Is faith a reliable path to knowledge?

We are in the midst of a mystical deepening of presence that will remove the barriers to the dreamscape itself. Reality has always been radiating seekers whose prestige and whose souls are baptized in potential. Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the quantum matrix using prestige and vibrations.

 

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I'm not willing to agree that science is somehow immune from faith. As I argued earlier in the thread, the whole idea of expounding universal 'laws of nature' based on finite data sets is dependent on faith in the validity of inductive reasoning, which is difficult to justify without circularity. Ontological naturalism is a metaphysical assumption, while methodological naturalism is simply a posit that derives from how natural science is defined. Science has faith in mathematics and in the assumption that reality necessarily conforms to logic.

I disagree pretty strongly with any suggestion that faith is a stand-alone source of information about anything. Faith works in conjunction with separate sources of information, which can differ dramatically in terms of credibility.

I certainly agree that it's true that we can obtain reasonably reliable information if we have faith in the right things. Sciforums' beloved 'scientific method' might be an example (if anyone can establish precisely what science's defining method is). Having faith in schizophrenic delusions isn't likely to be nearly as good a source of information. The crucial variable with faith isn't the faith itself, but rather the nature of whatever it is that we have faith in.

If an individual has no faith at all, he or she would likely fall prey to a corrosive and nihilistic skepticism in which all sources of information appear questionable and all possibility of knowledge doubted.

 

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I think it would be a mistake for a scientist to allow a faith-based inference to override an evidence-based one. This is one reason for introducing quality control into science and industry. Ideally, every procedure which is in place in some scientific or technological entity would catch any faith-based errors by testing against the evidence.

Contrast this idea with the question JamesR raised earlier: how does our "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow compare to the faith held by some religious sect which might happen to believe that a god is driving a fiery chariot across the sky . . . and then whatever they thought was happening when a solar eclipse occurred.

I think there must be two distinct ideas: scientific "faith" = "expectation based on evidence" vs. the religious forms of faith. The expectation that the axioms of geometry hold universally, as defined, is not, I think, properly called an act of faith. It would be better be called an inference based on a truism. If A=B then no one would question that B=A. This fundamental ability to infer the truth of a conclusion from a hypothesis has little or nothing to do with faith, I think. It has to do with something intrinsic about physical reality (in this case the reflexive property of equality), and it has to do with the human faculties which evolved to better ascertain certain kinds of truth in order to survive (such as: is that a predator about to attack, or is this my next meal?) It is those faculties which separate our reliance on science vs. reliance on something else like religion.

OK, but we should agree that faith-based science is probably bad science.

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Using a process that works is not the same as faith. As JamesR said early in this thread, it's the reliance in something that must be inferred by its law (it keeps happening). In this case, the law is that the scientific method keeps working, and no other known method (divining, praying, hoping, etc.) ever works repeatably. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that must be called a law.

Not only that, but faith in delusions is equivalent to not distinguishing between dreams and reality. In evidence-based inference, we need only deal with laws, and from those laws all the necessary procedures for inferring new conclusions becomes available. In geometry, we need start with only the most fundamental laws to derive everything else we need, to have a complete set of working procedures for solving a huge class of problems.

Quite the opposite, I think. If a person questions findings of fact and conclusions of natural law, replacing these with any of the many heuristic kinds of faith-based inferences available (esp. to the religious people) then that corrosive skepticism emerges (esp. the attacks on science by religion) . The faith-based inference may not necessarily be nihilistic, but then: what does nihilism have to do with discernment of the truth? Whether or not the result comports with some conclusion congruent with nihilism, "it is what it is" once proven. That is, science seems to me diametrically opposed to the concepts of nihilism. (Depending on which meaning of "nihilism" you had in mind.) Certainly science deals extensively with describing the actual world around us (at least at the macro-world level.)

 

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Hi, AI. Good post.

My point earlier was that 'evidence-based' inferences still require faith in the evidence, in our perception of it, and in whatever inferences we draw from it.

Remember Kittamaru's insistence that "the senses are flawed". Hence the argument was made that eye-witness testimony of unwelcome things can be dismissed simply because it's eye-witness testimony. But the whole idea that 'evidence-based inferences' are even possible requires faith that despite the possibility of error and illusion, the senses still remain capable of providing us with true and reliable information.

I don't entirely disagree with that distinction. But I question how clear-cut it is in real life. My view is that the same basic epistemic process is occurring in religion as in the rest of life. In both the religious and secular cases, what we see is commitment to propositions whose justification is imperfect.

It seems to me that logic is based at least partially upon intuition. We just kind of intuit the principles of logical inference and the logical necessity that supposedly adheres in them. And we just kind of assume that there's something intrinsic to physical reality that makes it conform, always and without any exceptions, to our logical intuitions. I agree that reality does seem to behave that way and that's probably why human psychology evolved these particular intuitions. But while that might explain, it doesn't fully justify the belief that our intuitions must hold true universally, everywhere and always.

How can science proceed without faith in inductive reasoning? That particular item of faith seems to be built solidly into what science is.

But what if the question at issue is whether the future will resemble the past? Evidence would seem to have little relevance here, since our evidence is evidence of what happened in the past, and our question is whether that has any bearing on the future. We can perhaps argue that in the past when we asked this same question, the unfolding of subsequent events verified our predictions, so that we should assume the same will happen now. But that prescription introduces the assumption of the uniformity of nature which we were originally seeking to justify, rendering the proposed argument circular.

How do human beings discover laws of nature? According to the hypothesis-testing accounts of scientific method, people suggest a possible law, use it to make predictions of how experiments or observations should turn out if it was true, and then perform those experiments and observations. Suppose that the experiments and observations are successful. How does a small set of confirming instances justify belief in a universal law that supposedly holds true in all instances?

The Buddhists believe that their meditation techniques work repeatedly. The experience of untold thousands of individuals during meditation is their evidence.

In my last post I disagreed with Wellwisher, who had suggested that an absence of faith would lead to an admirable open-mindedness. I suggested that an absence of faith would lead instead to a corrosive and nihilistic skepticism.

My point was that if we have no faith that our senses can reveal the truth about the world around us, we will likely start doubting whether an objective world even exists, and tumble down the rabbit-hole of subjective idealism to solipsism. If we lack faith in our logical and mathematical intuitions, reasoning becomes problematic. If we lack faith in the uniformity and constancy of nature, science would become very difficult.

My suspicion is that our whole intellectual life, and our personal lives along with it, is built upon some degree of faith. (I've heard that the capital of France is Paris, but I've never been in France and just take it on trust.)

 

Not only do scientists have great confidence in certain evidence, but so much so that we speak of the "laws of nature". This of course applies to observations which are universally repeatable. Thus I can say "I know for sure that ice begins to melt at just above zero degrees Celsius in an ambient of 1 atm of pressure" or "the acceleration at sea level due to gravity is about 9.8 m/s²".

There certainly are a huge number of cases for which this certainty does not apply. But to even use the word "faith" in a statement about scientific observation implies, in the context of scientific discussion about the particular topic at hand, that there is some doubt about the data (usu. the method of data collection), either because it has not been subjected to rigorous quality control procedures, or some anomaly exists which makes any conclusion premature, and so forth.

Of course it's hard to generalize here since the field of science is no very broad.

I am very glad to remain in possession of those senses which still work in me, so I will have to take issue with Kitt. The senses are evolved from the oldest of organisms, which needed access to energy sources to survive, and thereby evolved sense organs (or organelles) with which to locate those energy sources. It is that success in finding energy which (among a host of other things) led to the evolution of human senses. But I can name countless machines which sense things as well or better then than any organism can.

Of course, the statement is rather ambiguous. How flawed is human vision? I would say it's just about good enough to discern an attacking predator from, say, our next meal. Otherwise we would have some other kind of visual apparatus working inside of us.

As you know, eye-witness testimony is often admissible evidence in courts of law. And as we know, a great many injustices can result from allowing witnesses to control the outcome of a court decision. But I think once we gravitate toward "unwelcome things" we are drifting into something a little more like emotion than reason. It implies that the search for truth is somehow being manipulated. In short, there is no room for eye-witness accounts in science, other than as initial reports which need to be substantiated. Galileo was the first known eye-witness to the orbit of luminous objects around Jupiter. And indeed, he was correct in inferring that Jupiter had its own moons (confirming the Copernican view of a heliocentric "universe"). But we can only say this with confidence today because it has been universally and repeatably witnessed by every person who took the time to research the question himself. In fact, Galileo wrote later that he was frustrated by the refusal of church investigators to even take the time to look through a telescope themselves (every night over a period of several weeks). And of course he was under house arrest for the rest of his life simply for publishing what he witnessed.

I think the standard is different. When every person in the room sees a blinding flash of light and a hears a clap of thunder, there will normally be no question as to the cause. But in a war zone, hunkered down in a bunker, they will probably check the weather station to try to discern the true cause. It's this ability to combine facts and evidence into properly formulated logic that gives us that sense of reliability you speak of. But in every case, it's the universality of repeatable results which casts certain conclusions in concrete. Having seen the pictures taken by probes that visited Jupiter, you yourself would probably not doubt that Galileo was correct. I am quite certain you agree with Copernicus.

Does that mean you reject Galileo or Copernicus or any of a thousand matters of "settled science"? Atheists. I think, will argue that the religious objects simply do not exist, or rather that objects purportedly having magical qualities are simply artifacts of folklore. And they will do so with certainty when they have the requisite knowledge, since, once we establish that there are "laws of nature", we establish that they can not be repealed by anything other than newer, better evidence.

Again, this is an inherited faculty. We step out of the way of a speeding train for the same reason a rabbit heads for its hole in the presence of danger. Our actual survival, and that of countless ancestral organisms, is "living proof" that the sense faculties are not as flawed as Kitt mentioned. In fact, I would assert that the senses are "just good enough" to correctly appraise the world each organism lives in. And I base that on other laws I know of, which assure that (usually) a minimum of resources will be expended in the evolution of a trait that improves the survivability of a creature withing its niche.

I don't think anyone is claiming that; in fact that is why we dismiss lunatics and magic (to include religious metaphysics) from the science rooms. However, when we notice certain observations do in fact hold true universally, everywhere and always, then we say we have "settled science", in other words, we have now concluded that a natural law has been observed in action.

In fact science can not proceed without doubt. We must test every allegation before making findings of fact. Inductive reasoning has some limited value among all of the tools in our box, but moreso in pursuing rigorous theoretical predictions than in the applied sciences. I think that's where we find the huge reliance on universally repeatable results.

"Universal repeatability", yes, is built solidly into the confirmation of evidence and the determination of natural laws. But not "faith" itself, at least not until we agree that every observation is suspect and subject to some kind of aberration depending on the observer. But when or where does that apply? Almost never in the lab, at least not when dealing with a system that employs quality control. (Of course the QC process may be faulty, but that's another issue.)

 

I think there are a host of issues that we can pick at random which will render circular argument. I'm not sure how else to treat this question. Throughout this discussion I have mainly had in mind "what we know" and "how we know what we know". I wasn't even considering "things we can't possibly know (at least not today)".

When I speak of a law, I am speaking of something established in nature which no person or entity has control over. Some of these are readily confirmed to be valid in all instances. For example, the relationship between a the circumference and diameter of a circle is fixed because it is intrinsic. We simply have no recourse but to accept this. A lot of the natural world is like this. And we don't usually ascribe laws to a small number of experiments. That being said, a lot of data is easy to confirm (have confidence in). I can measure a lot of basic quantities (length, temperature, voltage, etc.) and I don't think you will doubt that my numbers are far off. And that intuition you speak of comes into play moreso in the lab where we learn to test our measurements and state them withing a "confidence interval". Intuition helps us reserve our judgments until we can be sure the instruments were calibrated, for example.

I don't think this conflicts with science. In fact, I have referred to meditation of that sort as self-hypnosis. But all of the ideas they hold to be true are merely manifest as ideas. There is no physical manifestation which comports with those ideas, which I can take to the lab and test, to produce some result they attest to.

I guess we might start with some assumption like "assuming I am living in the real world, that I am really me and these are really my eyes, then I would have to infer that (the sky is blue or whatever)" and that might be sufficient for small scale observations. But when ten or twenty different temperature probes all confirm that water begins to melt at around zero degrees Celsius, it's not "faith" that's the word I begin to use, but "confidence". Granted, there are many other things going on during this experiment that I can ascribe to "faith" (although I would probably use another word, like "trust").

Yes, I think we readily accept as true any statement or claim made by just about anyone, unless we have reason to doubt it, or to suspect that the claimant might be a hoaxster. This is also the way courts usually admit evidence (assumed to be true until proven false). But this is more predominant in the intellectual life of religious people than scientists, who are given to accept as true just about anything (esp. once it can be cited in sacred text), even when it flies against the laws of nature. And that, I think, distinguishes the religious person from the scientist more than anything else.

 

I have been trying to show that faith is often the main way most people obtain knowledge, since nobody has the time, expertise and access to resources to prove all things to themselves. We rely on others to do this for us and use faith in their judgement that what we learn is reliable. This has pitfalls because celebrity and personality often can influence faith in a person, which then people assume means their message.

For example, not everyone who submits a paper for publication in science journals will publish. There is only so much room for articles. Few if any scientists get to read all the papers to make sure the editors chose perfectly. What we do instead is have faith the editors did their best.

The editors themselves are personally and professionally connected to universities and research organizations through friends and colleagues, and they have more faith in certain organizations and people when it comes to submissions.

Now-a-days with social media, faith is even more widely used, since decisions often reflect many layers of faith and not direct output data from the source. This is easier because it require much less self reliance. Ir can make less intelligent people look smarter. Faith can be a tool that simplifies learning if used properly.

 

No, people obtain knowledge by gathering information, analyzing it, testing it, and forming conclusions. Otherwise, we would have to call all superstitious belief "knowledge". Consider learning how to walk, for example.

No, having instructors and instructional materials is merely a way to nurture the result (education). The idea is to give students a greater amount of time to devote to developing critical thinking skills, which is the thing that negates what you're suggesting. And then there is also a focus on labs and research, which is to increase the personal quest for knowledge by developing higher skills.

No, students are taught to uncover hidden facts, search for evidence, test facts and evidence, and deduce the truth for themselves. You sound like you are describing a school system in North Korea or something.

So, you never had to write an essay, a term paper, or do research, design or lab work? Sounds like you went to a very strange school. No matter, the rest of the world is mostly in the hands of able folks we call educators. Go look at the course materials for college student setting out to be an elementary school teacher. You would flunk that program with this kind of assessment.

People subscribe to science journals specifically to save them time culling out all the trash and styrofoam from the validated findings of sincere and qualified investigators. You sound like you never did any research yourself.

Who is this "we'? What journals do you subscribe to, and which "editors" are you knocking? Look, why are you attacking stuff you don't even work with? You're speculating, that much is clear. But your depiction of how research and publication works is sheer fabrication.

Oh really? So a dean of MIT sitting on a panel for some journal will reject a paper submitted by a NASA scientist in favor of a paper written by one of her students or staff? Get off the gas, bro. In the first place you have no clue. In the second place you are inventing Machiavellian plots just to sit and crow about your nemesis - academia. Guess what? No one cares. Go look at this month's list of articles for any of 10 reputable journals. Come back and tell us which "editors" are promoting which research!

BTW, many articles are the joint effort of a panel of investigators from all sorts of "affiliations". You really have missed the boat on this. Talk about a stab in the dark.

Where? Not in any academic or professional science entity I am familiar with. Geez, bro, you really should go back to school. You've become worse that just a cynic. You've become a delusional cynic.

Ah, then that would explain why we are slipping back into the Dark Ages. Now I get it.

So far, all you have done is to insult the intelligence of people smarter than you.

That's a concept all the educators here will shitcan along with the rest of what you said.

Really, dude: go back to school. You'll be glad you did.

 

I definitely agree with you about that.

Most of what we think we know, was acquired through our trusting the word of other people. And in everyday experience, the word of other people is notoriously unreliable, distorted by all kinds of errors and biases. Trust in perceived authority is certainly consistent with how I think 'faith' should be defined, as commitment to the truth of beliefs whose justification is imperfect.

That's obviously true.

Editors don't typically have the expertise to evaluate all the papers they receive. At low end journals that need submissions, editors will seemingly publish papers that superficially look scholarly, which results in trivial and at times crankish stuff being published. And there's a lot of that, since professors are judged in part by how many publications they produce. Anyone who reads the academic literature knows that much of it isn't worth the time necessary to read it. At higher-end journals, editors pass papers on to a group of often anonymous peer-reviewers who are typically academics in the same specialties as the paper. These readers' biases are unknown as is how much time and effort they devote to their thankless task. So faith in the idea that if the journals publish something, then it should just be accepted, rests upon a shaky foundation in my opinion.

There's this idea that scientific assertions are authoritative because they have all been replicated and verified. I wonder how often that's true. Repeating somebody else's work isn't the way for ambitious young researchers to make a name for themselves. They are expected to produce original research. There was that recent meta-study in which attempts were made to replicate the results of 100 psychological experiments reported in top (and presumably peer-reviewed) psychological journals. Only about 1/3 were successfully replicated. The implication there is not only that psychological results often don't replicate, but also that the attempt to replicate these kind of results is apparently an unusual event.

The peer-reviewers, whether the editors themselves or outsiders, are often committed to particular theories, approaches and positions on professional controversies. So one should probably expect that they will have a more favorable and less critical view of papers whose presuppositions and conclusions support their own.

It's also significant that university hiring and tenure decisions are often influenced by the positions that applicants take on professional controversies. It's often healthier to one's career prospects to conform to the views of the established bigshots at the institution where one is being considered, at least until after receiving tenure.

Laypeople typically don't read the journals. There's another filtering layer between the man and woman on the street and 'science'. Most of the 'science' regular people are exposed to is encountered in the newspapers, popular magazines and on TV. This material is the work of 'science writers'. (This has turned into a new profession in the last generation.) Many of these writers have little education in, or understanding of, science. (So we get excited stories about things like 'the God particle'.) There is little or no explanation of what justifies the often counterintuitive things that scientists say. It's just presented as if it was something akin to religious revelation or medieval wizardry, the result of some occult but absolutely authoritative gnosis that normal people will never understand but must nevertheless unquestioningly accept. "Scientists say..."

Textbooks are the paradigmatic example of that. Many textbooks, particularly in the hard sciences, are very good in my opinion. It makes a lot of sense for students to believe (perhaps provisionally, with a grain of salt) what they read in their textbooks. In the sciences, it's simply impossible to start again at the beginning, with the ancients, and then reexperience the entire history of human thought, understanding precisely why each new idea was adopted. It's hard to imagine how anyone could ever learn science unless he or she accepts some of it on faith.

 

The irony is that Wellwisher is the one on the insult end.

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That assumes all people are naive all the time. It may be true for very young children, but even kids quickly acquire the ability to sort fact from fiction.

I think I respond in the opposite way. Today I trust the word of other people insofar as they are relating what has happened to them. In this sense I react in the manner of a naive child. Once they state a fact that has anything to do with physical reality, I quickly become the skeptical reasonably well-informed person my academic and professional experience has made me. So if they say "my foot hurts" I will ask "Where?" or "What happened?", wondering if they need help. But if they say "I twisted my ankle when the transporter beam placed me on a rocky hill which I descended before stopping at the store for a loaf of bread" then I will just laugh, or ask them if they forgot to take their pill or something.

That reflects a jaded view, not yet explained. Suppose you are an orderly working in a clinic. All day you hear statements like "change those bandages daily" and "follow the directions on the pill bottle exactly" and so forth. I think the orderly would have to disagree with you.

Here we are talking about science. Where is there room for error or bias? The area of a circle certainly can't be anything other than pi times the radius squared. The positions of the planets each night (ephemerides) of Tycho Brahe may not have been perfectly measured, but Kepler was amazed to discover that they fit the trajectory of elliptical orbits, within about 2 digits of precision. So much of nature can be measured, and those measurements are testable by subsequent investigators, that it is very hard for error and bias to survive in the curriculum. Furthermore, science as a curriculum has very little to do with accepting facts and more to do with understanding them - as per study, testing in the lab, researching prior compiled results, and - most importantly - developing analytical skills aimed at detecting and correcting errors. How else could any program of study in science have ever evolved to its present state, in which folks all across the globe will invariably reach the same answers to most technical problems, using every kind of method available to solve them?

That sounds OK but I think it excludes all knowledge for which there is no "authority" other than Nature itself, and for which all test results are repeatable, and for which nothing but raw data (evidence) need to be offered as "justification".

Only in cases in which testing is taboo or unimportant. Certainly untrue in the case of science.

I doubt that. If a paper is going to be published in electromagnetics, it would be unusual for a panelist receiving the paper to be unable to understand it. On the pother hand, it would be quite easy for a first year student to tell if it's pseudoscience, and dismiss it for that reason. The journals pick experts in the topic to cull the wheat from the chaff. It's hugely successful, as demonstrated by the extremely high quality of articles published. To date, I think there are only a handful of bogus submissions that have made it past the review process. (Editing is another thing entirely.) Compare this to the million or so articles ever published.

Also, be sure to distinguish bona fide journals from junk and pretenders.

So we write those pubs off as junk.

They are judged by the quality of their work, not the quantity.

Now you are insulting the intelligence of anyone who has ever done research. I would say, on average, about 80% of articles I encounter at random are fascinating enough for me to at least read the abstracts and decide whether I have spare time to read the article. I have learned a huge amount of stuff by reading "around" my research topic (getting lost in the articles I was not intending to read). I actually formulated a master's project around several such articles. And if you want to really blow your mind, go look up things reported 100 to 200 years ago. How about something as mundane as as a table of definite integrals? The mere fact that a person discovered a method for solving them by hand is fascinating enough, but the fact that they devoted a decade or more to solving tens or hundreds of thousands of them in a lifetime completely boggles the mind. No, I say you are wrong, and you are wrong because you have not spent night after night in a technical research library, poring through the endless supply of fascinating information, usu. impeccably prepared and left for posterity.

I find it hard to believe that this fairly categorizes the review process, much less the belief that the task is thankless or not. I can tell you from experience, that it takes an extremely well honed mind to write and publish anything novel and useful, and moreso to break new ground and launch a series of replies and studies to it. No, I think you have it wrong, my friend, and I think that comes from a naive form of cynical pessimism. I think the scales would drop from your eyes if you were to enroll in an applied science class as well.

 

No, science is not based on assertions. It is based on evidence. I can teach you the fundamentals of calculus, and the only things I will need to assert are some primitive ideas about natural law. In the process I will assert a synopsis of Newton's Principia but I will place the onus on you to refer to the massive text yourself. If you are worth your salt, you will probably want to drop the course, and read Principia instead. But if you are not prepared (literate in math in science) enough to understajnd what Newton is explaining, then you will come back and enroll in Geometry, Trig and Mathematical Analysis. And those course will assert facts from Pythagoras, DesCartes, etc. etc. which you will be encouraged to read for yourself by digging up their original treatises. So you see, this jaded view that science is based on dogma is really just a product of your imagination, nothing more.

Go back to school!

Instead you should tell us why it should not be true. I have a pretty good test for you: after being bitten by a poisonous snake, which anti-venom will you take? The one which has never been found not to work, or this new serum which has not yet been tested?

Nor will that result in a passing grade on a paper. Citing work already established is another thing. You have to establish the range of things already known. And very often this is done to point to anomalies. Einstein cited Maxwell, Michelson & Moreley, and Poincare & Lorentz in offering his theory of Special Relativity. And those folks cited other folks before them. But at each stage, the academic world evaluated and tested the claims of each. And essentially they are correct (or correct enough) to proceed from one stage to another. So the system works. It may not work 100% of the time, but it looks like it works about 99% of the time.

But how else do you propose to keep junk science out of the actual curriculum? There simply is no better system anyone has thought of yet.

No, that's mis-worded. They are expected to research (do a survey of current science) applicable to the topic, and then to offer something NEW and USEFUL in the way they tie that information together, and/or with their own experimentationb. (Actually this defines a dissertation better than a postdoctoral submittal for publication.) In any case, the idea for demanding novelty is so that papers are not (as you claimed) "repeating somebody else's work". Obviously, if a claim comes forward which is new and esp. if it is controversial, a lot of folks are going to repeat the work. And a limited number of classical ideas are repeated in the lab classes every day. We teach students how to test ideas, beginning with ideas already "asserted".

You should quote the actual conclusions made by the authors (to remove that bias you were complaining about). In any case, this distinguishes one class of experiments (human behavioral testing) from all others (e.g., applied science in general). Further, it demonstrates that there is a ton of verification testing to do in that field. And, lest we forget, it speaks to the underfunding of psychology, which makes verification often impossible. I would like to see that issue become the new focus here, rather than trying to drag all of science down with one narrow report of this kind.

Keep in mind, psychological treatment has typically been excluded from most insurance plans.

That assumes qualified experts are typically incapable of critical thinking which is cynical to the level of absurdity. You are making a lot of bald claims here which science literate people know to be false.

No, only a naive cynic should assume that.

Only in universities being meddled with by outside entities. (Koch Bros., for example). The rest is BS. Have you ever competed for such a position? I have. In each case in which I lost the people who were chosen were better qualified either because they scored slightly higher and/or because they had been full time students during their doctoral program whereas I had been working full time off campus. So you are way off base here, for sure.


(to be continued...)

 

The insults that very often appear in all discussion forums, is an attempt to lower the prestige of a person; messenger, so others who learn by faith, will not have any faith in their message. Those who asset the authority of the traditions, yet do not define a logical analysis of proof or disproof, are depending on the prestige of the traditions to create or reassure their faith and the faith of others.

A discussion without faith would be a logical data analysis without needing any prestige inductions. I would say about 90% of the science forum discussions are based on faith learning. Being banished to alternate theory or cesspool is about lowering the prestige, it is not about proving or disproving anything.

I often get censored more for being reasonable, than anyone. I am told the way I write makes it sound like this is proven science. The fear is connected to a prestige induction that might influence faith learners. Because the staff and others often use a prestige attack, and don't go through the logic to disprove the analysis, censor is a tool for faith versus faith learning. Faith is very common in learning.

 

If you write better than your adversaries, appear more thoughtful and make better points, then those qualities should be obvious to any impartial reader. So just do your best and make the best posts that you can.

I don't think that the everyday kind of faith is just a matter of authority and prestige. That's a big part of it obviously, but I think that the word 'faith' applies whenever we accept beliefs as true without being able to fully justify them.

That applies to logical data analyses, if logic itself can't be logically justified. And who can do that? The philosophy of mathematics and logic is very much a work in progress. (The difficulty in avoiding circular reasoning should be obvious.)

Data isn't just a pristine and unproblematic given either. There are the traditional problems of perception. There are interpretive issues as well, that range from simply applying names and concepts to percepts, to all sorts of theoretical assumptions built into observational and measurement methods and apparatus.

There will likely be problems of confirmation as well.

People obviously learn the science that they think they know somewhere.

Even if we ignore the kind of foundational difficulties that I just mentioned up above, people have rarely done all of the research on any scientific topic themselves (especially on a board populated by laypeople, like this one). They haven't gathered all the data, performed all the inferences, and reached conclusions step-by-step.

People usually form their beliefs about science from the popular media, or at best from university lectures and textbooks. There may be lots of brave talk about laboratory experiences, but labs don't typically prove scientific principles, more often they just illustrate them.

I think that the difference with science is that people often have faith that if a scientific conclusion is ever questioned, that all the justifying steps leading to the conclusion can be laid out. That may or may not be true, but there's obviously an element of faith involved when individuals don't have access to those justifications and merely trust that they can be found in the literature somewhere.

Learning in general might be very difficult without faith playing a role.

The learning process has to start somewhere. If it doesn't start at the very beginning conceptually, which is probably impossible in practice, it is going to be assuming the truth of beliefs without justifying them. That means initially just believing one's professors and textbooks about many things, trusting that the justifications exist and will be coming later. It's only in more advanced classes that students are exposed to the smaller details of why beginning classes say the things that they do. But even these more advanced explanations will still be assuming many things as unjustified givens. There doesn't seem to be any way to totally avoid it.

If the subject that we are considering is science, and we proceed backwards looking at all of the presuppositions and justifications that go into current scientific beliefs, we have entered into the realm of the history and philosophy of science. But working scientists typically are less interested in understanding how the edifice of science is built and what holds it up, than they are in trusting that it is ultimately sound and extending it to address new and interesting questions.

 

Here is an example :
A year after her newborn daughter helped wake her from a coma, a North Carolina mom is celebrating how far they both have come.

Last September, Shelly Cawley went into labor and had to undergo an emergency C-section. “I clearly remember lying on the stretcher to take me back to the operating room, and I was crying. I was telling the doctors I was scared that I wasn’t going to wake up from my surgery,” she told WCNC.

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Shelly’s fear almost came true. Though doctors delivered a healthy baby girl, a blood clot broke loose during Shelly’s surgery and sent the new mom into a coma. Hours later, she still hadn’t woken up. “The doctors had done all they could, and it was clear they absolutely thought they were losing her at this point,” Jeremy Cawley, Shelly’s husband, told People.

But a nurse at Carolinas HealthCare System NorthEast, where Shelly was being treated, had one final idea. “We’re a big proponent of skin-to-skin [contact]. We believe it has great benefits for the mom and the baby, and we just thought it can’t hurt, might as well give it a try,” nurse Ashley Manus told People. “I was hoping somewhere deep down Shelly was still there and could feel her baby, hear her baby, and her mother’s instincts would come out and she would realize, ‘This is where I need to be.’”

 

Most people don't have the time and the access to resources to prove and justify everything we believe in science. Many often justify what they know based on the accepted traditions. In manmade global warming, consensus was a major part of the sales pitch, even though science is not done by consensus. In science, one person with hard proof trumps any consensus with weak proof. The goal of the consensus pitch was to establish faith via the prestige of a majority. There has never an area of science with so many bad predictions, being sold as a done deal. This is due to that area of science driven by faith in authority.

The language game often tries to equate faith with religion. This is how this topic began. That being said, I have tired to show that many believe in many thing including science via faith. If that is true, does that imply such knowledge, even of science, is a form of religion? Would religion in science explain the dogmatic close-mindedness and appeal to prestige (insult or flatter) that appears if anything is challenged?

 

Don't use laziness as an excuse for faith. Faith is the ultimate lazy person's way of understanding things. It is not one supported by the methods of science. Consensus does embrace strong evidence over weak evidence. Consensus is when a bunch of people try the same thing to confirm the results. It is the opposite of having faith in a proposition.


You should be ashamed of yourself for promoting such ignorance.

Those many are wrong to do so. Science is the opposite of religion. Evidence is the opposite of faith.

 

And what do you think that is an example of?

 

The nurse did not have a scientific method , but it was a common sense for her , no thing was scientifically studied , yet it worked . Probably on the future some health study will be made.
Science is developed on common hunches and the extrapolate with additional study.

 

Yeah, that's not faith. That's experimentation. Also, there might actually be no link whatsoever between the nurse's action and the mom waking up. She could have woken up just then anyway.