Taking science on "faith"

[Knife]

I realized something earlier today that in hindsight seems totally obvious to me. I don't think I'm a stupid person by any means, but I basically take science on faith no differently than a believer takes his religion on faith. I do my best to understand scientific concepts, but as hard as I try my comprehension of the underlying physics of our universe cuts of somewhere on the mesonic level. Try as I might, I can't really wrap my head around planck's constant being the smallest measurement of both space and time, and I still have questions about evolution (namely the formation of the process of blood clotting, light sensitive cells and the flagellum, to name the big ones) that I can't seem to rationalize with my understanding of science. Yet I fall completely in step with scientific views, accept whatever comes out of scientific journals as fact, and consider myself an atheist. I can't understand all of it, but I believe it with no less certainty than a creationist believes the Earth was created in seven days.

I've never really been solid about my scientific believes; for a very long time I described myself as a deist out of uncertainty and the more I learn scientifically the more that label seems to fit my views. I know all this makes me an idiot, but does believing in scientific concepts while not truly understanding them all make me a hypocrite as well?

At the risk of beating a dead horse; science has a play by play instruction set so if you don't understand it, you can go step by step to recreate exactly what the scientist said happened. In fact, a fundamental underpinning of science is to try to prove the notion the scientist said, wrong. So even if you don't understand it, there is a trail from the begining to step A all the way to step Z with logic, data and most important, predictions on what will happen on step A, B,C etc...

Blood clotting, is by the way, fairly easy. You can look at it really like at least three organ systems working towards a common goal instead of just one if that helps. With all the proteins floating in the serum, it was only a matter of time before one or more of them were 'sticky' enough to start a clot function. Similarly, with all the different proteins floating around, they are going to have chemical reactions with each other and form other substances. Fibrin just happens to be one that likes to stick to connective tissue and other epithelial tissue and bind to it. The intrinsic/extrinsic pathways are just different ways your cells can release chemicals that start those chemical reactions that end with fibrin. Swelling, or the inflammatory response, is just a way your blood vessels 'leak' so all those serum proteins can get into the tissue where the damage is. Cells in the tissue have histamine and prostglandins that respond to other chemical messengers upon damage to start the inflammatory response.

You are not looking at one system, rather a cascade of other systems working toward a common goal in that one instance, to close a hole in your body. So evolutionary speaking, you have three or more systems developed for their own reason or cause that just also just happened to work well together in specific instances.

[Posner]

I rely on the fact that science is open to, and in fact encourages testing and falsifying statements. Careers are made by showing how an accepted theory is wrong or needs improvement. But even these criticisms are subjected to criticism. Once a theory is accepted much more effort is spent to refine it than to confirm it. Compare that to religion and you will see how it is not a matter of faith.

[Vendetta]

The thing I keep coming back to is planck's constant; an absurdly large number of times per second, the universe blinks out of existence and is replaced with a new one, slightly changed? I know how that conclusion was arrived at, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

This is, essentially, the Middle World problem.

The reason that this "doesn't make any sense" is that the human brain was evolved to deal with middle world objects, what angle and how far do I have to throw my spear to hit that gazelle? is that really a lion in the grasses? can I climb onto this branch without it snapping?

Those are the range of things that the brain can comprehend. Things like Planck's constant deal with the universe in ways we are not evolved to intuitively understand, so don't worry if you can't get an intuitive grasp of it, nor can anyone else. What they can do is work out mathematically, and test whether it's right or not, without needing an intuitive understanding of it.

This is the real core of the classic statement from Richard Feynman, "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory". If you think you have an intuitive grasp of this kind of fiddly concept that's well outside of the middle world, you are almost certainly misconceiving something vital about it.

"Faith in science" isn't really faith in some monolithic thing called science, all it really is is faith in the fact that other people were doing the sums right.

And if you want, you can go and do the sums yourself, or test the ones they did against the real world.

[Posner]

[This is, essentially, the Middle World problem.

A good excuse as any to link to my favorite Dawkins video
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=d ... emb=0&aq=f#
It's a little over 20 minutes long and it talks about the Middle World problem, complete with that Robert Feynman quote.

[Surlethe]

Split Samuel's and Terralthra's posts to Testing.

[Ghost Rider]

Split the whole hijacking.

Next time open another topic. I know you understand the button works Kan, don't be a complete fucktard.

[kinnison]

"Religion: the only genre that has lots of people dying for and because of it."

Not quite, unless you believe that various political theories are religions. Communism has caused the deaths of millions; ditto fascism and especially Nazism, a subset.

The conflict between the concepts of absolute monarchy and democracy killed quite a few too - the English Civil War being the setting for that.

Rather more recently, the belief of Americans that their political system is superior to everyone else's was a contributory factor in the deaths of tens of thousands (some of them Americans) in the Gulf War to date. (Gulf War II, that is - Gulf War I was a simple response to unprovoked aggression, and fully justified on other grounds than religion or political theory.)

[kinnison]

Sorry for the double post; the board wouldn't let me edit my first one.

On the original subject; this may be a repeat of others' posts, but it is true that scientific truths often have to be taken "on faith" because nobody has the time (or the training, or the equipment) to go back to sources and/or redo experiments to confirm all scientific conclusions that they come across. "On faith" in this context is not quite an accurate description - "on trust" might be better. The real distinction is that scientific truths are testable, and repeatedly so.

An example of the sort of wriggling out of a bind that religionists do is this; several times now, the power of prayer in helping to heal the sick and injured has been tested by scientific means - double-blind clinical tests, to be exact. The results have been uniformly negative. The response of God-botherers? "THOU SHALT NOT PUT THE LORD THY GOD TO THE TEST".

[Darth Wong]

The important thing is not to duplicate every experiment every scientist has ever done (that would truly be a ridiculous idea, and really goes against the concept of academia in general which is a cooperative enterprise), but to understand the logic of why the scientific method is superior to any other method for understanding the universe.