Science: A Religion? (long post)
September 7, 2014 at 11:07 am
(This post was last modified: September 7, 2014 at 11:24 am by ManMachine.)
Most of you know my views on this subject and I’ve posted parts of my arguments in other threads. What I wanted to do is try to put my argument together as concisely as possible with a view to both ‘setting out my stall’ and perhaps encouraging debate.
I am an atheist and I find science the most reasonable explanation for the Universe, so let's put any accusations of anti-science away, I will not respond to replies on that topic. I'll apologise in advance as it is a long post, for those of you with the patience to read it I hope it is thought provoking if nothing else. Thanks in advance for reading.
Science: A Religion?
To begin with I wanted to understand what is meant when we say ‘science’? This term gets thrown around quite a lot in the forums but it is a very general term that encompasses a lot of ideas. Often a debate that employs ‘science’ as a unified concept stutters and fragments as different threads are pulled out. To help clarify the debate I’ve attempted to identify what I see as the main principle concepts behind the general term ‘science’;
1. Scientific Enquiry – the functional ‘input’ or imperative that drives scientific endeavour
2. Scientific Method – this is a general term for a process that sets out the most efficient method for carrying out scientific enquiry
3. Scientific Theory – The theoretical ‘output’ - the development of a cohesive theory that explains the empirical evidence we gather carrying out scientific observations
4. Scientific Knowledge and Technology – The ‘output’ of scientific method and theory
5. Scientific Authority – The accumulated ‘significance’ scientific knowledge and technology has for humanity – e.g. Moral, Legal, Political, Societal, Educational, Commercial, (surprisingly for many or perhaps not so for others) Religious and in a recursive sense other Scientific Endeavour
This identification of the main principles, as I see them, is important to my argument, I also see them as key to pinpointing the issues in most debates about ‘science’. For example, I often find that when Christians attack a scientific theory they are using this as leverage to undermine scientific authority, in this respect I find some kind of distinction of the main principles useful. Any talk about ‘science’ in the general terminology includes all the main principles (I’ve referred to this as ‘scientific endeavour’), debate about the specific principles of scientific endeavour should be framed and directed at that principle.
The fundamental purpose of religion is to provide hope and censorship, hope that tomorrow will be better (enlightenment, everlasting life, etc.) and censorship by way of a set of rules to follow in order to realise that hope. Not only does hope have obvious political and commercial advantages it seems that it has evolutionary advantages too according to MD and respected Evolutionary Biologist Randolph M Nesse (The Evolution of Hope and Despair - 1999).
According to Nesse, for the individual, hope drives global strategies (‘portable’ strategies that can be applied to a number of different problems as opposed to unique strategies that only work for specific problems) and leads to their conclusion in satisfying base needs, we would not have developed global strategies if it were not for hope. On a social level humans seek reciprocal relationships, but there are no guarantees of this so we develop shared rules that govern our social relationships to increase the likelihood of reciprocity. The censorship of certain non-reciprocal behaviours is only as successful as the weakest adherent, so there is a social imperative to foster strong adherence to the rules of censorship, which is why we see groups of people react strongly to deviations. AF is a good case in point, the strength of reaction I get to my opinions is often proportionate to the degree of deviation from what is broadly accepted to be norm for this group.
There are rules that broadly govern scientific method and the development of scientific theory. The rules differ from one scientific discipline to another - wonderfully illuminated by Sheldon Cooper in an episode of The Big Bang Theory, as he stands on a ridge in his paint-ball combat uniform and in an effort to attract fire to save his friends declares, ‘Geology isn’t a real science!’, while an obvious comic device for the character it does highlight real-world differences in attitudes to scientific method within the scientific community. When I see people talk about scientific method it is almost as if there is one set of golden rules that everyone follows, this is clearly not the case yet the necessity to perpetuate this in exactitude persists. What’s interesting here is not the detail of this seemingly insignificant faux pas but the ubiquity of it. Scientific method does have a broad set of rules but there appears to be a general desire among groups of people who align themselves with scientific philosophy to coalesce them into something more coherent than they actually are.
The argument that scientific method is the result of development-by-accumulation of genuine attempts on the part of humanity to achieve objectivity is not only ex post facto it is not supported by observation. In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn observes,
“…When observational data arises which appears to contradict or falsify a given scientific paradigm, scientists within that paradigm have not, historically, immediately rejected the paradigm in question (as Sir Karl Popper's philosophical theory of falsificationism would have them do), but instead they have gone to considerable lengths to resolve the apparent conflict without rejecting the paradigm. Through ad hoc variations to the theory and sympathetic interpretation of the data, supporting scientists will resolve the apparent conundrum. In extreme cases, they may even ignore the data altogether.”
Kuhn’s book was based on his studies of a number of scientific projects in which he not only recognised individual and social bias but that social groups formed around scientific paradigms. He argues that scientific development is not an accumulative acquisition of knowledge but a lurching series of revolutions brought about by collapsing paradigms;
“…the failure of a scientific revolution is not an objectively measurable, deterministic event, but a far more contingent shift in social order. A paradigm will go into a crisis when a significant portion of the scientists working in the field lose confidence in the paradigm, regardless of their reasons for doing so. The corollary of this observation is that the primacy of a given paradigm is similarly contingent on the social order amongst scientists at the time it gains ascendancy.”
Not only did Kuhn’s book identify social structures that form around scientific paradigms but that they often engaged in activity that undermines objectivity. Scientific endeavor does not yield a fixed picture but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview. The social orders that form around paradigms are unfortunate but ironically they are almost certainly one of the main sources of the appeal of scientific endeavor by offering a refuge from uncertainty. Bertrand Russell had this to say on the matter;
“When I speak of the importance of scientific method in regard to the conduct of human life, I am thinking of scientific method in its mundane forms. Not that I would undervalue science as a metaphysics, but the value of science as metaphysics belongs in another sphere. It belongs with religion, art and love, with the pursuit of the beatific vision, with the Promethean madness that leads the greatest men to strive to become gods. Perhaps the only ultimate value of human life is to be found in this Promethean madness. But it is a value that is religious, not political or even moral.”
To think of scientific endeavor as the embodiment of the pursuit of truth is pre-scientific, it is to detach it from human need and make it something that is not natural but transcendental. In the words of John Gray,
“ …to think of science as the search for truth is to renew a mystical faith, the faith of Plato and Augustine, that truth rules the world, that truth is divine.”
Like religion, scientific endeavour offers us the promise of hope (a better life tomorrow) and gives us censorship (rules – like the general structure of scientific method, peer review, repeatability, etc.) in order to achieve that hope. There is no question that the knowledge and technology scientific endeavour delivers is perceived in the here and now as ‘progress’, but this concept is not measurable for humanity as a species and it certainly isn’t scientific. Anyone who ignores the destructive power of Knowledge and Technology is ignoring history. Religious persecutions are thousands of years old but without the railway, telegrams and poison gas the Holocaust could never have happened. Knowledge and technology are neither good nor bad, they are simply tools to enable humans, who by their nature will do good and bad things with them.
Of course, any talk of progress of our species is scientifically nonsense, we all know Darwin’s discovery was that ‘species’ are only currents in the drift of genes. The idea that humanity has control over its future assumes it is exempt from this truth. There are no universal constants that humanity can (or in my opinion even should) be measured against.
‘Scientific truth’ is a fallacy, an appeal to authority, but this is not an authority that comes from some universal notion of truth but, as Russell points out, from human need. Much of the authority afforded to scientific endeavour comes from our faith in its ‘truths’. But if there is one thing we have learned from Darwin it is that the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. Modern Evolutionary Behaviourists will tell us that deception is common among primates and birds, truth has no systematic evolutionary advantage over error, according to Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist,
“ …the conventional view that natural selection favours nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the wold must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.”
Humans are remarkably good at deceiving themselves, this is important because ‘if we cannot deceive ourselves we are less likely to be able to deceive others’ (Robert Wright – The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life).
At a fundamental level, science performs the same functions as religion. The scientific-faithful may want to believe scientific authority arises from its truth; that scientific method has arisen out of accumulated knowledge; that scientific endeavour is the disinterested pursuit of fact and even that knowledge and technology lead to human progress but none of this can be empirically supported or reasonably justified. Scientific endeavour is a human construct designed to meet human needs, it is and always has been another expression of our anthropocentrism, it encourages us to believe that we can understand the natural world and bend it to our will, it supports the conceit that humans are unlike all other animals.
Our modern faith in scientific truth is an ancient creed. Socrates founded Western thought on the grounds that truth makes us free. He believed that knowledge and a better life went together, this was passed on to Plato and so to Christianity, it now survives as the central belief of modern secularism. Against all available historical evidence the belief persists that humans will be reasonable, and history has shown us time and time again that this has never been true.
For Wittgenstein the whole point of having religious beliefs is that ‘the meaning is to be found in the life in which they are employed’. In scientific endeavour humans have found hope and a belief that censorship will deliver on the promise of that hope, that knowledge and technology will lead to a better life and that our faith in truth will set us free. The unsatisfying pay-off of Wittgenstein’s observation is that no one will ever know how they really feel because we know how good we all are at deception and in order for any deception to be believable, we must successfully deceive ourselves.
MM
I am an atheist and I find science the most reasonable explanation for the Universe, so let's put any accusations of anti-science away, I will not respond to replies on that topic. I'll apologise in advance as it is a long post, for those of you with the patience to read it I hope it is thought provoking if nothing else. Thanks in advance for reading.
Science: A Religion?
To begin with I wanted to understand what is meant when we say ‘science’? This term gets thrown around quite a lot in the forums but it is a very general term that encompasses a lot of ideas. Often a debate that employs ‘science’ as a unified concept stutters and fragments as different threads are pulled out. To help clarify the debate I’ve attempted to identify what I see as the main principle concepts behind the general term ‘science’;
1. Scientific Enquiry – the functional ‘input’ or imperative that drives scientific endeavour
2. Scientific Method – this is a general term for a process that sets out the most efficient method for carrying out scientific enquiry
3. Scientific Theory – The theoretical ‘output’ - the development of a cohesive theory that explains the empirical evidence we gather carrying out scientific observations
4. Scientific Knowledge and Technology – The ‘output’ of scientific method and theory
5. Scientific Authority – The accumulated ‘significance’ scientific knowledge and technology has for humanity – e.g. Moral, Legal, Political, Societal, Educational, Commercial, (surprisingly for many or perhaps not so for others) Religious and in a recursive sense other Scientific Endeavour
This identification of the main principles, as I see them, is important to my argument, I also see them as key to pinpointing the issues in most debates about ‘science’. For example, I often find that when Christians attack a scientific theory they are using this as leverage to undermine scientific authority, in this respect I find some kind of distinction of the main principles useful. Any talk about ‘science’ in the general terminology includes all the main principles (I’ve referred to this as ‘scientific endeavour’), debate about the specific principles of scientific endeavour should be framed and directed at that principle.
The fundamental purpose of religion is to provide hope and censorship, hope that tomorrow will be better (enlightenment, everlasting life, etc.) and censorship by way of a set of rules to follow in order to realise that hope. Not only does hope have obvious political and commercial advantages it seems that it has evolutionary advantages too according to MD and respected Evolutionary Biologist Randolph M Nesse (The Evolution of Hope and Despair - 1999).
According to Nesse, for the individual, hope drives global strategies (‘portable’ strategies that can be applied to a number of different problems as opposed to unique strategies that only work for specific problems) and leads to their conclusion in satisfying base needs, we would not have developed global strategies if it were not for hope. On a social level humans seek reciprocal relationships, but there are no guarantees of this so we develop shared rules that govern our social relationships to increase the likelihood of reciprocity. The censorship of certain non-reciprocal behaviours is only as successful as the weakest adherent, so there is a social imperative to foster strong adherence to the rules of censorship, which is why we see groups of people react strongly to deviations. AF is a good case in point, the strength of reaction I get to my opinions is often proportionate to the degree of deviation from what is broadly accepted to be norm for this group.
There are rules that broadly govern scientific method and the development of scientific theory. The rules differ from one scientific discipline to another - wonderfully illuminated by Sheldon Cooper in an episode of The Big Bang Theory, as he stands on a ridge in his paint-ball combat uniform and in an effort to attract fire to save his friends declares, ‘Geology isn’t a real science!’, while an obvious comic device for the character it does highlight real-world differences in attitudes to scientific method within the scientific community. When I see people talk about scientific method it is almost as if there is one set of golden rules that everyone follows, this is clearly not the case yet the necessity to perpetuate this in exactitude persists. What’s interesting here is not the detail of this seemingly insignificant faux pas but the ubiquity of it. Scientific method does have a broad set of rules but there appears to be a general desire among groups of people who align themselves with scientific philosophy to coalesce them into something more coherent than they actually are.
The argument that scientific method is the result of development-by-accumulation of genuine attempts on the part of humanity to achieve objectivity is not only ex post facto it is not supported by observation. In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn observes,
“…When observational data arises which appears to contradict or falsify a given scientific paradigm, scientists within that paradigm have not, historically, immediately rejected the paradigm in question (as Sir Karl Popper's philosophical theory of falsificationism would have them do), but instead they have gone to considerable lengths to resolve the apparent conflict without rejecting the paradigm. Through ad hoc variations to the theory and sympathetic interpretation of the data, supporting scientists will resolve the apparent conundrum. In extreme cases, they may even ignore the data altogether.”
Kuhn’s book was based on his studies of a number of scientific projects in which he not only recognised individual and social bias but that social groups formed around scientific paradigms. He argues that scientific development is not an accumulative acquisition of knowledge but a lurching series of revolutions brought about by collapsing paradigms;
“…the failure of a scientific revolution is not an objectively measurable, deterministic event, but a far more contingent shift in social order. A paradigm will go into a crisis when a significant portion of the scientists working in the field lose confidence in the paradigm, regardless of their reasons for doing so. The corollary of this observation is that the primacy of a given paradigm is similarly contingent on the social order amongst scientists at the time it gains ascendancy.”
Not only did Kuhn’s book identify social structures that form around scientific paradigms but that they often engaged in activity that undermines objectivity. Scientific endeavor does not yield a fixed picture but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview. The social orders that form around paradigms are unfortunate but ironically they are almost certainly one of the main sources of the appeal of scientific endeavor by offering a refuge from uncertainty. Bertrand Russell had this to say on the matter;
“When I speak of the importance of scientific method in regard to the conduct of human life, I am thinking of scientific method in its mundane forms. Not that I would undervalue science as a metaphysics, but the value of science as metaphysics belongs in another sphere. It belongs with religion, art and love, with the pursuit of the beatific vision, with the Promethean madness that leads the greatest men to strive to become gods. Perhaps the only ultimate value of human life is to be found in this Promethean madness. But it is a value that is religious, not political or even moral.”
To think of scientific endeavor as the embodiment of the pursuit of truth is pre-scientific, it is to detach it from human need and make it something that is not natural but transcendental. In the words of John Gray,
“ …to think of science as the search for truth is to renew a mystical faith, the faith of Plato and Augustine, that truth rules the world, that truth is divine.”
Like religion, scientific endeavour offers us the promise of hope (a better life tomorrow) and gives us censorship (rules – like the general structure of scientific method, peer review, repeatability, etc.) in order to achieve that hope. There is no question that the knowledge and technology scientific endeavour delivers is perceived in the here and now as ‘progress’, but this concept is not measurable for humanity as a species and it certainly isn’t scientific. Anyone who ignores the destructive power of Knowledge and Technology is ignoring history. Religious persecutions are thousands of years old but without the railway, telegrams and poison gas the Holocaust could never have happened. Knowledge and technology are neither good nor bad, they are simply tools to enable humans, who by their nature will do good and bad things with them.
Of course, any talk of progress of our species is scientifically nonsense, we all know Darwin’s discovery was that ‘species’ are only currents in the drift of genes. The idea that humanity has control over its future assumes it is exempt from this truth. There are no universal constants that humanity can (or in my opinion even should) be measured against.
‘Scientific truth’ is a fallacy, an appeal to authority, but this is not an authority that comes from some universal notion of truth but, as Russell points out, from human need. Much of the authority afforded to scientific endeavour comes from our faith in its ‘truths’. But if there is one thing we have learned from Darwin it is that the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. Modern Evolutionary Behaviourists will tell us that deception is common among primates and birds, truth has no systematic evolutionary advantage over error, according to Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist,
“ …the conventional view that natural selection favours nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the wold must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.”
Humans are remarkably good at deceiving themselves, this is important because ‘if we cannot deceive ourselves we are less likely to be able to deceive others’ (Robert Wright – The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life).
At a fundamental level, science performs the same functions as religion. The scientific-faithful may want to believe scientific authority arises from its truth; that scientific method has arisen out of accumulated knowledge; that scientific endeavour is the disinterested pursuit of fact and even that knowledge and technology lead to human progress but none of this can be empirically supported or reasonably justified. Scientific endeavour is a human construct designed to meet human needs, it is and always has been another expression of our anthropocentrism, it encourages us to believe that we can understand the natural world and bend it to our will, it supports the conceit that humans are unlike all other animals.
Our modern faith in scientific truth is an ancient creed. Socrates founded Western thought on the grounds that truth makes us free. He believed that knowledge and a better life went together, this was passed on to Plato and so to Christianity, it now survives as the central belief of modern secularism. Against all available historical evidence the belief persists that humans will be reasonable, and history has shown us time and time again that this has never been true.
For Wittgenstein the whole point of having religious beliefs is that ‘the meaning is to be found in the life in which they are employed’. In scientific endeavour humans have found hope and a belief that censorship will deliver on the promise of that hope, that knowledge and technology will lead to a better life and that our faith in truth will set us free. The unsatisfying pay-off of Wittgenstein’s observation is that no one will ever know how they really feel because we know how good we all are at deception and in order for any deception to be believable, we must successfully deceive ourselves.
MM
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions" - Leonardo da Vinci
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
