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Wednesday, September 03, 2014

"Science flies us to the moon–religion flies us into buildings"


I'm going to comment on some statements by the late Victor Stenger in The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Reason and Science (Prometheus Books 2009), 59. 
We trust scientific method, logic, and mathematics because they work. They give us answers that we can independently test against objective observations. They give us electric lights, computers, and cell phones. 
i) Is there just one scientific method?
ii) Apropos (i), seems to me that there's a distinction between great scientists and average workaday scientists. The average scientist is methodical. But great scientists operate more from intuition. Flashes of insight. Take Einstein's thought experiments involving clocks, trains, elevators, or riding a light beam. Is that a method? 
A method is reproducible. A set of instructions. Just follow the instructions. Do it yourself. 
But the average scientist can't imitate Einstein. Einstein had a remarkable knack for visualizing physics. That's not a method–that's a talent. Ironically, as Einstein got older, he became more methodical, but less insightful. 
Same thing with Newton's cannon, Schrödinger’s cat, and the EPR paradox. Is that a method? 
What about Feynman's sum-over-histories interpretation of quantum mechanics? In a sense, that's a method. But how did he arrive at that in the first place? Was there a method by which he hit on that interpretation? 
Or take this example:  
I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity.

How many physicists sitting in a cafeteria would draw that analogy? Is that a method? Great scientists employ analogical reasoning. They discern parallels which lesser scientists don't notice. Like Newton's bucket. That's a real experiment. A simple experiment. Anyone can do it. What made it special was not the experiment itself, but Newton's extrapolation. He used that as a springboard for a thought-experiment. One which, in turn, proved to be a stimulus to Mach and Einstein. 

Great scientists resort to thought-experiments, in part because that's a short-cut, and in part because the technology may not exist to perform a real experiment. So they have to experiment in their heads. For instance, the double-slit experiment was originally a thought-experiment. When Feynman proposed it, the technology did not exist to do it for real. 

iii) Do we trust logic because it works? How could we tell what works apart from logic? What works doesn't prove logic; rather, logic proves what works. There's no way to "independently test logic against objective observations," for that comparison depends on logic from the get-go.  

iv) Do we trust math because it works? If math didn't work, how could we tell? Not by taking measurements to see if math matches our measurements, for measurement depends on math.

How can we independently test math against objective observations? Suppose I observe some marbles. How many? Are there five marbles or six? Unless I have a preconception of number, I can't count how many marbles there are. Absent math, I can't register their number. How does Stenger think math works in that setting? How could he ever detect a mismatch between math and how many marbles there really are? 

Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.
That's a catchy slogan. Appealing to the rabble. 
i) From a Christian standpoint, that's a false antithesis. Absent God, there'd be no moon, no astronauts, no rocket scientists. No electricity. God is the ultimate source of science and scientists. God is the ultimate source of logic, mathematics, and the physical world. 
ii) It wasn't religionists in general who flew airplanes into buildings. It was Muslims in particular. A very specific theology. 
iii) Yes, science flies us to the moon. Science also gives us tanks, missiles, stealth bombers, battleships, bioweapons, chemical weapons, thermonuclear weapons, and predator drones. In future, it may give us orbital weapons.   

3 comments:

  1. "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings."

    One could just as well say something silly like, "Religion lifts the human spirit, science throws it down," if by "science" we mean the atheistic, materialistic, reductionistic "science" Stenger espoused.

    Of course, people like Stenger wouldn't have seen it this way. But that's because they fail to grasp the implications of hard atheism.

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  2. By the way, I believe Feynman's IQ was 125 or thereabouts. If so, it's a good IQ, but not good enough to be considered the genius he is. However, given Feynman's obvious genius, then shouldn't this reflect rather poorly on the accuracy or reliability of IQ tests to measure intelligence?

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  3. Good point about great scientists and average scientists.

    I think this is similar elsewhere. Such as among medical doctors and clinicians. There are plenty of average physicians and surgeons who more or less follow a script or guideline or policy or the like. At the same time, though they may not be publicly heralded or anything, many doctors can probably tell stories of this or that other amazing doctor who simply had an uncanny knack for working up a patient and diagnosing the patient's exact disease based on what nearly all other doctors would find scant resources. Perhaps many a doctor has had such an insight in their career, but I'm referring to the doctors who appear to do it more or less regularly. These are the doctors other doctors will themselves call up or otherwise consult if they don't know what to do for a patient or how to treat this patient or the like. They're the doctors' doctors.

    (As an aside, I happen to think one of the more difficult to see if not invisible issues with ObamaCare is it's putting tremendous pressure on such doctors to survive and thrive in modern medicine and instead moving medicine as a whole more toward cookie cutter recipes. Medicine by cookbook. If a patient has x, y, and z signs and symptoms, then run these tests; if the test results show a, then apply treatment a to patient, whereas if the test results show b, then apply treatment b to patient, etc. If so, as I believe is occurring, then I suspect these doctors' doctors will eventually be squeezed out, or at least pushed to more peripheral sorts of roles in the medical system, while the average physicians will gravitate toward more central roles in our nation's healthcare. Of course, I'd have to defend these claims, cite details, and so forth, but for now I'll simply leave it at my personal observation and naught else.)

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