NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/sci/physics/18448

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-08 | 7.3 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Stephen F. Schaffner)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Religion & Physics Don't Mix
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 8 Nov 92 23:25:28 GMT
References: <[e-mail]+ <[e-mail]+ <[e-mail]+ <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]
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Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Gene Kochanowsky)
writes:
|> [e-mail] (Stephen F. Schaffner) writes:

|> >    This is complete nonsense.  There may be religious leaders who
|> >demand unquestioning acceptance of belief, but I've certainly never met one.
|> >As a matter of interest, how many have you actually asked?  Most religions
|> >do indeed require some kind of intellectual commitment eventually, but in the
|> >varieties I'm familiar with that commitment is compatible with continued
|> >questioning.
|>
|>     What planet do you come from? It is not Earth. There can be no religion
|> without faith. With no faith, the congregation becomes a social club of like
|> thinking people.

This part of GK's post has been well-answered by Keith Ramsay in another post,
who offers an existence proof for the compatibility of religion and
questioning (to give extreme examples, try checking with the nearest Unitarian
minister or Reformed rabbi on the subject).  He's also right, this part of
the subject belongs in another newsgroup.



|>     Or if you are a bible thumper try this quote for size:
|>
|>         "proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing"

    I doubt I've ever thumped a Bible, and I can't imagine a reason for
thumping a bible, but I'll bite anyway: where's the quote from?


|>     If there is any complete nonsense here, it is that a person can be truely
|> religious and scientific in his religion at the same time. It is absurd,
|> illogical
|> and speaks volumes of misunderstanding on the part of that person of what is the
|> basis of both science and religion.

    Who said anything about being scientific in his religion?  I expect a
scientist to scientific in her science, not in her religion.  What I did object
to was the simple paradigm "science questions everything, religion questions
nothing".  I don't think either part of the statement is true.


|> >You simply can't do science without the
|> >"unquestioning belief" (usually unconscious) in the foundations upon which
|> >it is built.
|>
|>     Yes, you are absolutely right. In the last hundred years there have been
|> no scientists that have questioned the science of thier time. Not Rutherford or Bohr,
|> or Einstien, or Shroedinger, not Feynman or Dirac. Gosh, it doesn't seem like any
|> scientist has questioned the science of the day..... NOT.
|>
|>     And just maybe in the group of "space potato" scientist, as you call them,
|> might be the next Einstien, or Dirac. That person will be heavily criticized, and
|> scrutinzed, but, just maybe, if the person is right, the experiments will be done,
|> and will prove thier point. That person will become the producer of new science.

I'm afraid you've missed my point.  I said nothing about questioning the science
of the day -- how conservative science should be is a practical question only.
I was pointing out that all scientists, as long as they're doing science, must
accept the conceptual foundations of science (doesn't sound very controversial,
does it?).  Let me try an example.  Suppose an experiment is reported in the
literature that suggests that conservation of energy does not hold under
some circumstances.  What options are available to a scientist reading this?
He can dismiss it as a bad experiment or a statistical fluctuation (which would
probably be the case); if the evidence is strong enough, he might consider
changing the definition of energy (unlikely, but it's happened before).
Finally, if he's really bold, and he can't find a way to fit the new results
into the existing theory, he will consider the possibility that energy
conservation in fact doesn't hold, and that what we had taken to be a valid
conservation law was actually an approximate result of some more fundamental
theory (very unlikely, but as you point out, revolutions do occur).  Mind you,
he may have no idea yet what that theory is, but he is confident one is out
there, waiting to be found.  The one thing he does not do, as long as he is
acting as a scientist, is conclude that the world has stopped exhibiting law-
like behavior, and that no theory will ever be found to explain the new
result.  This, I maintain, is an example of faith in operation.  I happen to
think it's well-founded faith, but that's irrelevant.  As in the case of
religious faith, you can continue to practice your science even if you harbor
some doubts about its foundations, as long as you don't let them affect the
way you do your work; once you actually start believing that the world
doesn't follow rules, or that the scientific literature is all cooked by the
government to keep the truths of Larsonian physics from the masses, you are
no longer doing science (the analogy with religious faith should be clear).
    Now you may well believe that the assumptions made in doing science are
self-evident (I have the same inclinations myself), but it doesn't take much
reading in the literature of other cultures to realize that self-evident
beliefs are often historically conditioned.  If you want a more contemporary
approach, try reading some sociology or philosophy of science: some of those
people don't think what we're doing is at all simple or self-evident.


|>     The only sad thing about Mr. Shaffner's last statment is it shows a
|> confusion, a thought process that identifies Science as a kind of religion. When I was
|> in grad school, it was common for the students of the time to rigidly oppose any
|> idea that the Science being taught at the time could be wrong. This was independent
|> of any opposing idea, they had faith in what they were being taught. These grad students
|> were not scientist, they were preachers.  Because of this, I am afaid for science in
|> the US, this is the sort of thing that could kill it.

    Sorry, I don't think science is a kind of religion.  I engage in both
pursuits, and I am well aware that they have different goals, methods and
motivations.  One thing they do have in common, though, is that both offer an
interpretive framework for understanding the world.  Whether the frameworks are
compatible depends in detail on which religious tradition you're talking about
(had the original claim been that, say, fundamentalist Christian creation
science and biology were incompatible, I would have done nothing but agree).
That they frequently are compatible is clear from the many scientists who are
and have been practicing believers in a variety of religious faiths.

--
Steve Schaffner        [e-mail]
    The opinions expressed may be mine, and may not be those of SLAC,
Stanford University, or the DOE.