And things like Gödel's incompleteness theorems are not a weakness of mathematics but a strength - knowing in principal limits is something that seems completely out of reach for everything but mathematics.
  - waps 12y ago
    There is a mathematical definition of consistency that I was referring to. It basically means that you can prove that a model can't be used to create a contradiction. In maths, any model where you can't prove that is disqualified for most work. Problem is, the numbers we use don't actually satisfy that standard. There is at least a chance that it isn't possible to create a correct model at all using what we generally call "numbers". If someone were to stand up and "complete" Godel's work, so to speak, that would invalidate all of science (Godel proved it isn't possible to prove science correct, so completing his project would be to find an actual deep, unsolveable problem with numbers. A number of good candidates have crept up over the years, famously the axiom of choice debacle, and a lot of interesting paradoxes, like "does the collection that contains every collection that doesn't contain itself contain itself ?" (last 4 words - not a typo)) There's actually 3 different consistency standards for models (and number 4 is that it's not consistent at all): 1) consistent <- we can prove it ! 2) inconsistent <- we don't know, but we may find out at some point in the future 3) inconsistent <- we don't know, and we can prove we don't know, that we will never know 4) inconsistent <- we have an actual counterexample, and thus a proof that it's inconsistent Science falls in the third category. So does (Christian) religion [1]. There is no real difference in consistency between science and faith by this standard. Problem is that other standards have similar problems. Again a distinction should be made between different religions, as there's only one where I've ever seen any serious discussion on the side of the religion. a) verifiability : faith is not verifiable. A Christian would say that's part of the point. Of course, neither are most sciences. Certain aspects of mathematics are not verifiable (the other godel theorem), either not at all, not by any finite procedure, or not by any reasonable amount of effort. For physics there is actually only a relatively small portion that is directly verifiable, and once you go down the ladder ... verifiability becomes a distant memory by the time you get to things like history. Btw: a misconception you seem to have is that theories get modified because of inconsistencies. Well, I'm not saying it never happens, but in practice theories get modified because there's a need for it. Architecture, for example, works with pre-Newtonian physics (buildings architects calculate on stand on a disc suspended in space, with a constant gravity vector straight down, in a barely viscous liquid. Has been that way since before Newton was born, and there's no good reason to change it, so nobody did (in fact there's good reasons not to change it, complexity for one)). Yes this is the utilitarian argument, but it's true. It may not control all academic activity but it controls 99.99% or more. If anything, it's been getting worse. An illustration of that fact can be found in physics for example. Relativity was discovered because of the black body problem. You see, Newtonian physics predict that if you heat up any object, the universe should explode. Obviously it doesn't, and this was an eyesore. Now keep in mind that Einstein was a patent office clerk with a weird hobby, and this is no coincidence : there wasn't all that much attention going to that problem. Every theory has eyesores. Currently there are 2 huge established theories, and one that everybody believes in but no convincing predictions have been made using it. Here's the current eyesores : relativity theory only has gravity, doesn't have particles or any force (gravity's not actually a force in that theory), has a continuous infinite universe that is either flat or just ever so slightly bent (like a millimeter per lightyear or so). The standard model doesn't have gravity, yet things fall, it has a discontiuous universe that is bent twisted and shifting beyond recognition at small scales, it fails to predict large scale objects in any reasonable manner (e.g. large scale universe is obviously mostly flat ... why ? How does the shifting particle soup that is the standard model's playground become the flat expanse we call space where a photon can fly undisturbed for millions of lightyears ? This, to me, is not a small detail you can just gloss over), yet we can design things like cell phone radios and cpus using it. Then there's string theory ... string theory however is a theory with so many open ends that you can do pretty much anything what you want with it. It answers the question "hows does the universe work", by giving you a brainfuck compiler and get cracking on a simulation, stating that the answer is in there (and of course, it is, in the sense that you can probably write a correct simulation in it). Those are current eyesores. I sure hope some people at the patent office are about to fix them, because I doubt significant heyway will be made any time soon. b) predictability. I would argue that religion makes predictions, and I would argue that, averaged, they're pretty good. E.g. islam says camel piss is good for you [2]. This sounds ridiculous of course, but taking 2 facts into account it makes sense, somewhat. First urine is the one bodily liquid that is sterile. If you care about disease spreading, you can't eat or touch the same food as someone else, you can't drink the same water, you of course can't have sex or other things that exchange bodily fluids, certainly not with animals, but urine is an exception, it's fine, it's sterile, it's safe. If you don't have a water source you trust, camel piss may be preferable. Knowing that poisoning water supplies was standard Roman army practice, it may make sense if you're waging a war on them. Eventually of course, it'll kill you, but only after months of drinking it. But it's not a stupid, random piece of gibberish either. And religion certainly makes predictions about what will happen, most of which you'll find yourself in agreement with. A lot of sciences don't care about predictability. Maths would be one example. We study models, because of their implications, and because we like the idea of, shall we say, "classifying" logic. This is a fool's errand, but it's fun. "This does not predict a thing" is a perfectly valid criticism of all but one project I'm involved in, and that's because it's beside the point. Obviously predictive ability is one aspect of the utilitarian view of science, so it can't be ignored completely. But most physics theories that are being actually worked on (in other words : string theory and nothing else), do not have any demonstrated predictive ability that I am aware of. And how does e.g. history fit in with predictability at all ? I would argue that religion definitely scores higher on predictive ability than the humanities, somewhat lower than most exact sciences. c) falsifiability. Again most sciences aren't falsifiable. Mathematical models work with axioms, and falsifying correctly constructed models is impossible (with of course, the glaring exception of the natural numbers (and thus rational numbers, and real numbers, complex numbers and anything based on them), which we know may be falsifiable. This is considered very, very bad) But string theory for example isn't falsifiable. And again, how does that work for the humanities ? Any statistical work effectively isn't falsifiable. Take climate theory for example. It hangs together from approximated differential equations. The predictions made using them by the IPCC in 1990's ... well, they were wrong. I mean I'm not saying the earth isn't warming, but the IPCC's numbers from the 1990s are bullshit, but they correctly point out that that doesn't actually falsifies their models' claims (although, frankly, it does prove their error margins calculation is ridiculous). They only claim that to a best approximation, their model is what should happen to the variables they're monitoring over time. Medicine is the same. For most medicines we have a double blind study. Now you should think, really hard, about what the exact claim is that is made by those studies and how it's verified. You'll see the truck-sized hole in the thinking. d) ... The greater point here is that these are all standards of correctness, trustworthiness, "truth". They're all different, they all have their uses, and they are followed in various ways by various sciences. Within individual sciences, there tends to be a whole spectrum of theories that rank differently on all of these standards. Religion is no different. It simply has a place on the spectrum, just like any science does. Various components of religion very on where they fall on all these standards. But it is certainly not the case that sciences score higher than religion on all of these standards, it is simply the case that there is utilitarian need for both, and for criticism of both. Science has it's uses, and so does religion. Where things fall on standards of consistency, falsifiability, predictive ability, ... is simply a property of whatever fills that particular niche best. [1] https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/RammReconcile.HTM https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/RammReconcile.HTM [2] https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120421070459AAEj4y6 https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201204210704...

by jabelk 12y ago

ohsnap 12y ago

That was a confusing sentence by the author, but I think he was referring to the metaphysical quality of the universe - e.g. perceiving the universe as being made by a creator (or not)

waps 12y ago

TLDR: Science is inconsistent, and so is faith. "Gut-level judgements" are all we have, both in science and in faith. Can people please stop ignorantly claiming otherwise ? The laws of mathematics actually prohibit anything other than a "gut-level" judgement. Let's take one problem (but go ahead and take 5 books about "constructivism" out of the library and you'll get to 50 problems soon). Godel's theorem, because it's the most generic, but there's plenty of them. Assuming you believe in any science that uses natural numbers, rational ones, or real ones (ie. all of them), then there's 2 possibilities : - you're not convinced that there are no contradictions. In this case, what do you have that faith doesn't ? - you're convinced that there are no contradictions. In this case you can be sure : you're wrong. Either because you don't realize there are contradictions, or because you've got a wrong theory. So how exactly is science better than faith ? It's not. Here's how this argument evolved : 1) Faith does not follow reason ! It kind of does, or rather we can't find good examples of obvious inconsistencies. (the bible was written by people who had studied under Greek philosophers, so it really is quite consistent. It's not perfect, but compared to say, the quran or the vedas, it's bloody hard to find conclusive contradictions. Whereas the quran simply says that it has inconsistencies and you shouldn't care about that, for example, and points out a specific inconsistency in itself. But this was not a real argument at the time) 2) oh-oh the vatican claims they do follow reason. They have some good arguments on that too. But they don't follow reason entirely ! 3) oops ... science doesn't actually follow reason either. We don't actually have proofs of consistency, and worse : we don't even construct most arguments. Let's fix that. 4) (~100 years later) we give up. This is not possible. Let's be brutally dishonest and at least look for a proof that we could write a constructivist science and do that. (this is brutally dishonest because it would be a non-constructivist proof that constructivism could work without actually making it work) 5) (~10 years later) okay, that can't be done either. We can't have a science without pulling new concepts out of thin air without any real reason to assume they work other than that we haven't found any mistakes ! 6) (~20 years later) This idiot "Godel" comes on stage and claims if you have a proof that a scientific theory is consistent you can rewrite that into a proof that that theory is wrong ! Prepostrous ! Let's pelt him with tomatoes ! 7) (1 day later) "Say guys ... I've been looking through that proof of Mr. Godel and I can't seem to find a mistake" ... followed by 1 month of doing nothing but looking for errors in that proof. 8) (1 month later) Success ! Godel made a mistake. 9) (2 days later) Godel writes an article fixing the mistake 10) (~2-20 years later, depending on who you ask) Okay, we give up. Science is not consistent and can never be consistent. "We cannot pull ourselves out of the mud". Given this history, can we please drop the argument that science is consistent and faith is not ? (Christian faith, because it is the only one that claims and tries to be consistent, not saying you couldn't create others, but no-one did) Science is inconsistent, and so is faith. Can people stop claiming otherwise ?

danbruc 12y ago
I have to disagree, science is not inconsistent. Science, more precisely natural science, is in the business of building models of our world and if the model is any good it is consistent with our world. Some models are precise to 10 digits, some models only describe the behavior of a school of fish on average. If a theory is found to disagree with reality it will get modified or maybe get abandoned and this is no problem because natural science never claims to provide any truth but only a good model of our world that may have to change in the future. Religion is similar in the regard that it provides a model of our world but a very poor model under scientific standards like verifiability, predictability and falsifiability. While science constantly challenges its own results and even methods religion is far, far more in the eternal truth corner. Finally mathematics is a very different thing and comparing it with physics or religion may be misleading. Like religion but unlike natural science mathematics is in the eternal truth business but unlike religion and natural science it is not in the describing the world business. Mathematics is used to describe the world but does not so on its own. And things like Gödel's incompleteness theorems are not a weakness of mathematics but a strength - knowing in principal limits is something that seems completely out of reach for everything but mathematics.
- waps 12y ago
  There is a mathematical definition of consistency that I was referring to. It basically means that you can prove that a model can't be used to create a contradiction. In maths, any model where you can't prove that is disqualified for most work. Problem is, the numbers we use don't actually satisfy that standard. There is at least a chance that it isn't possible to create a correct model at all using what we generally call "numbers". If someone were to stand up and "complete" Godel's work, so to speak, that would invalidate all of science (Godel proved it isn't possible to prove science correct, so completing his project would be to find an actual deep, unsolveable problem with numbers. A number of good candidates have crept up over the years, famously the axiom of choice debacle, and a lot of interesting paradoxes, like "does the collection that contains every collection that doesn't contain itself contain itself ?" (last 4 words - not a typo)) There's actually 3 different consistency standards for models (and number 4 is that it's not consistent at all): 1) consistent <- we can prove it ! 2) inconsistent <- we don't know, but we may find out at some point in the future 3) inconsistent <- we don't know, and we can prove we don't know, that we will never know 4) inconsistent <- we have an actual counterexample, and thus a proof that it's inconsistent Science falls in the third category. So does (Christian) religion [1]. There is no real difference in consistency between science and faith by this standard. Problem is that other standards have similar problems. Again a distinction should be made between different religions, as there's only one where I've ever seen any serious discussion on the side of the religion. a) verifiability : faith is not verifiable. A Christian would say that's part of the point. Of course, neither are most sciences. Certain aspects of mathematics are not verifiable (the other godel theorem), either not at all, not by any finite procedure, or not by any reasonable amount of effort. For physics there is actually only a relatively small portion that is directly verifiable, and once you go down the ladder ... verifiability becomes a distant memory by the time you get to things like history. Btw: a misconception you seem to have is that theories get modified because of inconsistencies. Well, I'm not saying it never happens, but in practice theories get modified because there's a need for it. Architecture, for example, works with pre-Newtonian physics (buildings architects calculate on stand on a disc suspended in space, with a constant gravity vector straight down, in a barely viscous liquid. Has been that way since before Newton was born, and there's no good reason to change it, so nobody did (in fact there's good reasons not to change it, complexity for one)). Yes this is the utilitarian argument, but it's true. It may not control all academic activity but it controls 99.99% or more. If anything, it's been getting worse. An illustration of that fact can be found in physics for example. Relativity was discovered because of the black body problem. You see, Newtonian physics predict that if you heat up any object, the universe should explode. Obviously it doesn't, and this was an eyesore. Now keep in mind that Einstein was a patent office clerk with a weird hobby, and this is no coincidence : there wasn't all that much attention going to that problem. Every theory has eyesores. Currently there are 2 huge established theories, and one that everybody believes in but no convincing predictions have been made using it. Here's the current eyesores : relativity theory only has gravity, doesn't have particles or any force (gravity's not actually a force in that theory), has a continuous infinite universe that is either flat or just ever so slightly bent (like a millimeter per lightyear or so). The standard model doesn't have gravity, yet things fall, it has a discontiuous universe that is bent twisted and shifting beyond recognition at small scales, it fails to predict large scale objects in any reasonable manner (e.g. large scale universe is obviously mostly flat ... why ? How does the shifting particle soup that is the standard model's playground become the flat expanse we call space where a photon can fly undisturbed for millions of lightyears ? This, to me, is not a small detail you can just gloss over), yet we can design things like cell phone radios and cpus using it. Then there's string theory ... string theory however is a theory with so many open ends that you can do pretty much anything what you want with it. It answers the question "hows does the universe work", by giving you a brainfuck compiler and get cracking on a simulation, stating that the answer is in there (and of course, it is, in the sense that you can probably write a correct simulation in it). Those are current eyesores. I sure hope some people at the patent office are about to fix them, because I doubt significant heyway will be made any time soon. b) predictability. I would argue that religion makes predictions, and I would argue that, averaged, they're pretty good. E.g. islam says camel piss is good for you [2]. This sounds ridiculous of course, but taking 2 facts into account it makes sense, somewhat. First urine is the one bodily liquid that is sterile. If you care about disease spreading, you can't eat or touch the same food as someone else, you can't drink the same water, you of course can't have sex or other things that exchange bodily fluids, certainly not with animals, but urine is an exception, it's fine, it's sterile, it's safe. If you don't have a water source you trust, camel piss may be preferable. Knowing that poisoning water supplies was standard Roman army practice, it may make sense if you're waging a war on them. Eventually of course, it'll kill you, but only after months of drinking it. But it's not a stupid, random piece of gibberish either. And religion certainly makes predictions about what will happen, most of which you'll find yourself in agreement with. A lot of sciences don't care about predictability. Maths would be one example. We study models, because of their implications, and because we like the idea of, shall we say, "classifying" logic. This is a fool's errand, but it's fun. "This does not predict a thing" is a perfectly valid criticism of all but one project I'm involved in, and that's because it's beside the point. Obviously predictive ability is one aspect of the utilitarian view of science, so it can't be ignored completely. But most physics theories that are being actually worked on (in other words : string theory and nothing else), do not have any demonstrated predictive ability that I am aware of. And how does e.g. history fit in with predictability at all ? I would argue that religion definitely scores higher on predictive ability than the humanities, somewhat lower than most exact sciences. c) falsifiability. Again most sciences aren't falsifiable. Mathematical models work with axioms, and falsifying correctly constructed models is impossible (with of course, the glaring exception of the natural numbers (and thus rational numbers, and real numbers, complex numbers and anything based on them), which we know may be falsifiable. This is considered very, very bad) But string theory for example isn't falsifiable. And again, how does that work for the humanities ? Any statistical work effectively isn't falsifiable. Take climate theory for example. It hangs together from approximated differential equations. The predictions made using them by the IPCC in 1990's ... well, they were wrong. I mean I'm not saying the earth isn't warming, but the IPCC's numbers from the 1990s are bullshit, but they correctly point out that that doesn't actually falsifies their models' claims (although, frankly, it does prove their error margins calculation is ridiculous). They only claim that to a best approximation, their model is what should happen to the variables they're monitoring over time. Medicine is the same. For most medicines we have a double blind study. Now you should think, really hard, about what the exact claim is that is made by those studies and how it's verified. You'll see the truck-sized hole in the thinking. d) ... The greater point here is that these are all standards of correctness, trustworthiness, "truth". They're all different, they all have their uses, and they are followed in various ways by various sciences. Within individual sciences, there tends to be a whole spectrum of theories that rank differently on all of these standards. Religion is no different. It simply has a place on the spectrum, just like any science does. Various components of religion very on where they fall on all these standards. But it is certainly not the case that sciences score higher than religion on all of these standards, it is simply the case that there is utilitarian need for both, and for criticism of both. Science has it's uses, and so does religion. Where things fall on standards of consistency, falsifiability, predictive ability, ... is simply a property of whatever fills that particular niche best. [1] https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/RammReconcile.HTM https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/RammReconcile.HTM [2] https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120421070459AAEj4y6 https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201204210704...