One frustrating aspect of our discussion about the compatibility of science and religion was the amount of effort expended arguing about definitions, rather than substance. When I use words like “God” or “religion,” I try to use them in senses that are consistent with how they have been understood (at least in the Western world) through history, by the large majority of contemporary believers, and according to definitions as you would encounter them in a dictionary. It seems clear to me that, by those standards, religious belief typically involves various claims about things that happen in the world — for example, the virgin birth or ultimate resurrection of Jesus. Those claims can be judged by science, and are found wanting.
Some people would prefer to define “religion” so that religious beliefs entail nothing whatsoever about what happens in the world. And that’s fine; definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication. Personally, I think using “religion” in that way is not very clear. Most Christians would disagree with the claim that Jesus came about because Joseph and Mary had sex and his sperm fertilized her ovum and things proceeded conventionally from there, or that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, or that God did not create the universe. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose job it is to judge whether a candidate for canonization has really performed the required number of miracles and so forth, would probably not agree that miracles don’t occur. Francis Collins, recently nominated to direct the NIH, argues that some sort of God hypothesis helps explain the values of the fundamental constants of nature, just like a good Grand Unified Theory would. These views are by no means outliers, even without delving into the more extreme varieties of Biblical literalism.
Furthermore, if a religious person really did believe that nothing ever happened in the world that couldn’t be perfectly well explained by ordinary non-religious means, I would think they would expend their argument-energy engaging with the many millions of people who believe that the virgin birth and the resurrection and the promise of an eternal afterlife and the efficacy of intercessory prayer are all actually literally true, rather than with a handful of atheist bloggers with whom they agree about everything that happens in the world. But it’s a free country, and people are welcome to define words as they like, and argue with whom they wish.
But there was also a more interesting and substantive issue lurking below the surface. I focused in that post on the meaning of “religion,” but did allude to the fact that defenders of Non-Overlapping Magisteria often misrepresent “science” as well. And this, I think, is not just a matter of definitions: we can more or less agree on what “science” means, and still disagree on what questions it has the power to answer. So that’s an issue worth examining more carefully: what does science actually have the power to do?
I can think of one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question: first, attempt to distill the essence of “science” down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been “the Baconian scientific method” or “logical positivism” or “Popperian falsificationism” or “methodological naturalism.” But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures. A much better strategy, I think, is to consider specific examples, figure out what kinds of questions science can reasonably address, and compare those to the questions in which we’re interested.
Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let’s ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? Or, to make it slightly more empirical, was the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision within one percent of the magnitude of the total momentum before the collision?
This isn’t supposed to be a trick question; I don’t have any special knowledge or theories about the interior of Alpha Centauri that you don’t have. The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.
A stickler might argue, well, you shouldn’t be so sure. You didn’t observe that particular event, after all, and more importantly there’s no conceivable way that you could collect data at the present time that would answer the question one way or the other. Science is an empirical endeavor, and should remain silent about things for which no empirical adjudication is possible.
But that’s completely crazy. That’s not how science works. Of course we can say that momentum was conserved. Indeed, if anyone were to take the logic of the previous paragraph seriously, science would be a completely worthless endeavor, because we could never make any statements about the future. Predictions would be impossible, because they haven’t happened yet, so we don’t have any data about them, so science would have to be silent.
All that is completely mixed-up, because science does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data. The definition of “better” is notoriously slippery in this case, but one thing is clear: if two theories make the same kinds of predictions for observable phenomena, but one is much simpler, we’re always going to prefer the simpler one. The definition of theory is also occasionally troublesome, but the humble language shouldn’t obscure the potential reach of the idea: whether we call them theories, models, hypotheses, or what have you, science passes judgment on ideas about how the world works.
And that’s the crucial point. Science doesn’t do a bunch of experiments concerning colliding objects, and say “momentum was conserved in that collision, and in that one, and in that one,” and stop there. It does those experiments, and then it also proposes frameworks for understanding how the world works, and then it compares those theoretical frameworks to that experimental data, and — if the data and theories seem good enough — passes judgment. The judgments are necessarily tentative — one should always be open to the possibility of better theories or surprising new data — but are no less useful for that.
Furthermore, these theoretical frameworks come along with appropriate domains of validity, depending both on the kinds of experimental data we have available and on the theoretical framework itself. At the low energies available to us in laboratory experiments, we are very confident that baryon number (the total number of quarks minus antiquarks) is conserved in every collision. But we don’t necessarily extend that to arbitrarily high energies, because it’s easy to think of perfectly sensible extensions of our current theoretical understanding in which baryon number might very well be violated — indeed, it’s extremely likely, since there are a lot more quarks than antiquarks in the observable universe. In contrast, we believe with high confidence that electric charge is conserved at arbitrarily high energies. That’s because the theoretical underpinnings of charge conservation are a lot more robust and inflexible than those of baryon-number conservation. A good theoretical framework can be extremely unforgiving and have tremendous scope, even if we’ve only tested it over a blink of cosmic time here on our tiny speck of a planet.
The same logic applies, for example, to the highly contentious case of the multiverse. The multiverse isn’t, by itself, a theory; it’s a prediction of a certain class of theories. If the idea were simply “Hey, we don’t know what happens outside our observable universe, so maybe all sorts of crazy things happen,” it would be laughably uninteresting. By scientific standards, it would fall woefully short. But the point is that various theoretical attempts to explain phenomena that we directly observe right in front of us — like gravity, and quantum field theory — lead us to predict that our universe should be one of many, and subsequently suggest that we take that situation seriously when we talk about the “naturalness” of various features of our local environment. The point, at the moment, is not whether there really is or is not a multiverse; it’s that the way we think about it and reach conclusions about its plausibility is through exactly the same kind of scientific reasoning we’ve been using for a long time now. Science doesn’t pass judgment on phenomena; it passes judgment on theories.
The reason why we can be confident that momentum was conserved during that particular collision a billion years ago is that science has concluded (beyond reasonable doubt, although not with metaphysical certitude) that the best framework for understanding the world is one in which momentum is conserved in all collisions. It’s certainly possible that this particular collision was an exception; but a framework in which that were true would necessarily be more complicated, without providing any better explanation for the data we do have. We’re comparing two theories: one in which momentum is always conserved, and one in which it occasionally isn’t, including a billion years ago at the center of Alpha Centauri. Science is well equipped to carry out this comparison, and the first theory wins hands-down.
Now let’s turn to a closely analogous question. There is some historical evidence that, about two thousand years ago in Galilee, a person named Jesus was born to a woman named Mary, and later grew up to be a messianic leader and was eventually crucified by the Romans. (Unruly bloke, by the way — tended to be pretty doctrinaire about the number of paths to salvation, and prone to throwing moneychangers out of temples. Not very “accommodating,” if you will.) The question is: how did Mary get pregnant?
One approach would be to say: we just don’t know. We weren’t there, don’t have any reliable data, etc. Should just be quiet.
The scientific approach is very different. We have two theories. One theory is that Mary was a virgin; she had never had sex before becoming pregnant, or encountered sperm in any way. Her pregnancy was a miraculous event, carried out through the intervention of the Holy Ghost, a spiritual manifestation of a triune God. The other theory is that Mary got pregnant through relatively conventional channels, with the help of (one presumes) her husband. According to this theory, claims to the contrary in early (although not contemporary) literature are, simply, erroneous.
There’s no question that these two theories can be judged scientifically. One is conceptually very simple; all it requires is that some ancient texts be mistaken, which we know happens all the time, even with texts that are considerably less ancient and considerably better corroborated. The other is conceptually horrible; it posits an isolated and unpredictable deviation from otherwise universal rules, and invokes a set of vaguely-defined spiritual categories along the way. By all of the standards that scientists have used for hundreds of years, the answer is clear: the sex-and-lies theory is enormously more compelling than the virgin-birth theory.
The same thing is true for various other sorts of miraculous events, or claims for the immortality of the soul, or a divine hand in guiding the evolution of the universe and/or life. These phenomena only make sense within a certain broad framework for understanding how the world works. And that framework can be judged against others in which there are no miracles etc. And, without fail, the scientific judgment comes down in favor of a strictly non-miraculous, non-supernatural view of the universe.
That’s what’s really meant by my claim that science and religion are incompatible. I was referring to the Congregation-for-the-Causes-of-the-Saints interpretation of religion, which entails a variety of claims about things that actually happen in the world; not the it’s-all-in-our-hearts interpretation, where religion makes no such claims. (I have no interest in arguing at this point in time over which interpretation is “right.”) When religion, or anything else, makes claims about things that happen in the world, those claims can in principle be judged by the methods of science. That’s all.
Well, of course, there is one more thing: the judgment has been made, and views that step outside the boundaries of strictly natural explanation come up short. By “natural” I simply mean the view in which everything that happens can be explained in terms of a physical world obeying unambiguous rules, never disturbed by whimsical supernatural interventions from outside nature itself. The preference for a natural explanation is not an a priori assumption made by science; it’s a conclusion of the scientific method. We know enough about the workings of the world to compare two competing big-picture theoretical frameworks: a purely naturalistic one, versus one that incorporates some sort of supernatural component. To explain what we actually see, there’s no question that the naturalistic approach is simply a more compelling fit to the observations.
Could science, through its strategy of judging hypotheses on the basis of comparison with empirical data, ever move beyond naturalism to conclude that some sort of supernatural influence was a necessary feature of explaining what happens in the world? Sure; why not? If supernatural phenomena really did exist, and really did influence things that happened in the world, science would do its best to figure that out.
It’s true that, given the current state of data and scientific theorizing, the vast preponderance of evidence comes down in favor of understanding the world on purely natural terms. But that’s not to say that the situation could not, at least in principle, change. Science adapts to reality, however it presents itself. At the dawn of the 20th century, it would have been hard to find a more firmly accepted pillar of physics than the principle of determinism: the future can, in principle, be predicted from the present state. The experiments that led us to invent quantum mechanics changed all that. Moving from a theory in which the present uniquely determines the future to one where predictions are necessarily probabilistic in nature is an incredible seismic shift in our deep picture of reality. But science made the switch with impressive rapidity, because that’s what the data demanded. Some stubborn folk tried to recover determinism at a deeper level by inventing more clever theories — which is exactly what they should have done. But (to make a complicated story simple) they didn’t succeed, and scientists learned to deal.
It’s not hard to imagine a similar hypothetical scenario playing itself out for the case of supernatural influences. Scientists do experiments that reveal anomalies that can’t be explained by current theories. (These could be subtle things at a microscopic level, or relatively blatant manifestations of angels with wings and flaming swords.) They struggle to come up with new theories that fit the data within the reigning naturalist paradigm, but they don’t succeed. Eventually, they agree that the most compelling and economical theory is one with two parts: a natural part, based on unyielding rules, with a certain well-defined range of applicability, and a supernatural one, for which no rules can be found.
Of course, that phase of understanding might be a temporary one, depending on the future progress of theory and experiment. That’s perfectly okay; scientific understanding is necessarily tentative. In the mid-19th century, before belief in atoms had caught on among physicists, the laws of thermodynamics were thought to be separate, autonomous rules, in addition to the crisp Newtonian laws governing particles. Eventually, through Maxwell and Boltzmann and the other pioneers of kinetic theory, we learned better, and figured out how thermodynamic behavior could be subsumed into the Newtonian paradigm through statistical mechanics. One of the nice things about science is that it’s hard to predict its future course. Likewise, the need for a supernatural component in the best scientific understanding of the universe might evaporate — or it might not. Science doesn’t assume things from the start; it tries to deal with reality as it presents itself, however that may be.
This is where talk of “methodological naturalism” goes astray. Paul Kurtz defines it as the idea that “all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events.” That “explained and tested” is an innocent-looking mistake. Science tests things empirically, which is to say by reference to observable events; but it doesn’t have to explain things as by reference to natural causes and events. Science explains what it sees the best way it can — why would it do otherwise? The important thing is to account for the data in the simplest and most useful way possible.
There’s no obstacle in principle to imagining that the normal progress of science could one day conclude that the invocation of a supernatural component was the best way of understanding the universe. Indeed, this scenario is basically the hope of most proponents of Intelligent Design. The point is not that this couldn’t possibly happen — it’s that it hasn’t happened in our actual world. In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena. No virgin human births, no coming back after being dead for three days, no afterlife in Heaven, no supernatural tinkering with the course of evolution. You can define “religion” however you like, but you can’t deny the power of science to reach far-reaching conclusions about how reality works.
Mr. Penfold at 74:
1. Yes, many religious people make some claim that their god or gods intervenes in the Universe. But I wonder whether those claims are the heart of their religious beliefs for many of these people. For some Yes, for others No.
2. It is also useful to distinguish between people who insist on claims about divine intervention even if such claims are inconsistent with science, and those people who withdraw such claims if inconsistent with science. I think the former is much more of an issue for the role of science in our society.
3. In addition to Deists, what about the many Buddhists or Unitarians for whom belief in God does not define their religion, or who do not even believe in God? I think the group of religious people who do not make claims about God intervening is broader than Deists.
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My understanding is simple:
You are correct, your understanding is simple. It is also flawed.
I suggest you read about Russell’s Teapot to try and understand why belief and non-belief are not the same. Your argument talks of god, but try using invisible pink unicorns. I can claim there is an invisible pink unicorn in my room. Using your argument you would be forced to admit science can say nothing about this invisible pink unicorn which most people would find patently ridiculous. There is no more reason to believe god(s) exist than there is to believe invisible pink unicorns exist.
More formally the concept I am talking about is known as the null-hypothesis. The burden on proof is on the person making the affirmative claim for the existence on an entity. Thus unless there is evidence that invisible pink unicorns exist it should be assumed they do not. The fact that someone claims they do exist does not shift the burden of proof.
The percentage that would agree with that statement is probably fairly high, but the percentage of people who could honestly say that their religious beliefs make no comment about natural phenomena is probably fairly low.
Believe in the literalness of transubstantiation, virgin birth, or the resurrection? Then you can’t claim the “Category 3” exemption you propose. Believe that homosexuality is sinful? Bzzzz, “Category 3” is forbidden to you.
I recognize there are lots of religious people (you mention Unitarians; I happen to know a Quaker couple who would fit this category) who do get to claim this “category 3”, but they are in the minority. Most people’s religious beliefs make claims about events in the natural world, even if that is not the main reason they hold those beliefs.
And that contradicts science. Which is fine, I suppose, but let’s not pretend that they don’t. If your religion only says that the stories in your Holy Book are nice allegorical stories (although many many things in the Bible are actually not very nice at all, but I digress…) and that there is nothing literal about it whatsoever, then fine, that is a non-overlapping magisteria. But the minute you say, “Yeah, I think that actually happened…” then you’ve got to acknowledge the scientific ramifications.
I don’t have to read anything.
What I’ve written holds perfectly well if you read it carefully and you can’t say anything to disprove it.
Oh, and one more comment about this “Category 3″… I am pretty sure that virtually all of the so-called “New Atheists” would have very little to say if 95+% of religious people fit firmly in your “Category 3” description. I, for one, would be overjoyed… Religious proselytizaton would effectively cease to exist. Street corner preachers would be a thing of the past. The idea of a Holy Book influencing the political process would be as laughable as basing our foreign policy on the latest Harry Potter.
Yes, please, bring on this very soft definition of “religion” that doesn’t make any claims that contradict science! That would be great!
Fine. I will let you stew in your ignorance.
You neglected a possibility. Parthenogenesis.
That is why science cannot study the supernatural because it would cease to be supernatural. It can not study god because it would cease to be god. It would become some alien or someone from the future with knowledge and technology beyond us, not the supernatural. It would become the unknown, not the supernatural. Now if the supernatural produced natural consequences, science could study those consequences. If it communicated with us, science could study those communications. If it could and would, science could study it, but if it couldn’t or wouldn’t, science could not. An isolated fact is experimental error. It is something to be explained by natural causes or ignored as anomalous until repeated and if never repeated science could never learn from it. It would be an error, a mistake, a lie, a tale, or a trick. Science can narrow the field but never eliminate the possibility. It is not surprising the Greek gods arose from chaos. In chaos there is always possibility.
sigh
I mean, this is willful ignorance, dude. You realize that, right? “I have made an argument, and because I don’t immediately see any flaws in the argument, I refuse to listen to anyone who thinks there are flaws.”
For the record:
Um, no.
You can’t prove that I am not a wooly mammoth, since you don’t truly know who is typing this.
Thus you are not allowed to say anything about whether or not wooly mammoths are extinct, or whether they are able to post comments on blogs. Right?
To paraphrase Lord in comment #84: God isn’t real.
I mean, really, that’s what you’re saying, if you think about it. You’re saying that if God were real, then He wouldn’t be God, he would be “some alien or someone from the future with knowledge and technology beyond us”.
Fine. I’ll concede the point. Science cannot study something that doesn’t actually exist. We agree!
Also:
This is true, and if you read carefully, nobody actually disputes this. Us atheists are just saying that the possibility is vanishingly small.
Read up on the idea of a “null hypothesis” to understand this. You can’t actual disprove the existence of anything (see also, Russell’s Teapot). But, to roughly quote Dawkins, “I think the existence of a god or gods is extremely unlikely, so much so that I am going to live my life on the assumption that they don’t exist.”
When we say science contradicts religion, we don’t mean that it is impossible that there might be some data that would eventually expose that contradiction to have been illusory (in fact, Sean explicitly says this in the very blog post on which we are commenting…). We just mean that it contradicts any reasonable interpretation of the data we currently have.
Eventually, when something reaches a certain point of improbability, we have to make a decision to operate on the assumption that it is false. Otherwise, you’re basically a solipsist, and nothing is real.
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Yes, I prefer my ignorance than mouthing platitudes like some people.
God is an unproven hypothesis explaining the origin of things i.e. a belief.
Science can’t falsify this hypothesis because does not know the origin of things.
So science has nothing to say about this hypothesis except that it can’t falsify it.
>Science cannot study something that doesn’t actually exist. We agree!
But what if he DID exist? What if Jesus showed up tomorrow morning? I’m not saying that he does or will (I’m an atheist), but here’s a possible limit of science: even if he did show up, would a true scientist accept it? How much evidence does science need in order to concede the supernatural?
The point I’m trying to make is that there is no amount of evidence that could “prove” the supernatural; there would always be a “well, it COULD be sufficiently advanced technology somewhere somehow…”. Is that a flaw in science?
Tim Bartik’s category 3:
“I am religious primarily as a way to give meaning to my life, not because of any religious claims about natural phenomena that can be contradicted by science.”
Clearly cat 3 types are not happy with the world as they see it and feel depressed and under-valued. We all feel like that some times. Somewhat flippantly I suggest they just need some drugs to make them feel better.
I would add a category 4 (which I’m sure my mother falls into, for example) where religious ritual, procedure, language, and congregation, are regarded as part of your history, and perceived to be a connection to your roots and your ancestors. Certainly my mother goes to church (religiously 🙂 ) but (and I would never do this) if I pressed her on Noah’s ark , Lazarus, or Lotts’s wife, etc, she would be very uncomfortable.
Heh, you should check out the short story “Judgment Passed” by Jerry Oltion, in the compilation _Wastelands_. It answers this question from an atheist perspective.
No, because again we come back to the idea that you eventually have to assume a particular thing is false if the probability is sufficiently small — or conversely, you have to assume it is true if the probability is sufficiently high.
If Jesus came back tomorrow and started performing all sorts of miracles, certainly I — like many others — would be very slow to accept the Christian explanation, because it contradicted so much other previous evidence. Eventually there would come a point, though, when that was the most reasonable explanation.
In that case, we could always continue to assert, “Well, it could just be malicious aliens who are exploiting our religious myths,” and certainly a number of scientists and skeptics would continue to maintain that view. I might cling to that view myself, as I’m not sure my psyche is capable of dealing with the idea of an omnipotent being who actually cares what people do in their bedrooms.
But I do think we can envision a Second Coming that would be so convincing that the mainstream scientific view would eventually have to accept literal Christianity as the most reasonable hypothesis. Without any evidence to support it, the “it must be aliens!” hypothesis would eventually start to fail Occam’s Razor.
Of course, one complication is that Jesus strenuously expounded on the virtues of faith, and if He actually appeared and said, “Hey doods,” then faith wouldn’t really be an option anymore. (You can’t believe in something unseen if you’ve already seen it!) But that’s a problem with Christianity, not with science. The very hypothesis has dug itself a metaphysical hole that may be impossible to overcome from a logical perspective.
I suppose if you want to say that science is flawed because it can’t fully endorse a hypothesis that is inherently self-contradictory… well, okay, I don’t call it a “flaw”, but to each his own 😉 😉
Sean,
That was a really interesting post. Your view on these religious matters is always well thought out and refreshing, and a pleasure to read.
A little while after reading this article, I happened to watch the Feynman Messenger lecture called ‘The Great Conservation Principles’. Here Feynman strongly defends the view that you argued – that science does not proceed on a phenomenon by phenomenon basis. In Feynman’s words “If you will not say that it’s true in a region you haven’t looked yet, you don’t know anything! If the only laws that you find are those which you just finished observing, then you can’t make any predictions.”
The lecture is available here: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
(see lecture 3, chapter 10 for the relevant bit)
Enjoy!
Aatish
As it turns out, my wife and I almost fit this category, despite both being atheists through and through. We don’t go to church(*), but we observe a number of Jewish holidays and traditions. It helps us feel a connection to something, a sense of place and identity, so to speak. My gentile ass even memorized the Channukah prayer! Of course, we’re quite clear about it being all a bunch of tribal mumbo-jumbo… Does this make us “Category 4 religious”?? heh.
(*)My wife would actually really like to find some sort of “church-esque” community-intensive activity to do once a week, ideally one that would stimulate ethical discussion, and that would also fit in with our values. We tried a Unitarian service once, and while the sermon itself was pretty awesome and mostly fit the bill in regards to her criteria about ethical discussion, the music sucked, and there was still a bit of magical thinking here and there that I didn’t care for. We might still go back, but it’s not really what we’re looking for. If anybody has any suggestions, I’m all ears!
Repeatability, repeatability, repeatability. If it’s science, it had better be repeatable. Since nothing ever repeats perfectly, we’d better not take this as a definition. See #60, and Sean’s agreement, at #62. Ah, so we instead look for regularities, in particular for correlations between all the observations we make. We can control some of those observations, others we simply have to wait for the value to change however it will, so that even with no control of the planets’ trajectories we can nonetheless confirm that they move in ellipses (fortunately we can control where we point our telescopes).
Having retreated to this more careful definition, QM forces us to retreat somewhat further, because there is a point of detail beyond which we cannot make continuous observations, so we can only observe correlations between discrete events [which, furthermore, require the presence of a relatively large-scale thermodynamically nontrivially engineered “measurement apparatus” for any discrete events to happen]. Although we can by a series of systematic experiments observe a continuous, unitary evolution of a relatively theoretical entity, the quantum state, we cannot control the times when the individual discrete events will happen, which together make up the measurement dataset. Thus there is both determinism and indeterminism in the quantum mechanical class of models and experiments. More troubling, we have a concept of causality at the level of the quantum state description that accommodates Sean’s suggestion that “science passes judgment on ideas about how the world works”, but at the level of the individual events in the experimental dataset in someone’s lab note book or computer, there is no concept of causality, or of individual particles, and we have no idea how the world works. [It is possible to introduce something like Bohmian mechanics as a classically causal “idea about how the world works”, or Nelson mechanics, or Stochastic Electrodynamics, to name two others, and there are apologias for quantum mechanics such as consistent histories and topos theory, but many physicists have decided that we basically have no idea “how the world works” at the atomic or similar scales that satisfies their preferred ideas, and it’s not necessary to have any idea because we can perfectly well use QM as an engineering tool.]
We are faced with Hume’s problem. Scientists at their most skeptical — scientists are proud of how much more skeptical they are than anyone else — can only say “here is the raw experimental dataset, and here are the regularities we can extract from this experimental dataset, by the following statistical formulae, and here are a few quite accurate formal systematizations of the regularities”. These systematizations give us some warrant to judge ideas about how the world works, if we can prove that there is no system of models of a given theory that accommodates the given experimental datasets, but we also have to make extremely pragmatic decisions as to whether there is *any* modification of the given theory that would have a system of models for the given experimental datasets, and that satisfies our ideas of what a simple and tractable theory should look like. At such points, there is no systematic Methodology of Science, which has been in a mess for 50 years. Yes this blog-comment analysis is confused, but I doubt that others can do better if they start to confront what QM and the critique of positivism have done to the Methodology of Science at a sufficiently detailed level.
To end with a graphic analogy, the question would be whether scientific knowledge has painted religion into a tiny corner, or whether Scientific knowledge has painted an almost insignificant dot of paint onto an infinite landscape? Religious are sure of the latter opinion, Scientists seem to think that they know a whole lot. To invoke a somewhat exotic mathematical idea, perhaps we should think of the paint as having a fractal dimension that is almost everywhere less than the dimension of all experience? Perhaps either the whole landscape or the painted part may not be measurable. Quantifying the landscape that must be painted may not be easy to do.
If your definition of God is “the currently unknown origin of the universe”, then okay… I grant that the universe exists and that its origin is currently unknown, so if we decide to label that unknown origin with the letters G-O-D, I guess we can do that if you really want… but that’s not really religion.
As soon as you start saying, “And by the way, this currently unknown origin of the universe also knocked up a virgin 2000 years ago,” or even something as vague as, “And by the way, this currently unknown origin of the universe is a conscious agent who knows us and loves us,” then you are making falsifiable claims and you must be prepared to have science comment about it.
From this we should take there are some questions science can answer, the age of the universe and the earth, the evolution of life in outline. There are other questions it can only answer by way of experience, evidence, and simple probability, the applicable boundaries remaining fuzzy; there is no known ordinary natural way of this occurring whether it did or not. And there are other questions it can’t really answer at all. Pretending these questions don’t exist, or pretending we already know the answers is as imaginary as anything else. They may not have answers or the answers may be unaccessible scientifically. They are beyond science, either currently or forever.
Wait… why does religion get automatic dibs on the unpainted region?
I am not sure what to make of your comment that “Scientists seem to think that they know a whole lot,” but whether that is true or not is irrelevant. Whether science has explained a lot of reality or a little of reality, religion doesn’t get to just claim the rest of reality carte blanche. Unless of course you make religion a placeholder for the currently inexplicable, which yields the rather pointless and unsatisfying “God of the Gaps”.
Thank you. I don’t understand General Relativity or QM very well, so it is nice to read something understandable and clarifying on an issue that I have spent a lot of time thinking about myself.
GR and QM posts are good too, and perhaps ultimately more important in the scheme of things, but can be confusing without the necessary background. – but that’s my problem.
“then you are making falsifiable claims and you must be prepared to have science comment about it.”
Yes indeed. Read again the last paragraph of #75.
Um, we only know the age of the universe and the earth as simple probability, dude… We only know anything as a probability. It’s just when the probability gets really really high, we call it true.
Name one. That’s the big problem with all this. Theists mightily proclaim, “There are some questions science inherently can’t answer!”, but I have yet to hear one actually produce an example that stands up to critical examination.
I actually think there are some questions that science can’t answer, but I don’t think there are any objective questions science can’t answer. Science can’t tell me what my favorite type of ice cream is (well, okay, maybe it could I guess by modeling all of my neurons, but that’s not really what we mean).
But you know what? Religion can’t tell me what my favorite type of ice cream is either. Only I get to decide that.
It’s the same with the meaning of life. By definition, there is no such thing as objective meaning — meaning is what a particular thing signifies to a particular being, so it is inherently subjective. So if the question is, “What is the subjective meaning of life?”, or rather, “What does life mean to me?”, only I get to answer that question. Religion provides no epistemological insight whatsoever into that question. I guess it gives you an arbitrary answer that some crazy dude made up a couple thousand years ago to keep his tribe in line, but uh… yeah, I’ll find my own meaning, thanks.