*!"Do You Believe in Science?"!*

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Having realised today, ( on the thread "Global Warming; Fact or Fiction?" ) that i don't believe in science, i wondered who else didn't either, and why, whether you you have known this for a long time, or whether you had been wondering about it.

The three most important axioms/assumptions of science are:

1) There is an objective reality, matter exists.

2) The world obeys universal laws, of which a fundamental one is that of cause and effect.

3) The nature of the world can be revealed by asking it questions in the form of experiments; in other words it can be measured.

The question is who believes in these and who doesn't?

I realised that i am not completely, not 100%, convinced that there is an objective reality, nor that matter exists.
Also that I believe that there is a kind of "space" between measurable cause and effect for something unpredictable/unmeasurable. And even occasionally wonder whether cause and effect is an illusion.

And i believe that the act of observation alters events. I know this is only theorised at level of tiny particles and only proven in the case of human and other animal behaviour, but i believe that this may have very odd effects on the universe, possibly.

Consequently i do not quite believe in science, not as it stands anyway. ( maybe if they found a way, a unified theory, to tie it all together, then i'd feel differently, but at the moment the bits i love are not attached to the rest). This came as a shock to me , because it had not occurred to me that science required any belief, that something so apparently "evident" should need me to choose any fundamental beliefs at all.

Science is a philosophical position. An approach. Very effective and powerful, but perhaps inherently/inevitably dangerous/destructive without the admission of a forever unpredictable element.

I read that apparently Christianity is the only religion to have allowed/encouraged science to advance this far.

What do you think?

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Feb 2008, 5:13 pm, edited 5 times in total.

I think you are a very confused individual. Of course I believe in the methods of science as one of the only reliable ways of finding things out.

time for teh orly owl

You seem to think that this is an unusual belief-position!

I too didn't know it was possible in this day and age not to believe in science, but when i realised that no facts were going to convince me about global warming, as a real thing, ( though now that i see HOW it arose, as an artefact of a certain philosophical position, i am more sympathetic towards the stress aand panic of those dealing with the mess that scientists seem to think scientific method, greenhouse gases, etc, have landed us in), i went looking on the net, and it turns out that i am definitely not alone, that in fact disbelief in science is perhaps responsible for most of the sceptics position on global warming.

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Feb 2008, 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Science is not always accurate but i think it's among the best techniques of exploration and explanation. I think there is a point where science, spirituality and philosophy all interverene and that's somewhat where the truth is.

Seriously.
Francis Bacon. Encouraging the exploration of nature as far as possible, whereas Islam did not , nor did any other, beyond a certain point.

The difference between industry and none. etc.

Science's conclusions are supported by evidence. Global warming is a real phenomenon. To ignore it is to stick your head in the sand, which, by the way, is the advice given by orthodox Christianity, which has systematically ignored the conclusions of science as soon as they became uncomfortable. Galileo was one of it's first victims. Do you believe the Earth is the center of the universe, and that the Sun revolves around it?

The net is full of disinformation, mostly distributed by corporate interests designed to subvert science and confuse weak minded individuals. The purpose is to continue the practice of destroying the Earth for profit.

The skeptics on Global Warming must also use science to support their position, and do. Otherwise, it's just a matter of faith.

The question seems awfully broad. However, the scientific method is hardly infallible, but it's the best we've got.

I accept science and I enjoy the 2 years I have spent studying chemistry and physics. I have nothing against science in itself; I have a lot against the philosophical presuppositions used by some academia, but science in itself is wonderful.

That's alright if science will allow for that intersection. But at the moment the tenets of science are such as to rule out god's intervention for example, or the possibility that there pure objective reality is an illusion. I seem to believe in the possibility of "god's" intervention, which surprised me at first, but when look at cause and effect i realise that i believe that there is the possibility that something "else" will happen.

While science claims all, with only a wee smidge of Heisenberg et al of quantum physics, etc to allow for "odd things" happening, ( and even then science has still not found a way to connect that with the rest of science, so that most of it is deterministic), i do not believe in what science is. However efficient it is supposed to be.

Countries without this degree/kind of science managed very well with bicycles and water wheels etc for many thousands of years, and in fact in the case of china made more efficient ploughs over 2000 years before europe finally grasped how to make one without strangling the cow/horse, and such as to cleave the soil powerfully.

And exactly WHAT is responsible for the pollution of the planet, but the "efficiency" of the science you say is the "best" technique? China and other countries stopped when science was still human scale and contained within wider philosophy.

Last edited by ouinon on 03 Mar 2008, 6:15 am, edited 4 times in total.

That the earth revolves around the sun is a FACT ; that is not the same thing as science. Science is a philosophical position, a methodology with certain premises/assumptions, listed above ( in OP) .
Do you believe in those First Principles of science? Most scientists approach experiments with the assumption that there is an objective reality. Before measure anything, already chosen to believe that. I am not entirely convinced. Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is that this physical life is an illusion. Where does science allow for that?

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Feb 2008, 12:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The Question
Do you believe....

1) that there is an objective reality/that matter exists? ......AND that,
2) the world obeys universal rules of which "cause and effect" is a fundamental one? .....ASWELL as
3) that the nature of the world can be revealed by asking questions of it in the form of experiments? rather than its nature being altered by the very fact of looking at it as per Heisenberg.

You say it's the "best method", but for doing what? In what way is it superior to the system of thought used in ancient china? ( which had very different assumptions, ) and who until they bought our western science's philosophical system were NOT polluting anything.

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Feb 2008, 12:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The uncertainty principle is specifically related to finding the radius or mass*velocity of an electron. See here for it http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics ... ciple.html The experiments in Heisenberg's time altered one parameter while measuring the other. I heard about a femptosecond laser pulsing technique which has been able to measure these quantities (my stepdad told me about it and that it's on Physorg.com, however their search engine sucks so I haven't read it yet) with more of a degree of accuracy.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not mean there isn't certainty in science, anymore than General or Special Relativity has anything to do with philosophical relativism, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics has to do with disorder. Using scientific terms from one field and using them in a popular sense is not valid.

after checking out Joseph Needham, i found this amongst other things, which expresses fairly well what i mean about science, with clarifying references to what i meant about Heisenberg.

You don't think that that introduces uncertainty? ! isn't that rather uncertain, a probable reality?

at : http://www.cttbusa.org/other2/buddhism_science.htm

Joseph Needham's description of the difference about eastern scientific philosophy before infection by western one;
"It was not that there was no order in nature for the chinese, but that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws decreed aforetime. Taoists would have scorned such an idea as being too naive for the subtly and complexity of the universe as they intuited it."
"Individual human experiences express causative principles effective in the environment at all scales."
Needham referred to Europe's "philosophically naive scientists" "suffused with spiritual pride".

Simberg Rand says "Science is a philosophy in itself, and one that is faith based." simberg@transterrestrialmusings

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Feb 2008, 5:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Science is not all evil (just part ). It is useful but you can't blindly believe that every "scientific report" you hear about on TV is the absolute unbiased truth. The scientific community is affected by the pull of money just the same as anything else. Right now there is a lot of money to be made (in the form of govt funding) in the creation of Global crises. In the seventies it was an impending ice age now it's global warming. The key is doing research on subjects yourself to see if there is another side of the story and deciding yourself which one make the most logical sense to you. Most people just trust that everything they hear has been proven as fact in unbiased scientific studies but that is not always the case.

Without science we wouldn't have advanced healthcare or the technology we have now, so it isn't always wrong, but it isn't a god and it isn't always right.

"~~Order, ~Rational." Id est, there may be some order to the universe but it is either irrational or beyond understanding?

"not an order ordained by a rational personal being" In other words, not by God but by some "force"? Sounds like Star Wars...