RE: Science: A Religion? (long post)
September 8, 2014 at 5:34 pm
(This post was last modified: September 8, 2014 at 5:45 pm by ManMachine.)
(September 8, 2014 at 12:55 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:(September 7, 2014 at 1:39 pm)ManMachine Wrote: If you choose to use your belief in scientific endeavour to 'negate religious or opinion based thought processes' is your decision, there is no scientific imperative that requires you to do this.
The scientific method IS designed to try and negate opinion and beliefs and to focus on results.
It doesn't always work at once but over time with lots of data and peer review it does do the thing you say it doesn't.
I think you have a very idealistic and naïve view of scientific endeavour. Modern scientific endeavour has triumphed over its perceived adversaries not through superior rationality but because its late-medieval and early-modern founders were skilled in the art of rhetoric and politics.
As Paul Feyerabend notes, Galileo did not win his cause for Copernican astronomy because of 'scientific method' but because of his persuasive skill, and because he wrote in Italian. By identifying Latin as the language of the scholastic community that opposed his cause, he side-stepped them and appealed to the general population by publishing his works in Italian, a deliberate move on his part. Galileo did not succeed because of the persuasive truth of Copernican astronomy but because he identified the social trends of his time. What this illustrates is that to limit the development of scientific endeavour to 'method' would slow the growth of knowledge and perhaps even bring it go a grinding halt. For any social construct to survive it must keep pace with society and trends.
Galileo considered himself a defender of theology, Newton explained anomalous occurrences as traces left by god, Tycho Brahe viewed them as miracles and Thomas Kepler described astronomical anomalies as reactions of 'the telluric soul'.
I've already mentioned the problems with scientific method identified by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. More recently Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, identifies the politics, favouritism and deliberate stifling of any theory that challenged the established paradigms that exists at the heart of Theoretical Physics, another Theoretical Physicist, Peter Woit identifies the same problems in his book, Not Even Wrong.
You only have to look at the US space programme to see what can happen to a field of scientific endeavour if society loses interest in it. Scientific authority is extremely powerful and we know what power does to humans. Scientific endeavour serves humanity and nothing else, and it is just as prone to corruption as every other human endeavour.
It is clear from history that scientific method was not 'designed to try and negate opinion and beliefs' but embraced them and that today advances in scientific knowledge comes not from reason but from acting against it.
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)
