That’s where I think the word “faith” is being stretched beyond the breaking point. If faith includes the most basic assumptions of a real, rational, and measurable universe then everything would be faith. It seems to me that when theists talk about religious faith it is something other than the belief in the constancy of the speed of light through time and space.
2 Likes
So here I wasn’t actually talking about science. I was talking about the root discipline responsible for our being able to use statistics. Namely, pure mathematics.
It’s not possible to test the underlying assumptions of every model in our repertoire, even in cases when the model is appropriately fitted to the data.
My thoughts on this are that intuition is used in determining truth within science to the degree that intuition is used in determining the truth of anything that science relies upon, such as in mathematics or philosophy.
As far as I have ever known, part of having faith in anything is having confidence. I don’t think you’ve understood the way that I’ve used the word here.
Do you mean, trust in the absence of empirical evidence? Evidence is more than just empirical observations. Verification of things can come from places outside the laboratory, and I would think that theists think it is just as important for matters of their faith.
As for God not communicating any data, I would disagree - all the theists here would disagree.
Regarding Christian theism, this is specifically what the Bible represents; the Old testament carrying on his messages that he gave to mankind through the prophets, the new testament the apostles, and then directly from the mouth of God in human flesh is the communication of the gospel.
The certainty we can hold in Jesus having been resurrected is (if not the best) probably the best form of verification we could ask for in favour of Christian theism, given the context in which it happened. There are other forms of verification that we look for with respect to what we would expect to see should theism be true. I’m not well-equipped to discuss these lesser verification points, but I could refer you to a number of people who can.
Think back to the way I defined revelation as a communication of information from one mind to another.
Generally when we think of the word revelation, it takes on specific religious connotations that aren’t applied anywhere else - namely, communication to man from the divine. However, the broader idea of the word gets applied all over the place, including in science communication.
I’m using faith similarly here. Stripped of it’s religious connotations (which have been developed for certain ‘in-house’ purposes and references), faith is synonymous with other words that we would be more likely to use in day to day. The concept of faith is still intelligible without it’s religious connotations, but it is not so when stripped of its more general meaning.
2 Likes
Arithmetic, as in 2+2=4, is much older than set theory.
Yes, the development of arithmetic might have made use of elementary intuitions about sets (or collections). But it did not depend on what we call “Set Theory”.
This is just wrong.
The validity of our statistical models is based only on mathematics.
The usability or applicability for a specific model depends on how well that model fits what it is modeling. And that’s not a matter of faith. It is up to the scientist to investigate that. And a good scientist will report any concerns he/she might have about the adequacy of the model. It is not left to faith.
Again, I disagree with that.
Yes, I do read research reports. But if a scientist is going to build on the work of other scientists, he needs to go beyond reading research reports, and has to do some of his own testing and validation of what is reported in that research. Science is not just a house of cards, ready to collapse at any moment.
1 Like
@John_Harshman, I do think we’re getting a bit off-topic, but these were good questions. I work in an environment where Christian worldview is essential an axiom so you’re helping me think through these things. A trivial answer would be that of course faith would add something that non-faith wouldn’t, almost by definition. I’d like to do better, and I think I can, but I think it’ll take time.
One thing I do want to be clear on, I’m not suggesting that Christianity or faith is required to do science and whatever faith adds, I do not believe it changes the actual process of doing science itself.
If intuition is not a way of determining truth for you, great. We agree. Others have made the claim, though. Since you reinterpret the meanings of revelation and faith, our disagreement seems only about whether the bible is truly revelation and whether faith is warranted by the evidence.
Sure, but do we use those subjective methods to determine truth, or rather should we? Should we use them to do so in science and/or theology?
Is intuition a way of determining truth in mathematics? I don’t think so.
That’s too vague to respond to. Perhaps an example?
Then we disagree on what “axiom” means.
Clearly. I’d say that faith is confidence without justification.
No, I mean trust in the absence of evidence. I deny that there is evidence other than empirical evidence. Why would you suppose that empirical evidence is restricted to the laboratory?
That’s revelation. But how do we know it’s really revelation? How do we know what the revelation means? It may be evidence, but it’s very poor evidence, and no better than the Koran or the Vedas or the Eddas, which Christians discount.
Ah, but can we indeed hold such certainty? On what basis? The evidence is not strong.
True. But I’d say that what we would expect is not what we see.
1 Like
Don’t worry, you were always clear on that. I’d be interested in your articulation of how faith aids your understanding of science, or whatever it does.
That takes us down the road of “What Is Truth?”, and various other issues. Is it true that I love my family? Yes. Is love a subjective emotion? Yes. Is love a scientifically valid measurement? No. Do we objectively know that a magician doesn’t make the card actually disappear? Yes. Do we still enjoy a magic trick? Absolutely.
The best answer I can give is that we use subjectivity to establish subjective truths (with a little t). I think the human experience would be poorly served if we expunged all of the subjectivity and emotions from our lives. Doing science is just one part of human experience, and it shouldn’t be a model for everything we do. We are as much a species of emotion as we are a species of reason. We should embrace both.
1 Like
Ok - I think this is all that’s needed to substantiate my point, though.
That’s a bold assertion. I think it’s most certainly the case that the validity of our statistical models relies on more than just mathematics.
The meaning of mathematical concepts and terms doesn’t happen in a vacuum. At the very least we need some kind of wider framework to make sense of how these terms relate to our ideas of evidence and hypotheses.
What I am really commenting on here is a regress back towards the applicability of mathematics to the physical world more generally. If I was not a theist, I would probably agree with Wigner that its applicability to the world is otherwise unreasonable.
The utility of independent replication is itself is predicated on scientists communicating what they have learnt from the results of their individual research.
I don’t think science is just a house of cards - but it does rely on a number of assumptions which would (at least in principle) turn it into a house of cards if they proved to be invalid. Of course, I think we have good reasons to think that the assumptions science takes for granted are valid - at least for most things.
My subjective sense experience is used to determine actual conditions of the world. Should I doubt my eyes and sense of touch when it helps me conclude that there is an external world, simply because these experiences are subjective?
To take from something I was trying to learn more about until a few months ago:
As far as I currently understand, this is the case for basic Mendelian Randomisation (MR) models.
MR grants some evidence of causality for an exposure. Namely, that some environmental exposure (E) causes an outcome (O). It does this by using an allele (A), which has strong associations with the exposure, as an instrumental proxy of the exposure. Because of mendels second law, the allele can be interpreted as a defacto RCT. The major assumptions required for a causal inference to be valid are;
- The association between the allele (A) and the exposure (E) is real.
- The allele (A) should not have any strong associations with known confounds (C).
- The association between the allele (A) and the outcome (O) is not mediated by some other factor that is related to the exposure, but not actually the exposure (~E).
E.g. an unexpected non-random association between the allele of interest and another allele
From what I remember, it isn’t possible for studies that use basic MR models to actually perform a direct test of this third assumption.
Now I’m sure there are probably ways to mitigate this limitation (particularly because my readings were not particularly extensive). But provided that I am at least roughly accurate in my description of this model, I think it speaks to my point that any assertions of causality that are made from this model rely on having some kind of reasonable confidence that the assumptions of this model are more likely to hold than not.
Let’s imagine a case where we use a basic MR model to test something, and all the assumptions we can test do hold.
Because we can’t perform a direct test of horizontal pleiotropy, we might think that the other assumptions being valid, along with other known facts around our instrument allele (A), together act prima facie to decrease the prior probability of the third assumption being violated, such that it is low enough for us to justify thinking that the assumption is more likely to be valid than not.
In this case, anytime we express that we think the assumption is likely to be valid, we ought to concede that our confidence in this is especially subject to some future disconfirming evidence.
I don’t think empirical evidence is restricted to the lab. For example, I think my personal sense perception is a form of empirical evidence of various things.
There are non-empirical evidences though. For example, if some kind of hypothesis relied on an implicit self-contradiction of terms that was hard to discern, I could probably use a truth table to show that it is incoherent. This would count as a non-empirical form of evidence against said hypothesis, in the sense that it ipso facto decreases the probability that the hypothesis is true to zero.
If revelation is the best explanation of the experience (which we could think of in terms of some kind of data), I think it would be reasonable to conclude that it is so. As for the meaning of the revelation, I think this would depend on the mode of revelation. Certainly, I think theologians do a pretty good job expounding on the meaning of special revelation (the bible).
The evidence of this revelation in isolation might be weak, and might be no better than the Koran or the Vedas. But it could still be made more reasonable to believe on the basis of other evidence.
For example, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I think we can, on the basis of logical inference. Specifically, that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of the historical facts.
Perhaps we could begin another thread to discuss the nature of evidence surrounding the resurrection?
It seems to me we are at a point in this discussion now, where whether religious scientists are inconsistent and compartmentalising, depends on whether or not we are justified in believing in anything like the resurrection.
I think this is the wrong question!
I think a better question is more along the lines of “Can my love for my family be reliably measured with an acceptable standard of scientific validity?”.
This would probably depend upon what you think about psychometrics.
The usual technical meaning of “valid” has only to do with logic. An argument is said to be valid if the logic works, and to be sound if the assumed premises are true. You seem to be using “valid” to broadly.
That gets to the question of soundness, and not just validity.
As it happens, I strongly disagree with Wigner.
There you use “valid” for assumptions rather than for logic. So you are using the term in a non-standard way.
1 Like
You’re right, I should have been more careful to refer to soundness in my last few posts.
That there is a problem? How would you explain the applicability of mathematics, then?
What I’m trying to get at is that most assumptions (including those for science) are themselves premises that have been established by some flow of logic.
There’s still serious scholarly discussions around many of the assumptions of science (e.g. determinism, empiricism). In my experience, it’s a bit of a meme for scientists to proudly ignore what’s going on in those discussions as though it’s some kind of academic virtue.
Scientists design the mathematics into the science.
There is a lot of science that is outside of logic.
Logic, by itself, does not require a world. It operates on propositions. Science does require a world, and that goes beyond logic.
2 Likes
This seems evasive to the subject, which is concerned with how and why it is even possible for mathematics to be designed ‘into the science’.
I’m not really sure what this means. Are you saying that science is in some sense, illogical?
It seems to me that the very object of science is necessarily predicated on logic. What else is science meant to be doing, if not generating accurate propositions about the world and how it works?
It isn’t always possible. That’s why biology and geology are not nearly as mathematical as physics.
With physics, many of the central concepts originated within physics. When you are constructing new concepts, you can often construct them in a way that implies mathematical relations between those concepts.
No, of course not. Something can be outside of logic without being contrary to logic. Logic does not address scientifically important topics, such as how to go about getting useful real world data.
I’m not sure that geology and biology being less mathematical than physics necessarily speaks to whether it is possible or not. This is just to say that ‘just because it is not [currently] so, does not mean it can’t be’. I am of the position that, if something can be formally expressed in philosophical terms, it can probably be expressed in mathematical terms, too.
Psychology is a discipline that struggles with mathematization more than most other sciences, yet it looks as though in the last decade there has been at least some progress applying mathematical models to decision making, despite there being many people who thought (think?) this was (is?) not possible.
But it would seem to me that our conclusions about how to get useful data is itself based on some kind of rationally articulated position that involves some kind of logic.
Whether its practice directly involves formal logic or not, all I’m saying is that there are logical foundations to science that still feature contemporary debate.
Yes. But if you don’t get equation or other useful mathematical methods, then it isn’t going to look very mathematical. The value of mathematics is in its tools more than in its form of expression.
Science is systematic. And being systematic may suggest some kind of logical organization. But if you did not get to that organization by purely deductive means, then how you got there was outside of logic.
This is trailing off from the OP and the point I was trying to make; that religious scientists are not being inconsistent.
As Theists we are pistos in our scientific modelling just as we are our belief that Theism holds true.
To be inconsistent, there would have to be some way in the nature of our beliefs in one of these things does not make use of pistos, while the other does, without there being any good reason for us to apply it in one and not the other.
Because the very nature of affirming any possible belief that humans could have requires some kind of pistos, it’s not clear that there are any inconsistencies with scientists citing it for both Theism and Science.
If we continue to deviate from the OP, perhaps we could make another thread.
What do you make of inductive logic?
Are logicians mistaken when they call it as such?
1 Like
Personally, I have never suggested that they were being inconsistent.
I see it as nonsense.
2 Likes
8 posts were split to a new topic: Jordan’s View on Faith and Science
A far more basic but related question as to whether Religious Scientists are inconsistent is whether a Scientist can believe in an occasional miracle or even many miracles and be consistent.
And even more basic question, how can we insist there are no miracles. One might only insist that their own miniscule sample of reality, and their own assessment of reality, leads them to believer there are no such thing as miracles. But that’s a faith statement, not a science statement.