The problem that I see is the way we frame these discussions. Does the question "do you believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years" preclude you from believing in science on any level?? In these discussions we throw everyone into one bin or another - you either believe in evolution or you believe God waves his/her magical hand for everything.
I'd bet if you asked those same people the question "Do you believe God cooked your pop tarts this morning or do you believe the toaster cooked your pop tart through principles of electricity and heat" you'd get a much more interesting set of answers. (No doubt that you'd still get many that answer the former.)
The problem with these questions is that what you are really asking people of faith is "Are you completely faithful to a religion that guides your daily life?" Most people use and come to religion to guide their day to day human interactions rather than using it as a tool to explore the principles of the universe. If we as humans want to make progress we have to stop pushing on the evolution lever - it just causes divisions. What we should be doing is approaching the topic of science for people of faith from a more artificial level meaning "if X causes Y then Z" sort of stuff. In other words we can approach and teach scientific principles without going down the rabbit hole. Some people will say this isn't possible but I just don't think thats true.
I don't see how "do you believe god created humans 10k years ago" can be answered affirmatively while simultaneously believing in evolution, unless you're thinking of a God unlike any of the generally known concepts. A yes carries the weight of rejecting enormous amounts of empirical evidence for evolution of the species and historical accounts.
While this may be true according to some conceptions of God (personified and material God seems to be a fairly common belief, especially among laymen) most philosophical descriptions of God tend towards a "First Mover"-theory. That is, God created the universe, and the universe played out according to his creation.
This definition of God is certainly compatible with all scientific advances because, by definition, this God is beyond the measure of science.
I happen to find this belief rather boring and derivative of Plato (a natural world and a supernatural world, each separate and uncrossable except that the natural world is really just a poor reflection of the ideal and perfect supernatural world? Where have I heard that before?), but it's certainly not incompatible with science.
I thought the phrasing used in the article (humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power) was particularly exclusionary. I know plenty of people who believe in evolution and God (they would answer no to the previous question). They don't buy into the whole six days and rib bone thing literally, but the process by which "monkeys" turned into people was overseen by someone pulling strings.
There's a lot of chance in the world. Which of a million sperm fertilizes the egg that turns into Alexander the Great. I don't particularly believe someone's out there manipulating chance events, but it's not provably false, so I see no reason why it's fundamentally incompatible with science.
I have learned never to underestimate the human ability for rationalization. Usually the smarter and more intelligent the person, the crazier and more convoluted the self rationalization goes. So believing god created humans and believing in evolution is, I think, quite common.
"God guided the evolution". "God used the evolution to build the physical form then imbued the bodies with human souls". I could go on, but you get the gist.
People are very irrational, and quite easily believe contradictory things.
I'm not inclined to argue too hard in favor of God guided evolution, but I don't think you've demonstrated that such a belief is "very irrational". At worst, it's not provable, but it's not disprovable.
> At worst, it's not provable, but it's not disprovable.
And the next step is to realize that things that are neither provable nor disprovable do not have any effect on the universe we live in, and thus can safely be ignored and forgotten.
Full disclosure: I firmly believe in evolution and have faith that God created our souls.
How could I answer this survey with those ridiculous answers that either pigon-hole me a as scientific illiterate, or someone who thinks that the entire universe is deterministic.
There's a middle ground that I feel is wise: Trust the evidence you see, but remain hopeful that there's more to this world than a fleeting life, death, and permeant non-existance.
Your view is the same as mine. Chemical engineer here with an interest in quantum physics. A lot of people take the view that God directly created "stuff", as in He literally created the earth or literally put together the universe. My view is a little different -- I think he created the laws of physics (and math itself essentially) in such a way to form everything exactly the way it is now.
It's a much deeper level of creation than most people consider, partly because the laws of physics are generally taken for granted as simply existing on their own.
See, that's what makes it intriguing. Simple systems can become incredibly complicated over a few iterations very quickly. It is one area that humans are (currently) horrible at predicting -- thus it's barely science if you can only barely predict it.
God, almost by definition, would know the results for any chaotic system and can set up the defining parameters to produce a particular output. (Note that this is different than a fine-tuned universe as I am referring to fine-tuned laws rather than natural constants).
As one who lives a religiously observant lifestyle, I've always been a bit of an outlier on the topic of religiously motivated supernatural beliefs like these. I don't believe in souls for the same reason I don't believe in a Cartesian duality of the mind and body. Any rationally grounded support for such a belief vanished as soon as we developed reasonable alternative and scientifically motivated theories of the mind.
However, for some reason my mind's stubborn refusal to let me believe in the supernatural has not eroded my sense of religious commitment. I think this is because I realized long ago that the crux, and contemporary import, of religion for me (and this is entirely my opinion, and mine alone) is not in instilling belief in any specific historical event or supernatural phenomena, but rather instilling the notion of belief, in the broadest sense, deep within every individual.
This is ultimately what differentiates humanity from all other forms of life that we know of. That is, we are conscious creatures (mostly) capable of lofty pursuits, and there is value in exploring unknown territory and working together with other human beings to achieve great things. These are religious concepts at heart, because they are predicated on the belief that human achievement and the pursuit of knowledge are not merely the means to some material end. The journey itself is the point.
There are many reasons but the most important one, IIRC, is existential insecurity. The more one fears for one's wealth, health, and life, the stronger and widespread religious beliefs. The thesis goes back to Gregory S. Paul [1] and has been confirmed by others; for instance, by Inglehart and Norris (2004) [2].
I wonder why people hate on believing that the sun revolves around the earth. It would make for more complicated equations of motion, but is not unscientific or wrong to believe that to be the case. It just turns out that the math is easier when you believe that the sun is at the center.
It's certainly unscientific. Believing something to be true despite evidence to the contrary is fundamentally unscientific.
Edit: Since people don't seem to understand my point, there is more to the theories of celestial mechanics than just path prediction. Our understanding of the path mechanics is derived through our understanding of gravity. To believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth one would have to completely upend our theories of gravity, which have been shown by experiment to agree with predictions in almost all cases.
I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its center.
Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.
I think you misheard. The epicycle system is, in essence, an n-termed complex Fourier series (not transform). The point that the person who told you this was trying to make was that any path can be represented using enough terms in a complex Fourier series, so it's a fairly bad system for deriving physical laws.
Well if you want to be pedantic, they both revolve around their centre of mass, sort of (complicated by the fact that there are many other bodies influencing the motion).
But the intuitive view referred to in the article is that the sun revolves around the Earth once per day, as observed from Earth. That you cannot make work by fancy maths, without running into conclusions which contradict other observations.
Especially when you consider that both are, in fact, "wrong". In a two-body system, they both revolve around around the center of mass. (Though truly our solar system is far beyond a two-body system).
True. I think that people who think that they are scientific like to believe certain things just as much as people who are not scientific. I am sure that if you sat Jonah down and asked him to prove any of these things there would be a squirt in his 'A.C.C.' circuit!
In one chapter of his book On the Wild Side (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the hollow Earth model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this hypothesis posits that light rays travel in circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish between the two cosmologies.
I've always been interested in the definition of 'science'. What makes one belief 'scientific' as opposed to non-scientific.
In order to approach science, we must assume that nature is lawful, deterministic and understandable. Of course, we all know that there are certain 'laws' of nature that exist and have been proven beyond doubt, but the majority of science consists of findings that result from studies that rely on an arbitrary probability of 95%+.
The idea that there are laws of nature proven beyond a doubt doesn't accord with the history of physics. Newton's conception of natural law was held to be "true" until it was upended by Einstein.
Karl Popper actually proposes a nice criterion to distinguish science from non-science. He argues (whether persuasively or no) that scientific claims are falsifiable, where non-scientific claims need not be. That allows us to distinguish between things like astrology, whose claims are generally not falsifiable, and mathematical astronomy, whose claims are falsifiable.
Science is not a belief system, it is a knowledge system and the distinction is quite precise and necessary. Science is a method for developing predictive models based on material observation and nothing else.
I wouldn't limit the goal of science to developing predictive models, to completely understand a behaviour we must also be able to describe, explain and control the behaviour.
I would suggest that describing and explaining a behavior is the same as constructing a predictive model of that behavior, and that controlling it is in the realm of engineering, not science.
The problem with that is that some things we currently regard as scientific can neither be described well or controlled. Quantum mechanics is a good example. The defining characteristic that still makes it science is that we can predict things using mathematical equations (although not as well as we would like).
Which brings me to an interesting question. If a hypothetical alien civilization develops technology using different types of math than us, different analogies than us (particles/wave, etc.), and different beliefs than us, is it still science? I would argue yes. If they can create sophisticated technology that is predictable, the end effect is the same that we humans have.
Which brings me to my last question. Is string theory science? Again, I would say yes. Because although its predictions are not currently capable of being tested, they are in principle capable of being tested with more sophisticated technology. There is a clear path to developing a test of its predictions.
So I think "science" can best be described as the pursuit of prediction.
[in regards to the Big Bang] Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in?
I hate to wade into Intelligent Design but I'm feeling grumpy tonight so what the hell.
First, I do not believe in some mythical deity who created the world 7 thousand years ago. Or even last week. I'm agnostic. Those things I do not know about, I do not know about. It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them.
Having said that, we had a great piece on HN a year or two ago from a mathematician showing that we are most likely living in a simulated universe. I don't have the academic chops to comment on it, but I know that it's entirely possible that all of our sensory inputs are being manipulated in ways that mimic the universe we think we live in. When you think of billions of years of intelligence evolving all over the place, we're fairly simple creatures. Just like we could fool an ant into thinking his queen lives somewhere else, I don't think it'd be very difficult at all for some external entity to control us. Maybe as a game. Who knows.
The point is: the idea that our sensory perceptions are fabricated and false in some way is a perfectly self-consistent and logical thing to believe in. Of course, it's a really stupid thing to believe in if you're a scientist, because if you can't trust empirical evidence, science kind of goes out the window. So yes, scientists can't believe that and have any kind of career at all, but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it.
I bring that up because of something good the author mentions: This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts
This is true. Much like pilots have to learn not to trust their inner ear when flying, students of science have to unlearn many things they may consider "common sense".
But you end up coming full circle. Even accepting science as the only light mankind has in the darkness, eventually you end back up wondering if the models we have are not just more fancy versions of the Ptolemy's Celestial Spheres[1]. You can take models that don't fit and do all sorts of magic with them to make them work. For a long time.
I am concerned that we are "diagnosing" people as somehow in need of re-education, medication, or intervention simply because they think in a different manner from the rest of us. If my neighbor wants to believe he's living in a Matrix, more power to him. He's not going to be a rocket scientist any time soon. And even if he is, plenty of people manage to have deeply trans-rational beliefs about the way things work and they function just fine in the world in all sorts of intricate, complicated scientific endeavors. We are drawing distinctions where none may be needed.
Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated by science to be better than their peers. That's pretty cool when you're 20 and figure out how awesome it is that calculus and physics go together, but it's a really screwed up way to live your life or influence public policy.
I was thinking about this a bit recently. Now, as a disclaimer, I am not particularly well-versed in philosophy or anything, so chances are I'm either categorically mistaken or echoing a well-known idea.
My thought was this: something that is fundamentally unknowable is also fundamentally irrelevant. Particularly, something only matters if it has some effect. This leads to two cases: it either has an effect, and is therefore measurable, or it does not have an effect and therefore does not matter.
Now, this only applies to problems that are fundamentally undecidable--if it's just practical limitations (say technological shortcomings) then they could have an effect that we just can't reasonably trace.
But the idea of living in a perfect simulation that behaves just like the universe? From our perspective, that is not different from the just living in the universe at all. Now, if we could measure a difference, it could be important, but lets take the premise that we can't: now thinking about the universe as is or as a simulation of the universe as is is equivalent. So in either case the simpler model--no simulation--is, in essence, correct.
The same applies to a religious straw man--the god who does not affect the world at all. If the god just makes the world behave exactly the way it behaves, it may as well be taken out of the picture, mathematically cancelled (in a sense).
Sounds similar to Pierce's thoughts on pragmat{i|ici}sm:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object
Other than Pierce, there are other thinkers who were pragmatists of one variety or the other that had a big influence on american thinking like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr and William James.
I think we'd need to distinguish "scientifically irrelevant" from "humanly irrelevant".
Scientifically, discovering that a god created the universe and let it be (the disinterested watchmaker) has no bearing on any future experiments.
Psychologically/sociologically, discovering that some god exists would change humanity forever. Even if the god couldn't be interacted with, the level of religious fervor would rise to unimaginable heights.
Discovering we are simulations living in a matrix [every neutrino has a serial number on it!] might drive people to drastically different behavior (suicide, risk taking, etc.) even there may not be a measurable difference in the simulated and virtual reality.
Basically,
human society with irrelevant knowledge of universe != human society sans knowledge
But if we could discover that we live in the matrix or at the whim of some deity, it would mean that that fact had some effect on the world. Even a tiny non-zero effect could be amplified, like you explained, to have gigantic repercussions.
However, I was only really thinking of fundamentally unknowable things. That is, my argument is basically (in mathy notation) `∀x: ¬disoverable(x) → ¬matters(x)`. That is, if you can know x, I've said nothing about it. All I'm saying is that if you cannot discover something to be true, it cannot have any effect on you.
The contrapositive is also very important: `∀x: matters(x) → disoverable(x)`. That is, if something could have an effect (like your examples) then it has to be discoverable.
Since your main premise is that disoverable(x) is true--e.g. we can somehow find this out--my statement does not apply (or, rather, thanks to the way implication works, it's true regardless of what effect x does or does not have).
Now, if we fundamentally can't prove whether we're living in a simulation or not, somebody could still convince the human population that we are and cause the same effects you're mentioning. However, the beautiful thing here is that this could happen regardless of whether we actually are in a simulation or not (since the premise is that we can't tell), so the truth of the fact doesn't actually matter.
I think your making a few logic errors there. There would have to be some effect to prove either of those theories and that would be scientifically relevant. Just for example the first may be say seeing into the heavens which would raise questions about what laws of physics governs theres.
In other words "knowledge of the universe" == "knowledge" and there is no irrelevant knowledge as the universe is everything.
This is a fundamental property of the scientific method: that which is untestable(what you call unknowable)is inadmissible in reasoning. This is also the materialist view you are expressing (and my own view as well).
Yes, many feel this way. After thinking about it, I have found it a bit of circular reasoning, though. When you use a phrase like "fundamentally unkowable" you are using the definition of the thing you wish to explore, simply stated another way. You begin with saying "I can only reasonably take action on things that I know about in a scientific sense." then you point out that when dealing with things like simulations, they exist outside the world of empirical data, ie, scientific knowledge. You ask the question something like "But if I am unable to determine something empirically, what sort of useful action could I take?" and finally end up with "I can only take action with things I know about in a scientific sense." Full circle.
The problem is that the premise is demonstrably not true. We take action all the time based on things that have nothing to do with science at all. You watch a movie about dogs and decide to buy a dog. I tell you a story about a starving kid in Africa and you decide to send him some money. Science enters not into the picture one bit. Humans are not robots.
Here's a thought experiment. Let's say you are living six thousand years ago and about to go die in some epic battle. I am able to visit you from the future, but only you, and only appearing as somebody of your time. I tell you something like "Yep, you're all probably going to die today, but I'm from the future and I want you to know that your death has major meaning and changes the future for mankind in ways that are tremendously good. Thank you."
So you go out into battle motivated and kill a few more of the enemy. Perhaps before the battle you stand up on a rock and tell everybody you know that people from the future will one day remember their names in glory and that what they do here today is a tremendous victory for mankind. You have received information and are acting on it that is completely outside your ability to verify. It's completely outside the ability of your entire culture to make sense of or verify. Yet it has a major, positive impact. The people listening to you, based on science, should not accept what you say. Yet this is not the way it plays out.
Let's run through the scenario again, only this time I lie to you. In actuality your death means nothing. Perhaps I'm not even from the future. Perhaps I came from across the valley. The thing is, it makes no difference at all. The fact that it had an emotional and very real physical impact on the world means that it is something worthy of our consideration as humans -- not as scientists, but as humans.
You might feel like I am going down the road of "religion may not be true, but it has emotional impact on people, therefore it is good." but I am not. What I'm saying is that there is a class of information exchange and reasoning that has nothing to do with science yet is useful and irreplaceable in our lives. How you choose to go about dealing with that class of information and reasoning is your own business, but for me at least I've found the chain of reasoning that sounds like "things I cannot scientifically prove are not worthy of my time" to be unworthy of pursuit. It seems woefully incomplete when compared to what really happens in the world. And perhaps a bit naive. Or at least blinkered.
Just my thoughts. Thanks for sharing yours! :)
EDIT: Just to clarify, when I say "It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them." in the GP, I mean not worthy of my emotional energy. To me, it's perfectly normal to act in as rational a manner as possible, and to enjoy myth, being human, superstition, awe of the unknown, and creative speculation when I need to. I do not spend all of my time in either system, and it's not worth a big emotional investment to try to debate things between two such fundamentally different paradigms. I do not understand why people keep trying to do so.
The question of whether or not we inhabit a simulated universe only matters insofar as we would be able to determine the fact or not. Any speculation beyond that is unscientific.
Incidentally, the mathematical construction I believe you are referring to is the Boltzmann Brain.
The boltzmann brain arises from a statistical fluctuation. I think he is talking about the simulation hypothesis and in particular arguments put forward by the philosopher Nick Bostrom.
He mentioned the likelihood of existing in a simulated universe in the context of probabilities - the Boltzmann Brain is the construct I know of that directly addresses this.
Bostrom's argument is also a statistical kind of argument. I can't know what Daniel was thinking - I merely hooked on the words most likely living in a simulated universe. and all of our sensory inputs are being manipulated in ways that mimic the universe we think we live in.
The cause of a Boltzmann Brain does not act directly, it's merely a random fluctuation that allows an arrangement of particles to form a mind that thinks it's existing. There is no simulation or manipulation or attempt to fool. It just is something so unlikely, you have to wait an unmentionable amount of time to have it occur. Assuming there is nothing in physics that ends up barring such.
The Boltzmann brain argument is one that is hard to swallow and very unlikely by definition. Bostrom's simulation argument puts forward that we are most likely in a simulation and makes a compelling case.
The Boltzmann brain is about a conscious entity arising due to chance, or the known universe for that matter; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
The word simulation does not occur on that page, it is about our universe being just a fluke.
There are thoughts that are relegated to philosophy. An important field certainly, but one distinctly separate from modern science, which is concerned primarily with the observable. Is it possible that we are living within a simulated universe? Certainly. However, unless we begin to find evidence that suggests so, in the realm of science, it doesn't matter one bit.
As an aside, this happens to be my view on religion as well. I suppose though with the possibility of eternal damnation and all, it perhaps matter a bit more than the whole Matrix thing.
You can perform empirical experiments on the topics philosophy is concerned with in the same way you can perform experiments in the realm of 'pure' mathematics. I don't think there's any such distinction as philosophy/science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson does a good job of explaining the difference between modern science and philosophy at the 1:02:00 mark in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zXYTwuwsyI
Tyson appears to distinguish between the two on the basis of topics under investigation, but not by any difference between the scientific method and the methods used by philosophers. I am not sure I agree with this distinction from an epistemological point of view.
I would suggest logic is a tool for measuring and observing in the universe in the platonic forms just as the large hadron colider is in the universe of the physical.
I think logic is more a proxy or a heuristic. It helps you make conjectures about the world even if you don't necessarily have direct evidence.
But if your observations contradict your logic? Something must be wrong. It could easily be the observations, but the more you have, the less likely it is. I think, at the very limit, deduction would have to give way to induction.
This happened to Kant. In Critique of Pure Reason, he presents Euclidean geometry as a set of incontestable, fundamental truths that human beings understand intuitively, and uses that as a launching point to argue for the existence of an ideal universe outside of our own perceptions and experience. Problem is, Euclid's parallel postulate is contradicted by observable evidence, as per general relativity. Other fundamental logical ideas about causality seem to be contradicted by experiments involving quantum mechanics. For science to work, though, we do have to take one thing on faith: That the universe can be understood through observation. Everything else, even logic, is fair game.
I'm sorry, my particular choice of words is sloppy. Ricardobeat said that "philosophy can only offer logical proof, non-observable/measureable". In this context, I assumed that "logic" really meant deduction or, at most, observations much less rigorous than science.
Now, assuming that by "logic" I really mean reasoning without observations, I hope my point becomes more clear. My impression is that philosophers do not really go in for scientific studies and experiments; if an idea proved logically by a philosopher contradicted sufficiently good experimental evidence, for some value of "sufficiently good", I would side with the evidence.
Hopefully my thinking is clearer now. I'm working on improving my writing, so hopefully I'll be less needlessly ambiguous in the future :).
Pascal's Wager is about behaving as if Deity existed even though you're not sure in order to avoid damnation.
Moreover, why do you make Deity a global variable? What if everyone has his or her own's afterlife? If it's global it should probably be a constant anyway, it's one of those things you don't want to mess with…
> Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated by science to be better than their peers.
You seem to be making an odd distinction here. I find the idea that humans are easily fooled and one shouldn't believe things until you have evidence, rigorously checked by other people and with techniques based on hundreds of years of experience in how human beings fool themselves and get things wrong, to be very humble.
I don't see more and more people feeling elevated by science and becoming condescending or superior. I do see people get that way when the idea of evidence is casually dismissed because of some gut feeling. That condescending response isn't helpful and doesn't do the scientific or intellectual community any good but it's because of the incredible arrogance behind the cavalier dismissal of all that experience in searching for what's true.
> Science is provisional
That's quite the statement. Scientific findings are provisional. At this point, it's really hard to argue that science itself is. The idea that one is most likely to be right if they don't believe things without evidence and the enormous philosophical machine humanity has built that turns hard work into facts isn't provisional. It's the only thing we've ever discovered or built that works.
As to the simulated universe: What if the universe where the beings who simulate our universe is also simulated in another 3rd universe, and that one in a 4th universe and so on up until you get to 7. Then it stops.
That's just as likely as 2 nested universes or that the universe is the dream of giant inter-dimensional turtle or that your own mind is the only thing that exists and the rest of the universe is a hallucination.
All these things are possible, and impossible to be disproved, but even if they are true, science is still the only working method for figuring out what the rules are to the simulation/dream/hallucination. So go ahead and believe we are in the matrix, I will still have the same simulated contempt for other simulated people who decide that thousands of years of work by human beings attempting to learn about the matrix is worth the same as what they "feel" should be true. That's incredible arrogance.
What you're saying only makes sense as long on no one acts on their unsupportable beliefs in a hidden world. As soon as they start behaving in a manner inconsistent with the mean collective human perception of reality, they become a danger to themselves and others.
You could say the same about anyone who deviates from the norms of whatever society he's in. One could say that Richard Stallman, for example, "behaves in a manner inconsistent with the mean collective human perception of reality". But is he a danger to himself and others just because he does so?
Inconsistent with the mean collective human perception of reality, or inconsistent with an accurate perception of reality? If there's anything that ought to be clear from the article I would think that it's that these two are not the same thing?
When we wade into the idea of whether or not we're living in a simulated universe, we're wading into Rumsfeldan territory: those things we do not know we do not know. Personally, I find God a lot more elegant than the Matrix, but neither are within our epistemic horizons.
I think anyone who says otherwise is vastly overestimating the capacity of human knowledge. And besides, wouldn't the universe containing a simulated universe be even more complicated?
The simulation hypothesis doesn't change anything with regards to science, though. Experience shows that the simulation has some kind of consistency that allows us to make predictions. Science is a systematic way to explore how the simulation works. Call it "the real world" or "the simulation", it doesn't really change anything.
Why do people still think that not believing in something must be an active position to take? Atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive, and in fact, most people who identify as one are also the other.
I don't care if a person thinks we're living in the Matrix, or that God created the world in 6 days 5000 years ago, or that the world exists on a giant tortoise shell. People can believe whatever bullshit they want. I do have a problem when that shit starts informing policy decisions. It's the difference between "I believe God created the world for man to live in" and "I believe God created the world for man to live in, so I'll pollute that shit as much as I damn well please". The problem is that people vote for politicians who support policies steeped in bad science, or no science at all, because they don't know science or, even worse, they are willfully ignorant of it.
No matter how convincing the argument that we're living in a simulated universe is, or how much a person truly believes in God, until it has a measurable effect on the real world, such a belief has no place in the arena of public policy.
> Those things I do not know about, I do not know about. It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them.
That's the atheist position: An atheist (like me) simply accepts evidence and comes to conclusions based on that. My disbelief in deities is the same as my disbelief that my bank account currently contains one million dollars US: The best I can do based on my current knowledge.
Agnosticism is a belief that we can't know some things, which I do not have.
> but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it.
Fine, unless his belief in it means he kills his family and himself so they can escape the Matrix. Beliefs have consequences.
> This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts
The findings here seem fairly spurious. Intuitively true things are given more immediate access in the brain because the neural pathways are strong for them. Non-intuitive things take longer because the pathways are weaker. Equating this with instincts seems unreliable at best. Really the problem is people have a hard time grasping the unintuitive so long as it is not brought into alignment with more intuitive concepts. This is much more fundamental than "bad instincts" - it's really more that the vast majority of learning takes place outside of conscious perception and is not conceptual in nature.
I believe in science, and the belief itself is nothing different from the beliefs in god for some people. Science theories are all about proving older theories wrong, and humans naturally regard those older theories as "intuition".
I don't think it has anything to do with being naive or not. Aristotle thought that bigger object falls faster, force is required to maintain motion, and air is made with one element. These are all great discoveries that hold for over one thousand years. They are science. And I don't think they are naive at all. Aristotle is one of the most intelligent people at his time, and so is Issac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Yet today we regard the views of the elites as "truths" and all the rest as "naive intuition".
These scientists all did the same thing: prove something wrong by discovering something that explains more things more accurately in more circumstances. The fundamental way they achieved this is empirical observations, which are simply endless. Therefore, there's nothing stopping us from proving Newton's laws or Relativity wrong.
The way we come up with scientific conclusions has very similar characteristics with the way we know God. In school, we can reach conclusions by drawing a graph with 7 data points and observing some linear relationship with an imaginary straight line that somehow connects them. Boom! A conclusion of "truth". One major difference of scientific discoveries is that they involve mathematics, which is a priori by nature, and this makes "science" consistent and stable.
It's perfectly understandable that not many people believe in evolution. It's a fact that evolution theories have more evidence than creationist beliefs, but it's never a human nature to chase the "more evidence". We make irrational and hence suboptimal decisions everyday, yet we humans as a whole are not necessarily disadvantaged by irrationalities. "More evidence" doesn't mean it's right and "less evidence" doesn't mean it's wrong. "More probable" doesn't mean it will happen, and "less probable" doesn't mean it won't happen. You get the idea.
Or is it true that elites (minority of people) have more tenancy to believe in theories with more evidence, accept explanation that covers more circumstances and do things that have more probabilities of success? And everyone else is stuck with emotions, "naive intuition" and irrationalities?
I find the problem of induction interesting. I’ve long had this strange doubt whether, for example, the natural numbers actually correspond to a natural phenomenon—or whether classical logic is anything more than an approximate model of whatever logic actually underlies the universe.
Humans mostly understand counting intuitively, logic perhaps less so. But how can we make inductive statements about natural numbers if they’re merely a by-product of how our brains work? How could we use the “pure” language of mathematics to communicate with extraterrestrials if our understanding of mathematics is based on entirely different principles?
As a pragmatist, I mostly just keep my head down and say “numbers and Booleans may not be anything, but we can use them to do things, and that’s good enough”.
I found myself wincing at "pressure produces heat". For the purpose and context of this article, that is probably close enough. Because the subtlety of energy spent increasing pressure being converted to thermal energy is too finicky. But it's also more correct.
And this relates to a problem I've run into whenever you try to talk to an expert about something. People come up to me with fanciful ideas about physics and you have to stop them every five seconds to clear up what they mean by "power" or "energy". Or (as a favor) just listen all the way through and see if you can get a notion of what they mean so you can discuss their idea.
Same thing happens when I try to ask lawyers about something. I'm always getting asked, "Do you mean a law, or a statute?" or having things like "well, that's a legal term-of-art" given back to me.
The point being that it's hard to jump into thinking about anything that others have spent a long time considering and carefully defining.
So, I /am/ a scientist (computer, but still: I was in the PhD program for a long time, and am mainly interested in theoretical issues in parsing and type systems) and most of my friends are as well (everything from chemists and physicists to public health researchers), and even I don't "believe in science" (to mean, if someone sais to me "science claims X", and even shows me a bibliography with quotes from the authors, that I now believe X). If it weren't for my background and experience knowing that science could actually work, or having not spent the time to look into and learn the individual arguments being made and seeing that some of them actually are sound, I could easily see myself discounting something like evolution as a passing fad.
The problem is that 99% of your average person's interaction with "science" is by way of newspaper articles claiming "scientists say red meat is bad" and then three years later "scientists say red meat may be good". Another three years go by, and they see "scientists say red meat is bad for you after all". In reality, some scientists demonstrated an interesting correlation with a single marker (and often later studies are talking about correlations to something else entirely) that may or may not actually be causative, and either the media is spinning it into "a story" or some public health bureau is playing a numbers game that leads to the behavior "if it has any effect at all we should recommend it".
But, what the public sees is: "scientists say X" followed by "scientists say Y, previous scientists were somehow wrong", followed by "scientists claim that second scientists were wrong and they were right the whole time". We are actively training the public so that when we hear "scientist say X" the response is "engh: they're probably wrong". Hell, this article and my reading it is an interesting example: it's chock full of references to published journal papers and actual psychologists, but I honestly don't even care anymore as every time I've gone and pulled the research articles like this are based on I've come up with tenuous conclusions based on flawed experiments that are being trumpeted as the new truth.
Worse, much of the "science" being cited isn't really science at all: a cohort study, for example, has no controlled experiment and can't really be used to show anything definitive; it is, at best, a way to come up with interesting hypotheses on which to later run actual experiments. However, a good number of the "scientists say X" that people hear are from health research, where controlled experiments in humans are sufficiently rare and tied up in ethical conundrums that many of the statements being made (and almost all of the ones involving diets) come from new cohort studies or meta-analyses of previous cohort studies. It is no wonder, then, that every three years we hear something different. ;P
Now, with that in mind, imagine the average person hearing "scientists claim evolution is true". They often respond with things like "it's just a theory: one of many". I will contend that they do that because to them "scientists claim evolution is true" only has as much evidence behind it as "scientists claim red meat is bad for you" or "scientists now claim salt may not be bad for you after all" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613) and the result is now that they don't trust us: we can tell them anything we want, but they have no reason to believe us anymore, as we were continually wrong to them every time it mattered to them before.
I will then claim that if we want to be credible, we need to stop reporting every paper that comes out to the public as "scientists say X" and even further be careful about what we call "science" in the first place. It should be that when we claim that something is true, it is because we have sufficiently strong theoretical models and experimental evidence that can really claim "this is knowledge that may be imprecise, but is not inaccurate" in the way that newtonian mechanics is a little imprecise (it doesn't take into account relativistic or quantum effects), but isn't so wildly inaccurate that we should ever expect to see a newspaper headline "scientists report we were wrong all along: objects of greater mass actually repel each other".
I don't believe I would have to suppress theory that Sun revolves around Earth because I never had such theory because when I became curious why this bright dot on the sky appears on different places it was explained to me what revolves around what and how it is possible.
I think I might have more trouble with the question "does the sun move across the sky" because when I look up I don't see any movement.
It's not about the intuitiveness of a belief. It's about whether the right or wrong theory got to the child first. You internalize first good enough theory you hear not the one that's most intuitive or the one that explains all the data best.
I don't think it's that simple. Look at our language: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Noon is when the sun is straight above us. All this basic language implies the sun is moving and the earth is stationary. Language is incredibly important to how we form thoughts.
"Sun rises" implicates only movement. Sun apparently moving does not imply that I'm stationary. It's easy to tell that the sun moves same way as trees move seen through a window of a train.
You could explain it to a 4 year old. But for that you have to know and believe that it's the Earth that actually moves. Otherwise you'll plant false idea and intuition into member of next generation.
That point wasn't whether or not you could explain it or believe it; obviously everyone knows the earth revolves around the sun. The point is that somewhere deep in our brains the sun moving around the earth is fundamental. The fact that our language implicates movement of the sun might just be the cause.
I don't think our brains have built in even the concept of the Earth having any around for the Sun to move.
Many religions have concept of sun being born at dawn, travel through the sky and die at dusk and stay dead through the night.
Our brains surely have the idea that Earth is flat built in. But I don't think that anyone has to suppress that ingrained theory when answering "is the Earth round or flat?"
This is because we all as children, when we were for the first time curious what shape the world has, were told that it's round and were shown pictures. That's first sensible theory we got and that's the one we internalized.
> But I don't think that anyone has to suppress that ingrained theory when answering "is the Earth round or flat?"
That's an unfounded assumption; perhaps we pause at that question as much as we pause about questions about the movement of the sun. Certainly the character of the question is the same.
I generally agree. I don't find evolution troublesome, for example, because the idea that "my cousin is an ape" is OK by me.
The counterexample to this tidy situation is quantum mechanics. Its implications are confusing even to experts. We have so much experience with macro-level phenomena that runs counter to what QM says. It's hard to imagine a world where this mismatch could be averted at an early age.
For real. I stopped reading the article once the author used "Begging the question" incorrectly. Not sure how I'm supposed to take any journalism seriously if the reporter can't even use simple English phrases correctly.
That's a very pervasive mistake, to the point where one could question if it may be simply snobbery to insist on it being a mistake (although I am strongly in favor of correct usage, the nature of language is such that people use terms which they believe others will interpret as they do, and the people who associate the "wrong" meaning already appear in the majority). On another note, I think it's generally nothing to be proud of when you "stop reading something", and I wish people would stop announcing it in this complaining manner--if you didn't read the article, there's not much to discuss so you might as well not make this known at all. There are lots of other informative points to be gleaned from the article if you look past these rather superficial errors.
There are plenty of people outside the US, religious or not, who have no problems with science. Religion only seems to be anti-science in the USA and amongst a tiny minority in the Islamic world.
I wonder if religion is really the issue. Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science? Perhaps business, politics and media have worked to create a society turned away from science and then those people turn to religion to fill the gaps.
> Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science?
Certainly there is. Maybe not in an evil way like "hey! let's keep all the people ignorant so we can control the world", but mainly to keep the status quo.
Consider this: Science teaches to question everything, so you can understand the rationale about how and why something happens the way it does.
But... having a bunch of people questioning everything, even the very fabric of our society, is usually not something very amusing to the ones that happen to be the current rulers. That's why, from the ancient world to this days, the higher studies where reserved to the elites... the less likely part of the population that would turn against the current structure of society. For example, during the Dark Ages, the church saw science as the works of the devil (and sadly, some of them still do [1]).... or more specifically, something that would make people question about their doings, their position it society, and so on...
And usually, things doesn't go so nice to the people in power, when more and more people starts questioning their world. Look at what happened to Luis XVI, Nicholas II, or more recently in the Middle East. Or looking even closer... the anti-globalist movements and the environmental movements, as (not-so-extreme) examples of people questioning the status quo.
Finally, in some countries it's very public that some politicians think and say that is much easier to handle an ignorant population, than a well educated one.
[Edit: Added]
[1] A few years ago, when I asked a very religious fellow student about the existence of fossils, his answer was that some where the remains of the animals that lived before the great flood, and the older ones where there just to "test our faith".
One of the key things that gets lost in this that the piece tends to assume that unscientific beliefs are somehow bad and we'd be better off without them. I am not convinced that's the case.
There are two reasons I think so. The first is that, as P. W. Anderson pointed out in his essay "More is Different" (published in Science magazine in 1972) reductionism doesn't work. With added complexity comes fundamentally new patterns. Just as chemistry is not just applied physics and biology is not just applied chemistry, I don't think life is just applied science and the real epistemological limits to what science can tell us are very real barriers. Heisenberg does a great job of mapping out these problems in his look at the history of scientific thought ("Physics and Philosophy").
When you look at verbomotor cultures and how they look a the world, their ideas of magic and religion aren't really filling the same roles as science today (see Ong, Walter "Orality and Literacy" and Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and Reality" See also Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" and Grimes ed., Ronald "Readings in Ritual Studies"). Instead, in a culture based on spoken discourse instead of writing, everything is based on re-usable patterns that can be flexibly applied. This is something greatly missing in religious thought today. The mystery of a story is not whether it happened in the past but rather how it happens today. From this perspective a story like the Fall from Eden isn't so much about the origins of sin as it is the model of leaving one's parents' house, getting married, having kids, and becoming an adult.
I think these sorts of patterns are likely deeply ingrained in us and it's better for us to accept and use it than fight it in the quest to conform to science. For example, in the article, you have the idea that people naturally think of heat as a substance. This works fine for many applications. One can think of heat exchangers as not being fundamentally different than the system of oxygen exchange in the body or vice versa. They do work the same way on a metaphorical level and these metaphors as Heisenberg shows (again "Physics and Philosophy") are also at the core of the formation of scientific theories. I therefore wonder if we'd have any scientific progress if our scientists had no unscientific beliefs.
Additionally you have issues with the quest to be more scientific often eating the tail of, well, science. For example, it is worth noting that countries in Western Europe who use midwives as the routine primary care for childbirth have better outcomes than Western European countries that do not. Yet there is a fear that by doing this in, say, the US, we will be backing away from our commitment to science. Why is following emperical data seen this way though? Is it that we really worship technology in the guise of science?
> "Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in?"
Because some scientific ideas are constantly derided and publicly ridiculed by moral, cultural and political leaders and institutions. If the church and half the country (still) held that heliocentricity were preposterous, it may still be as 'hard to believe in' as evolution is, decades after science considered it 'settled'.
Yes. An idea formed on a basis of scientific study.
"Idea" is just shorthand to cover what we colloquially know as theories, natural laws, hypotheses that haven't yet been directly tested, etc.
> At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long.
I would say that it's exclusively an American problem :) I get rather annoyed stumbling on the creationist articles. It's like reading on flat earth in 2012. What's even more entertaining is that people try to explain it in A.C.C. and D.L.P.F.C. terms. Just "get your shit together", folks :)
Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts, quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for direct causes and effects over linear time scales. That's just the tip of the ice berg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - That's a pretty comprehensive list. Memorize and comprehend all of those, and even then you won't get a handle around how badly humans reason - because you are human yourself!
It's also why humans find programming difficult (logic is very unnatural to a inductive reasoner). All swans are white programmers will quickly smash into the error caused by unpredictbale black swans coming into the system. Hence that's why you need exceptions, conditionals and containers to deal with the most absurd inputs (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...).
Humans are animals, with a bunch of neurons in their heads that look for and extract statistically significant patterns from correlated data over short term linear time scales. We mistake correlation for causation thanks to all the mental shortcuts that were used to keep us alive in a less complex world.
Why don't we believe in science? The same reason we eat food, drink water and socialize with our peers - to stay alive. Science is deduction from first principles (backed by evidence of course). And that is very, very unnatural.
I am irritated by the use of the word "we" in the title, "Why We Don't Believe in Science".
The article begins with three paragraphs discussing the widespread belief in creationism. It appears to the reader (that is to say, me--I clarify just whom I'm speaking for, unlike the author) that this is intended at least as a prominent example of "us not believing in science". In fact, this appears to be the focus of the article.
However, the author talks as though he sees creationism as obviously false, calling the 46% statistic "a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere", and asking, "What makes the human mind so resistant to [...] facts [...] buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?" Furthermore, the author does not provide any arguments against creationism, instead proceeding as though it were obviously false to his audience as well.
Well, if neither the author nor his intended audience is a creationist (when evolutionary alternatives to creationism appear to be the "Science" that "We Don't Believe In"), then just who is "we"? The word seems quite inappropriate.
All the article manages to establish about "we" is that, when we're processing and reasoning about physical systems, if they don't map well to visceral intuition, then we use an extra part of our brains; and that this appears to cost some kind of effort and slow us down. I expect even that last effect could be mitigated with practice or by developing a certain mindset; but ignoring that, all it would establish is "We Think More Slowly About [Certain Kinds of] Science", not "We Don't Believe In [Certain Kinds of] Science". Just learn to think slowly and carefully in certain situations; I think I, for one, have that reflex built into my bones. Anyway, it being difficult to think about something is clearly insufficient explanation by itself--how many people "don't believe in integral calculus"?
If you actually want to know why the people who believe in creationism believe in creationism, then you should probably investigate them. Let's see. We have idea A (creationism--really this refers to a category of many specific beliefs), and competing idea B (human evolutionary theory). Both ideas are sufficiently complex and detailed that it is unlikely that many of the people we're interested in came up with it on their own. So let's see when and how they're exposed to both ideas, and how they reason about the ideas on their own after exposure.
At this point, for a journalistic article worth publishing, you would probably want to present some research. Find some creationists, ask them some questions about their background, figure out some patterns, do some large-scale sampling to see if you've found all the common patterns, and do detailed interviews of a few representative people from each pattern.
(Probably the biggest pattern is "grows up in a religious, creationist family; is exposed to human evolutionary theory either not at all, or just a little in high school, and is told by parents and priests or other authorities that it's all bunk, and accepts this; takes a career path that doesn't involve studying human genetics or biology in detail; and doesn't find a need to seriously question creationism at any point in the rest of their life."
If evolution were easier to reason about, it might increase the rate at which people decided on their own--after having been exposed to evolutionary theory--that humans evolved. But... I find evolution easy to understand and reason about--at least in simple cases of obvious improvements to an organism; the evolution of behaviors that are useful only in a group or in a family with certain structure is much more difficult, because it's hard to know what hominid societies were like; but most of the obvious changes between humans and more primitive mammals--getting taller and more dexterous and brainy--are easy to at least decide to be plausible. I think it really just doesn't come up often in these people's lives, except as something like "Another godless rant from a misguided intellectual", which is easily dismissed. I conclude that the scientific content of this article--the studies involving observing how people and their brains respond to "nonintuitive" physical situations--is probably in fact irrelevant to the stuff about creationists.)
Once you've learned why creationists are the way they are, then you might learn what might be good ideas for how to change them. But! Any moral principle that justifies you using any means to try to change them can justify them using the same means to try to change you. Anyone who advocates compulsory, tax-funded public schooling, and then complains about the fact that they're being forced to send their kids to be taught anti-science and to pay for the same disservice to be done to other kids--I consider you to have brought your problems upon yourself and I have no sympathy for you. (Nor do I sympathize with creationists in favor of compulsory public education. A plague on all your houses, dammit!) If you feel the need, then put your efforts into civil, reasoned argument, hopefully in a not-annoying way.
This result about people apparently having to "push back against their instincts" is an interesting thing. I'd be interested to hear more detailed and careful investigation on the subject: can you establish exactly what things are hard to reason about? does it vary from person to person? can you improve by thinking about such situations more, and would this make it hard to do repeated measurements with the same people? etc. This would have been good as a standalone science article. Unfortunately, it was cast as an article about evolution vs creationism, with an annoyingly incorrect (and possibly condescending) title and a probably misleading conclusion.
On the other hand, it'll probably attract a lot of traffic. If that is the author's job, he's probably done it well. I want to go live in a private little world now...
Well, I don't know. Maybe backlash from people like me can have some effect. There's probably a reason they don't put up even more linkbait-y stuff. Some people would decide to read other stuff. Even those who eat up the linkbait, they're probably not discriminating, and they could easily switch to another linkbait source that might happen to give them better content once, or be more convenient once. I guess maybe I can hope for competition and a race to the bottom to wipe out stuff like this. (Come to think of it, that is happening. But this newspaper probably has some highbrow content as well, neh? Hmm... It's possible that an editor (with detailed observation of readers), or the author, might figure out that linkbait eventually loses readers and reputation, and eliminate the column from the paper, or the technique from his writing repertoire. Possible. For now, I'm still going to my private little world.)
The problem that I see is the way we frame these discussions. Does the question "do you believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years" preclude you from believing in science on any level?? In these discussions we throw everyone into one bin or another - you either believe in evolution or you believe God waves his/her magical hand for everything.
I'd bet if you asked those same people the question "Do you believe God cooked your pop tarts this morning or do you believe the toaster cooked your pop tart through principles of electricity and heat" you'd get a much more interesting set of answers. (No doubt that you'd still get many that answer the former.)
The problem with these questions is that what you are really asking people of faith is "Are you completely faithful to a religion that guides your daily life?" Most people use and come to religion to guide their day to day human interactions rather than using it as a tool to explore the principles of the universe. If we as humans want to make progress we have to stop pushing on the evolution lever - it just causes divisions. What we should be doing is approaching the topic of science for people of faith from a more artificial level meaning "if X causes Y then Z" sort of stuff. In other words we can approach and teach scientific principles without going down the rabbit hole. Some people will say this isn't possible but I just don't think thats true.