Science, the supernatural and being proved wrong
I’ve been chatting to a friend recently who’s a Christian and it seems moderately militant about it. (E.g., when talking about the subject I said in what I hoped was a very non-confronting way, “Well, I’m basically agnostic myself” to which he respond “Oh, not game enough to make a decision, hey?” Hmmm.) The other night a group of us were having a discussion about horoscopes, and I described the various Forer effect experiments that have been done which suggests that astrology is a pretty weak science. I don’t buy it myself, either aesthetically or scientifically, but it’s fun so who cares.
Anyway, we eventually got onto talking about the scientific method. In particular, I professed that I don’t believe in the supernatural. Not that I refuse to believe in telepathy, the afterlife, etc, but simply that I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for all that within science. Maybe it’s more complicated that we’re ever going to be able to comprehend, but if we were smart enough I’m dead certain there’s a rational explanation for everything. If ghosts really are out there, then we simply need a way to explain what they are, why they’re here, etc - eventually, it’s a new theory that will be incorporated into scientific knowledge and hopefully supported by experiments, etc. Julian May’s fantastic Intervention / Galactic Mileu does a beautiful job of how scientists would respond to the development of mental powers.
After professing my trust in the scientifc method above anything else, my Christian friend then said, “What about all the time that science has been proved wrong?” Interesting question! I would counter that I think there are very few examples where science has been blatantly wrong; more often, science has just been incomplete, and most of those times it has been wrong have been because there were, until then, no experiments/observations that could distinguish between fact and fiction, and so, who cares?
Let’s take a couple of examples: The Earth is flat. We now know that’s untrue. But locally, the Earth appears flat. If you’re out in the desert, or better yet the ocean, for at least 20 or 30 kilometres in any direction, the sand/water appears flat, probably even as far as the eye can see. Therefore, if we’re not going too far, it’s fine to assume that the Earth is flat. Only when a ship (camel?) appears slowly over the horizon do we realise there’s something more going on, and we need to think a bit harder. Of course, there were drawbacks - exploration was probably hampered by fear of dragons, and if we’d known you could saild both ways around the world and still get to the same place we’d probably have done better too. So as science and understanding advanced, society advanced, but our theory was expanded (”The Earth isn’t flat, but it’s a very large sphere so that it appears flat locally”) rather than being completely disregarded.
The more stereotypical example is Newton’s laws of motion. Einstein showed that these laws only really apply at “low” speeds - less than half the speed of light, say. In fact, strictly, they’re always wrong, but until you’re going at like 100,000km/hr they’re only out by 0.00000001%, say. (I made up those numbers - feel free to do some better calculations. It’s actually a good exercise!) Therefore, our theory now reads, “Special relativity is the most general law of motion, but at “typical” speeds, the old theories work just fine, and we can prove why.” Now add general relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. Each additional theory just expands the previous to cover more scenarios.
Examples of science being completely wrong would include the aether, geocentrism (the sun goes around the Earth?)…Any suggestions for others? But again, it was only when we started to make better observations that those things were proved wrong - the theories were consistent with all our observations (limited!), and when they weren’t we made new theories. Of course, Galileo was probably less impressed how the Church responded…
Anyway, the point of all this was that I think the scientific method had consistently proved itself throughout history, and has done more to advance society than simply having blind faith in religion or the supernatural - most of all, a scientist would never say something is beyond science, and that’s why we’ve accomplished so much. I’m certain it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and our theories are nowhere like complete, and maybe we’re even on the wrong track with some stuff. Whether or not science can explain why we’re here, I leave as an open question (i.e., a topic of another post!)
Since this is a long post, which I’ve been working on for a while, I’m going to leave it here, and come back to the original religion/science question next time! I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on these ideas, though, dear reader!
jack dark waters Says:
Lets see if the world science had advanced beyond BIBLE’s first verse which says::::::::
” In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” now lets observe this
In the beginning[time,formation of the universe] God[supernatural power that keeps universe running] created[how was it created,science is nowhere to near expalanation,science or scientists say may be this theory or that theory all u have is assumptions that are not even clear] the heavens[space or universe] and the earth[life on earth]” ,God had made these five as boundaries to human science and no one can go beyond this,,almost theres no advacement in these fields except for hypothetical assumptions proposed now and then.
Bible has all the science [all that is/was seen is not made of visible things],so explore ,all the best.
It’s an interesting thing to think about. There are a lot of distinctions. We would say science is whatever (strictly) follows the scientific method. The scientific method is a series of stepping stones that we hope approaches the truth because at every step we attempt to capture it via empirical observations. This is heavily interlinked with the principle of induction (not mathematical induction). We hope that the successive approximations of truth converge to the truth and that this chain of progression can’t be undone by the universe being perverse.
A few of the ways we can mess up the scientific method are to make bad measurements or to make bad assumptions. Measurements can be “bad” if they are not exact enough or measure the wrong thing. Assumptions can be bad if we generalize it beyond what we have tested or if we mistake one thing for being the cause of a phenomena when it’s actually something else (which runs up against the age old “correlation is not causality” - causality is a direct connection where correlation need not be).
Newton’s laws were a case of people not having the engineering ability to make precise enough measurements, and assuming that the level of error in these measurements for the low-speed cases would be the same for the high-speed ones. In this way, all scientific theories have an implicit disclaimer about accuracy, saying “This is seems correct given the accuracy and extent of tests we have done at this point in time”. We try to make this accuracy beyond (current) reasonable doubt, but we are definitely overstepping our boundaries if we say that it is necessarily true.
Even with perfect engineering and details on the extent of experiments, there are still problems. The primary one is that science is a human endeavour and humans are falliable. Even in mathematics, that bastion of “truth”, humans can still get it wrong. It doesn’t mean that mathematics is wrong, it means that the humans doing mathematicians were wrong. This applies to all scientists. The responsibility of the correctness of science is up to the scientists, not science itself. There is a strong belief that the majority of those before us did a good job. But it’s not a fact. The average person considers science to be incontrovertible truth and gets a kick out of mistakes being found. This is, I think, because they forget the human part of it all.
Religious folk love it when this “weakness” is revealed. The mighty giant of science is weakened! But they shouldn’t dance too much, as religion is similarly a human endeavour and on just as shaky ground. The main difference is that science is physical, and religion is mental or emotional. And as far as consistency goes, the former outclasses the latter.
(Well that was a garble of thoughts. I hope it wasn’t too long of a response!)
did you know the bible described the world as round, explain that mr scientist
Not sure exactly what you’re getting at - the bible says lots of things that are true, like various historical facts, or even that fact that horses have four legs. That doesn’t mean that everything in it is true though!