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> Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself

What's wrong with that?

The thing about science is that it cannot pretend that it knows. It needs to prove. To which end, I don't think we should be supposing that we're going to know. Otherwise we're doing religion.

Science is, effectively, religion/faith in a particular set of base presumptions (axioms of set theory or logic theory guide all "logical" reasoning). Basically, limits of human mind understanding things come with just having to trust some things are simply so.

The biggest difference from things more commonly referred to as "religions" is that science invites you to challenge all these assumptions and look for a better (and smaller, simpler) working set that still explains all the phenomena we observe at least as well as the sets of axioms we currently use. And it knows that all the knowledge we gain is simply the approximation of the real stuff, and that we can only work to improve those approximations.

> Science is, effectively, religion/faith

No. No no no no no!!!

Science is a process. The result of that process is explanations for phenomena. And the reason this matters is that the particular explanations produced by the scientific process turn out to give you the power to make extraordinarily accurate predictions about (certain aspects of) the future, and thus give you a tremendous amount of leverage in becoming the master of your own fate.

It is absolutely not a religion, except insofar as it is the only thing mankind has ever come up with that truly gives us the gift of prophecy.

Not to lend any credence to the antiscience above, but nothing about science being a process or even the falsifiability and other safeguards of that process preclude it from religious adherence. Even if they’re extraordinarily accurate processes, “it” absolutely can be and sometimes is treated as religious. Elevating science as a process of knowledge acquisition does it a disservice too. Scientists make mistakes, have attachments to their areas of study, and have a lot of complicated incentives that nominally would be anathema to the “process” even if they’re following the process … faithfully.

How is it anti science to say the science is just our best approximation?

You may see the above as a critique of science: I actually consider it a positive aspect that puts it way above traditional religions.

The fact that I recognize there are both faith and religious elements to science only makes it easier to explain how and why science is better than religion.

Note that science similarly includes a lot of areas where our predictions are not "extraordinarily accurate" (all the statistics-based science, like medicine, social sciences...) in any particular case, yet it's still science because we recognize the limits (eg. "with a large number of samples, this will mostly happen").

The scientific method lacks two features that distinguish religions from other human activities:

1. A doctrine whose source is authority (usually but not always a deity) rather than observation and

2. Rituals based on that doctrine

One might argue that the actual human practice of science sometimes involves the acceptance of authoritative doctrine (e.g. peer-reviewed papers) and associated rituals (e.g. conferences), but that is not quite true because the rituals are not based on the doctrine. Scientific conferences are not held because there is a peer-reviewed paper that says that they should be, they are held because empirically they help to advance the scientific process (or at least did in the past). Religious rituals exist entirely because of authoritative doctrine. There is no reason for (say) communion or baptism other than what is written in the Bible or proclaimed by the church.

> science similarly includes a lot of areas where our predictions are not "extraordinarily accurate"

Sure. Science isn't perfect. The view it provides us into the future isn't flawless, it's just vastly better than anything else humans have ever tried.

No. Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contrary evidence. If we were to suppose the "base presumptions" of science were on the same level as religious claims, then they could be arbitrarily ignored without real-world consequences.

Disclaimer: not a scientist.

Part1:

For the sake of the argument: Have you seen evidence of scientific fact-x? (For example x=“water is made of H2 + O”)

Since set of “x” is so wast, no matter who you are, for most of “x” the answer will be “NO”. Time, accessible equipment and brain-capability constraints force us to outsource the evidence check to others. (even smartest scientists read papers instead of reproducing all experiments)

Part2:

I would like to distinguish two meanings/aspects of word “Science” used by in various contexts:

- scientific method - hypothesis, experiment, …

- “institution of society” -distinct group in society, view/expectation by the rest of society, education, trusted sources and similar

Methods of science and religion are very different. But as “institutions”, they do have some parallels.

- Both offer basic explanation of reality.

- In both cases people trust stuff written by others.

- Both have consistency if you accept some basic truths.

To sum it up:

I (and most) believe that “carbon has 6 protons“ without evidence. The basis of this belief is trust in science (the institution of society) based on its authority, stated principles&process. But in the end laypeople don’t have evidence for that.

You can e.g. electrolyze water at home and see bubbles. Of course this proves nothing but the fact that water has something in it that makes bubbles at plus or minus, and regularly so. You can add salt/soda and see that it goes faster. All this is not a direct evidence of H or O or what electricity is, but at least some indirect one that can be progressed further, even if you won’t.

You can buy a complex device like a microwave oven or a chemistry lab and experiment with them, checking how they map to scientific knowledge, and asking on physics/chemistry SE about your findings and getting answers from people completely uninterested of fooling you, who are not knowledgeable of what you’re doing besides what you described.

It’s harder with C=6, but by messing with chemicals you can at least make some natural sense of what 6 means in that theory.

Religion at its face value cannot be experimented on at all. Any coincidences (if you find what to experiment on) are so irregular that can only be explained by statistics, even if you won’t. The only way to “study” religious knowledge is to fall for an interpretation of the day, which is always based on some experimental knowledge which others extracted from nature, because these people are interested in converting more adepts from a general population.

You’re correct that there is no direct way to learn and proof to yourself due to materialistic limitations. But when you take plausible interests and statistical phenomena into account, you can easily see yourself what has much more evidential depth and innocence of presupposition.

I trust scientific facts proportional to the evidence I have that these facts are true. This is not the case for faith, wherein disproportionately large amounts of trust are demanded without any evidence.

Our model of the atom allows us to accurately predict chemical reactions. Religion has no predictive power whatsoever, and none of its unique "truth" claims are provable or falsifiable.

People who uncritically trust "science" as regurgitated by pop-culture media are more akin to theists.

This isn’t a good comparison. Science can do something religion can’t: it can predict what will happen ahead of time based on prior knowledge. Religion works backwards to explain why a thing that happened was the will of some god (in the example of Christianity).

This then has practical, real-world implications. Praying harder never seemed to stop a bridge collapsing but a better understanding of physics allowed humanity to build bigger and stronger bridges.

I guess you are unacquainted with formal axiomatic basis for the most formal of all sciences (mathematics).

Eg. natural numbers are defined by assuming that there exists one, and that there is a successor to one: everything else flows from that (this is an older system, but more approachable than the set theory one).

Basically, we never, ever prove that one indeed exists, or that it has a successor: these are assumptions that have so far proven to work well, but we can never tell for sure.

In the past, axiomatic systems have been found to be "wrong" when matched against reality (most notably the axiom of parallelism and hyperbolic geometry), so there's nothing to say that any of the other ones are "correct".

So we have faith that one exists and that it has a successor. Without evidence, just like you say.

Again, none of this makes science useless: it is an approximation of reality that we always work to improve. But some things we can't prove, so we have just assume they are so (otherwise known as faith).

Numbers are a human construct, just like words in a language. They don't "exist" in the same sense as anything physically real. Nobody has "faith" in the number one, it's just a concept that's proven to be universally useful. If it weren't useful, people wouldn't (and couldn't) conceptualize it. Again, faith is believing in something despite lack of evidence or despite evidence to the contrary.

It’s treated that way by the masses but it most certainly isn’t. You aren’t going to find the origin of reality via science but science is used to describe reality.

Otherwise I agree. It will always be our approximation and until we meet aliens and do science with them we can’t be sure all of reality isn’t a construct of the human mind.

Going back to the simplicity statement from the video: you can model the universe as the product of your imagination but it seems surprisingly consistent if it is. It’s clear that the universe continues existing even when you’re not paying attention to it. For this to be true either:

* Your brain is storing and processing the entire universe all the time * Your brain is constantly rewriting its own memory on a mass scale to pretend the universe is consistent

Both of these seem way more complicated than just “the universe exists and you’re a part of it.”

(Yes, I know our brains rewrite history but not on the scale required to make all of reality seem consistent in this way)

> Similarly, it’s entirely conceivable that we may find independent ways to test which of the proposed modifications of the evolution laws is correct, for instance by using data collected from binary mergers. Then, these modified laws would lead to a modified story of what happened near the Big Bang.

Sure, but you have to start from observations of the binary merger, not from what you'd like the Big Bang to be like, like most of these theories do. Starting from predictions about the origin of the universe is unlikely to produce good testable theories, since there is nothing to test there. You have to look at phenomena that are actually still happening in the universe to guide your research, and only then extrapolate.

Einstein's equations are time reservable and deterministic, so the evolution has only one path and ultimately it doesn't matter which end you start at, you'll get to the other unique end point regardless. The problem is to get the correct start conditions that makes the other end of the path end up somewhere plausible.

It is largely a matter of training and temperament if you think it's more rewarding to start from the observations of current phenomena that all have some uncertainty and laboriously work backwards to predict an early universe that doesn't match the observations and then have to start over, or if you think it's better to start from the distant past and work toward the now only to find a problem and having to start over.

Sure, the equations themselves lead to the same place.

But this is only true if they are the right equations.

If you look at an existing phenomenon that maybe relativity doesn't describe well enough, and find some modification to these equations that explains it better; and then you go and check that indeed this new model explains all known observations better - you have a pretty solid new theory. You can then expand this theory into the early universe and see what consequences it would have for the inflation model.

However, if you start from the big bang and want to modify Einstein's equations, what will guide you to a better model? Most likely you will use your intuition on how the universe must have begun - but then, chances are, your modified laws will predict entirely the wrong thing about the current universe; or, you can add terms to the existing equations that have no influence in the current universe, but then, by Occam's razor, your theory should just be discarded since it explains all observable phenomena equally well, but is more complex.

Look, the entire problem is that wherever people start, their modifications lead to entirely wrong predictions.

To be very clear this also happens when you start with a theory that describes the local universe well, indeed the fact that when general relativity extrapolated backwards gives blatantly unphysical results is the entire issue we are trying to solve!

She does apply it to the big bang as well. She says that it's just the simplest explanation we have and that it's probably wrong too.

As I read the post, she takes the fact of a Hot Big Bang (narrowly construed in the modern sense of a homogenous, hot initial state prior to which vanilla GR breaks down, not as a literal singularity) to be a fact knowable by the normal process of science. Whereas the question of what came before that — I.e. what modified description takes over at higher temperatures yet — is placed in a different epistemic category of forever unknowability.

Of course, for any theory that applies within a certain domain, there’s always the question of what happens beyond that domain (“what came before that… and before that… and before that…?”). But this infinite regress isn’t particularly noteworthy. If I understand her correctly, she is claiming to be able to draw a particular line and to say that we can know things on one side of this line but— even in principle — can never know anything past this particular line.

She certainly understands her stuff. But I respectfully disagree with her conclusions — I see no reason to think that we might not make progress on the question through the normal process of science.