Do you believe in God?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

That's like the people who write in response to my movie reviews at MousePlanet saying "That's just your opinion, you should say so." Just as "in my opinion" is inherent in a movie review, "could be" is inherent to "I theorize."

Very true, but a lot of people miss that point.

Science is as much of a belief system as anything else. It requires acceptance on faith of certain base assumptions that are not proveable. The basic axioms of mathematics, the basic postulates of geometry. There is no positive proof for the identity axiom, or that a straight line can be drawn between any 2 points. They simple must be accepted because there's no reason not to believe they are true. And yet all of science is based on them.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

They simple must be accepted because there's no reason not to believe they are true. And yet all of science is based on them.

This isn't quite true. There is no reason to not believe they are true but there is also a lot of reason to believe that they are true.

Why? Because based on those assumptions we can make predictions about the universe. Predictions that are born out by observation. Unlike simple faith, science includes a method for attempting validation and revision. Simple faith, generally explicitly rejects any such effort ("despite any evidence to the contrary I know the Earth is only 6,000 years old"). And until that process of validation can be performed ideas aren't accepted completely and even then are open to revision and re-examination.

For 200 years the luminiferous ether was accepted as a theoretical necessity because nobody could figure out how light could otherwise move through space. They could think of no experiments to prove its existence but it did a good job of filling a theoretical gap. And yet, even after 200 years of the most educated believing it existed it was still open to examination and by the late 1800s technology was allowing experiments that created paradoxes at odds with the idea of the luminiferous ether and opened the door for relativity.

When Einstein published his paper on the electrodynamics of moving objects (special relativity) there was no objective evidence for it. The technology did not exist to prove it. And yet within a decade it had completely overturned physics because the theory makes sense, makes predictions that matched was was known and also made predictions that could eventually be tested to provide opportunity for validation. Several aspects of relatively were not directly testable for nearly 30 years. Einstein's 1906 prediction of time dilation was not directly measured until the late 1930s (with muon decay) and not to general acceptance until the early 1940s (with direct measurements by cesium clocks on airplanes).

The scienctific method is not simply a different kind of faith. It has a fundamentally different structure.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

The scienctific method is not simply a different kind of faith. It has a fundamentally different structure.

I disagree. I'm not saying it's the same kind of faith as religious faith, but it still takes a certain level of faith to accept unproveable axioms (I'm talking a=a; if a=b and b=c then a=c, etc.) as, or close enough to, true. Yes, it is clearly different in that those axioms are open to change should evidence otherwise come forward, but the fact remains that to get off the ground, to make any mathematical or scientific progress, one must believe that certain things are true without proof. Experimental evidence, yes, but not proof. I, for one, do believe them to be true.

[Alex]

Mathematical axioms have nothing to do with the axioms of the scientific method (and the example you provide does have proofs, mathematical proofs). You can change mathematical axioms all you want, devise perfectly functional mathematics and it changes nothing. There is no inherent connection between mathematical axioms and the acutal observed universe around us.

The reason we use the mathematical axioms that are most commonly taught is that they have proven best as providing descriptive and predictive power for the universe around us. If it turns out that "parallel lines intersect at Trump Tower but at not other point" is a better geometric axiom for describing our universe it would soon supplant the traditional Euclidean axiom.

If you want to call that faith, I can't stop you but I think it is a perversion of the word that removes all meaning.

There is really only one axiom of the scientific method: that the fundamental properties of the universe are consistent across space and time. Yes, this, I suppose, requires an unprovable faith. But to assume a different axiom is to render all observation of our universe pointless. But again, it is an axiom that is supported by observable evidence.

Of course, pretty much all religious thinking is a rejection of that axiom and that is why I hold religion and scient to be unreconcilable.

[Frogberto]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

I disagree. I'm not saying it's the same kind of faith as religious faith, but it still takes a certain level of faith to accept unproveable axioms (I'm talking a=a; if a=b and b=c then a=c, etc.) as, or close enough to, true. Yes, it is clearly different in that those axioms are open to change should evidence otherwise come forward, but the fact remains that to get off the ground, to make any mathematical or scientific progress, one must believe that certain things are true without proof. Experimental evidence, yes, but not proof. I, for one, do believe them to be true.

Well, and this may just be semantics, but I disagree with your disagreement. (I also can't help the double negative).

If you're saying that if you regress enough questions, than the underlying assumption of anything about reality, then that might be true. Nothing is categorically absolute in science, because there may always be additional data that requires the modification or the "throwing out" of an entire theory. So in that sense, it's provisional. But, if I ask you enough questions about anythinng, you have to admit that there are some unknowns at a deep level. We have to act with things consistent not only with our understanding of how reality behaves, but also consistent with everything else we know and have tested. For that reason, no one's ever seen an atom, true, but we have other ways of measurement, and everything is consistent with atomic theory, to the extent that rejection of that theory is madness without overwhelming proof.

I hear again and again that "science is just another type of faith". But science is anything but. Whenever evidence is found to contradict previous conclusions, those conclusions are abandoned, and new beliefs based on the new evidence take their place. This "seeing is believing" basis for any theory in science is exactly the opposite of the sort of "faith" you've implied by your statement.

In fact, your statement implicitly equates faith with believing things without any basis for the belief. Such faith is better known as gullibility. Equating this sort of belief with faith places faith in anything on exactly the same level as belief in UFOs, Bigfoot, and modern Elvis sightings.

Science is not religion and it doesn't just come down to faith. Science is a method of thinking, a process, if you will, based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.

Faith, on the other hand, is a conclusion, and science is a process. Because scientific results are tested, the results have two very important consequences: First, the scientists know that their results will be subject to challenge, so they work harder to make sure the evidence really does support their results. Second, published ideas that the evidence does not support will get rejected, especially in times or places with different cultural biases.

Scientists, as opposed to those of faith, usually welcome disconfirming evidence when it comes along. They key problem with your statement is that science is not a position - it's a process.