Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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For a while, placards stating something like "In this house, we believe in science" were showing up all over the area I live in. It's very odd because concepts like faith and belief are inherently religious, and don't have any place in scientific inquiry. A notion like 'these are the fundamental truths of our religion, and to be a member of this religion, you must accept them without question' has no place in the scientific world. Any claim can be questioned, if one has the observational or experimental results to support alternative explanations.

I've seen this most often in the strident atheist crowd, many of whom appear to be refugees from strict religious upbringings. They haven't actually adopted the open-minded experimentalist approach that science relies on, but have merely switched their allegiance from 'faith in religion' to 'faith in science'.

This was all spectacularly on display when 'junk DNA' concepts were replaced by the now well-supported notion that there is no junk DNA, instead it plays important structural roles in the genome. The atheist argument that junk DNA proved evolution was a random flawed process (hence no 'intelligent design') had become an article of faith in that crowd, and they reacted to the new data rather like fundamentalists react to heresy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/feb/24/scientists-a...

> For a while, placards stating something like "In this house, we believe in science" were showing up all over the area I live in. It's very odd because concepts like faith and belief are inherently religious, and don't have any place in scientific inquiry.

Belief is not “inherently religious”, religion is one of many kinds of beliefs. Science is centered on a particular epistemology—a belief about what makes a belief justified—rather than opposed to belief.

According to Popperian epistemology, there are no justified beliefs, only guesses that have been exposed to tests of some sort. I think David Deutsch has even used a formulation of words something similar to: "you shouldn't believe things".

Isn't that a meaningless distinction? If I've tested my hypothesis, isn't "believe" perfectly fine as a label for how you think about it then? It is, but when people use that word they often have in mind that the source of the knowledge is important -- it isn't. I think that is what's behind most of the "I believe in Science" statements. What's really important is rather how vulnerable to attack an idea is.

Edit: "believe in" also tends to get used with the implication that a time needs to arrive where you make a decision that a hypothesis is true. That also goes against Popperian epistemology, which says rather that all ideas remain subject to correction forever.

True enough. This is why the simulation hypothesis is so interesting - i.e. the notion we are all living in a perfect VR simulation that never glitches. Science can't be used to address the veracity of that hypothesis, much to the apparent dismay of the fundamentalist atheists. I really lost interest in Richard Dawkins after he said something like "I won't answer silly questions about whether chairs and tables are real".

Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events, but they make sure to do it only when the scientists aren't watching.

Personally I don't really care if we're working out the rules of the simulation or the rules of base reality, as we can't distinguish between the two.

>Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events, but they make sure to do it only when the scientists aren't watching.

The atheism catechism already has an entry for this, it's the teapot hypotheses. It goes, "nobody can refute my claim that there is a teapot in the asteroid belt, but nobody should believe it either."

That sounds like a good argument to me although I don't know the metaphysical philosophical details of why. (Occam's razor?) No matter our stances in abstract epistemology we must all agree we can't go around believing every irrefutable claim we or anyone else thinks of, at minimum because many are contradictory.

> True enough. This is why the simulation hypothesis is so interesting - i.e. the notion we are all living in a perfect VR simulation that never glitches.

That’s not the hypothesis, afaik - we’re beings generated inside the simulation rather than ‘brains in a vat’ experiencing it. Science could address veracity if (say) whatever was running the simulation chose to make it apparent, either directly (by revelation) or by some quirk of how physics operated, for example if we detected some (reflected) method to control how reality was being generated.

Saying that, I’ve pondered that giving every person their own entire universe where they had free will but everyone else was a simulated non-player character was one way of solving the religious problem of evil - nothing evil actually happens to real humans, it’s just a scripted set of tests to see whether the particular individual chooses to be good or bad.

I think that’s just moving the goalposts; evil still exists in the mind of the evildoer.

Nothing can be used to address the veracity of that hypothesis. It's the same as saying I have a monster in my closet, which is invisible, undetectable, and never interfere with any object in any manner.

Or that I'm just a cloud of consciousness dreaming about this entire experience, human, earth, the universe all being my imagination.

I don't see why it would dismay an atheist specifically. It's just an untestifiable statement like many other metaphysical thought experiments. Surely anyone with a basic read of philosophy would have encountered some.

> Science can't be used to address the veracity of that hypothesis

Thus, it is not a hypothesis but a conjecture. (Or, perhaps more accurately, an omphaloskeptic intellectual autoeroticism.)

> much to the apparent dismay of the fundamentalist atheists

Neither a fundamentalist nor an atheist myself, but I’ve never seen any of the latter “dismayed” by the fact that people can string together words to create a proposition outside of the domain of scientific inquiry.

> Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events

One could assert that easily, but to argue it one would need first to establish some framework in which something could be offered to support that conclusion.

> omphaloskeptic intellectual autoeroticism.

You could have made your point without being rude to the parent.

From your last sentence, it sounds like you agree with Dawkins. Isn't a question that is epistemologically unanswerable a silly question?

I'm not a native English speaker, but I think that the words "believe" and "belief" have diverged in meaning a little bit. "Belief" means any piece of information that a person holds as true (as in justified true belief as what used to be definition of knowledge), and "believe" is a specific way to hold something as true — not through experiment or logic, but usually through submission to someone's expert authority.

Forgive non-professional philosophers their casual misuse of terms like faith, belief, and knowledge. Even so, you know very well what these placard brandishing plebes meant, despite your pedantry.

> I've seen this most often in the strident atheist crowd...

Granted. New Atheists are insufferable. For future, maybe use their moment of conversion as an opportunity to introduce them to Aristotle, Popper, your fave thinker.

> Forgive non-professional philosophers their casual misuse of terms like faith, belief, and knowledge.

I think that's good general advice...

> Even so, you know very well what these placard brandishing plebes meant, despite your pedantry.

... but I don't think it's pedantry in this case but a stupendously important point: I think both me and the GP think "Believe the Science" does very often correspond to some sort of belief in the importance of sources of knowledge or the need to shield ideas from criticism. "The Science" seems often very much "The" with a capital T.

Why stupendously important? If all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and all knowledge is conjectural, then damaging traditions of criticism is maybe the worst thing anybody can do.

I mean you still have to believe that grasping what is actually going on is preferable to a numb, comfortable lie.

The nature of the world around us obviously doesn't care too much what we consider true about it and continues more or less unimpressed to go its course (unless of course we start to base our actions on these considerations).

You don't have to believe in a factual thing to make it true. Or well, you could, but it would be totally pointless either way.

But what you can believe in is that facts actually matter — and quite frankly there is a huge populus who are in dire need of that believe from at least one standpoint.

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