Although this topic and debate are hackneyed, my thoughts here are inspired by some new experiences. I recently moved to a Physics department situated in the bible belt. It is by no means the heart of the bible belt, so its effects on the University were surprising to me. I was aware of the existence of "evolution deniers" before I arrived in the US, but I did not expect to find them in the Physics department. You may ask why not? This question and its answer are at the heart of my thoughts here.
I have come across researchers from the fields of astrophysics, as well as particle physics, who quite happily state that they do not "believe in evolution". One of the most interesting conversations involved an astrophysicist telling somebody that they should believe in the theory of Relativity, only to state five minutes later that they themselves did not believe in evolution. I find this a curious stance. Leaving aside the point that these things are not a belief system, how can you agree with one scientific theory and deny another, equally amazing and successful, scientific theory. I hear people say that "...he is an intelligent guy... he is researching quantum mechanics, but believes that the dinosaurs were wiped out in the Great Flood." My response is that somebody like that is actually quite stupid, because they have not learnt from their education. (Of course, I would be more forgiving if the person denying a scientific theory had no scientific training. Although, refusing to think is not really excusable!) The greatest human invention, I believe anyway, is the scientific method. It tells us to take our theories and test them. If a theory makes predictions and they match the observations, then it gets a scientific reprieve. This kind of observational confirmation does not prove the theory, but simply states that this is the best we have so far. It is a beautiful system because it tells us to have humility. So any scientist simply denying the evidence for a scientific theory, because it does not suit their beliefs, has somewhat missed the point of their training.
This is the reason why evolution denying is not compatible with any science department. The theory of evolution is not perfect, but it provides us with a relatively simple and logical explanation for an extremely complex problem; most importantly, there is evidence for the theory. Call it parsimony or Occam's razor, but either way, you are a poor scientist if you replace a simple logical explanation with a belief-driven faith-driven "theory" reminiscent of epicycles. So can Science and religion truly live in harmony in our minds? I do not think so; science asks for evidence and religion wants faith. An attempt to placate both just creates a life of hypocrisy.
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ReplyDeleteOmar, like all your posts this one is thoughtful and provocative, and of course you know a lot more about science than me. But if I may speak outseide my own area a little, it seems to me that, like most scientists, you wrongly assume that science has got nothing to do with faith, because you confuse it with fidelity. There is a massive difference between believing something that is contradicted by the evidence on the one hand (e.g. that the dinosaurs were lost in the Great Flood) and saying that belief has no place at all in the presence of scientific method. What links the two forms of thinking is authority and when/why we accept an explanation as authoritative. In religion this is easy to appreciate because the holy books don't give any reason to accept their stories that we would call scientific. In the absence of empirical proof that God exists, or the miracles happened, or Christ rose from the dead, or that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the Koran to Muhammad, we must simply accept the authority of the text, or the teachers that these things happened. It's a story about how things came to be that we must either accept as authoritive or else say (quite rightly) that there is no evidence to support them as anything otherwise than wonderful tales. In science its a little more obscure but it's there nonetheless, because although stories arrived at by scientific method are more readily justifiable (ie by saying "if you don't believe me I can prove it's true because I can recreate and repeat the experiment!") they still require us ultimately to accept the authority of one story over another.
ReplyDeleteThis i why you are right to say that the method engenders humility: the 'story' we *believe in* today may well be superceded by another one in a few years. It doesn't mean that when one theory replaces another one as the orthodoxy we should think "wow, how could we have believed such nonesense before?!": the same rigourous methods can lead us to completely different but nonetheless equally 'true' stories, by slight or radical alterations to the method, the technology used to 'see' the results, the mathmatics sued to interpret them etc. As you rightly say, the whole point of scientific method is that an explanation may be proved wrong eventually, and the same for it's successor, and so on. I think it's because these stories that science tells can be so different from age to age that makes us think that in previous times we must have been blinded by religion or dogma or susperstition. But actually it was not always ignorant 'belief' but obervation and repetition that lead us to think, for example, that the world was much younger than it is, that the universe is much smaller, that the physical world is made up of far fewer components etc.
And this brings me to the distinction beteen belief and fidelity. A religious fundamentalist does not merely 'believe' in his story: he is also faithful to it in the face of contradictory evidence. The scientist on the other hand has belief, but not fidelity. Despite knowing that the accounts scientists give us are temporary, we nonetheless 'believe' in them. The only thing that separates the 'scientific' mind from the 'relgious' one is that the scientist - if he is true to the ideals of science - will be more readily to throw out the old belief and accept a new one.
Joseph,
ReplyDelete(I took the liberty to delete the repeated comment. I think they were identical comments.)
Thank you for an insightful comment. It made think and I stand corrected. I should have been more careful in my usage of the terms 'faith' and 'belief'. I don't think they are interchangeable. I guess this may be going down the semantics route, but it is important. I would define 'faith' in the way you refer to 'fidelity'. So Science does not have anything to do with faith. I believe in scientific theories; I do not have faith in them. So I agree with you when you talk about the role of belief in science. However, when it comes to faith I think then we already have an additional layer of what you are referring to as fidelity. A belief is linked with the body of evidence and can (and should) change with it; faith, on the other hand, holds no matter what. So you a right that belief has not hindered our progress (whether social or scientific), but faith unfortunately has