Compatibility of Science vs Religion

[Physics Guy]

As an undergrad I took a course in the philosophy of science given by William Newton-Smith, but I'm not sure it took. I wasn't disappointed in the philosophical approach, or anything. As a mere undergrad at the time I felt that Newton-Smith seemed to have an accurate impression of how science worked; I think I have a wider view now of what science is like, but insofar as I remember the course, I think I'd still say that.

My only real beef with the philosophy of science falls well short of critique, but it's the feeling that science isn't the only set of academic disciplines in which offering jobs for the girls and boys is the great contribution. In natural science it may be a bit easier to get grant money for studying something, but philosophy is just as liable to insist that something obvious really deserves careful analysis, to the point where you can make a nice career out of dotting i's and crossing t's on a foregone conclusion. And then because that can get a little too obvious, other people can make careers out of iconoclastically defending absurdities. They flourish because the other stuff was too obviously pedantic, but then their nonsense justifies all the pedantry by showing that it really was a fight that had to be fought. It's a co-evolution.

Academic disciplines are all like that, I figure, but it means that if you're an interested observer in one rather than a participant, as I was and am in the philosophy of science, you're going to find a few things worth taking seriously but eye-roll past a lot of stuff on both the pedant and troll sides.

[huckelberry]

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.

I realize that I do not know what sort of meaning compatible has in this discussion. Obviously people can value both religion and science. I was thinking of Stephen Gould's nonoverlapping magisteria. I do not think that idea is the whole story, human activities overlap. It probably is useful to Gould in order to limit the time he has to interact with flood geology proponents. There are a variety of ways religious tradition using knowledge of physical and historical world from a few thousand years ago conflicts with current knowledge.

A thankyou to Physics Guy for his expanded and useful observations on this.

[DrStakhanovite]

As an undergrad I took a course in the philosophy of science given by William Newton-Smith, but I'm not sure it took. I wasn't disappointed in the philosophical approach, or anything. As a mere undergrad at the time I felt that Newton-Smith seemed to have an accurate impression of how science worked; I think I have a wider view now of what science is like, but insofar as I remember the course, I think I'd still say that.

My only real beef with the philosophy of science falls well short of critique, but it's the feeling that science isn't the only set of academic disciplines in which offering jobs for the girls and boys is the great contribution. In natural science it may be a bit easier to get grant money for studying something, but philosophy is just as liable to insist that something obvious really deserves careful analysis, to the point where you can make a nice career out of dotting i's and crossing t's on a foregone conclusion. And then because that can get a little too obvious, other people can make careers out of iconoclastically defending absurdities. They flourish because the other stuff was too obviously pedantic, but then their nonsense justifies all the pedantry by showing that it really was a fight that had to be fought. It's a co-evolution.

Academic disciplines are all like that, I figure, but it means that if you're an interested observer in one rather than a participant, as I was and am in the philosophy of science, you're going to find a few things worth taking seriously but eye-roll past a lot of stuff on both the pedant and troll sides.

Your comments here reminded me of a paper by J.D. Norton (I’m certain I shared this before):

We have learned that the work that led up to Einstein’s great discoveries was long and complicated, typically spanning years. There is no easy synopsis that does not mislead in some aspects. Much of the work was devoted to lengthy, mundane investigations. They brought moments of disappointment, frustration, and even despair. Einstein persisted with tenacity and discipline. Then there were moments of transcendent insight; however, these were rare moments and were only possible because of the painstaking preparatory work.

An armchair theorist can think up many strange ideas that fly in the face of past thinking. Yet Einstein could know that his novel and outrageous thought was the right one of the many possible because of the thoroughness of his preparation. It showed him that nothing else would work. A real understanding of how Einstein discovered requires a fuller appreciation of these lengthy investigations, in all their complexity.

Our efforts to gain this understanding face a formidable obstacle. We want simple answers. We see Einstein perform intellectual wonders like a magician and we want to know the trick. We can learn how a magician materializes a live tiger on stage. The trick, once revealed, does turn out to be simple. We know that there cannot be a comparably simple trick behind Einstein’s magic. But we still hope against hope that our necessarily abbreviated accounts still capture what is most important.

If we pay proper attention to the work leading up to the great moments, careful scholarship can be quite successful in explaining how Einstein discovered; however, the measured deliberations of cautious scholars are no match for the popular demand for simple answers. Here, Einstein’s prodigious powers can mislead us. He was wonderfully adept at presenting difficult and hard-won results in engaging and simple narratives, often with compelling and memorable thought experiments. He too felt the popular demand for a simple story and he tried to meet it with cautious simplifications. The broader literature, however, has not generally been so cautious. It all too often meets the same demand with accounts so truncated as to mislead. Worse, the popular demand invites uncontrolled guesses and even opportunistic fabrication.

I think a lot of people underestimate how incredibly hard it is to make novel contributions to any domain of human knowledge. You have to invest an inordinate amount of time and effort mastering a specific subject and once you reach that point, now have to rely on creativity and other unorthodox means to find something that others haven’t considered or otherwise neglected.

[Physics Guy]

I haven't discovered anything as important as Einstein. I have found a couple of little things, and they have been humbling, not in the fake-humble way but in the literally embarrassing way that makes you slap your forehead over being so stupid not to have realised it much sooner. When you find something, it's always in the last place you look. Yeah, gee: you don't keep looking once you've found it. The last piece that falls into place has been dumb like that, for me.

I learned something in boot camp. "Leather doesn't shine: polish shines." You get that amazing mirror-shine on a pair of boots by covering the leather in a layer of polish, which can shine just like glass. The stuff that protects your feet on a long march is the leather, and it never shines.

The stuff that makes a cool story in science, and looks smart and elegant, is polish that gets packed on afterwards. The stuff that actually gets you over the hump is usually not cool at all, but banal. Humans are not very smart.

[Gadianton]

My only real beef with the philosophy of science falls well short of critique, but it's the feeling that science isn't the only set of academic disciplines in which offering jobs for the girls and boys is the great contribution. In natural science it may be a bit easier to get grant money for studying something, but philosophy is just as liable to insist that something obvious really deserves careful analysis, to the point where you can make a nice career out of dotting i's and crossing t's on a foregone conclusion. And then because that can get a little too obvious, other people can make careers out of iconoclastically defending absurdities.

Kuhn's idea of hill climbers and valley crossers is interesting. Valley crossing in science is more interesting than valley crossing in philosophy. If you think about all the valley crossing required to keep up with viruses and pandemics and immunology, there's lots of work to do. In philosophy, it feels more like there's lots of work you have to make if out of so many university students x number decide to study philosophy.

I'm ultimately an 'against method' guy. Let's say falsification is our demarcation between science and everything else. If it's falsifiable in principle, then it's a scientific matter. Now I'm a philosopher, and I've read a lot about science, and it seems to me that to be science, the idea must be falsifiable in principle. Here's this new thing, string theory. Out of 100 physicists, let's say 35% are very interested while others are cautious, and some are antagonistic. Here am I, with a bare layman's grasp of even basic mechanics let alone the building blocks of theoretical physics, but, I have this tool that says if it can't be falsified in experiment then it's not science. And so, as a philosopher, I can make predictions about what ideas will be successful in physics without really knowing anything about physics.

It's the idea of efficient markets in finance. You can look at historical data and find rules the market seems to adhere to. Here's a stock with a outrageous price/earning ratio; that's got to be shorted to bring it back into line. I might go broke doing that because a) the market knows something that isn't reflected in that metric b) the market is irrational, and meme traders keep it going anyway. And so if my rule is falsification = science and I'm betting against certain theories, I'm really betting against bias in scientists who are behaving irrationally (by studying string theory). Assuming there aren't tremendous mal-incentives and decent free-flow of information in the physics community, then that seems weird and unlikely, and more likely is that like the out-of-whack P/E, in the market of physics ideas, the main players know something that I don't. And so therefore, the more efficient the market of ideas is in science, the more useless is the philosophy of science.

[Physics Guy]

I started out doing high-energy theory in my PhD—not string theory because it happened to be dead for a while just then, but alternative abstract approaches to quantum gravity. Starting from Hawking radiation of black holes, I wound up getting more interested in the interface between mechanics and thermodynamics generally. You can address some deep questions with real experiments.

Experiments are awesome. I once did a sort of high-noon showdown with an experimentalist in the hallway outside the lab where he had just measured something I had predicted. When we got close enough we each said our numbers; they matched. We high-fived. It was cool.

Not many experiments make it into the textbooks, however. Theory gets most of the glory. As I like to say, physics is a science in which all the breakthroughs are experimental—but all the revolutions are theoretical. Experimentalists get much bigger grants and have much bigger groups of students and post-docs; theorists are pawns with a chance to turn into queens if we can go far enough. Day-to-day, year-to-year, theory is the servant of experiment, suggesting what might be measured, tidying up the results. In the long run, though, experiment exists to serve theory.

So my own motivation to do theoretical work in experimentally active fields isn't really about any kind of epistemological strategy. I'm willing to buy that string theory, or whatever, could in principle find enough observational data to support or disprove itself, from looking at things out in space. I just don't think that human minds are creative enough, to find enough good ideas fast enough to see big new things in my lifetime, without inspiration and hints from things we can poke and prod. Testing ideas to reject them if they are false is great, of course, but I kind of take that for granted. What I value more consciously is the way the prospect of being able to test something in lots of different ways seems to help us to form good ideas in the first place. It taps the ingenuity of our monkey-brains at fumbling around with a tool in our hands until we can crack the nut or whatever.

I'm not sure how efficient science really is these days. A lot more people are doing it now than there ever were in the past, but I don't think we're scaling well. We're getting diminishing returns, paying too much just to get tomorrow's breakthroughs by late tonight. In physics, at least, I think we may have failed to adapt to some climate change. There were those glorious decades in the early-to-mid twentieth century when the Kingdom of Heaven was up for grabs, and all kinds of reckless young whippersnappers could scratch their names into history just with a crazy idea. I think we've been out of that valley for a while, though, and now we need to be less brash and more critical. We shouldn't have so many people trying to be Richard Feynman. We should have more trying to be like Max Planck.

[Philo Sofee]

I started out doing high-energy theory in my PhD—not string theory because it happened to be dead for a while just then, but alternative abstract approaches to quantum gravity. Starting from Hawking radiation of black holes, I wound up getting more interested in the interface between mechanics and thermodynamics generally. You can address some deep questions with real experiments.

Experiments are awesome. I once did a sort of high-noon showdown with an experimentalist in the hallway outside the lab where he had just measured something I had predicted. When we got close enough we each said our numbers; they matched. We high-fived. It was cool.

Not many experiments make it into the textbooks, however. Theory gets most of the glory. As I like to say, physics is a science in which all the breakthroughs are experimental—but all the revolutions are theoretical. Experimentalists get much bigger grants and have much bigger groups of students and post-docs; theorists are pawns with a chance to turn into queens if we can go far enough. Day-to-day, year-to-year, theory is the servant of experiment, suggesting what might be measured, tidying up the results. In the long run, though, experiment exists to serve theory.

So my own motivation to do theoretical work in experimentally active fields isn't really about any kind of epistemological strategy. I'm willing to buy that string theory, or whatever, could in principle find enough observational data to support or disprove itself, from looking at things out in space. I just don't think that human minds are creative enough, to find enough good ideas fast enough to see big new things in my lifetime, without inspiration and hints from things we can poke and prod. Testing ideas to reject them if they are false is great, of course, but I kind of take that for granted. What I value more consciously is the way the prospect of being able to test something in lots of different ways seems to help us to form good ideas in the first place. It taps the ingenuity of our monkey-brains at fumbling around with a tool in our hands until we can crack the nut or whatever.

I'm not sure how efficient science really is these days. A lot more people are doing it now than there ever were in the past, but I don't think we're scaling well. We're getting diminishing returns, paying too much just to get tomorrow's breakthroughs by late tonight. In physics, at least, I think we may have failed to adapt to some climate change. There were those glorious decades in the early-to-mid twentieth century when the Kingdom of Heaven was up for grabs, and all kinds of reckless young whippersnappers could scratch their names into history just with a crazy idea. I think we've been out of that valley for a while, though, and now we need to be less brash and more critical. We shouldn't have so many people trying to be Richard Feynman. We should have more trying to be like Max Planck.

Thanks for sharing your ideas here PG... I hope you are wrong that we aren't in blase trouble, and I hope you are correct that more Max Plancks can and will show up. Yes the early 1900's were the HUGE era of exciting times in physics. We just don't hear a lot about it these days, well except for our new space telescope, and even now we aren't hearing a lot about it. I am seriously hoping that changes.

[Physics Guy]

Excitement like that revolutionary era probably can't go on all the time. Progress comes in bursts. So I'm not really disappointed that things haven't moved nearly that fast in my own time. I'm just worried that we aren't managing our current era as well as we could be, so it may be longer before the next burst than it had to be.

[Rivendale]

Excitement like that revolutionary era probably can't go on all the time. Progress comes in bursts. So I'm not really disappointed that things haven't moved nearly that fast in my own time. I'm just worried that we aren't managing our current era as well as we could be, so it may be longer before the next burst than it had to be.

I sometimes wonder (especially in todays society) if we have asymptotically reached a point of diminishing returns. Maybe we have entered a point where the limits of a stable society have outweighed progression. Progression is such a loaded word. If there is a better future how can we possibly know what it is? How does a person or generation envision a better future when they are creatures of attitudes. Attitudes that are not the same especially when new information may change the world view. In the early 20th century technological innovations created by people made life easier. And for that generation they deemed it better. Now some say it has created a slothful selfish mecentric population that does not value new world discoveries. I think excitement can go all the time but resists. Desensitization seems to have robbed a large section of society regarding any discovery. On the flip side maybe we can't see the water we swim in and this is the greatest advancement for humanity ever.