How do we know science is really real?
Offline Okay... perhaps I'm just thinking too much here... but how do we know science is real? We've all heard this arguement from theists, and I've quoted many a scientific study and fact. However... since I'm not a scientist, nor have I been a part of any of these studies, nor have I gone back in time to witness these events, so should I believe them?
Technically I could apply that logic to everything. Is the Earth really round? Well, I've been told it is all my life... but I've never been to outer space. I know there are scientific ways to tell the Earth is round without going up into space, but I'm no scientist. I could look over every theory and nod, sure. How do I know that we've found dinosaur bones? I've never tripped over ones in my back yard. I've seen them at the museums, but could they just be in depth fabrications? I've seen excavations on TV, but could those be staged too?
I know... I'm just thinking too much. Believe me, I am sane (maybe) and a full time atheist. However I tend to wrack my brain too much.
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Science itself is just a method to determining if something is real or not. Am I right? Among athesits there seems to be a taboo against having 'faith'. There's nothing wrong with having faith in something like evolution for example. The difference is in the the rationale and intuitive logic you use to justify your faith. For example, I don't understand how evolution works and I don't necessarily agree with every commonly held belief on evolution, but I do have faith in the general principle because it makes sense and it seems to be the only logical approach to answering the question of life.
Yea, i think maybe this post goes a little beyond the scope.
It reminds me of the character "Ogar" in the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds" part two.
They are all laying on the beach smoking a joint passing it around making philosophical statements.....then Ogar jumps in and says:
"Hey guys, what if C-A-T actually spelled dog".
Are you eating funny brownies with illicite ingredants?
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According to Encarta the definition to faith is
"Faith: 1. belief or trust: belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof"
I wouldn't say I have faith in science or history books. I have seen dinosaur bones with my own eyes, I have conducted scientific experiments myself in science class in school. I have walked along the old Oregon Trail wagon ruts, and once saw a real Egyptian mummy. I've been shown time and time again thru out my entire life that most of what I have read in history books and science books is true. Everything has a trail of some sort that I can follow if I chose to verify results myself. Faith is used when there is no trail to follow. If you're standing in front of a large office building with two men standing outside each claiming to have single handedly designed the building themselves, you don't know which one to believe. To believe either one of them at this point would be on faith. On the other hand, if one of them is loudly claiming it was them and what they say is true so you should believe them, and the other one is saying that they did it but here's the blue prints with their name on it, here's the permits all with their name on it, and here's a picture of them while they were building it showing the designs to the workers, then it doesn't take faith to believe the second guy is the true designer, but to believe the first guy it would. It's no different with religion. The theists are out there loudly claiming their god is the designer, while the scientist are showing nature did it itself, but scientist are doing it with all the scientific studies, discoveries, fossils, and the like. No faith needed to figure that one out either. As for could all this evidence be a fabrication? That would take even more faith for me to believe then there being a god. To believe the world is conspiring to commit this huge fraud and making it all up, faking all this evidence, creating fake dinosaur bones, building mountains out of layers and layers to give it the appearance it was made over millions of years, all to convince me alone that it's real, all the while everyone else in the world who would have to be a part of this conspiracy keeping it all a secret just incase I might find out, is so far fetched even the theists would have trouble believing that.
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The difference between faith/religion is science is that science uses logic and evidence. The cornerstone of science is the testable and provable hypothesis. Supernatural concepts have been absolutely unprovable to this point and the only arguments espoused by theists usually try to make a end run around logic and evidence.
For nearly two centuries we have known about evolution and natural selection. This hypothesis has been proven over and over by observations of nature and experiments. Intelligent design/creationism has been defeated out by it time and time again for example in the concept of the irreducible structure.
Scientists hold beliefs in ideas which have EVIDENCE. This is the main difference, and every time you get into an argument with a theist they like to use arguments which are based on faith (i.e. a lack of evidence) or bringing up solutions to problems which are even more improbable...
Not to mention the fact that the possibility of a creative designer/god as espoused by creationism is truly false and extremely improbable because a creative intelligence capable of designing a universe and life must have been sufficiently complex. Sufficiently aware and complex creative intelligences arrive late in the scheme of evolution and the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for creating it.
And in terms of you not being sure of theories... go out and look at the evidence for yourself. Read scientific papers, books, etc. This is all easily available and I can point you to a particular resource if that might help.
Biochemist & Law Student
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." -Thomas Jefferson
Seriously, I went to college. There is such a thing as too much pot. LOL
Funny thing is I have wondered about this myself (sober) and the thing about science is that it is testable. It is tangible. Pick something up and let go...it will drop to the floor thereby proving gravity for you. The rest of it that you personally can't prove? Well, you have a logical, skeptical mind. You know when something just doesn't sound right and you know when it does so you look for evidence to find out the truth. There are sources you trust and those you don't. You don't just listen to something (the earth is round) and accept it at face value - you look for the logic behind that statement (even if it is not on a conscious level)...it just isn't how your mind works. That is the price you pay for being a skeptic.
Does that help?
To above poster jce:
But aren't you forgetting about the gravity spaghetti monster? It is an incarnation of the all holy Spaghetti Monster that holds things up until you let them go. It knows when you let them go because it is omniscient. Of course I don't have evidence, just have faith in it! lol just kidding of course ;]
And to the original poster, you can actually see that the earth is round - in fact I believe it was one of the earliest observations of the true shape of the earth. If you are out on the ocean on a boat, if you watch a large ship come directly at you from the horizon - if the ship is large enough - you will see the ship appear to get taller, that is rise up from the ocean. This demonstrates the curvature of the earth. ;]
Biochemist & Law Student
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." -Thomas Jefferson
Well, you can rationalise that science is also a system of competitors. If I could decimate every single scientific theory so far and replace them with my theories, not only that I would be the most famous person on Earth and could easily get lots of money by lecturing, my name would be in the history books.
In science it isn't about coming up with new theories, but testing old ones as well.
The nature of the Real can not necessarily be assertained by observation, only that which is apparent in varying degrees can be discovered. Science doesn't every "prove" anything, it just recognizes that something appears to be a certain way.
When we see a lamp on a table, we can say we've scientifically "proven" that the lamp exists if we ask 100 people if they see it too, but all we have "proven" is that 101 people see a lamp on a table. More inquiry can go into what the other qualities of the lamp are, but never can science say "That is a lamp" because the nature of existence is beyond the scope of science.
But for practical non-philosophic reasons, we can assume the lamp is basically real and that science has basically shown that.
You're not crazy, I think the exact same thing sometimes. What gets me is that I have actually had this brought up to me in an agrument with a xtian. I was pointing out some obvious scientific fact and they we're like "prove it", or something to that effect. It was a question I couldn't have answered unless I was either the scientist themself who did the experiment, or somebody who knows a great deal about science. (of which i am neither) Even if I had been either, to explain how science got to that point would take hours, and by that time I would have lost their attention and/or confused them.
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Hope I'm not stepping on any toes here, but your thinking is correct, lucidfox. To put it another way, in order to conclude that science is really real, you need this assumption:
evidence = truth
This assumption is axiomatic in science. Even scientists recognize that you have to take it on faith. If it happens not to be correct, then all bets are off for science.
The really insidious part, of course, is that you can't use evidence to support the assertion that evidence has a relationship to truth--that would be a circular argument. It is true that all the evidence so far indicates that evidence is related to truth, but conclusions from observation are inherently inductive, we can never be 100% sure that it isn't just some extremely unlikely coincidence.
I first came across this idea in Douglas Hofstadter's explanations of Godel's theorem--that the mathematical theorem suggests from a philosophical standpoint that any time you turn a system back on itself, it breaks down. So science can't prove it's own validity with scientific methods. The idea is probably in other sources as well.
Technically, though, science doesn't use that assumption. The assumption that underlies pure science is more like this one:
evidence = predictability/reproducability
This is really a more useful assumption for doing things like building bridges and designing vaccines. Predictability and reproducability are better to work with because they can be defined by quantifiable human standards (i.e. statistics), as opposed to truth or reality, which are harder to get a handle on.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
Thank you, Textom! This was great! I was ready to cry foul after reading the first part of the post, but your explanation is perfect. I am not a science-type person so there are those that may disagree, but at it's core, to me this is what science is all about.