Compatibility of Science vs Religion

[dastardly stem]

I'm with Physics Guy, the use of scientific method is overblown and not well definable. I'd say there is something incompatible with religious thinking and rational thinking. I'd call sensible thinking rationality. And I'd say most definitely religion has shown time and again to be incompatible with rational thinking. But that was the point of my comments, essentially, the last couple of weeks here. There is no spirit realm simply because we wish it is so. Religious thinking in general suffers from the same problem. A possibility is not turned into a probability by sheer desire of some humans.

Religion all too often, it seems to me, appeals to irrationality in its own defense...demonstrating there is no rational defense. When someone proposes a defense of religion and thinks it rational, it fails every rational test. That's easy to show. Just ask any person who thinks there religion's is true, to defend it. Every piece of evidence examined hangs on the balance of whether the evidence is an explanation for the religion or not, in, at best, a 50/50 way. But that's the most reasonable a religious person can muster, I'd say. Most defenses are try their best to turn a least likely into a most likely simply because it's possible.

I know. I overstate things. But I maintain that's about right, from my experience. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise, but i ain't going back to Sic Et Non's comments page again. It's cute, in a way, but boring and foolish in another.

[huckelberry]

Physics Guys comment above is better than mine but I will add my version just to expand the thread.

The word compatible here is confusing. Science and religion are different activities with different goals and procedures. Well of course one can see some common elements. Would it be compatible to play a game where half of the players used soccer rules while the other half played basket ball. The ball is similar.

[DrStakhanovite]

For years Daniel has been dropping the names of authors and books that have so much relevant material on this topic and yet absolutely none of it is brought into the discussion.

[Rivendale]

For years Daniel has been dropping the names of authors and books that have so much relevant material on this topic and yet absolutely none of it is brought into the discussion.

I have noticed this also. When people ask for a simple summary of evidences he quotes long tomes written by John Sorenson. Yet he himself was persuaded by one book.

[drumdude]

For years Daniel has been dropping the names of authors and books that have so much relevant material on this topic and yet absolutely none of it is brought into the discussion.

It’s easier for him to just assert that you are a dogmatic moron for not reading the books that are so incredibly convincing to unbiased observers…

[doubtingthomas]

The word compatible here is confusing. Science and religion are different activities with different goals and procedures. Well of course one can see some common elements. Would it be compatible to play a game where half of the players used soccer rules while the other half played basket ball. The ball is similar.

The Matrix franchise is also compatible with Science. You could have trillions of similar balls.

[huckelberry]

The word compatible here is confusing. Science and religion are different activities with different goals and procedures. Well of course one can see some common elements. Would it be compatible to play a game where half of the players used soccer rules while the other half played basket ball. The ball is similar.

The Matrix franchise is also compatible with Science. You could have trillions of similar balls.

I am sorry I am at a loss to imagine how the number of balls increases compatibility or establishes it. With a mix of soccer and basketball I thought one ball would be enough to create incompatible confusion.

[Gadianton]

In my thirty years in academic physics I have only even heard scientific method mentioned a handful of times—and then only to laugh wryly about how we never mention it. There's a lot of technology and a lot of math, but no special scientific way of thinking in physics. It's not a game that has to be played according to certain conventions. The only rules are common sense.

"The scientific method" appeared in a textbook one day a long time ago and went viral from there. If science were too rule based, I could just write a python script to go out and find scientific truths for me. But I don't think we have to always mean "the scientific method" when talking about method, or any other absolute set of rules when talking about method. A great scientist may not be able to codify intuition. It would be ridiculous to talk about how to make yourself come up with brilliant insights. But, once the insight is on the table, it's got to be communicated, and in the process of communicating and supporting the theory, I'm pretty sure there will be some method.

A classic example of "method" in a science debate: Peter Woit's blog "Not even Wrong" was named to make fun of string theory, castigating it for not being falsifiable. Many scientists and science popularizers assume falsificationism as "the scientific method", and if nothing in string theory can be falsified experimentally, then it raises the question of whether we can regard string theory as "science" at all. Ed Witten responded to this general accusation of string theory going the "against method" route, saying that we can't say in advanced what rules govern future science.

Are the tactics you use to search under the lamppost compatible with the tactics you use to find keys in dark alleys? In some ways and up to some points, sure they are; in other ways, no they're not. Searching in the dark and searching under the light are not totally unrelated activities, but they do have different circumstances.

Are the tactics used to prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon the same as the tactics that were used to discover the City of Troy? Maybe the apologists have new ways to access historical truths that will revolutionize archaeology -- make digging a waste of time.

[Physics Guy]

Another famous quote about string theory was Steven Weinberg's explanation for why he started working on it despite having serious basic concerns about it: "It's the only game in town." It was an allusion to an old joke about a poker player who plays in a weekly game that he knows is rigged. Weinberg might just have meant that string theory was the only big thing going on in his research community, so that he had to get into it in order to attend conferences and stuff, but I think he probably meant that string theory was the only big idea that anyone had on the subjects that interested him.

I think that is indeed a common feature of religious and scientific thinking: a willingness to adopt a working theory and push it as hard as you can, even if it's far from clear that the theory is true, rather than simply sit on one's hands and do nothing because the data are insufficient to support any hypothesis clearly. You get in the game and try stuff, acting and thinking as though the hypothesis were certain—and see what shakes loose.

If you're only reading the textbooks when they finally come out after the dust has all settled, as an armchair consumer of science, you might not see the resemblance between scientists and religious believers here. The scientists are just methodically testing hypotheses, not believing in anything. If you're in the lab trying to shake up the dust, though, I think the similarity is clearer. You're investing precious time—often years—in something that might well go nowhere. Sure, in principle even a null result is another little brick on the pile of knowledge; but nobody wants to look back on a career that only produced null results.

Adopting a research program usually has a big opportunity cost; you're committing resources that could have done a lot of other things instead. You're placing a bet and you'd like it to win. So you want to bet as shrewdly as possible, but the bet that definitely won't win is the one you don't even place. So there's a bias for action. In science the bias for action is supposed to be a bias in favour of testable hypotheses, and I think it generally is, but when the conclusive test is going to take several years, the daily grind keeps itself going in large part just because it's something to do. You want to go emeritus with your boots on.

I think that really is much the same spirit as Anselm's famous credo ut intelligam, "I believe in order to understand." And I think one might even argue that religion and science are too similar in this way—that aggressive investment in a hypothesis can be a productive strategy, or at least not too wasteful, when the hypothesis is about simple enough things that it can be tested within a human life span or so, but that it's misguided for ideas that are harder to test than that. Maybe religious believers are like reckless poker players who play mediocre hands through to the showdown, when the clearheaded player would have folded right after the ante, just because they came here to play, for Pete's sake, not to keep folding and watching the others play.

Maybe we're just stuck with that kind of strategy even when it's not so appropriate, though, because human brains are just adapted for hypothesis-based operation. Maybe it's the only game in town.

[DrStakhanovite]

The idea that there is a discrete method for science is a relic of positivism and all attempts to formalize it have failed. Logical Positivism and Phenomenology are two famous examples from the last century that show rather graphically how hard this is to do.

DCP should know this simply by virtue of his claim to have read Karl Popper, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. You don’t even need to actually read through an entire book to do this, familiarizing yourself with the respective entries available on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy would be more than enough to explain to AxelBeingCivil why he is in error.

Alternatively, one could do as PhysicsGuy and simply reflect on how humans reason and investigate their world. His comments on discursive thinking demonstrate the difficulty of trying to parcel out such a method, given that we all use inductive reasoning for just about every activity under the sun.