Yes science is a belief but of a particular kind. Science is based upon the idea that logic is infallible and that all that can be known can be deduced through that which comes to us through our senses. Since the senses are limited in nature and logic only applies within a very narrow framework, this is an assumption of enormous proportions. Consider the following argument from the philosopher Bertrand Russell:
"Experience has shown that it is dangerous to start from general principles and proceed deductively, both because the principles may be untrue and because the reasoning based upon them may be fallacious. Science starts, not from large assumptions, but from particular facts discovered by observation or experiment. From a number of such facts a general rule is arrived at, of which, if it is true, the facts in question are instances… Science thus encourages abandonment of the search for absolute truth, which belongs to any theory that can be successfully employed in inventions or in predicting the future. "Technical" truth is a matter of degree: a theory from which more successful inventions and predictions spring is truer than one which gives rise to fewer. "Knowledge" ceases to be a mental mirror of the universe, and becomes merely a practical tool in the manipulation of matter."
Russell shows here that science can lay no claim whatever upon absolute truth because it is limited in nature and is really just a system of manipulation of matter. If you want to understand just how limited the intellect is, try describing a colour ? You can't do it because it is outside of the intellects grasp and indeed all experience is like this. The idea that you can model the universe on impressions that come to you through the senses is deluded. The intellect gives the impression that it is explaining things but in reality it cannot grasp anything that doesn't have a label. The word "blue" is a label that keeps you away from the understanding that the experience of the colour blue is beyond intellectual grasping. The whole universe is really like this and the intellect is a mirage, nothing more than a tower of "logic". Consider the following quote:
"By the nature of our processes of sense-perception, our direct perception of the world "outside our skins" (so to speak) does not show us that world "outside our skins," but, rather, the impact of that unperceived real world upon the biology of our mental-sensory processes. In other words, the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave"
Human understanding is limited by biology and our make-up and therefore science can never claim that it explains anything. At best it can claim a narrow understanding of particular perceived phenomena. The real cause of that phenomena may be entirely beyond intellectual grasp. Science is the assumption that logic and the intellect are infallible and is therefore belief.
Therefore ... ?
Fundamentally, despite the existence of 'pure' areas, defended by their practitioners as such areas tend to be, science is a significantly practical enterprise based on the assumptions that a physical universe exists and exhibits a useful degree of consistency, and that people are generally capable of apprehending what happens in the universe with a reasonable degree of accuracy and repeatability, both via the [obviously] constrained natural senses, and by using senses augmented by instrumentation.Originally Posted by zenthinker
However, those same assumptions about reality are generally acknowledged, implicitly if not explicitly, by pretty much every person considered to be sane, whether scientists or not.
Even someone who might honestly believe in innumerable spirits constantly micromanaging reality and playing with everyone's senses must still generally act as if reality were somehow still largely consistent, unless they are to rely on everyone else feeding and cleaning them.
Some people who take philosophy far too seriously, and/or who consider themselves more profound than others might go on about how we can't really *know* anything, but they don't seem to understand how little everyone else cares.
'Good enough' is actually good enough for most people, even those who might pretend otherwise.
It is of course possible that microscopes are merely a figment of our imagination, or that they don't actually do what everyone thinks they do, but that seems to be one of the vanishingly small possibilities that people who actually have a life don't seem likely to worry much about.
Without needing any input whatsoever from philosophers, it really should be clear to anyone with an age in double figures that not only is science not infallible, but neither does it pretend to be infallible.
Also, science doesn't pretend to be capable of fully explaining everything, especially not the subjective things like "What a colour feels like to an individual". However, since nothing else can possibly explain that either, it's hardly a meaningful criticism of science to say it isn't all-knowing.
That said, there is a great amount of scientific knowledge that is about as close to certain as anyone needs to get.
Along with its close sister-subject, engineering, science is something that countless millions of people repeatedly bet their life on on a daily basis, with an astonishingly high success rate.
The fundamental problem with this argument is that it omits consideration of technology. We can accurately describe colour in terms of the wavelenght of the light emitted or reflected, and then the intensity in terms of the number of photons. This can be done repeatedly giving the same results every time and under every available circumstance. If this were not possible then we would not have television etc.
As to the second paragraph 1200 years after Occam this argument wears a little thin.
The real question for you then is if Hill's criteria for cause and effect can be demonstrated again and again under varying circumstances with independent researchers, validators and using diffiring technology - why should we not accept the relationship as proven. Further if this cannot be regarded as proof, what on earth can any form of metaphysical enquiry possibly add?
I haven't read all 94 replies so apologies if I'm repeating what has already been said.
I view science as a procedure rather than a belief, a process by which evidence is gathered, significance and chance calculated and conclusions drawn. As it's a process I don't think it can know anything, however it has led to us knowing lots of stuff!
I need a degree of trust as I'm not in the position to replicate every study I might be interested in but science as a process doesn't require trust, replication and debate are built into it's structure (these days!).
zenthinker said:
I believe this is from Russell's " Religion and Science" ( 1935).Consider the following argument from the philosopher Bertrand Russell:
"Experience has shown that it is dangerous to start from general principles and proceed deductively, both because the principles may be untrue and because the reasoning based upon them may be fallacious. Science starts, not from large assumptions, but from particular facts discovered by observation or experiment. From a number of such facts a general rule is arrived at, of which, if it is true, the facts in question are instances… Science thus encourages abandonment of the search for absolute truth, which belongs to any theory that can be successfully employed in inventions or in predicting the future. "Technical" truth is a matter of degree: a theory from which more successful inventions and predictions spring is truer than one which gives rise to fewer. "Knowledge" ceases to be a mental mirror of the universe, and becomes merely a practical tool in the manipulation of matter."
On this occasion, Bertie's argument wasn't very good. He asserts, for example, that science ( why not " scientists"?) proceeds from particular facts to general rules. Well, does it? Won't it do to say that it proceeds from " large assumptions " to particular facts— and abandons those large assumptions when they are inconsistent with those facts? I'm not a historian of science, but I should have thought the latter at least as plausible as the former.
On to his assertion that science thus encourages abandonment of the search for absolute truth. Thus marks a nonsequitur. And the word absolute is doing only rhetorical work here— what sort of truth do we ordinarily contrast with the absolute sort?
From zenthnker, again:
What are we to make of this? What is it to describe a colour? Well, I can describe one blue as duck-egg blue and other blues as royal blue or navy blue. If our intellect is limited in not being able to describe colours, we can probably bear it.If you want to understand just how limited the intellect is, try describing a colour ? You can't do it because it is outside of the intellects grasp and indeed all experience is like this.
But that's not a description it is a comparison reliant of the other party knowing what duckegg blue and royal blue are.
I'm not sure what you mean by " comparison reliant...", but you need to show it can't be both.
I think that you need to distinguish between intellect, perception, and the ability of language to describe subjective perception. Not necessarily the same things, in my humble opinion.
What the original question was to describe what blue is. You can't it's simply impossible, blue is blue it's as simple as that.
'Blue' is the subjective, visual, human interpretation of electomagnetic radiation at around the 450–495nm wavelength.
What we lack is the linguistic capacity to describe that subjective experience, without resorting to comparison to similar phenomena.
... which of course applies to any subjective impression. We can only describe something we perceive by analogy with something someone else can perceive - either by concrete example ("I call the colour of this ball 'blue'") or by measurable properties ("I see light in the wavelength range 450-495nm as 'blue'").
Well there have been quite a few replies to my post and all of them show that you do not grasp the fundamental point I was trying to make. Science is belief because it assumes that the universe is logical in nature and that therefore it can be explained by logic. However in reality "logic" is something that belongs to human beings and not to the universe. Human logic is based on our experiences of how the visible world seems to behave and when we say "this is not logical" what we're really saying is that this doesn't conform to our "normal" way of viewing things. That's all. Because something is illogical it does not mean it is not true.
Logic only operates within a very narrow framework, one that I call the Newtonian framework because Newtons laws of motion are intuitively understandable by human beings ie. they seem to "make sense". However once we step outside of this framework into say the relativistic framework or the quantum mechanical framework then things begin to "not make sense". A particle can be in more than one place simultaneously for instance which does not conform to human ideas of logic. Therefore the underlying universe is not logical in it's operation and therefore logic cannot be imposed upon it. If logic cannot be imposed upon it then ultimately the human mind cannot understand it because the human mind can only understand that which it perceives as logical.
Our so called logical thoughts are built entirely on our perception of the world. In my previous post I gave the example of the impossibility of describing the colour blue. In reality all our perceptions are beyond description but our intellect plays a trick on us so that we imagine we can "describe" and "explain" things. For instance try describing what "hot" is. You cannot do it except by resorting to it's extreme opposite "cold" and "describing" it in relation to cold. However you cannot describe "cold" except by resorting to "hot" and hence you are really not describing anything. If you met a person who had never experienced hot or cold you would never, even until the end of time be able to give them any idea of what "hot" and "cold" were. It is entirely dependent on experience and your "logic" is also dependent entirely on experience. Therefore since your senses are limited in nature it is impossible for you to conceive of anything that is outside of those sense perceptions and hence it is ultimately impossible for you to understand how the universe really works. You are only capable of proposing similarities.
This is the great error that logicians and scientists make. They assume that the universe is logical in nature and that their senses can ultimately comprehend it's workings. As I said earlier this is a massive and totally unjustified assumption. Bertrand Russell is entirely correct when he says that science is nothing but the manipulation of matter. It contains no "truth" whatsoever. It is just a very limited "logical" construction based entirely on limited human perception of the world. It is really a mirror of human psychology.
Science doesn't exactly assume logic is correct ... it applies logic to observable facts and finds that it does work. The skeptical scientific method in action, in fact.
We can't prove that there isn't a great, unobservable foundation to the universe which does not follow any kind of logic, but we can see that at least the part of the universe we can observe follows what we call logic.
If you are trying to convince yourself than nothing can ever be known therefore you may as well not bother, that is your choice. However, most of us would beg to differ, and point to the many things we do know, in the sense that by applying that knowledge we can predict the results of further observations which then turn out to be correct.
And you clearly don't grasp the point I made, that in reality, the assumptions science makes about the universe are essentially the same ones that normal, sane people the world over make in everyday life, only more explicit and more formalised.
Apart from pontification, even the people who'd like to think they're above all the 'reality' stuff very rarely practice what they preach - they don't jump out of high windows on the assumption that gravity is an illusion, they don't walk across motorways on the assumption that the vehicles they think they see aren't actually real, they don't stick their hands in fires* on the assumption that 'heat' is some abstract scientific concept, (possibly based on a deeply subjective Caucasian and phallocentric worldview).
(*At least, rarely more than once.)
The other thing you don't seem to grasp is that people who view science as a highly successful and substantially practical pursuit, as well as one which can give great satisfaction, really aren't hugely interested in philosophical musings on science
They've heard it all before, very probably thought about from time to time in an idle moment, and then put it to one side with all the other things that don't seem likely to be particularly enlightening.
Indeed - an apparent contradiction between events as perceived and reported and the explicit understanding of how the world works is interesting, since that's actually one of the driving factors of science - to try and build the best possible understanding of the universe.
It's probably more sensible to say that what we find at the deepest level does not conform to the everyday view of 'particle', and that people who might find themselves confused by the different meanings of the word at different physical scales might be better avoiding quantum mechanics.
You seem to be confusing 'logic' and 'common sense'.
It's not 'common sense' that I can have two rigidly fixed solid metal rods running through the air from one building to another, and that I can transmit a huge amount of power through them without them moving.
However, there are few people who doubt that that can happen, even if they don't understand how it works.
There's also no doubt that there's a comprehensive scientific understanding of electricity which allows what happens to be explained and what will happen to be predicted with great accuracy.
The whole point of science is to extend human knowledge beyond 'what everyone knows' into 'what some people have found out' whilst doing so in a sufficiently well-ordered and well-argued way that people can generally have confidence in the findings, and which allows people disagreeing with them to put forward an alternative view.
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