Actually, it does. I propose that we ask your thesis advisor’s opinion. Whaddaya say?
The qualification nullifies your first claim.
That’s not what happened that first time. A portion of the quote was removed - unintentionally and I proceeded to erroneously respond to what I had quoted.
I am happy to amend my quote to include the rest of it. I don’t think it changes anything, though. I am happy for @Timothy_Horton to explain to me why it does.
How so?
I love the use of the passive voice there.
You already explained it by deleting his qualification.
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In this example, the YEC person is not sure about whether he should be taking his theology over the scientific evidence for common descent or vice versa.
Your answer presumes that theology is unreliable at producing any knowledge about the physical world. In this sense, you are advocating science as though it is the only reliable means of acquiring knowledge. But, you’ve taken it further and explicitly said that it is the only reliable means of knowledge about the physical world (the quotation issue).
That the knowledge is for one part of the world (the physical world) is besides the crux of the point, I think, because the statement itself leaves open the impression that I have stated is what’s wrong with much science communication.
You keep talking but I don’t see your alternative, demonstrably better method for understanding the physical world. Science is used for the simple reason it works. It produces tangible results, makes testable predictions. What has theology provided in that area?
This is proving my point.
The question is shifting from whether science is being spoken about as though It’s the only reliable method, or the claim that it is the only reliable method to whether something else is just as, if not more reliable - an entirely different question.
You can have several methods that produce reliable results, where one is more reliable than the others.
I am on the same page here Tim in that I think science is the most reliable method for knowledge of the physical world. But I would never want to present it as though it is the only reliable method, or state that it is the only reliable method.
There may we’ll be other methods that are less reliable, but reliable nonetheless. Not acknowledging this is part of the problem which I think feeds into resistance against science.
Then name another reliable method. You keep tap dancing but not answering.
@moderators this is off topic and should be split.
Everyone else keep in mind that @ThomasTrebilco is a grad student who is not an anti-evolutionist. Much of what he is saying has validity if interpreted in a charitable way.
He is, for example, completely correct that science isn’t the only way if gaining knowledge of the physical world. Most our idiosyncratic knowledge (e.g. who is your father and mother?) of the physical world doesn’t even come from science, but from experience, trustworthy reports, and recorded data.
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Virtually all of our experience, trustworthy reports, and recorded data can trace their origin back to science. Unless you’re going to hang on trivialities like “what’s your favorite color”.
Broad comments on the thread (in particular to @ThomasTrebilco) , since I don’t have time to reply in detail.
Scientists are humans, and they are as prone to cognitive biases as other humans, and they are frequently unaware of their own biases. Scientists do indeed sometimes overestimate the certainty of some scientific conclusions and experience selective amnesia about times those conclusions have been wrong. (I recall witnessing one researcher make the transition from, ‘X isn’t true’ to ‘I’ve always known X’ within a morning session of a meeting. Good times.)
I really doubt, however, that scientists’ failings in this regard have had much impact on things like anti-vaccine beliefs and climate change denialism, which typically involve little direct contact with the scientists themselves and which are clearly driven by other factors.
What to say to a YEC who is weighing conflicting input from science and church/Bible? What I do say is that they are free to believe whatever they want, but are not free to claim that science supports their beliefs. It doesn’t. Some things are well enough established, by enough independent lines of evidence, that we can safely treat them as true – I take that to be what we mean by ‘facts’. The age of the earth and common descent are facts in that sense. I can treat them as true without wasting time wondering whether I’m actually in a computer simulation, or in a Truman-show situation, or suffering a psychotic break.
So why is science privileged as a way of knowing these things over reading the Bible? For two reasons. First, because science’s track record when it comes to this particular kind of dispute – scientific claims about the physical world vs Biblical or theological claims – science has by far the better track record. Second, because close observation of how creationism and science go about explaining something reveals that they are not on an even footing. Creationism ignores and misrepresents both data and arguments in systematic ways that science simply does not.
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I appreciate your thoughts Steve. I am thinking this might be a good topic to pick up in another thread.
Much of what is driving my thoughts on this topic are conversations around the utility of terms like science-deniers, anti-science etc and whether they do more harm than good.
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Done, hopefully well enough. That was a very long topic so I hoped I got everything in the right place.
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Could you unpack what you believe to be the legitimate domain of science. Maybe science is not the final arbitrator of the best movie of 2012. But how many ways of knowing the equation of state for ethane are there? Would science not be it, period?
If I may butt in here for a moment? I’d like to comment on what you say here:
“Some things are well enough established, by enough independent lines of evidence, that we can safely treat them as true – I take that to be what we mean by ‘facts’. The age of the earth and common descent are facts in that sense.”
As an Earth Scientist I am quite happy to say that the age of the Earth is somewhere in the range of 4.5 billion years. I’m not sure I would consider this statement a fact, though. Rather, it is the conclusion of a number of independent scientific lines of analysis that converge on this particular number, giving it so much support that withholding consent would be irrational if not also accompanied by an alternative that is equally well supported.
When is a fact a fact? Many (most? all?) scientific explanations are models, constructed by integrating physical data and processes and then interrogated to yield particular conclusions. Models can, and often are, replaced over time as more data becomes available, new processes are discovered, alternative explanations are proposed and then supported. At its heart, radiometric dating is a model that relies on certain assumptions regarding processes and the validity of certain measurements.
Now, we have of course good reasons to assume that we are getting it right, consistency and consilience not the least of them. So I think we have a very, very good model and I’m happy to accept the outcome as the best scientific explanation we have. But does that make the outcome a fact? By considering it as such, don’t we close off all escape hatches that would allow us to maintain credibility if we ever, with good reasons, wanted to modify our model and so perhaps arrive at a different outcome?
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Not that I disagree with your post, but then does “fact” become a intrinsically misleading word because there can be no such thing as a real fact, some tentative acknowledgement that the fact may be superseded always being present? Is the earth being a sphere a fact? Conversely, when can we absolutely rule out alternatives? Can we at least say that the earth being flat is false - so a negative fact? Is there an absurdity limit?
That’s what Stephen Jay Gould called a fact:
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No, I don’t think we do. Because all ‘facts’ about the world are models we’ve constructed, consciously or not, and all are subject to modification. If we choose to restrict ‘fact’ to statements which could not under any circumstances turn out to need correction, then we don’t know any facts about the world – which pretty much makes the word otiose.
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All good points, and yes, I understand the slippery slope to ‘there are no facts at all’.
Perhaps this is true? Perhaps our knowledge approaches the ‘fact’ line only asymptotically, without ever reaching it? After all, the world could really have been created last Thursday with everything on and in it. Is it really a fact that it wasn’t?
I know of one type of statements that really are facts, and that is definitional statements. Some things are true by definition and not by us acquiring external knowledge about them.
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This is an important point, and one that is widely misunderstood.
Scientists can be certain of their models. No, they are not certain that their models are true; they are certain that their models are their models. But they will switch to a better model if one becomes available.
People who are not scientists tend to misunderstand this. In particular, they misunderstand the certainty about a model, and instead treat it is a truth claim expressed with certainty.
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