[ExI] Science or Scientism?

[Samantha Atkins]

Having been deeply into spirituality for a time I well know its strengths.
However I found little there that I can trust more than what the best
science an rationality I am modestly capable of has verified.   I fervently
wished it was otherwise.  I really wanted to BELIEVE.

On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 4:27 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

> John Clark wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 8:00 AM BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> *> there are many questions that do not have scientific answers because
> >>  they were not legitimate scientific questions to begin with. Many of
> >> these questions concern the things that are most important of all:
> >> faith, hope, love, truth, beauty, and goodness ? these do not lie in the
> >> territory of science.*
> >
> > Hope, love, beauty, and goodness are all important virtues in my opinion
> > but I don't expect science to say anything about them. Science can inform
> > me what the universe's opinion about various things are but these virtues
> >  are not about the Universe's opinion they are about mine, and even the
> > Universe doesn't know more about my opinion than I do. But truth is
> > different, science can help us get more of that. As for faith, in my
> > opinion faith is not a virtue at all, I think it's a vice.
>
> You are right in that science cannot say anything about those virtues.
> That is both a strength and a weakness of science. It is due to the
> empirical nature of science. Science is the art of using experiments to
> prune away falsehoods. What this leaves you with is a mixture of truths
> and unfalsifiable hypotheses.
>
> Now keep in mind that there are many reasons why a hypothesis could be
> unfalsifiable.
>
> For example, limited resources. I could hypothesize that crashing
> red-giant stars together would make a blue giant star. Since we cannot yet
> crash stars together on purpose, my hypothesis is unfalsifiable which does
> not necessarily make it true or false.
>
> Another reason hypotheses might be unfalsefiable is for legal or ethical
> reasons. I could hypothesize that human centipedes would not live very
> long unless the people involved happened to all be the same blood type and
> HLA tissue type. Since creation of human centipedes is unethical and
> illegal, the hypothesis could never be tested.
>
> Less disgusting but equally unethical would be conducting experiments
> regarding things like love and hope because these entail emotional
> manipulation of other people.
>
> A third reason a hypothesis could be untestable is that it is logically
> impossible to falsify. For example, solipsism would fall into this
> category as would many other religious claims.
>
> All that being said regarding the limitations of science. Now lets turn
> our attention away from science, the art of determining falsehood through
> empiricism, and turn it to math, the art of generating truth. Math is all
> about truth.
>
> A mathematical theorem is true in every place and every time. If a
> mathematical theorem fails to be predictive of your world, it is because
> you have misapplied it to something that falls outside of the scope its
> intended axioms. The theorem itself is inevitably true.
>
> Math too has its limitations, however, and its limitations are interesting
> in relation to those of science and can be contrasted with them to good
> effect. One notable limitation to math is the notion of uncomputable
> numbers and functions. Another is Goedel's Incompleteness, which states
> that in any consistent system of axioms there are true statements that are
> nevertheless impossible to prove within that system.
>
> Now I state that it is self-evident that the intersection of the set of
> unfalsifiable hypotheses and the set of unprovable truths is non-empty. I
> leave the proof as an exercise to the reader. It might be possible that
> some religion somewhere might be an element of that set. This is
> especially possible if we live in a simulation.
>
> > Tell that  to the religious nuts who burned Giordano Bruno alive or
> > threatened to torture Galileo and imprisoned him for life or to the
> > Taliban
> > who kill doctors who try to vaccinate children. Or tell it to any
> > evangelical Trump voter who thinks the universe started not 13.8 billion
> > years ago but in 4004 BC .
>
> But the very gravity of these things should inform you that regardless of
> the truth of their dogma, all religions are very real entities. This goes
> back to my argument that all Shannon information has an energy content. If
> you don't believe me then do a BOTEC using Landauer's principle for how
> much energy it would take to erase all the information in the world
> pertaining to radical Islam for example.
>
> You would find it to be quite substantial.
>
> > I don't understand why so many people typically feel that in order to be
> > a good person one must be a religious apologist.
>
> I don't think it is about being a good person, so much as it is about
> being politically correct to avoid offending people. I am reminded about
> an apocryphal story that when Voltaire was on his deathbed, a priest urged
> Voltaire to renounce Satan. To which Votaire supposedly replied, "I am
> sorry, father, but now is not the time to make new enemies."
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
>
>
>
>
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