You have to be educated to be educated (1997)
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
> For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith.
I get the point that most people do not and will never fully understand the basis of most scientific facts. Only a very small percentage of the world has a complete grasp on the evidence for natural selection, climate change, the big bang, etc... . It reminds me of Mac's presentation in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia where he asks whether Dennis has ever seen the fossil records, and follows up with
> Let me get this straight Mr Reynolds. You get your information from a book written by men you've never met. And you take their words as truth, based on a willingness to believe. A desire to accept. A leap of... dare I say it... faith?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjg0XlZ0Uv4
But there's a subtle difference between this and acts of faith: if science is conducted properly, it lays out in public the available objective evidence for its truths and invite anyone to come and investigate, and falsify the claims if they have sufficient evidence to the contrary. I could understand the basis for climate change if I took enough time out of work and family and did my research. With religious truths, on the other hand, investigations reach a dead end with "this is simply a matter of faith" or "you just have to feel this to believe it".
Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.
This is worth questioning (and hopefully coming back around to believing in)! Most of the reason I reject the idea of young earth theory is that the incentive to fake the earth's evident age is so vanishingly low my understanding of the rest of society would also have to be rejected. And that's a deeply stressful act to engage in without my own incentive to. But it's worth knowing about yourself that your view of the world is inherently based in your place and comfort within it, even the stuff that people broadly agree about, not some sense of discovering absolute truth. The latter aspect is just a symptom of having a coherent worldview, which people manage with very heterodox beliefs all the time.
It's worth looking into examination of flat-earthers and why they turn to it—it's often linked to myriad other conspiracy theories, each of which support each other.
Not arguing the specifics here, but a deliberate effort to deceive is not a prerequisite for a widely held theory to be false. It is likely that all of the proponents of luminiferous aether believed they were dutifully following the evidence but they still arrived at the wrong conclusion.
All evidence is theory-laden. Scientific study is still a sociological system despite our best efforts (yes, I've read Kuhn like everybody else)
This is true statement, but it doesn't mean any given piece of knowledge produced by science is actually battle-tested. See the replication crisis.
Yet as soon as a published paper gets an idea from their abstract into The News (TM), that interpretation (potentially misunderstood or embellished by the journo) is "facts" and "science."
Science isn't in the business of truths. It's in the business of explanations, predictions, theories, and data. e.g. This theory explains/predicts all of the data so far.
There are truths involved in science, but they are just mathematical/logical truths. Data is taken to be axiomatic, and logically true statements can be derived from the data. e.g. "95% of the values fall in this range", "no value is greater than 50". Those are just logical statements about sets, and they couldn't be used to prove any theory true, although they could prove one false.
It doesn't need to and I didn't claim it was trying to (especially as it's impossible as you correctly point out). But the closer the model is to reality, the more useful the model is, and therefore the closer it is to being true.
> Science isn't in the business of certifying its theories as true, just discarding them as false.
Given the immensely complex and sophisticated and successful human achievements that depend on these models, such as spaceflight, computers, GPS, any number of things. I think you're doing the baby/bathwater thing. The models work very well so they must be very close approximations to what the universe does. So they approach 'the truth'.
I think we may have to agree to disagree. It may be you see as a binary thing – it is or it isn't. I see it as graduated.
The purpose of science isn't to establish truth, it is to find the mostly likely hypotheses to explain natural phenomena (or the hypotheses most unlikely to be false).
I think that is the real difference between a religious statement and a scientific explanation: the former is a statement about truth, the latter a hypothesis that could be refined based on further evidence.
science is not generally understood as a source of constant critical inquiry, but rather a source of unquestionable belief.
When asked if the Earth goes around the sun, most people would confidently reply, "Yes, it does."
However, when asked if they have any doubts, they would unlikely admit to any uncertainty. It suggests to me that most people have faith in what science says. Rarely questioning or ever challenging it.
The few who disagree with the scientific consensus are not necessarily more scientific, but at least remain skeptical which paradoxally may make them more scientific than those who just take it for granted. Whether the skeptic have well articulated reasons for their doubts or not, they are often met with resistance or even ridicule.
In my opinion, scientific claims have become as problematic than religious beliefs. If one questions or challenges what is published in a scientific journal today, they may be seen as heretical. The recent pandemic has shown how science can be used to impose a dogma, much like religion.
Even though I don't understand any of the science very well, I know enough not to attribute these mysteries to magic or gods.
A chimeral person with two different DNAs in their body isn't magical, but it can throw off any rule base system that says "People only have one DNA in their bodies". The first chimeral person that showed up was a type of black swan event showing us that we did not understand the problem space as well as we thought.
> how in good conscience could he act on basically "taking the word of some guy in a white lab coat."
is actually quite correct. There is science behind DNA evidence, but there is also frequent malpractice of lab technicians, which ends up muddling results, with life ruining consequences.
John Oliver has talked about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScmJvmzDcG0
> > For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith.
I largely agree with the statement you quote.
I have a PhD in physics; I understand science well. I believe that man went to the moon. I understand one of the proofs - they left a reflector which you can aim at with a laser.
But.... I've never pointed at laser at it myself. I would probably struggle to obtain such a laser and would definitely struggle to aim it and detect the reflection (by reading up on engineering I probably could do it if I dedicated to it very significant effort). So, on what basis do I hold this belief?
The truthful answer is that I believe I'm good at evaluating other more indirect sources of information. For example, if a scientist claims that they have such a laser and made the measurement, I believe I am knowledgeable enough to read their publication and spot a large class of inconsistencies that could expose their frauds. But.... I haven't even done that. And this is me, who (probably) has the intellectual tools to explore these questions. Imagine someone who doesn't even understand the scientific process.
EDIT: I'm now reading the article and I see that they've made the same points already much better.
One thing I did realize, though, the first time I got to play with a Geiger counter, was that this was probably the first time I had actually observed the inverse-square law, after nearly two decades of schooling on the matter.
That's entirely my point. You know that you could investigate these facts to their full extent, if you really wanted to. That does not hold for the "faith" that religion talks about.
I'm guessing only a small number (1-2 digits of people) has a "complete grasp" on the evidence for any one of those topics at all, and there isn't a single human on earth with a "complete grasp" on all of them. To support the article, integrating knowledge of fields that you don't have "complete grasp" on still requires faith in institutional processes that produce what we call "science".
And this is even more complicated when it comes to the replication crisis—I'm guessing having a "complete grasp" on the understanding the literature represents of difficult to reproduce fields is 0. I don't know much about climate change work myself, but it seems like such a dynamic and chaotic field that many results on specific claims of cause and impact are going to be difficult to reproduce.
I assume that's the point of the article; people who are not educated to identify nonsense will accept nonsense or decide to trust nothing.
This is obviously very ham-fisted, but I believe that's the idea.
To be completely transparent. I was referring to religion “Trust me” and science “Don’t believe me, try it yourself”.
Because humans have bias, and depending on what side of the fence they are on, they will read it how they want to read it.
One could make an argument for both.
The statement is true though. One is about loyalty and faith through blind trust, and the other is faith through trust that they followed the scientific method. Both have “published papers”. Both have some sort of verified results. Only one is real science of hypothesis, experiment, observation, conclusion. If it fails that test, it’s lumped in with Scientology.
In those last 2,000 years virtually all "scientific truths" have changed. Scientists used to believe the Earth was flat, that it was the center of the universe. Doctors prescribed cocaine. And you can dispute those examples maybe but i hope you see what i mean.
It's not completely unreasonable to see how that might lead some people to not believe current scientific consensuses.
Christianity has multiple times completely changed how they viewed Jesus let alone less foundational aspects of the faith. Read up on the First Council of Nicaea and similar such events, or ask the Vatican how old the earth is.
God himself seems to have changed around the time of Jesus, with a really elaborate justification to make sense of it, based on very little that's actually in the Bible:
I meant Numbrino (Cocaine hydrochloride) which was approved in 2020 is used in place of Cocaine the same way Hydromorphone etc is used in pace of Morphine. Cocaine is a useful topical numbing agent, but tweaking it slightly is beneficial.
Current religious beliefs of religious groups change all the time; its a common conceit that the underlying truth is eternal, and sone groups also work hard to rationalize the changes as not really being changes if you squint just right because they have beliefs about the immutability of doctrine that are confounded by them changing their doctrines, but...
> With religious truths, on the other hand, investigations reach a dead end with "this is simply a matter of faith" or "you just have to feel this to believe it".
No religion worth its salt would ever present a proposition, point blank (e.g., the divinity of Christ[2]) and then claim you are required to believe it just because, or because "feelings". That is merely a caricature, a straw man, and if that were the case, then you could easily ask why this particular belief? Why not what the guys down the street are selling? New Age is big on feelings, a grand synthesis (read: hodge-podge) of superstition, so why not them? Why not the various kooky ideologies springing up in our times, nearly all of which follow the same gnosticizing script, with the added aggression and bullying they deploy when demanding you believe their claims simply because they make them. Certainly, there are some traditionally religious people who say the kinds of things you say about faith, today perhaps especially in the US, but it is neither wise nor charitable to judge a faith by the flaws of its weakest professors. And not only that, but not all faiths are the same. Not all faiths are actually faith, that is, rational faith.
Now, because faith is a kind of trust, a kind of uncertainty does enter the picture. But legitimate trust is not irrational, and so genuine faith is not irrational, and indeed, all men have faith; your distinction is not as profound as you may think, though certainly there are distinctions to be made and a certain diversity of methods ought to be considered (historical vs. empirical, for instance). Methodology is an important thing to bear in mind, specifically when recognizing, that rationality and modern, empirical science are not identical. This is the error of scientism, one easily refuted by the observation, that the claim that equates the two is not itself a scientific claim.
John Newman[0], for example talks about how the aforementioned assent can take place, and here is an article[1] that gives a brief summary. But a look at, say, the robust tradition of Catholic apologetic scholarship will certainly show, that this faith not only respects reason, but in doing so, proceeds from it. It goes where reason leads and takes off where human rationality is too feeble or circumstantially constrained to continue. There must be warrant, and reason and authentic faith cannot contradict. So here, too, you could, in principle, also do you own apologetic and theological and philosophical research and come to certain conclusions, just as you could, in principle, if not in practice, do your own empirical or historical research or whatever.
[0] https://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/index.html
Firstly, "liar, lord or lunatic" are not the only options. William Lane Craig suggests several plausible alternatives such as "Jesus was deluded with respect to the specific issue of his own divinity while his faculties of moral reasoning remained intact".
Secondly, Jesus never claimed to be divine in the first place. The earlier gospels and the writings of Paul do not mention it. It's not until decades later that the Gospel of John talks about it.
Thirdly, even if those were the options and Jesus did claim to be divine, the evidence for "lord" is lacking. Especially considering the rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Human culture is rife with examples of narcissists, psychopaths and tricksters who convinced large numbers of people of their wisdom, compassion and intelligence. Some of them get "found out", some do not. Jesus may be one of the latter. Reading the gospels hasn't convinced me otherwise. Ironically, Peter Kreefts argues exactly by appealing to feelings: "The savviness, the canniness, the human wisdom, the attractiveness of Jesus emerge from the Gospels with unavoidable force to any but the most hardened and prejudiced reader."
All truths reach this dead end, scientific or otherwise. If you don’t understand that the fundamental truths upon which all scientific enquiry is based are 100% taken on faith, then you very literally are practicing a religion in exactly the same way that an ignorant and non-curious fundamentalist would be.
You can extract some sort of goo from strawberries that your teacher claims is DNA, but I don't think there's any actual way for a high schooler to verify that it is DNA.
In high school, you're not actually doing what they claim you're doing. You are performing a procedure, and then evaluating your results against the "right" answer that you and the teacher are accepting on faith. If your experiment does not match the accepted answer, then one of three things is true: (1) the physical law is actually wrong; (2) you flubbed the procedure; or (3) your measurements were accurate and the physical law is correct, but it is an incomplete description of everything that affects what you are measuring.
Cows are not spherical, they do not float in a vacuum for very long without changing in unpleasant ways, friction exists, and your ability to press the buttons on a stopwatch is not very precise.
Little-s science always involves faith, and big-s Science really does not want you to think about that. The replication crisis is real, but it's not new. (I guess that's my tl;dr of the article.)
No doubt in today's world where so much info/opinion can be self-selected (you tune into media of your own choosing), each of us do shape our own world more than in olden times. But I suspect we surround ourselves with media that resonates positively with the people we share our lives with. Otherwise if you adopt perspective arising from those 'foreign' ideas, you run the risk of clashing with the ideas of friends & family, thereby making you unpopular, dismissed, and even shunned. Thus we adopt the ideas that reward us most, socially.
https://youtu.be/gcwSwkQySw4?si=uQwSmmhKsVpv8_a8
A lot of what we think we know is based on social interactions. That's how humanity works.