* subscribing to an aesthetic hunch about fundamental physics (which has no consequences on how to lead our lives at all!), with
* subscribing to an epistemology of revelation, and the ancient, unethical, incoherent scribblings of the Abrahamic religions (with big, bad consequences for our lives),
as both being instances of some harmless, justified (or justifiable) "faith"? That's very wrong.
His hunch about the underlying structure of physical law is not comparable to people clinging to religion in today's world, neither in justification nor in consequence.
Note BTW that he cites prevalence of atheism among philosophers as an instance of convergence towards truth (not as a reason for accepting atheism). Please don't foist simple logical fallacies on him.
> Of course, I've found that most atheists tend to have faith in science without actually understanding science
Funny, I've found most atheists to be better versed in both science and religion than most theists.
> I would always encourage atheists to investigating with an open mind, and to learn more about their system of beliefs, and more about logic.
Thanks. I'd expand your enjoinment to study one's system of belief and logic to include not only atheists, but everyone; surely the rank of atheists will then continue to swell.
As an aside, it would help if you could break down your writing in paragraphs.
Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. If, as GP says, you are taking it on faith that some "scientific conclusion" is true, you're merely deferring expertise on the matter. Much like when your tech support guy says your hard drive is shot and you need to replace it, you just trust that he's more likely right than not, and take his advice. If you didn't want to believe him, you could go back to school to learn everything there is to know in the field and find out for yourself whether or not your hard drive is salvageable. You may even come to a different conclusion!
With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views: Believe this because I tell you to!
Nonsense - that ignores that fundamentally science is a human activity. Because it is a human activity it is open to the same biases, self-deceptions, fads, groupthink and political pressures as any other human activity.
Apart from that, implicit in your defense of science and attack on religion is a belief that true knowledge can only be attained through the scientific method, and nothing which is true can be acquired outside of experiment and observation, which itself is a faith based (though pragmatic) argument.
That being said, I make no claims for the existence of a God, Abrahamic or otherwise. At the same time you could be a little more circumspect and humble about what you know to be true.
The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature. In fact, it's practically the only tool we have. Almost every major advancement our species has made has been because someone had a theory, figured out a way to test it, and came to a conclusion with some degree of confidence that they were then able to act upon and share with others.
Since this is a thread about philosophy, "truth" (and how one determines it) is extremely relevant. Epistemology is a whole branch of philosophy. If you're truly skeptical, one could even argue that true knowledge cannot be attained at all, and all we can hope to do is arrive at conclusions with as high a degree of confidence as possible.
My point is that science offers a way to increase confidence in a conclusion, religion does not.
It's as simple as that.
I agree.
But I also believe freedom is better than slavery. I value wisdom over ignorance. And I believe those things without any proof. The scientific method cannot prove to me that murder is wrong, and yet I hold it to be true.
So despite the fact that I agree with the power of the scientific method, I'll cop to truths that I believe without proof.
The study of evolution gives a mechanism through which a sense of morality is 'hardwired' into us for its adaptive benefits. Or, less teleologically, the study of our own brains can provide evidence for us as humans just not liking certain things.
Additionally, a technique like group simulation could show that allowing murder is against the average individual's interest.
I'm not claiming I come to my beliefs through deliberate scientific reasoning, but I do think that science has important things to say about most things.
You believe these things on the same kinds of evidence you use for believing the sun will rise tomorrow.
>I think that the idea of a singular thing called "truth" is actually fairly harmful.
I disagree with that.
Duly noted.
Citation please.
There's a few thousand years of Talmudic scholarship you might want to read up on, just to pick one of the more obvious from among the many counterexamples.
Almost every religion is a much broader and much more intellectually diverse intellectual project than their respective fundamentalists would like you to believe.
Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.
Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?".
It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations.
In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
I agree. I take a fundamental interpretation approach to the Bible. I firmly believe that science must jive with my belief-set. If it doesn't, there are serious questions that I need to answer.
Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible.
I don't purport to know everything, nor do I think I'll ever manage to answer all the outstanding questions. I also don't claim correctness on either side of the question. What is important for me is cognitive resonance.
> Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally [...]
No. I would counter that religion (in general) seeks to answer the "why" of it all.
> It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
"Seek and you will find..." in this case, we go looking for answers and eventually, (sometimes) in matters that can't be handled scientifically, we settle on suitable answers.
It's not clear the Bible has much to say about these at all.
Fundamentalists insist that it does, but there are many other strands of Christian thought that disagree.
If we assume there is a ground truth (as an axiom, inductively suggested by persistent results from physical experimentation), then we still can say nothing of the God that created it (this, all of this expansive and perplexing existence). In fact, science as it stands cannot answer questions that we cannot test.
How do you test for the existence of a being that is not a part of what we live in? Even if the God overlaps with our existence (a core tradition of Christianity being omnipresence) what test can we leverage to show He is here?
All of this leads to the dispersed opinions of many, many people. We have supposed two things so far: there is a God, and there is some absolute representation of our universe (above I called it existence).
Given ground truth, how might we approach the texts that are said to explain God? As a society (my guess is many people do this) we tend to overlay what we "know" onto things we don't understand.
For example, in Genesis we have words like erev and boker which are translated consistently as "morning" and "evening". But its ancient Hebrew, we don't actually have the meaning as it was intended. We have lost the societal context that informed the deeper meanings of those words. So we guess. We think they mean morning and evening. But that's at best ambiguous.
They could mean "order" and "disorder", as they are used in other contexts to mean that.
I'm sure I could meander about and come up with a logically sound chain of interpretations, but I only left this here to illustrate just how difficult the interpretation of simple things can be.
If you're Orthodox, both the written Torah and the Oral Torah (Talmud) were capital-R Revealed by a supernatural authority at Mount Sinai.
Yes, the study notes for the book were revealed with the book. If you find this confusing, well, go pick up Rudin's Principles to Mathematical Analysis.
I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works.
> you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views
In practice that is true for science too. I take it on faith that scientists are trustworthy and doing their best to uncover truth.
As an example, Leviticus is fascinating if read as "here's the political structure of a herding culture". It's visibly more of a constitution than a religious text, including the allocation of taxes, a permanent administrator class, a penal system, and a statute of limitations on debt.
Sheer nonsense. The Enlightenment, the greatest period of scientific advancement in human history, was driven by people who saw it as their sacred duty to understand God's Creation. Atheism in the form of the Soviet Union dragged us backwards.
You employ a rhetorical move that some theists have used in the past -- namely, casting doubt on the veracity of scientific beliefs by painting them in the guise of religion.
This is also a convenient move that lets you characterize huge swaths of academia that disagree with you by questioning their psychological motives for holding the beliefs they do.
And now that philosophy and science are reduced to priesthoods, what makes them better than religion? After all, most atheists "have some personal, emotional reason for not believing in God rather than a well-thought out chain of reasoning; but most people believe things for personal and emotional reasons, so it isn't surprising." As if the motivations behind a given belief have any ramifications on its truth value.
This effectively allows you to justify belief in God without actually making any arguments for it -- as if in the hypothetical vacancy of science and philosophy we're left with no choice but to default to theism.
I would encourage you to investigate the philosophy of belief and God in more detail, and to be "open to discovery of truth even when [you] may not like it." There is a great deal more literature on the subject than the pithy writings of Dawkins et al (of whom I am no fan) that deal with the subject in much greater detail, and with much more nuanced arguments than you're giving the entire discipline of philosophy credit for.
Also, for the record, I am not an atheist or an agnostic. I am not a philosopher, and I didn't even major in it college. There's a lot of great philosophy out there I haven't even tried to tackle. But I appreciate its value.
I think it's clear you're arguing in bad faith. And I'm disappointed that such an argument is the first thing that comes up on an article like this on HN.
Are you not doing the same thing back to him ?
If you disagree, then please tell me the definition of science.
"Scientisits" use those processes to attempt to arrive at true conclusions. This can be very difficult.
Over time, "science" (the nebulous institution) can build up enough accrued "truths" that it can make interesting conclusions with a decent degree of confidence. (Note: scientific studies that are reported by clickbait headlines are not what I'm talking about.)
The point is, that you can personally go learn how it all works, follow the studies, and attempt to replicate them, even, to arrive at the same conclusions. Or, if you find issues along the way, you can point them out and contribute to the corpus of "scientific knowledge" by removing an invalid "truth".
If you want to define science as that which uncovers truth, then, for that to be true, you must be able to define truth without resorting to tautology (that is, there must be a way to verify 'truth').
Excluding a subset of what's false doesn't necessarily lead you to discovering or being able to accept (integrate) the truth.
That doesn't mean that red isn't a colour because there are colours that are not red.
From there the practice of science is repeating and testing claims about nature, and communicating these tests through various social processes such as peer reviewed journals or running through the streets naked shouting "Eureka!"
No, science is the practice of using the assumption of consistent laws of nature to build predictive models. In a way, it is more an elaborate extended test of the utility of the assumption than a belief in it (though obviously belief may support the practice and observed utility of the resulting models may create or reinforce belief.) But belief in the assumption is neither necessary to nor sufficient for science.
They didn't say that. They said science was a collection of tools and processes. Obviously tools and processes exist that aren't a part of that collection.
2) here are several definitions: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science
2. The question is whether you can show that what the person you're replying to is arguing in favor of is not science. Pasting some definitions proves neither that you understand them nor that they apply.
I think we found a point we can agree upon!
Seriously, people question if time exists or how many dimensions their are. Consensus is what allows medicine to operate and people to build computers etc, but it’s not accepted Truth.
People simplify things like to use hypothesis > experiment loop as Science. But, in practice simple observation is often used for things like Botany.
Ex: Philosophy is not science becase it does not work. You can’t argue from first principles and end up with a modern CPU.
I'm slightly amused by this statement, as modern science is descended directly from philosophy. Indeed without philosophy, I could easily argue there is no science as we know it.
Now days we call the useless bits philosophy, 200 years ago back when people took Phrenology as a real thing that was not true.
Thats just it though, science is natural philosophy. Doesn't get changed by modern terminology at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
Your personal definition of science and philosophy don't override the overall usage of the terms. Feel free to encourage their use, but know those definitions aren't the overall accepted definitions in use.
Anyway, it's really not my definition for Science, if you want to quote wikipedia: "Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge")[1] is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[2][a]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science) Notice the last of specific implementation details, that's what I am referring to.
"The earliest roots of science can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3500 to 3000 BCE" well before natural philosophy. The Greeks are given a lot of credit, but they the ideas are much older than them.
You think he is commenting on the scientific method but he is really commenting on human nature.
People really are treating Science as a kind of religion.
Understanding this motivation is important because it shows the precarious position we are in - any event which causes a loss of faith in “Science” the religion could quickly turn our culture away from its relatively pro-science culture.
Maybe I totally misunderstood OP, but it seemed like they were conflating the state of popular discourse with the state of academic philosophy.
As an aside, I don’t think that people are likely to stop trusting in science or the scientific community because of the state of discourse surrounding science. I think that people are much likely to distrust science simply because they don’t like certain findings or it’s not politically aligned with them, imho. At least in America.
It seems incredibly unlikely someone would cite the popularity of agnosticism to establish the certainty of atheism, so I am fairly confident that was not the move he was making.
Looking back at the prompt:
> "Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth..."
Pretty sure he was just giving a counterexample: a convergence which he happens to believe to be true, along with compatabilism for free will. He's not making some appeal to popularity to resolve the issue.
After reading it I'm not even sure whether he considers himself an atheist or agnostic.
Presumably he wouldn't cite the convergence towards atheism as an example of convergence to the truth if he'd consider it mistaken. So that assumption is safe, I'd think.
Same could be said of agnosticism, which he also specifically mentions.
Probably an atheist if you're just listing that as a more probable position things could "converge" towards-- I was really just surprised at brobdingnagians' confidence in Maudlin's religious views, based on a passing reference to the entire body of philosophers, from which inference brobdingnagians later levels a charge of hypocrisy, because elsewhere Maudlin discloses an unevidenced belief when pressed on another (nonreligious) matter without even indicating how strongly he holds that possible hunch.
Thought it was worth an aside that brob might not have perfectly pinned Maudlin down.
You probably mean the colloquial use of agnostic fornegative atheist - the position of someone who does not believe that a god/supernatural being exists -, in contrast to positive atheism, the position of someone who believes that there is no god/supernatural being.
There is no problem with this colloquial use, I just wanted to clarify that the "professional" terminology does not match it.
I was just quoting someone else's use, I didn't really mean anything by it.
I've read about Anthony Flew's framework, but it still seems like unnecessary architecture to me, since I still haven't encountered situations where lay terms fail to describe someone's position in a reasonable way.
But you know, come to think, if there's one thing religion has taught me-- people can self describe however they like, and there's no sense fighting them on it. If people want to be called just plain atheists, or negative atheists, or double plus agnostics, or pastafarians, that's fine, I can go with whatever everybody's preference is.
Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.
Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.
1. A belief that the scientific method will definitely approach reality (a realist/pragmatist claim)
2. A belief that the current consensus is right - (but it could be disclaimed)
3. A belief that science will explain everything, so one could discard other studies, such as philosophy or theology.
Each of these positions can be disputed and may be wrong (especially since they were not acquired by the scientific method, but arrived at by philosophical thought), so to some extent you need some "faith" to accept these statements to be true.
No scientist believes position 2 in general. Regarding particular subject matters and well-confirmed theories, on the other hand, it's pretty much uncontroversial. No cell phone would work and no plane would fly if the underlying physical theories were flat-out false.
Position 3 is probably analytically true, too. The idea that there is something that can in principle not be explained by taking a close scientific (=skeptic, methodical, experimental, precise) look at it hardly makes any sense.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction
My point 2 was not supposed to mean that current theory was wrong as much as there (most likely will) be a more accurate better theory that will replace current ones. No-one disputes that (non-Microsoft) cell phones work. The problem lies on the philosophical side - Newtonian mechanics caused a big problem in that it was quite strongly suggestive of determinism. But more underlying theories, such as QM make the situation more difficult and complex. Assuming the current or fashionable theory of the time is correct is very likely to lead to a temporary or fashionable philosophy.
Position 3 - Science is an empirical study of reality - it cannot in any way explain why it is not some other reality, for example. If it is governed by logic/maths, unless every mathematical construct has physical existence (which is a rather weird and unrealistic idea), you cannot explain why this mathematical construct has existence and another does not. You may argue that other studies may be pointless, but you definitely cannot claim analytically and for certain that science can ever explain everything - so this is the point at which you are bringing in an unreasonable faith in this case. And science without study of philosophical implications is rather shallow and cannot give a reasonable mind satisfaction (not that philosophy is satisfying).
I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap.
Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.
FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.
What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong.
So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models.
Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes?
This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it.
So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles.
You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.
As an introduction, Alan F. Chalmers' What Is This Thing Called Science? is good. It covers Popper in chapters 5 to 7 (Introduction & Naive Falsificationism, Sophisticated Falsificationism, Limitations). Then it moves on (as it were) to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Imre Lakatos' Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (great short read, btw, applying those ideas to maths: Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations), and Feyerabend's Against Method. Chalmers then covers Bayesianism, new experimentalism, the nature of scientific laws, and scientific realism.
They've all pointed out problems with Popper's demarcation criterion. Not sure there's really a good catchy replacement, though. It seems to amount to "it's complicated".
One of the problems with Popper's account is the following: an observation is never about only one hypothesis, but about it and a whole set of auxiliary hypotheses. So, if your observation does not line up with the prediction, do you throw out the theory, or some auxiliary hypothesis? (Eg, Uranus didn't move as predicted, so Newton's physics was wrong. But wait, it was not a problem with Newton's physics, but there was another planet, Neptune.) Quine's notion of a "web of belief" captures that quite nicely - you don't just take one hypothesis, test it, and drop it if falsified, but you adjust the whole edifice such that it becomes coherent again. See [1].
Not to contradict anything you've said, but my original message above was in response to something very different than I think you're talking about. I see a lot of comments where people seem to treat Science as some unquestionable list of facts and treat Scientists reverently. It's like they've made a religion out of it and don't dare question the priests - which is ironic/silly when they're refuting conventional religions.
Anyways, maybe my current view is a little too hard line on good science relying on falsification, but I still reject the notion that any scientific belief is verifiable / provable. A given theory may be the best we have, but a new piece of information could change it radically.
All I wanted to add is that things are more complicated than just that one demarcation line, and philosophy of science has not stood still over the last half century.
Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.
Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians"
So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading
My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.
Knowing your great grandmother's nickname doesn't significantly affect your life, and assuming your mother isn't a compulsive liar, there's little reason to doubt her. Furthermore, it also strikes me as the kind of information that would probably be passed down intact because it's easy to remember.
Argumentum ad consequentiam or appeal to consequences.
Once you let go of thinking that truth is knowable you'll realize that there is some faith that you have.
It's not in science per-se; but it might be faith that you exist. That you can reasonably conceive of thoughts. That those thoughts order the world and that the world that you perceive is a representation not unduly clouded. That the actions of your being are guided by your own will.
Truth might not be knowable in an absolute sense, but you can use these little starting points of faith then come to appreciate that there is a truth continuum and science is a good approach to discovering knowledge.
Philosophy seems so stupid before you start learning it, but it really is beautiful and I regret not being able to pour over it more.
I'm arguing that mere truth is unknowable without faith. We have evidence of derangement all around us and it takes faith to proceed as though our actions are our own and are unclouded. From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason. But there is no escape because the mind is the centre of all investigation.
Could you please define "mere" truth?
>From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.
Nonetheless, that probability can be very low, putting us firmly in normal epistemological territory and not requiring any "faith". In fact, millions of people regularly make the rational, but clouded, assessment that they are too drunk to drive, and take a taxi home.
(Also, from a Bayesian perspective, the form of the generative model and priors is up to the experimenter. From a formal epistemology perspective, you can either try to designate some optimal universal prior, or you can take a variational approach and simply say you want to minimize KL divergence of your predictive posterior from your available data.)
Does the infantry man's faith in ballistic charts affect where a mortar will land? Yes it turned out that Newtonian physics doesn't describe absolute truth, but it sure is useful if you need to blow that enemy up over on that hill.
> one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.
An interesting thought experiment, but what practical use can I apply it to?
btw I'm not implying that only lines of inquiry that result in practical uses are worthwhile, but, science for the most part is related to this.
I guess there is a distinction to be drawn between faith and blind faith. "Faith" in the atomic model allowed prediction of elements that had not yet been discovered. That faith was rewarded when the elements turned up exactly where expected (even though the orbital model of electrons turned out not to be the absolute truth). "Faith" in Einsteins theories required a belief in time dilation. Turns out we can't have GPS without accounting for it.
This is quite different to, for example, religious faith which so far has not had any of these predictive powers.
What characterizes an AaC is the following structure: if X were true then the consequences would be good/bad; therefore X is (probably) true/false.
So if eli_gottlieb were saying "I believe in science because it would be lovely if science were right", that would be an AaC. But that's not at all what he's saying.
The form of his argument is more like this: "by assuming X we can arrive at a bunch of conclusions, and they consistently seem to be correct ones; therefore X is probably true". And that is (a rough sketch of) a pretty good argument.
(There are nits to pick -- more with my paraphrase than with Eli's original. For instance, science isn't a bunch of propositions so much as it's a way of trying to find truths, so "believing in science" isn't so much "believing that X" as "endorsing X as a method". And "... therefore X is probably true" isn't quite the right thing; "... and this constitutes evidence for X" is better. Etc.)
In the seems.
But: If you define "faith" broadly enough then sure, everything with any element of belief to it involves "faith". Derive everything rigorously from axioms? That means having "faith" in your axioms! Do literally anything else at all? That means taking a step at some point that doesn't have a watertight logical justification, so it's "faith"! -- So, sure, Eli's argument (or at least my sketchy reconstruction of it) involves an element of "faith", just like literally every other argument anyone could ever possibly make.
I guess this is what you mean by denying "that truth is knowable". If by "knowable" you mean "... with literally no room for any sort of uncertainty" then I vigorously agree with you -- but I have the impression (perhaps wrongly) that you were offering this as some sort of correction or education for eli_gottlieb, and I see no reason to think he needs it. All he's said is that he believes in science because it works, and that is perfectly consistent with taking "believe" to mean "accept as our current best approximation, to the best of our knowledge, to the truth, with the understanding that later discoveries might change our opinions greatly" or something of the sort.
But my core argument here is that we have no starting point. If you want to call them axioms that's fine, but I'm not here to quibble about language. Even if we had no experience of senses and minds leading to erroneous perceptions and thoughts, we would still have no way to prove that our minds are reliable. At best we would have smaller priors. But quite the opposite, we routinely encounter evidence of erroneous perceptions and thoughts. In dreams, lunatics shouting on the street, or our seemingly invisible optic nerve.
The problem with saying:
> Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
Is first defining faith incorrectly[0] and then second by appealing to its outcome as a measure for its justification. Theologians manipulate their mental state with their own methods. When they say they encounter manifestations of the divine and say they have a rational reason for their religious beliefs by saying "it works!" they're doing the same thing.
Only by humbly admitting that our starting point requires some first acceptance can we then make progress. If you want to take it as an axiom that your mind is reliable, that's fine for you, but it isn't something that's necessarily true. I love Russell, but when he tries to break out of this by calling solipsism a self-refuting idea he's being intellectually dishonest. He was more honest when he was younger and he said solipsism is boring. And there[1] we fully agree.
[0] Faith is about mental state, not action. From Google dictionary: "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something."
[1] With the axiomatic qualifications / faith.
And the rest of us are saying: you don't need a foundationalist epistemology to have an epistemology.
One would have to constrain the definition of "the universe" to a tautological one in order for science, the careful use of rigorous empirical analysis, to be the best at investigating it.
We use other forms of analysis to study different things, forms that may share some aspects with science, but aren't quite the same. Some things just aren't amenable to scientific study. The humanities, for instance.
> cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics [sic] among philosophers [...] as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God
because that isn't what he's doing at all.
The interviewer asks him what he thinks about David Chalmers's lament that philosophy isn't converging to agreement on the truth on big questions like the existence of God. (Note: Chalmers's actual paper on the subject, which you can find by chasing a couple of links from the OP here, puts the existence of God in its list of big questions but concedes later on that on that particular question there is convergence. So the interviewer has misrepresented him a bit.)
He responds by saying he doesn't agree: that philosophy is converging to agreement on the truth on the big questions the interviewer asks him about.
Of course he doesn't go into why he thinks the positions he says philosophers are converging to are correct. The arguments on any of them could fill many books, and have in fact done so. The interviewer asked him a short question about philosophy converging to the truth; he gave a short answer to that question.
[EDITED to add:] After writing that, I notice that FabHK's reply points out the same thing. I'm leaving this here in case the extra detail I give is helpful.
I found this statement really fascinating: as you said "Of course" I take it that you presume that the belief in some number of gods to be innate? Do you think it an evolutionary advantage and manifestation?
The part I elided (many atheists exhibit an essentially credulous belief in "sience" without knowing what it is) I have observed too (though "many?" I don't know) but humans are, you know, humans.
And this is only about people who argue the issue -- what about those who simply don't care and never talk about it?
I think "Of course" is used because his beliefs, which follow, may be expected by the reader based on his previous statements.
Atheists/agnostics who do not understand science, yet believe it anyways likely do so because they are confident that they, or anyone else, could understand it if they put in the necessary effort to do so.
The same can not really be said of theists/deists. I'd be happy to be proven wrong here, of course.
They view the creation story in contrast with other creation stories of the religions of the time. Notably, that there is a single, eternal God directing all things for good rather than a pantheon of gods in conflict.
quoting OP because you kind of just confirmed his point. no, we do not know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, that we’re all made of the stuff either made in the Big Bang or inside of the stars. these are theories, the most fundamental axioms of which still escape us, if they exist at all. their success should not be turned into the deceptive illusion of having reached true knowledge.