Is science a belief?

[tolman]

On a side note, that arch materialist Richard Dawkins has now admitted that a strong case can be made for a deistic god.

It's always possible to make a *case* for a deistic god, since it's easy to define a deistic god in a way that's not possible to disprove.

"Deity created universe in some particular state a while ago, things have changed, and now here we are!"

[zenthinker]

a) People who want to believe something that science would contradict, or at least fail to support.

b) People who have a chip on their shoulder about not being much good at science themselves.

c) People who assume being able to attach the label of belief' to 'science' somehow makes science equivalent to any other belief, when it obviously does no such thing.

d) People who have read more philosophy than their critical faculties can reasonably cope with, and who think that pointing out that science isn't about Ultimate, Absolute Truth somehow gives them justification to feel superior, despite only being an N'th rate armchair philosopher.

Or some combination of the above.

Insult is the last refuge of the scoundrel tolman. Why not refute my points rather than resorting to insult.

By the way you still haven't grasped what I'm getting at here. Maybe you don't want to because despite what you "logicians" say you are scientific absolutists. You will not face up to the problem of limited sense perceptions. I was not talking about an alternative to the wave/particle model that you could conceive of but one that you couldn't. ie. It may be beyond human perception.

[tolman]

By the way you still haven't grasped what I'm getting at here. Maybe you don't want to because despite what you "logicians" say you are scientific absolutists.

So, you're happy to effectively call people liars if they honestly say that don't care about Ultimate Absolute Truth, but you jump on your high horse when someone lists *possible* common motives for some people wanting to do what you want to do - define science as a belief.
That seems to be somewhere beyond hypocritical.

Unless something struck close to home, and you're using righteous indignation as a cover, you seemingly don't care or understand that the motivations I listed all really exist in practice - people really do attack science for all those reasons, often in combination. If your motivation isn't in the list, feel free to describe what drives you to waste your time trying to tell people science isn't what they already thought it wasn't, or trying to tell them that they don't actually think the way they say they think.

You will not face up to the problem of limited sense perceptions. I was not talking about an alternative to the wave/particle model that you could conceive of but one that you couldn't. ie. It may be beyond human perception.

You obviously have a desire to think that limited human senses are a huge problem for science, and that people with a different opinion are 'failing to face up to the problem' when in reality, they just don't see that there is such a problem.

Ultimately, if something is beyond the possibility of detection by human senses, or by human senses augmented by any conceivable machine extension, then it is by definition beyond the possibility of experiment, or of influence on the conceivably observable universe, and therefore apparently irrelevant for practical purposes.

It's also likely to be unknowable to anyone who isn't practicing science, and therefore its unknowability isn't a meaningful black mark against science, except for those with a peculiar idea of what science is.

[zenthinker]

.Ultimately, if something is beyond the possibility of detection by human senses, or by human senses augmented by any conceivable machine extension, then it is by definition beyond the possibility of experiment, .

Precisely tolman, therefore science can make no claim to truth. Science works within the limits imposed by human perception and is thus limited in nature in the same way the senses are limited in nature. It is a narrow subset of the universe, one that Bertrand Russell described as merely "the manipulation of matter".

or of influence on the conceivably observable universe, and therefore apparently irrelevant for practical purposes

Not at all. Just because something cannot be perceived does not mean it has no influence. If the underlying nature of the universe is beyond human conception, does that mean it has no influence on our world?

[tolman]

Precisely tolman, therefore science can make no claim to truth.

You seem to be stuck with the same dumb argument, based on a misunderstanding of what science is, allied to a seeming fixation that people who actually understand science must share your misconceptions about it, and your devotion to Unattainable Absolute Ultimate Truth, even when they state quite clearly that they do not.

Science works within the limits imposed by human perception and is thus limited in nature in the same way the senses are limited in nature.

Humans can extend their perception in both timescales and lengthscales to vast and tiny extremes, and build machines to sense all kinds of things which human senses are quite incapable of perceiving. Humans are also capable of conceiving of things which lie far outside their capacity to directly percieve (various invisible radiations, electric/magnetic fields, etc), so at best, you seem to be using a ridiculously poor analogy.
However, the fact you keep using it does rather suggest that it's the best one you've got, and/or that you don't even understand what you're saying well enough yourself to come up with anything better.

It is a narrow subset of the universe, one that Bertrand Russell described as merely "the manipulation of matter".

I'd take the mere manipulation of matter over the cod philosopher's approach of misusing language (what we might call "merely masturbating over a dictionary") anyday.

Not at all. Just because something cannot be perceived does not mean it has no influence. If the underlying nature of the universe is beyond human conception, does that mean it has no influence on our world?

If the underlying nature of the physical universe has no discernable effect on the physical universe that can be measured by any conceivable means, or observed to make anything behave differently than if that underlying nature were different, how is that underlying nature relevant? How can it even be said to exist?
For an underlying nature to become relevant, it must actually affect something that someone can directly or indirectly observe.

If/when we observe something in the physical universe that science can't find any way of explaining, somehow I doubt the call will go out "For God's sake, bring us a philosopher!"

[Tim the Mage]

Try a little nonsense - I find it helps:

March Hare: …Then you should say what you mean.
Alice: I do; at least - at least I mean what I say -- that's the same thing, you know.
Hatter: Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might just as well say that, 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see'!
March Hare: You might just as well say, that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!
The Dormouse: You might just as well say, that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!

[Pebble]

Science is indeed belief. It is the belief that logic is infallible and that everything can be deduced via that which comes to us through our senses. Having read many of the replies to my previous posts it is clear that very few of you understand the implications about what I was saying about the sense perceptions.

There is no requirement in science for logic to be infallible, merely that one is committed to continually challenging - empirically that which one holds to be proven.

beings are only capable of proposing similarities to what they already know, and what they already know comes to them through the senses. It is impossible for a human being to conceive of anything that they have not experienced or for such a thing to be explained to them. You can not describe the colour blue because it is pure experience and neither could anybody who had not seen the colour blue understand what it was without seeing it.

So prior to Archemides the cork screw was known by similarity to be the most efficient pump, prior to Newton gravity was known to exist, prior to Einstein relativity was known about etc, etc.

is no coincidence that the earliest theory of what constituted matter was that of the atom. This is just the most straightforward human extrapolation of a human experience. ie. matter is made up of smaller bits of matter called atoms. ie. it is conceivable. As the theory of matter progressed it became more complex and we now have the wave/particle duality model. But note that the wave idea is also something that is conceivable to human beings because we have experienced the wave concept through looking at the sea for instance. So there is nothing proposed here that is outside of human experience. ie. it is conceivable.

The fact that atomic structure was continually (and still is) questioned as the proposed models failed (fail) to explain all observations, doesn't indicate to you that your argument is flawed?

consider the following - what if the real nature of matter is neither particle or wave. We now have a huge problem. The human being cannot conceive of anything except in terms of something familiar. Therefore if the real nature of matter is outside of that which we are capable of conceiving then human beings can never understand it. In other words our perceptions limit our ability to conceive. You can only perceive and suggest similarities to that which you already know and therefore your abilities are limited. You are within a kind of prison or cage of perception.

Nope! what you have observed is one of the ongoing conundrums of science, that is why scientists continue to explore why nature of the atom. The LHC would never have been commissioned if this were not the case.

is why science has no claim to truth, and is really a reflection of human perception which is severely limited in nature. Bertrand Russells statement that science is nothing but the manipulation of matter is entirely correct. Not only is it just the manipulation of matter, it can never go beyond that which is conceivable by human beings.

Again - truth! what is that, observable reproducible/predictable events - now that is science

is why certain philosophers say that ultimately the universe is unknowable. This doesn't mean that science isn't useful, it is. But it has no claim on truth in any shape or form whatsoever. It is I'm afraid a kind of belief albeit a "logical" belief.

But what has philosophy ever achieved?


In essence, you are taking the position that what we now know as a consequence of scientific method is known, and therefore is within the remit of human logic/senses, but this clearly was not so before science showed it to be so. How would use of human senses have led us directly to knowing the distance between the earth and the Sun? or the nature of prions? the mathematical concept of 0, the nature and implications of infinity. Your worry about colour is superfluous - just look at any television screen and you will see that the nature of 'blue' is reproducibly understood.

[Mongrel]

As far as I can see, the people desperate to equate science with belief are generally (let me know if I've missed any):

a) People who want to believe something that science would contradict, or at least fail to support.

b) People who have a chip on their shoulder about not being much good at science themselves.

c) People who assume being able to attach the label of belief' to 'science' somehow makes science equivalent to any other belief, when it obviously does no such thing.

d) People who have read more philosophy than their critical faculties can reasonably cope with, and who think that pointing out that science isn't about Ultimate, Absolute Truth somehow gives them justification to feel superior, despite only being an N'th rate armchair philosopher.

Or some combination of the above.

I think you missed "People who have a deep, abiding need to believe can't comprehend that other people don't - therefore science is their belief"

[Croydon Bob]

Just because something cannot be perceived does not mean it has no influence.

Is this all a joke or are you really so lacking in understanding of what you are trying to discuss?

If it has an influence then it CAN be perceived.

Just because you don't understand doesn't mean that nobody understands.

[Tim the Mage]

[quote=Croydon Bob;47630]
If it has an influence then it CAN be perceived.
quote]

...but that don't make it real!

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!" Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

[moltenentity]

Science is a belief system, because you need to have faith in science to believe it. After all we don't all do the experiments ourselves so we are just trusting the word of a scientist most of the time. Just as religious people put faith in the words of their holy book. As we know science can get it very wrong and it is constantly being updated all the time so it is best not to take it as the gospel. Science is just our way of understanding the reality we live in, but in the future no doubt we will have a new way of understanding our reality.

[Admin]

http://www.ukskeptics.com/article.ph...r_religion.php

[Admin]

http://www.ukskeptics.com/article.ph...r_religion.php

Hey, Jackson, you might want to revisit some of the statements in that article.

[tolman]

Science is a belief system, because ...

Only by defining 'belief' so broadly that it covers basically any human activity based on experience of or expectations about the operations of reality, which effectively stretches the word 'belief' so far that it becomes effectively meaningless, and certainly becomes meaningless in the context of the phrase 'belief system'

There's an element of trust involved, as there is in any other human activity that involves more than one person.

A thought system that generally limits quite successfully how far someone can just make complete bollocks up seems to compare remarkably favourably with the most obvious examples of what people might consider 'belief systems'.

[Tony Williams]

Science is a belief system, because you need to have faith in science to believe it. After all we don't all do the experiments ourselves so we are just trusting the word of a scientist most of the time. Just as religious people put faith in the words of their holy book.

Can't you perceive the difference between believing something which emerges from an evidence-based rational analysis as opposed to what very primitive people once imagined about the world?

I do not need faith to believe in science because there is an overwhelming body of evidence that it works. If it weren't for science, we would still be living in caves and throwing rocks at wild animals to stay alive, rather than communicating over the internet.

As we know science can get it very wrong and it is constantly being updated all the time so it is best not to take it as the gospel. Science is just our way of understanding the reality we live in, but in the future no doubt we will have a new way of understanding our reality.

No - scientists can get it very wrong, because they are only human and their knowledge is inevitably incomplete. But science is a process rather than a body of knowledge, and the fact that our knowledge based on this process changes from time to time as new evidence emerges is a clear indication that it works. Unlike religious faith, which remains fixed despite any and all evidence against it.