What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
EDIT: Let's cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We're not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don't believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I'm sure almost everybody has something to add.
You are viewing a single comment
Science absolutely involves belief, the idea that the scientific method is a divorced concept from belief might fly in a badly written Wikipedia article description but in terms of actual science, belief absolutely factors massively into science. So does intuition.
Science is just a meaningless constellation of data points without any belief to connect them. One has to be very careful and continually retrospective about what those beliefs are, but it is absurd on the face of it to say that science is magically outside belief.
Science isn’t a collection of facts, it is a collection of questions that arise from hypotheses that themselves arise from belief and intuition. Just because that is scary and opens up the door to conversations about how belief always shapes our thoughts and actions even when it is in the context of science doesn’t mean you can just slam the door and demand that somehow science doesn’t include these things.
What differentiates science from other things is the intentional practice of questioning one’s conscious and subconscious beliefs, not the absence of belief.
Authoritarian minded centrists always want to bludgeon people with the idea that science is just a set of facts handed down by authority, but that is a lazy and ultimately fundamentally incorrect way to understand and advocate for science. The mistake we made was letting the word “skeptic” be redefined from a lifelong practice of questioning one’s own beliefs to being what some random person who knows nothing about a subject is when they just decide not to believe in something for no good reason.
I disagree. Science is making models to explain the data and testing them. Whichever model fits best the data becomes a leading theory. There is no belief whatsoever.
This aside, I agree with you that many people tend to mistake scientific theories for reality, they are merely good models. Thinking otherwise is belief.
Let's say the universe is a clock that we can't open. Even if we make a perfect model that predicts the exact motion of the hands, it doesn't tell us anything about what is inside the clock (it could be anything really). Belief is when you start believing your model IS what is inside the clock.
I understand that this is a nice way to teach kids how science works, but if you don’t think belief factors into every single thing that humans do in science you are massively off the mark.
Without belief or intuition, it’s just data.
Even if belief is very present in human nature, the scientific method is not a form of belief because it is just selectionning the model that fits best the data.
Coming up with models does not necessarily require intuition either when we can automate this process.
Belief is human, but science is universal.
Theory == belief.
Religion is not a theory because it cannot be falsified.
And the theory of evolution is not belief as it can be observed in real time in labs with flies for exemple.
Your equality is therefore incorrect.
Edit: typo
I don't believe that's the same effect we see in humans
I agree it is not straightforward. Evolution arises from gene reproduction, flies are just one easy example because they reproduce very fast. Humans are also using genes reproduction and our evolution can be also be traced. The evidence for evolution is everywhere and it is the simplest explanation that fits all the data.
Why do you believe that humans act the same way flies do?
Flies are very different than humans, but they are built using the same building blocks and processes.
It is not belief it is observation: humans are composed of cells that contain chromosomes. Genetic data is mixed with errors during reproduction (both with flies and humans) resulting in different characteristics in the individuals of the next generation (observable with flies and humans)
Sexual attactiveness of individuals will depend on their genes and their environment (also based on observation), which will impact their number of offspring, effectively selecting some genes and discarding others.
All of this is based on simple observation and you sée that belief has no place in this line of reasoning.
Of course there is more to flies and humans than evolution, yet evolution is such a simple process that it applies to both! Nature is truly amazing
That's an interesting theory, but I do not believe it to be true
Where do you see belief in what I explained? I'm genuinely curious.
It can't be the observations as you can make them for yourself, and you cannot find a model that fits the data better with less assumptions as it already fits the data perfectly and has no assumption beyond "organisms make copy of themselves with mutations"
Then what is it?
Why do you believe that?
It is just a logical statement. A theory must maximize data fitting and minimize assumption. You cannot beat a theory that fits all the data with only one assumption.
Sadly we are not having a debate as I'm giving arguments and you are not willing to criticize them on a core level. I hope other people find this one sided conversation useful.
I'm calling you on your fallacy that there is no belief whatsoever in believing in a scientific theory as the correct explanation for data.