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I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

scott wrote:Well, I know it's foolish of me, but I could suggest that something like 95% or 99% of the people on this planet have no means by which they could verify or understand cutting-edge science, and they have to take it on faith. And it is indeed faith. It's faith in a system (science) and faith in the people that are acting in that system. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to understand Quantum Mechanics when it's explained, things are different. But for most people, faith is the force by which science is trusted.

More like just untrue.

Science is not a system of faith. It's a system of gathering evidence and drawing conclusions from them. To use the word "faith" is a misappropriation: science uses terms like "assumptions" and "a priori" to describe things that are taken to be true in order for the system to work. That's not the same as faith, because there are always reasons for those assumptions, and if there are not reasons, then the assumptions are not grounded.

Secondly, science always has a limited understanding of its models (i.e. quantum mechanics). They are models[i] of the way a system works. They can always be adjusted in light of future evidence, and are not taken as rigid truths (and such are not elements of "faith" belief, where an absolute is stated and accepted without evidence).

Nobel prize winning Richard Feynman is famously quoted for saying that no one understands quantum physics, and it's silly to try to "understand" it. You just have to take the model, and accept the fact that it's damn good at making predictions about the natural world. It's not a faith belief. It's an acceptance of a theory that is applicable and testable, even if it sounds zany. Read his book Q.E.D. It's a quick and easy read. It will shed some <ahem> light on the subject.

Another accessible book on the subject is [i]Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat? which I've been revisiting lately. I think it's a bit biased towards the "we don't really understand things... there's some nebulous secret hidden under the surface that we can never understand..." appeal, but generally pretty good in terms of being true to scientific standards.
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scott wrote:
A better example might be the moon landing. None of us has any way of verifying that it happened. But we all trust that since someone showed us video footage and told us that man was on the moon, then it must be true. This is certainly faith, as none of us has the means by which to verify the truth of the matter.

This example is absolutely 100% erroneous. We can contact the people who can verify the moon landing through subjective experience (i don't think buzz aldrin is dead yet, is he?). Others can verify it by having been in communication with the group of astronauts while it happened. There is a wealth of evidence in support of the argument that it did indeed happen: video evidence, communiques, etc. Someone could go to the moon and look for the flag that they planted as confirmation. There is evidence for the moon landing and the question of whether it happened is testable, so it is can be approached scientifically, and has nothing at all to do with "faith."

Now, if someone went to the moon (or pointed a telescope at the moon's surface) and found no evidence of a flag in the purported location where it was planted, the moon landing could conceivably be called into question. But until there is substantial evidence that it did not occur, the evidence that it did occur outweighs the counter-argument, and wins in the logical-rational debate hands-down.

As for quantum physics: it deals with microworlds that are not directly observable. The definitions of subatomic entities are themselves constructs. You cannot hold an electron in your hand. So you accept the theory--the model--and you test accordingly, and see how well it predicts nature. It works pretty well (better than Newtonian-classical models) and thus we keep it. In time, it is further refined, or it will be refuted/replaced with a better model. And so forth. It has nothing to do with "faith."

I like your post Gio. I agree, there is nothing that has to be taken on faith in scientific research. For a lot of us who do research, finding fault with previous work, some preconceived notion or discovering some novel or anomalous phenomenon is what drives us. We struggle to challenge the norm of scientific thought and move forward toward a more complete understanding of the world around us, however inchoate that understanding may be.

As far as the directions that science may take us in the next century, there is a good book by Michio Kaku called Visions. It is a pretty fascinating read, although it maybe getting a bit dated.

Bill Bryson, in A Short History Of Nearly Everything wrote:Perhaps the most arresting of quantum improbabilities is the idea, arising from Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle of 1925, that the subatomic particles in certain pairs, even when separated by the most considerable distances, can each instantly “know” what the other is doing. Particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction and at the same rate.

It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and the instant you sent one spinning the other would immediately spin in a contrary direction at precisely the same speed. Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 when physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other...

...Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were forever unknowable. Moreover, the idea of action at a distance—that one particle could instantaneously influence another trillions of miles away—was a stark violation of the special theory of relativity. This expressly decreed that nothing could outrace the speed of light and yet here were physicists insisting that, somehow, at the subatomic level, information could. (No one, incidentally, has ever explained how the particles achieve this feat. Scientists have dealt with this problem, according to the physicist Yakir Aharanov, “by not thinking about it.”)

I find this utterly amazing and incredible and strange. Does anyone know anything else about this experiment?

By the way, you can download the whole of the book I read this in from hereat the moment, why/how legal I don't know. It's a great, great popular science read.

Throw some potassium in a golf course water hazard. Preferably while there's some geriatric old coot trying to putt for birdie on the hole.

That shit is crazy.

scott wrote:Well, I know it's foolish of me, but I could suggest that something like 95% or 99% of the people on this planet have no means by which they could verify or understand cutting-edge science, and they have to take it on faith. And it is indeed faith. It's faith in a system (science) and faith in the people that are acting in that system. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to understand Quantum Mechanics when it's explained, things are different. But for most people, faith is the force by which science is trusted.

Scott, you're nowhere near as stupid as this paragraph. You keep making up your own definitions for common terms so as to create uncertainty about them, with respect to their actual meaning:

Faith concerns matters which cannot be known through rational thought and observation, not those things which you personally didn't observe. I don't take it as a matter of faith that the earth revolves around the sun, I accept that it has been demostrated by evidence and deduction to be true. That I have not personally reviewed all the evidence and made my own calculations is immaterial, because I am not a tinfoil-hat freakjob looking to disprove the palpably true.

The scientific community does an excellent job of ferreting-out bad conclusions, because the whole of the world wants to share in its progress. Nobody will let bullshit stand for long if there is a way to disprove it, or if the evidence for it is shaky. I don't take that conclusion on faith either: it is a conclusion that has been drawn by centuries of progress in the hands of the rational. The scientific method has earned confidence, not demanded faith.

There is no evidence for matters of faith, and that is why they remain matters of faith. It isn't that I haven't seen the evidence myself, it's that it doesn't exist.

Steve,

What better source than the Oxford English Dictionary, right?

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/faith

Oxford English Dictionary wrote:faith

• noun 1 complete trust or confidence. 2 strong belief in a religion. 3 a system of religious belief.

— ORIGIN Old French feid, from Latin fides.

Definition #1 perfectly suits my usage. No?

Scott,

I think I understand what you are driving at: that is, since none of us internet nerds have direct access to particle accelerators, etc., that we have to take it on 'faith' that the scientists are handing us the truth.

Also: these laws of quantum mechanics are pretty 'out there', and perhaps just slightly less absurd than billions of people eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a mystic Jewish carpenter, for those of us who are not in a position to prove anything directly.

And I agree with you, for the most part: there are a million things in this world we cannot explain, yet we approach them with passion and certainty, regardless of how well science can break it down for us. For example, you may be in love, and perhaps science could break down some neural processes of being 'in love', but I'm not sure that would change the fundamental experience for you.

Cue Ken Wilber here: a good book is "The Marriage of Sense and Soul", which expands upon his "all-quadrant/all-level" argument that Science and Spirituality just address different aspects of ourselves, and that we don't have to be for or against anymore (perhaps I've read that wrong).

Anyway, as much as I feel that the Abrahamic religions have fucked things up in our world, I'm not sure I would ever describe myself as an 'atheist'. There is just too much that is unknown, and too much wonder and beauty, and other things that are hard to put into a box.

Regards,
Mr. King

Entanglement is insane, I love it.

I don't think science seems crazy, at all. But I don't think it's neutral, either. If you look at the kind of theories that come out of MIT, they often bear the stamp of MIT-ishness (Chomsky's computational/mechanistic model of language and Pinker's modular/computational understanding of consciousness and the brain being two examples I know of).

Different scientific cultures produce different kinds of theories. The debate between Steven Pinker and Steven Rose in my current signature is one example of this.

Pinker has a kind of trust (faith?) in computational models and abstractions, while Rose has a kind of trust (faith?) in a more dynamic/organic and less reducible paradigm of neuroscience. Both are experts in their field. Their disagreements are related to both methodology and interpretation. Is it inappropriate or inaccurate to think that faith has something to do with this?

I also think there is a lot of idealism at work in science which might amount to a kind of faith that empiricism, or instrumental reason, is the most valid way to partition the world (Linus let me have the last word on this here). I mean, NASA is planning to essentially bomb the moon in order to learn about it. Don't tell me there isn't an ideological valency to that model of learning.

I am a fan of science and reason , and believe science produces (in)valuable truths. But I also think the scientific method is the last refuge of idealism for secularists--it provides the ontological stability and security that religions used to. Go after the scientific method, suggest that it isn't totally pure--that it makes sense to think in terms of knowledge production as much as discovery--and people often become very indignant and huffy.

See my proposed reading list for more. There tends to be a lot of goal-post moving by people who won't even hear of a critique of science, too. So if you critique biological theories, people will say, 'well, biology isn't a pure science like physics is,' etc (to which someone could respond, read Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics).

The very idea that particle physics could have a sociological history is very off-putting and counter-intuitive to a lot of people (including me, initially). Because science is supposed to be extra- or a-cultural.

I would say the belief that science isn't itself a form of culture implies a kind of faith. Happily, I'm well-aware that there are many, many scientists who don't have this faith-based understanding. Culture doesn't have to be a pejorative thing, and science quite rightly holds a pre-eminent position in culture--and the fact that it occupies this position is all the more reason to come at it from different angles.

Anyway, as much as I feel that the Abrahamic religions have fucked things up in our world,

Hasn't science fucked up the world as well?

Example: Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Greenhouse effect. Et cetera. All in the name of rational progress, right?