Faith in Science

When it comes to the Ben Stein documentary Expelled, what is of interest to me is precisely this:  The signs that some scientists are reproducing the model the Church once held and monopolized in society and public discourse.    If it deviates from the dogma, it is not allowed.    If I don't accept this from the Church, and I don't, why would I, indeed, why should I, accept it from scientists?   Not to mention the fact their knowledge is specialized.  Most of them have little to no experience with thought outside the scientific method and the discourse which ensues.

That is a large area they know little about.

There are many many things of human interest, areas of human endeavour & study, where science doesn't enter.   Not because of some deep sinister motive; it is simply a question of it not being the right tool to make certain intellectual pieces of furniture.   

The same way I would not think a butcher knife ought to be included in my manicurist kit, is the way I think science is not the right tool to deal with things which are obviously not of a physical nature, such as what constitutes the self, personhood, politics, the place the human being needs to have in a discourse that has political ramifications, and so on and so forth.   

Philosophy is not good if we're trying to prevent my being run over by a car in front of the pharmacy.  Religion won't help me if the questions I have involve figuring out what'll happen if I have a kidney stone.  Medicine won't solve my culinary incompetence, etc.

It seems to me that whatever it is that makes We the People come up with systems, groups, academies, religions, etc, and then purge those who don't conform to the criteria set out by the "in group" has been left intact without proper examination, WHILE we replaced God and "His" creation in "His" own image (the discourse & its implications, I mean, not the correctness or truth of the position that we were created in God's image -- to a large extent that's sort of irrelevant) with no God and no special creation in nobody's image. 

The result in society is that Science (an impersonal faceless system controlled by no one in specific) took the place of God & Church and scientists are the new priests.  Sectarian ppl exist in ALL groups and cultures.  Sectarian thought, dispositon, and discourse, can exist within ANY theory, even the most benign ones.

I am not arguing against Science in any way.  I don't want to change its tenets or its method, I don't want to influence it in any way.  I haven't got the knowledge to back up any such pretension.   What I do want is for ppl to feel that even though they're ignorant of the science itself (most of us are) they can still ask questions and question scientists.  My criticism is of the way some scientists deal with science and its discoveries and possibilities, and the way they deal with non-scientists' discourse and questions.  Then, my criticism is also of how some scientists deal with other scientists.

Now, the scientists themselves, the dissidents, the heretics (right word in this context mos def!) who do have the knowledge and all the diplomas, degrees and experience with the method and its experiments within the academic and scientific worlds, are, a fortiori, even more "entitled" to present their views, indeed it is a requirement--especially when these differ from the majority. 

Like art, and perhaps even more so than art, Science is not and cannot be a democracy.   Just because 78523256 ppl say something, it doesn't make it true.   Just because 1 loner dude says something different, it doesn't make him correct either.  It doesn't make him wrong a priori, though.   Evidence has to be presented and reviewed, and the Maths and equations and what-not have to be analyzed by ppl who know what the hell theyre looking at, because I sure as hell don't.   Most of us don't.   We're like Medieval peasants in a cold CatholiChurch in Bavaria listening to the priest who could read & speak Latin and other languages and spent a whole life studying, and we couldn't even sign our own names.

There is a formula on my Higgs field mug from CERN:  I looked up what the formula means.  The formula is wrong, so "they tell me."   Further investigation revealed this is most likely deliberate.   Apparently, there is a joke in it.  It's an inside joke, because We the People wouldn't be able to tell!  Even that is specialized. And I like this!  This made me smile with strange admiration,and I can totally understand this kind of humour.

I have abso no problem with any scientific theory.   If I am rillly honest, it changes absonothing in my daily life.   Whether the Sun will or won't explode in 852031556 light yrs does not change the fact I want to find work. LOL  Whether God made me or not, whether I have in my core the most sophisticated code ever or not, whether that had to have arisen from intelligence, or not?   Rillly?  Will it change how I see myself and others?  Hardly.  I know I am intelligent and other ppl are too.   It is demonstrated to me daily.   Scientists themselves show me how intelligent our species is.   I have enormous admiration and respect for these ppl, like I have for composers (in a different way but not that different) and for ppl who can come up with a machine like the Large Hadron Collider and prove something as unlikely as the Higgs field (Higgs, who, incidentally, was ridiculed for his theory, too.)

I care because I love ideas and I want to understand them, even the ones I know to be beyond my intel-grasp, or beyond my knowledge, beyond what I can hope to study in one life.

I will not allow anyone or any institution, whether it has a Chief, a Head, a Boss or not, to tell me what I can and can't read, watch, listen to, or consider in my own mind.  I refuse to be intimidated by the possibility of ridicule from anyone - person or group.  

Whether it is Alain Soral, Zizek, Paglia, Stalin, Cardinal Ratzinger, WarrenBuffett, GlennBeck, SarahPalin, Jean-Luc Melenchon, IngmarBergman, or the Chocolate Rain dude?   Reading them, listening to them, finding out what they say, or even having their books or DVDs or whatever around does not mean I am in agreement with what any of what these ppl say.   Partially or wholly, in principle.  This procedure of "guilt by association" doesn't work on me.

Even if IntelligentDesign is distasteful to me (and it is, it is, and my God how could it not be after the negative campaign that was done for decades everywhere one looked into this topic??), I want to know more, because I have learned something from my study of the means of communication and the way language is used in them.   If everyone starts to bash something or someone?  I know I need to look at it more closely.  

To be frank though, this wasn't even the case with IntelligentDesign(TM). I didn't watch it as a noble contribution to freedom of conscience. LOL

I just happened across it one evening on YouTube, by random accident and not at all by intelligent design on my part, and saw Ben Stein and watched it because I like him, with increasing incredulity of both what was being said in the docu (some scientists are being silenced) and of what has been said of IntelDesign so far in the media (misrepresentation of the theory itself).

From what I could gather so far, IntelligentDesign theorists do not dispute most of the elements in NeoDarwinianEvolution even.  It is not true that scientists who study and put their money on IntelligentDesign challenge evolution.

What they are challenging, as far as I know & understand, is the NeoDarwinianEvolutionists' claim that the digital code present in DNA could have appeared without intelligence, and they argue that anytime a digital code appears anywhere it is evidence that randomness could not have produced it.   

Apparently (and again, I have no way of checking for myself), Mathematically, this claim for intelligence holds water-- according to the computations and calculations. 

Even Richard Dawkins, at the end of Expelled, told Ben Stein that he, Dawkins, thinks it could be that "at some earlier time in the Universe some civilization evolved... by some kind of Darwinian means to a v v high level of technology and designed a form of life that they ceded on to this planet" and that "you might find a signature of some kind of designer" in the detail of biochemistry & molecular biology.   His problem is that he says the designer or "higher intelligence" would have to have come from a Darwinian mechanism... that this possible designer can't have come from nowhere.

It's obvious, it doesn't take much arguing, that if the NeoDarwinians are corrrect, or if the IntellligentDesign theorists are correct, I am still here, and so are you, and 6 billion ppl, plus all the other species of fauna and flora.  They can both be true, with some details still to be clarified.

Also, and this is something that annoys me even more, there aren't only these two possibilities in science.   The way this is presented to We the People, this argument...   is the same way CocaCola and Pepsi are presented, or Republicans and Democrats.   Choose one.  There are only two options.  Well, it just isn't the case.   Science is not like that, neither is Art, nor is Philosophy, nor is Linguistics.  

All academic disciplines have many possible explanations going or being considered at any one point, like tactics in footie.  It isn't only "either offense or defense".   There's the midfield!  And even supposing we choose offense, within this choice there are many possible organizations of players.   A coach can go for 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 strikers.

WitcHunt and McCarthyism is very problematic in science, more so than in other disciplines, because scientific discourse and discoveries are the stuff at the heart of everything today, from political decisions to educational methods, and more often than not these discoveries are not given enough time to mature and be discussed properly; their ramifications aren't fully understood before theyre applied.    Everyone's on Facebook time, Twitter time, where one thing needs to follow another in quick succession, lest we get bored.

This is maybe the one good thing that an institution as old, as heavy, and as slow as the CatholiChurch left for us as a sort of last gasp of the hanged man.  "Take your time. The world is more complex than we might think, let alone understand in a week or a short screaming-match on an MSNBBCNN studio stool."

It was unthinkable at the time of Copernicus and Galileo that the consensus was wrong.   Yet the consensus was just that: wrong.  The Earth does revolve around the Sun.

This also goes for plate tectonics theory, the Big Bang theory (scientists didn't want to touch that one with a 10-million light year stick at the time Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest astronomer and physics professor, proposed it!), and others.  

Plus which, to illustrate how two "competing" theories can co-exist without causing the whole academic edifice to collapse, Einstein's theory of general relativity is incompatible with quantuMechanix, yet theyre both correct!   

It isn't as if physicists have it all sorted out.    They admit it in a few documentaries that there is a v big problem in physics, currently.   It doesn't mean they'll stop what they're doing... It means they'll carry on looking, carry on studying.   

But we're told we have to fully abandon one line of thought in favour of another, when they themselves know this is not how it works.  This could all be avoided if they had a Sassy Hegelian Friend.

The problem of these people's understanding and use of language is another one entirely which is, according to me, at the base of so many of the problems which follow, as is often the case whenever we're dealing with a mental/intellectual proposition.    

If we do not agree on what the terms mean ("oh, it's just semantics"), then we can't understand what the one and the other person are saying.  Let alone what the implications are.

Specialist terms are v tricky.   The fact that newspapers employ journalists who half-understand science and then write long, confused articles for public consumption over a casual cup of Sunday morning coffee is a v big problem, too.   

This is one of the main reasons why I think it is important, urgent, that ppl who study philosophy also study a scientific discipline. That a physicist at least read some of the big ideas in philosophy. Or at least learn some grammar, ffs.  Is that too much to ask?  Is that a crime? 

We need to remember to illuminate the obvious truth sometimes, which is in this case that entertaining one idea does not automatically mean we will throw all others in the intel-bin.   We're being treated as a monocellular organism unable to entertain one idea properly, let alone many at the same time.

What we currently have is a lot of scientists who think and say that philosophy can do nothing for science anymore, and sensu stricto, they're correct.   

What they miss is that philosophy can do something for scientists and their understanding of the world, of people, and human cultures, so that they aren't so quick to reduce a human person to some isolated cerebral activities in certain parts of the brain.  So they're not so quick in their conclusions (e.g. coming up with an experiment which demonstrates ppl move their wrist before theyre aware they decided to do so, and concluding this shows free will is "an illusion" and doesn't exist; finding serotonin or dopamine is released when someone is happy and concluding the hormone is what causes said state, instead of even entertaining the idea that it might be a consequence of said state, etc, etc.)   

They can open the human head and look for thought and feeling all they want.   That's been done in the Middle Ages and even well before that.   

They'd do better looking for human thought in books written by humans over millennia.   

Instead, they seem to see the human story as having begun with the scientific method (around the 18th century) and whatever happened before that is irrelevant and stupid.

That shows closed-mindedness not even religions have shown so far.   Because don't let's be fooled:  religionists, especially organized, are the first ones to read & consider things which pose a threat to the way they view the world, so they have enough time and material to come up with the arguments to oppose it.   

"Know your enemy."   I think that's a SunTzu half-quote... something about knowing yourself and your enemies guarantees victory, but not knowing either will inevitably lead to peril.

The sad thing is these ppl don't know what they don't know.  They're sincere in their position that they can learn nothing valuable from a non-scientific discipline.

They know a lot about a certain number of things, and nothing about many things, but they're not aware of what it is these many things are because theyre dismissing a great number of v valuable thinkers before MontyPython's philosopher footie match even begins.

According to me, also, sometimes this smacks of fear of losing one's tiny kingdom -- i.e. position in academia.    

In Expelled, Ben Stein interviewed many scientists who, for fear of losing their grants and for fear of ridicule and professional ruin, accepted to be interviewed only on condition their faces not be shown and their identities be kept secret.

Is this what the scientific "journey" has led to?   Weren't we supposed to be more intellectually free once we got rid of the grip religion has on our societies, on our lives?

Weren't machines supposed to make more free time for us, too?

The beauty of this of course is that the antidote is inside the system.   

Peer-review is a requirement.  How much longer will it be overlooked and tolerated that dissence is being shunned and some scientists are being prevented from publishing their papers in scientific journals?  

How much longer will we be satisfied, as ppls of good will, with having the same story be told to us as if it were new?   WWII style brain stuffing with science?   Another good thing is young scientists only make a mark if they either discover a new thing or if they successfully challenge a theory comfortably in place.  

I keep the faith.