All that is necessary for a rational and honest person who takes the scientific approach is to recognize what he can and cannot "explain" via observation of the world and the scientific method. Any aspect of human experience is a legitimate subject for science. The scientist's goal is to try to explain our human experience of the world. That includes discussing things like the idea of God, life, etc.Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
Hopefully it's clear by now my primary beef is against fundamentalism, the belief that The Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man. When I think of the "conflict" between religion and science, my mind immediately goes to the parts of The Bible that are demonstrably out of step with science. I'm certainly aware that many Christian thinkers feel the two are not in conflict, and do this by treating much of the Bible as allegorical, or recognizing that much of it was written by erring humans, offering, perhaps, only glimpses (but never perfect ones) of God, or feel that The Bible was only a starting point and that future Theologians have as much of value to add as any of The Bible's authors. I have much less a problem with those views, even if I do feel they're still (naively) holding on to a objective conception of God.
However, I have to take issue with your comparison of Theological and Scientific progress. Science progresses in demonstrable ways; Newtonian physics is demonstrably more accurate than what came before, Einstein demonstrably more accurate than Newton; Modern evolution is demonstrably more accurate than Darwin. I don't see how such progress can be measured in Theology, as opposed to Theology simply changing as societies and cultures change, which isn't unlike most Philosophy (though philosophy tends to intermix with science more frequently, especially considering science was initially rooted in philosophy). I would not label either as garbage until they start talking about the way the objective world works without science. What the Greeks had to say about cosmology is, indeed, pretty worthless to us today except as a historical record of Western thought. If they're addressing aspects of the subjective human experience, then that can be universally, timelessly true; not to mention areas where proofs and science can't tread, like normative ethics. Similarly, the value of art does not exist in the truths it reveals but in its truthful representation of experience. Keats' "beauty is truth, truth beauty" need not be "true" to have validity as a thought/feeling expressed dramatically within the form of his great Ode. However, art doesn't "progress" either, it just changes. Literature has never bettered Homer; perhaps philosophy has never bettered Plato; but science has undoubtedly bettered Thales.
Perhaps to put it another way: if we're talking about understanding how reality actually works, then science has proven the only legitimate means of achieving that understanding, and philosophy and Theology have almost nothing to contribute; if, however, we're talking about understanding the subjective human experience, becoming aware of our thoughts, or thinking through unprovable initial propositions (like in normative ethics), then these are, indeed, areas where philosophy and, perhaps, Theology have validity.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
I kind of think it is guaranteed over time for a couple of reasons.
1. The worldwide scientific community is huge.
2. Two traits many scientists are afflicted with are ambition and ego.
3. Given 1. and 2., it would take an immense concerted effort for that community to come together to form a conspiracy that promoted false theories. Also given 1. and 2., it wouldn't really be in the interest of scientists to do so anyway as that's not how scientists get ahead and win recognition and prizes. If anything, scientists get ahead by debunking the most popular theories at the time and doing so in demonstrable ways (Einstein's Eclipse experiment, eg).
So, even if there were a group of scientists, even prominent ones, who were trying to "get over" the public by promoting false theories, faked evidence, tests, etc., it's very difficult for me to imagine that, given peer review and subsequent testing, that no other groups or individuals would come along and reveal the attempt. In fact, such things HAVE happened in science's history, and every time it was debunked by other scientists, which does seem to show that there is a kind of internal policing within the community. You mention Global Warming, and whatever the biases of one major UK Group, what would be the point of climate researchers from other countries agreeing with them? Global Warming is something that 97% of climate scientists agree on, and I'm pretty sure one UK group does not account for that 97%, nor do I think you can rationally claim that this group is so powerful that they've deluded or bullied every other global group of climate scientists.
We're agreed this. This is why I think study of cognitive biases and logic should enter the public education system early. What is the point of teaching kids facts if you aren't also teaching them how to think correctly?
Ok, so what, in your opinion, can and cannot be explained via observation and the scientific method, and what value does religion have in those areas?
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
After several careful rephrasings, I'll ask this question with a preamble: this question is not intended in any way to seem "snotty;" it's being asked solely because I don't know the depth nor the breadth of your having delved into the Old Testament.
Have you read the Old Testament (since it's primarily the OT with which you take issue) as close to the source as possible (and here I don't mean the "chronological source" like the Codex Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus, but rather the linguistic source - the Aleppo Codex or the Leningrad Codex - or better yet, the extrabiblical manuscripts from Khirbet Qumran which speak to the immense diversity of the renditions of Originism within the construct of Second Temple [i.e. early Intertestamental Period] Judaism), or are you relying upon more modern "sources?
Yes,"over time" is the key point. There have been individual hoaxes, or very dubious "scientific" results, like "cold fusion" and "Piltdown man", but repeated investigation showed these to be hoaxes, or not acceptable. For "difficult to prove" theories, like "General Relativity" it took decades and many repeated, and repeatable, experiments before general acceptance. "The resurrection", "virgin birth", and other Christian "miracles" have no more prime facie validity than Piltdown man. Why should we accept dubious reports of these events... we need *repeatable* experiments & coherent theories before we can start believing in such things.
...and with the advent of Martin Tajmar's gravitomagnetism research and Thomas Smid's Lorentz transformation reconfigurations, more and more, the General Theory seems a pretty close approximation of early religious texts.
;)
GR is a good model, mercury's orbit wouldn't precess as predicted, light wouldn't bend as predicted, certain clock's wouldn't even work, if it was a bad model. God is a bad model; early religious texts are bad designs for a bad model....and with the advent of Martin Tajmar's gravitomagnetism research and Thomas Smid's Lorentz transformation reconfigurations, more and more, the General Theory seems a pretty close approximation of early religious texts.
As regards the value of Peer Review and science's ability to depend on such self-policing, I refer back to a comment I made a couple of days ago:
I would agree in principle that these processes should provide a check on dogmatism, if this constant questioning, testing/retesting, and peer review were honestly were honestly pursued. I'm not sure that this is guaranteed. For example, consider the science regarding "global warming." I have no scientific expertise in this area, but it does seem that there have been some legitimate questions about the objectivity of global warming researchers...concerns that were raised by the release of emails suggesting that one of the major research groups in the UK had some pretty clear biases when it came to deciding (via "peer review") the research that they would publish. Legitimate concerns were raised that these global warming "experts" were less than honest in rejecting out of hand any research that didn't "tow the party line" regarding global warming. Indeed, it does seem that folks, who were otherwise acting as good scientists, but who had ideas that didn't support the global warming "party line," were dismissed out of hand as "global warming deniers," just like, say, Holocaust Deniers"...
Now I am not going to take a position on the veracity of "Global Warming Science" but the emails that were recently exposed in the news media certainly do raise the spectre of bias by those whose job it is to objectively review and publish research on "Global Warming." It is every bit as bad for the reputation of science as was the Piltdown fiasco. Lest we forget, the Piltdown Hoax was easily taken up and even championed by reputable scientists because the skeletal "evidence" so neatly fit the notions of human evolution prevailing at the time the "evidence" was "discovered." Perhaps the UK researchers were affected by a similar willingness to accept prevailing theories about anthropogenic "climate change. Whatever their motivation, the emails, which so far as I know were not "made up" by Global warming critics, must raise questions about the ability of at least some highly regarded members of the scientific community to honestly and objectively police themselves via "Peer Review."
As regards my opinion of what can and cannot be explained via observation and the scientific method, I believe that everything within our human experience of the world is "fair game" to be the subject of science. This includes our experience of consciousness, all aspects of our behavior, including perception, cognition, emotions, and even "morality." Whether or not we can come up with adequate scientific "explanations" for these things depends on our powers of observation and our intellectual ability to formulate testable scientific hypotheses to account for our observations. As to the role of "religion" in all this not really clear to me. Maybe the role of religion is to provide us with some sort of alternative cognitive assurance regarding those aspects of our world that science cannot (as yet) adequately explain.
I was reading that comment about the faked Global Warming study, and it reminded me of this article from two weeks ago about a faked cancer study that got accepted by 157 journals.
So I punched in Science scandals into google and an alarming number of articles showed up from the Sokal Affair:A cancer drug discovered in a humble lichen, and ready for testing in patients, might sound too good to be true. That's because it is. But more than a hundred lower-tier scientific journals accepted a fake, error-ridden cancer study for publication in a spoof organized by Science magazine.
The fake study points to a "Wild West" of pay-to-publish outlets feeding off lower tiers of the scientific enterprise by publishing studies without any appreciable scrutiny, say research ethics experts. (See "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?")
Some 8,250 "open-access" scientific journals worldwide are now listed in a directory supported by publishers. Unlike traditional science journals that charge for subscriptions or fees from those wishing to read their contents, open-access journals make research studies free to the public. In return, study authors pay up-front publishing costs if the paper is accepted for publication.
"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees," says journalist John Bohannon, writing in the Science magazine report of his survey-style spoof of review practices at such journals.
The cover of Science magazine.
Image courtesy Science/AAAS
"The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable," Bohannon says. Of 255 open-access journals that said they would review his study, 157 accepted the fake study for publication. "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception," he writes.
Science Spoofs Not New
Spoof studies intended to spotlight problems with individual journals and their review practices have made news before. New York University physicist Alan Sokal spoofed the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996 with a crackpot physics treatise. And last month, Serbian academics spoofed a Romanian journal with a similarly ludicrous data-processing paper.
But the Bohannon study, which claimed to have discovered a cancer-fighting, lichen-derived drug ready for immediate testing on patients, represents a first systematic test of review practices, or their absence, across many journals at once, says research ethics expert Nicholas Steneck of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...review-cancer/
to The Schon Scandal:The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".[2]
The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[3][4] On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense...structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics".[2]
The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
And this article from The Scientist on the Top Science Scandals of 2012:The Schön scandal concerns German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970 in Verden) who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs with semiconductors that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, which was later rescinded.
The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. The debate centered on whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
Apparently, this kind of thing happens all the time.A widely discussed research study published this year showed that more than sloppy mistakes or accidental omissions, retracted papers are most likely to be withdrawn from publication because of scientific misconduct or knowlingly publishing false data. In fact, more than 65 percent of the 2,000 or so papers studied were retracted because of poor ethical judgment. According to that report, high impact journals have been hardest hit by the increasing rate of retractions over the past decade.
In light of these findings, researchers and other observers have proposed several initiatives to help the scientific community with its apparent honesty issues. One suggestion was the creation a Retraction Index. Unlike the Impact Factor, which is based on a journal’s citation rate, the Retraction Index would indicate the number of retractions a journal has for every 1,000 papers published. Following suit, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch blog suggested creating a Transparency Index, which could include a score for how well a journal controls its manuscript review process, including how it conducts peer review, whether supporting data are also reviewed, whether the journal uses plagiarism detecting software, and a number of other measures. Finally, the lab-services start-up Science Exchange and the open access journal PLOS ONE have collaborated to suggest the Reproducibility Initiative, which would provide a platform for researchers to submit their studies for replication by other labs for a fee. Studies that are successfully reproduced will win a certificate of reproducibility.
Still, The Scientist found no shortage of stories to discuss in this year’s roundup of misconduct stories. Here are a few of the most glaring examples of scientific fraud in 2012:
10 years of fabrication
This year, University of Kentucky biomedical researcher Eric Smart was discovered to have falsified or fabricated 45 figures over the course of 10 years. His research on the molecular mechanisms behind cardiovascular disease and diabetes was well regarded, despite his having used data from knockout mouse models that never existed. “Dr. Smart’s papers were highly cited in the specific caveolae/cardiovascular research field,” Philippe Frank of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia told The Scientist. Smart resigned from his university post in 2011, when the investigation in his misconduct started, and agreed to exclude himself from federal grant applications for the next 7 years. He now teaches chemistry at a local school.
Record-setting retractions
Setting the record for the most publications up for retraction by a single author, Japanese anesthesiologist Yo****aka Fujii fabricated data in a whopping 172 papers. Beginning his career in falsification in 1993 while at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, he continued it at the University of Tsukuba, and at Toho University in Tokyo, where he was finally dismissed in February 2012. According to investigations, Fujii never actually saw the patients he reported in his clinical studies, failed to get ethical review board approval for his research, and misled co-authors, sometimes including their names without their permission or knowledge. Although the retractions are not expected to have a large impact on the field—many of them had low citation rates—Fujii used the publications to further his career, publishing a total of 249 papers.
False forensics
The results from roughly 34,000 criminal drug cases were put into question earlier this year, when forensic chemist Annie Dookhan at the shuttered Department of Public Health Lab in Massachusetts was discovered to have falsified records on samples she was assigned to process. Instead, she forged signatures and did not perform tests she recorded as complete, according to investigations. Suspicions may have first arisen due to her impressive output—she claimed to have processed 9,000 samples in a year, whereas colleagues only averaged around 3,000. As a result of her actions, a number of defendants may have been wrongly imprisoned, while others who may have been rightly accused were freed. This month, Boston police warned of an expected spike in crimes due to the large number of convicted drug offenders who will be released because of Dookhan’s misconduct.
Creative reviewing strategies
Rather than falsify data in order to get published, researchers have taken a new tack this year by writing glowing expert reviews for their own papers. When asked by journal editors to suggest names of experts in their field who were not involved in their research, at least four submitting authors suggested names and emails that then forwarded back to their own inboxes. The trend, first reported by Retraction Watch, was caught by one journal editor when author Hyung-In Moon, assistant professor at Dong-A University in Busan, South Korea, offered up names of reviewers with Google and Yahoo rather than university email accounts. “It should be a wake-up call to any journals that don’t have rigorous reviewer selection and screening in place,” Irene Hames, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...ndals-of-2012/
Also Morpheus, Science isn't always rational, logical, or objective. Consider the findings of Thomas Kuhn who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
Scientific consensus can often be achieved in some weird ways, such as through the cult of personality that hovers around famous scientists like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein. Galen and Aristotle's errors went unchallenged until the Renaissance because they were advanced for their time, and much of what they said was true; so other scientists put their faith in all of the men's theories.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a 1962 book about the history of science by Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.[1]
For example, Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler, solutions that might be developed at some point in the future. Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its "paradigms" and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century. Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition. For some commentators it introduced a realistic humanism into the core of science while for others the nobility of science was tarnished by Kuhn's introduction of an irrational element into the heart of its greatest achievements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Str...ic_Revolutions
In fact, you might even question whether the majority of American scientists are atheist because they've been indoctrinated into that society by their peers and elders. This jump to atheism in the sciences is a relatively recent trend over the last couple of decades, and it may just be another temporary fad specific to a culture. Sort of like how, there is some reason to think that universities often espouse a liberal bias reflected in who they hire and what they teach their students; or how a lot of ancient Greek philosophers were homosexual, but homosexuality was not a prerequisite to being a good philosopher. Atheism may be incidental to the logic, objectivity, and scientific rationalism they've been trained in and more a vestige of their human culture, scientific role models, peer pressure, etc. Basically, I'm saying that if all of your teachers are Jesuits you might become a Catholic scientist.Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well, all objective conclusions, being ultimately founded upon subjective conditioning/worldview. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
Last edited by mortalterror; 10-18-2013 at 08:34 AM.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
Science is a child of religion. But it grew up.
In what way? Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climati...il_controversy and tell me how it compares to the Piltdown fiasco. An editorial in Nature stated that "A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories." There was a lot of fuss made about a scientist suggesting a "trick" be used, which was explained perfectly well by pointing out that "trick" is often used as shorthand for "easy, useful, not immediately obvious, technique" - I certainly know that to be true, scientists say that all the time!
My concern was not about the so-called "trick" (discounting dendrochronological "tree ring" data that was discordant with measured air temps), and I understand that the word, "trick" is used in the sense you describe with no intent to deceive or skirt logical rigor. The most rigorous mathematicians frequently use shortcutting "tricks" to solve problems or derive proofs. Often these tricks are the most brilliant aspects of their mathematical reasoning, having the quality of brilliant insight. A famous and perhaps apocryphal example is the story about the young Gauss whose elementary school teacher who asked his class to add up the first 100 integers, assuming it would keep the kids busy for a while. Little Carl put down his pencil after a few moments, much to the teacher's chagrin. Carl came up with the right answer, 5050, apparently by employing "trick" that reduced the laborious summation to a simple calculation of (100x101)/2. Gauss presumably "saw" this solution by imagining the series of integers from 1 to 100, and then he simply noted that you can add 1+100, then 2+99, then 3+98, and so on through 50+51, all of these being 101, which you then divide by 2 to get the sum of the series. This is certainly a "trick," but it is logical and brilliant (especially for an adolescent), and it leads to a formula, n(n+1)/2 for the sum of a series of n integers.
It is true that the EAU emails were investigated by several scientific and governmental panels and they concluded that what they revealed did not indicate fraud or invalidate the EAU published results, and in that sense it was not like the Piltdown Hoax. On the other hand, the emails do contain comments that reveal the animosity of the EAU researchers to research and researchers who submitted papers that disagreed with the prevailing scientific opinion of the EAU group and their strong reluctance to publish any of that research. Most of the outrage of the investigators seems to have been directed against the "criminal" hacking into the EAU email system, and while the reviewers did acknowledge that some of the email comments could seem to raise questions of the researchers' biases, they nonetheless excused the expressed opinions as honest confidential discussion that the writers never meant for the world to see.
Be that as it may, the fact is that it does tarnish the public faith in scientists as free from intellectual and emotional biases, and that was my point. Yes, the folks who hacked into the EAU computer system were criminals. So, for that matter, were the folks who hacked into DoD computer files and published the Wiki-Leak files....
really? how?
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Religion in its diversity is more spiritual, apparently it started from creation. Science was not invented either it was a late discovery from the creation. These two always coexisted, the other being spiritual (vaguely understood) and the other being tangeble (creation)
Fiction is compatible with science therefore religion cannot be more diverse than science, there is an isomorphism between the supposed factual characters of religion and the fictional characters that science declares these beings to be.
The religious person is not more spiritual than the atheist, as the atheist is equally concerned with "the higher things of the mind", and equally interested in seeking out "awe" and "wonder".
How could religion start from creation? There were no human beings around to make it up. It started from the first people looking at volcanoes and thinking, some heap big "beast" did that, let's call him God.
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