Man, I was just looking at my profile and someone gave me negative reputation points for this thread. I've been nothing but respectful, and the following rant is meant only in a respectful way, as a philosophical discussion and nothing more.
LittleMan said:
they teach in science class that "science cannot prove anything"
That's a gross simplification of scientific philosophy, about as crude as me saying that "all christians are fundamentalist idiots who quote biblical passages without reflection" - an assertion which is obviously false, as there are many brilliant christians running around.
So, why base your faith in science when even the scientists can't say that science is physical evidence?
Scientists work on the scientific method, which is a philosophical way of dealing with the world and coming up with ideas about how things work, NOT a specific belief system (in principle anyway). This is based on the idea that you can make a lot of measurements of something, and use statistics to say that in the future the same measurements will give the same results (or more complicated versions thereof, taking into account many different variables). For example, there is a gravitational constant that relates the size of an object like the earth to the gravitational force it will exert upon another object sitting at a certain distance from it. This is a number that lets you figure out how fast something will fall, or how much force is applied. You can use this to build bridges that work (as opposed to bridges that fall apart) and rockets that escape the earth and get out into space (as opposed to crashing into the ocean). There is no guarantee that some time some set of circumstances will arise where this will fail and gravity will not work the way we expect it to, and part of the scientific philosophy involves paying close attention to these cases and trying to incorporate them by building new theories. This is what you are probably referring to when you say "science can't prove anything" - this is basically true, because the core of scientific thought is the notion that you can be very wrong and your theories can be completely off base and that you can never know ahead of time how your theory is wrong (or when this would occur) and therefore cannot say with certainty that your theory is right in all cases. BUT, and this is important, you need some kind of repeatable observations to prove that you are wrong, and come up with some new theory - you can't just say "this theory isn't right because science is not positivist and therefore I believe gravity is caused by elephants" - you have to see an elephant, or the feces of an elephant, or the smell of an elephant, or something, and the elephant has to be necessary to explain what is happening. In practice it doesn't always work that way, and career scientists will often fight to the death to defend their dying theories ("No, I did not see that elephant, there is no elephant."), but in the end so far it seems that in most cases the method works and the stubborn scientists fall and a new generation takes over.
This part of science is, like religion, a matter of faith - when you choose the scientific philosophy, you've chosen what kind of evidence to believe in and how to structure your thought processes. Christians like the guy in this picture have some other kind of thought process that I really don't understand. It seems to involve a strong emotional sense of connection with something called God, which I have never seen. (I've fallen in love with the universe though, maybe it's the same feeling interpreted differently?) In any case, neither science NOR religion can prove that having either kind of mentality is absolutely right. In other words, I have the authority to say "I don't believe that" but I don't have the authority to say "this is absolutely correct for everybody on the planet".
Anyway, this fundamental flexibility in the scientific philosophy makes it very useful from a technological & pragmatic perspective. If your bridge falls apart, don't build the same bridge exactly the same way and hope it works this time - do a bunch of tests on material strengths and engineering shapes and support structures and try to make a better one. Of course this doesn't mean that it's superior in the arena of ethics and morality (although I personally think you can apply some brands of sociology there quite effectively).
Science is not a set of rules and equations, because those rules and equations are subject to continuous revision as people notice more and more interesting things happening around them. Science is simply a philosophical code, a way of structuring knowledge or belief - the specific contents of knowledge or belief are only considered true until a case can be found where they fail, and then they should be thrown out or revised. On the other hand, you can't just revise theories that work perfectly well without some kind of reason. This is Occam's razor - keep it simple and make testable predictions. Thus I can't say that gravity is caused by a secret, invisible, undetectable system of pullies and wheels operated by invisible elves, because I haven't seen anything to suggest those elves exist and they aren't needed to explain behavior and most importantly I've made an assertion that can't be tested - the elves are defined as things we can't ever see or know about... so how can I say they exist?. (Okay, that's an obvious metaphor for God, and I'm using it to illustrate a point, but not what you might think. Stepping beyond the "what and how" and into the "why" I think *IS* the realm of religion. We can know exactly how gravity works, but why? Where did it come from and what purpose does it serve in the bigger scheme of things? That's a religious matter. We can speculate about it and we can base our artistic view of what the world really fundamentally is on it. Just don't take that religious answer and skew it around and use it to say gravity is false, unless you can do it in a scientific way, because gravity is fundamentally a linguistic construct that really only exists in the realm of science anyway and is used in a certain framework to describe events like bridges collapsing. Same with evolution - evolution is a scientific idea, so you have to attack it with a scientific approach. You can debate the philosophical or religious ramifications of it using religious terminology, but you can't cut it apart with religious terminology because that terminology simply does not apply because by definition evolution is a scientific product. You can't, in other words, disprove evolution using religious arguments - all you can do is attack science itself (and that means all of science, not just evolutionary theory, but the entire philosophical framework of science and everything it has given you.). If you want to cut out specific scientific theories (like evolution, or like general relativity) without cutting up science itself, you need to work within science, because those concepts are themselves scientific theories. The ramifications, like I said, are a different matter, and really are a matter of religion. I can assert that God built all the laws of nature (like electronic interactions, the elemental particles, the basic forces, etc) and pressed "Go" and watched evolution happen, but I can't cut up evolution without getting into it. For the same reason, a scientist cannot say to an evangelical christian that "jesus was not the son of god and did not die for your sins and if you believe in him you will not have everlasting life" because those concepts are not scientific, they require a different line of evidence that is not part of the scientific method because the scientific method has no theory of Hell and Heaven. (Though as a scientist, I am still free to personally not believe any of it, I just realize there's no way I can convince you of it because we speak different mental languages) Got it?
This is getting abstract...)
I would also argue that this kind of flexibility is applicable to philosophical and religious problems. I see inconsistencies in certain religious world views so I don't accept them. I'd rather have a flexible view of god, like some types of Jewish mystics and other weirdos like that who are always questing and trying to figure out what the hell is going on and who the hell is behind it all.
But don't just close your mind to everything.... because it's more real than you can imagine...
I have no argument for this, I have a different world view and I've never experienced that, and I've never been convinced by the bible (which I have read). I was even raised a christian (gasp).
Anyway, now a bit of a different rant: some a**hole gave me a negative reputation point for this thread (which is why I came back to it, I just found out how to check these things), which is ridiculous because I have been nothing but respectful. I had a very honest discussion with the guy pictured in this photograph, expressing my views and realizing that the two of us live in completely different psychological universes. And I've been honest here and just spoke my mind as the obvious issues related to the photograph came up. Oh well.
Just don't legislate what I'm allowed to do and not do (so long as it doesn't involve you) and I won't care what you believe. The minute you try to say, for example, that I wouldn't be allowed to marry another man (no, I'm not gay), or I should go to jail for smoking a plant called marijuana (no, I'm not a drug user), or I should be arrested for having sex that you consider unusual or immoral (okay, I probably do that), you've crossed the line and are making judgements that only your God should be making. If I'm going to hell, leave me alone and let me go there on my own
Respect that and I'll respect you.
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