It would be more accurate to say that science corrects itself. At any given time there are ideas which appear to have been verified as much as possible, others which are near speculation, and others which are quite uncertain with evidence for and against.
What I think the parent means by contradicting science is rather different: the Bible says things which go against ideas which we believe have been verified by evidence, but the Bible won’t be changed to reflect that understanding. On the other hand, science will change its idea of what it thinks to be true as more evidence becomes available. Nobody changes things in the Bible.
Time, and causuality, is a construct inside of our universe. Asking who created the creator is like asking which way is down when you are in outer space..
If you can’t use the concept of causality outside of the universe, then the idea that there’s a creator outside of the universe who caused the universe is already out of bounds.
> who caused the universe is already out of bounds.
"caused" can mean a different thing. Imagine causualty in a 3d FPS video game, and the creation of the game itself. Though they are similar in semantics, one is different from the other.
Ah, well in that case, the parent poster can just say that asking about the cause of the creator is a valid thing to talk about, because they mean a subtly different kind of ‘cause’ than the kind of cause you told them wasn’t valid to talk about outside of the universe.
They can, but that wouldn't be too interesting to anyone in this universe. Or that it how I read it. Just like a being in a game wondering what caused the game company/programmer to write the game..
The reason will have no consequence to the beings in the game, and thus they will only be interested in the causuality mechanism within the game..
I infer then that you think the concept of a creator outside of our universe who caused it is a concept of no consequence. If so, then on that we agree.
You seem to have a view that the world consists only of (a) people who claim things, and (b) people who believe them, and that there’s no difference between types of claims.
The claim of someone who says they have the word of god is hearsay and there’s no way to figure out whether they do or not. The claims of someone who says they’ve followed the scientific method are verifiable by others. If they claim that their experiments show tiny blue tetrahedrons make up all matter, other people can check. Nobody can check if god talks to the first person.
The difference is not only in whether they are verifiable, whether they are verified, but also whether things which are produced from them actually seem to work. Religious claims fail at all three: they are not verifiable, they have not been verified, and they don’t seem to work.
The fact that things seem to work does not mean that they actually do work. We all are subject to cognitive biases which can trip us up. Most people aren’t very good at recognizing when that happens. That’s why these things survive so long.
Correct. And over time we--both as individuals and collectively as a civilization--gradually cull those things which seemed to work at one time but have become clear that they do not, and gradually adopt those things which seem to work better than those. In the end, over long periods of time, what matters is what does work, not what seems to. A society which believes than matter is made of small blue regular polyhedra will fail to develop as well as a society which continually culls and refines its beliefs based on experimental evidence.
Except when we test them, they don’t seem to work after all. Would you fly on an airplane engineered by someone trained in engineering, or a plane engineered by someone who relied only on inspiration from a deity? Would you go to the hospital with doctors who practice typical Western medicine, or a hospital in which the doctors only pray over you? Etc.
Yes, I have. The next step beyond thinking "Aha! Replication crisis!" is that the replication crisis is directing you towards its correction: the goal is replication, correct? And in many instances we fall short of that goal. The corrective action is to refine standards to which we hold scientific research. It is not correct to say, "Darnitall, we have a replication crisis, science is no better able to get us closer to things which are true than religion, divination, palm reading, astrology, and coin flipping." And that is exactly the sense in which the replication crisis is improving our ability to figure out which things are more likely to be true than others.
There is no "western" science. It's just science and it works the same wherever you are. Same as there is no "western mathematics".
Why are you and a few other people on the side of religion argueing so much against the west? Science vs religion does not care what the longitude you find yourself in. Or is "eastern science" somehow different?
Science is not perfect, how could it as it is made up of humans and we clearly are not perfect. It's still waaaaaay better than religious doctrines.
It is, because you can verify the claims of a holy man if you go meditate in a cave for a couple of decades.
Since no one is willing to do that, people used to accept their word for a fact. The same is the case with science claim that cannot be verified by common men who depend on them.
That they are also "believing", might be hard to get through the thick skull of these modern "science" gushers. They fail to see that "science" can be just a label, strapped to anything businesses wants to sell.
The missing ingredient is that if the common men--who you think have no better option than to depend blindly on someone they choose to believe--build a civilization based exclusively on the meditations of these holy men who they have accepted as the repositories of truth, they will find that their society will fall to those societies which have a, shall we say, more empirical basis for their view of the world.
> It is, because you can verify the claims of a holy man if you go meditate in a cave for a couple of decades.
This is the most ridicolous thing I've read in a decade on HN. Congrats I guess?
You can readily go and verify a lot of claims of science and I gave you an example in another comment. What claims about god can I go and verify? I'm eager to try.
I can’t reply to the question I was asked, so I reply here:
How many have I verified? I’m not sure of the #, but I’ve verified much of classical physics, chemistry, astronomical observations, and lots of things in electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and electromagnetism.
But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have personally verified everything, but whether they are verifiable in principle, by anyone. The claims of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc, are verifiable. The claims of a holy man are not.
Man is imperfect. The scientific method is a process that verifies, humans implement and observe the output. With religion, humans "observe" more than they can verify. Religion admits as much that it lacks verification, that's why it has faith.
Religion wants the best of both worlds, saying it is endowed with logic and verification yet when pushed you get the same tired argument about faith and 'gods exist outside logic'. At the same time it wants to say that it doesn't have to participate. Why should your side be special? Why can't I ultimately resort to illogic? Who knows, maybe my atheistic views are derived from a system so abstracted from my intellectual senses that I can validly resort to claiming they may ultimately stem from a time/place far removed from logic also, I just don't claim that it's an anthropomorphic entity like a god.
And yet, this mythical common man--who you say has to just choose who to trust--will find that if he chooses to build civilization by trusting the imperfect holy men, it will pale in significance to the civilization built by other common men who choose to trust the imperfect scientists.
Except you can find another group of holy men who disagree with that group. And a third group that disagrees with those two groups. The number of groups ends up quite large, and nobody can quite seem to figure out a way to test whether one group has it a bit more right than the others.
Why do you think that matters?
You might as well ask "what makes you trust your own perception when you verify scientific claims"?
As it happens, literally every time you switch on a light you are, in fact, verifying multiple scientific theories. Not to mention interacting with your phone or computer to type your HN comments.
>what makes you trust your own perception when you verify scientific claims"
Because it is with my own perception that I sense the rest of the world with it. So that is all that one should care. Let me know if you don't get this. I ll elaborate..
One of main reasons the scientific method has been so successful is because it forces us to challenge our assumptions that our perceptions of the world are correct.
My second reply is that it’s important whether things derived from two different claims actually work.
Make two hospitals: one which follows standard Western medical practice, and the other which does not and instead performs prayers over its patients. I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes.
> I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes.
That is quite besided the point. The point being every patient who goes there believes the hospital us doing western blah blah blah...
Let me simplyfy it even more. The common mans dependence of "science" is based on beliefs. Just as it was on religion at an older time.
That scientific method is more trust worthy, does not make that dependence not based on belief. That is the weakest link in the chain, and that link is common to both science and religion.
You seem to be focused on the so-called common man and his inability to do anything more than just believe things. I think you do this common man an injustice.
Let’s say this common man is religious (pick one) and is going about his day and is injured in some accident. He is taken to a hospital, and one which he knows is aligned with his religious beliefs. Upon arriving the doctors triage him and tell him he’s bleeding internally. But then they tell him that they have assembled a team of highly respected members of the religion to which he adheres and these persons are revered among its followers. They are about to lay hands on him and pray for his internal bleeding to stop. He asks if they will also be performing surgery, to which they reply that no, their god is loving, caring, and will hear the prayers of the faithful and heal him.
Now if you really are talking about the truly common man, this common man will, with whatever strength that remains, object quite strenuously! He will insist that a doctor perform surgery on him immediately and stop the bleeding.
And why does this common man do this? Because what he really believes is that while his religious beliefs may provide some type of assurance and comfort, when the rubber meets the road, he’d like some science, please.
The difference being what those beliefs are based upon.
I'd recommend a read through Plato's Socratic dialog Theaetetus. Then think through whether the progression of sensation, true belief, and justified true belief does or does not form a sequence of increasingly better ways to think about the world.
As for your last sentence, although I could say the same, I think you will agree that it would serve no purpose.
Ultimately everything that you can't verify comes down to beliefs which is many things for the common person. But all disciplines aren't equal in this domain. Science began being formalized with the scientific process, it was founded upon principles of rigorous verification. Religion was founded, generally, by a human or humans trying to "verify" the gods' wishes by very abstract and obtuse senses such as 'feelings'. Science may start with feelings or certain intuitions about what should be but then it has to be ran through a proper process that is repeatable and proven no matter how the scientist feels.
> Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a day to day basis, have you verified personally?
Many. Science claims when I push the brakes in my car I will slow down due to the friction. Seems to be working pretty well so far. How does religion explain it?
You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science. That's not how it works. If I can pick a random claim and given enough time and effort can verify it with a high chance then I can reasonably be sure the other claims are most likely correct. Not all of them! There are scientific claims that are incorrect. We know because they have been shown to be incorrect. But that doesn't invalidate the rest of the claims. And yes there will be claims that I personally can't verify so I'll have to use my own judgement to trust them or not. Over time someone will emerge to prove them wrong if they are indeed wrong. Unless of course they impossible to falsify like the existance of god. But then I just can ignore that claim if it can't be proven either way - no matter if it's a claim in science or religion.
With religion I can't verify much at all. Can I verify the existance of god? Nope. Can I verify earth was created X thousand years ago? Nope. Can I prove that my prayer will get some result? Nope. So logically my trust in the other religous claims is very low.
We had science classes in school. Physics and Chemistry for example. I remember doing experiments all the time to check if something was really working the way it was claimed. It checked out every single time. We also had Religion classes. I don't remember a single time that we tried to verify a claim. Not even an attempt! How do you build faith in a system full of claims with no evidence? As we kids grew older and developed a stronger independent way of thinking instead of blindly believing what the teacher told us, more and more of us started questioning those claims and were left utterly unsatisfied and ultimately left the religion class and switched to ethics instead.
>You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science.
I am not falling into any trap. Science and religion has its legit original purpose (religion was never meant to explain nature, though it does it as part of its own way of accomplishing its goals). But both are prone to exploitation by selfish entities, because of the need or requirement of laymans belief in the ir claims.
So ultimately, a religious claim and a scientific claim that cannot be realistically verified by 99.9 % of people are both similar, and both can end up casuing similar evils.
As I mentioned elsewhere, you cannot prove everything only by science. In Islam, we have logic and the honest news as two other sources we rely on to study and deduce facts about our reality.
No you didn't. The specific thread here of the conversation is not about scientism anymore. But if you want to go back, the original discussion was about science vs religion and not scientism. Nobody in here claimed they adhere to blind faith in science and that science can explain everything. The opposite was stated.
Some people have blind faith in scientific claims. That's not science though and it does not invalidate science. A big principle of science is to do exactly the opposite and not blindly trust in something. Every system gets corrupted by some people but it does not mean the system is bad. We're talking about the same thing over and over.
>But they are very very old tools and I don't think we need them anymore.
The societial problems that once solved by religion is worse than ever. It is true that current religions cannot solve it, because they have been "fact checked" out by the new religion of "science" with scientists as the new holymen, but that is a separate discussion.
The point is, we need a solution to those problems more than ever, but we truly cannot hope to find one.
Science is not a religion. Scientists are not holymen as evidence by the constant questioning of their theories by other scientists. That's the whole thing science is about! Relentless checking of hypothesis through experiments that match reality.
I agree strongly with you that we need a solution to these problems as currently we don't have one. I disagree though that we cannot hope to find one. Hope dies last :)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re trying to say that the phrase “toxic culture” signals something exasperating or frustrating to you about the person using it.
Is it because you don’t think that a culture can be toxic? Or perhaps that the phrase is overused or misapplied?
I'm more than prepared to just stop working for a few days or even a week or two.
I already actively boycott Chinese products where possible (I buy non Chinese if at all possible, even at significant higher prices), support the Georgian Legion with my own cash and have probably spent hundreds of hours on unpaid online activism this half year on top of what I do for my church (although in all fairness it still does more for me).
If enough people band together and just plain stop working, sooner or later politicians will have to listen.
contradicting science is no great flaw. "Science" contradicts itself from time to time.