Unlike the false religious mantra, “There are many religions, but at bottom they all worship the same god,” I have a similar saying, but one that I see as true: “There are many areas that claim to be ‘ways of knowing,’ but at bottom the ‘knowing’ must always be based on science.”
But ex-pastor (and now atheist) Mike Aus, said this better in his essay “Conversion on Mount Improbable: How evolution challenges Christian dogma“:
When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.
That’s one of my favorite quotes, and it heads a chapter in The Albatross.
Or, you can see this new cartoon from reader Pliny the in Between on his/her website Evolving Perspectives:
Agreed all around.
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Good one.
I’ve come to see it in terms of what you use as your standard by which you measure how right or not you are.
It should come as no surprise that your beliefs will tend to align themselves with whatever standard it is that you pick. Therefore, choice of standard is paramount.
Religion uses hallucination (“revelation”), wishful thinking (“small still voice”), tradition (“scripture”), and authority as its standards.
Science uses observation as its standard.
That the results of the two methods are what they are is exactly what you’d expect.
Cheers,
b&
Well put!
Not exactly.
The “small still voice” of wishful AND/OR fearful thinking (a.k.a. worldview, paradigm, Weltanschauung) does not belong to religion, because religions are usually not respectful of individual decisions; but will they ever be embraced in science?
Examples: abortion, rape (there is NO “lesser” form of rape, such ideas are LEGALESE, any chance to overcome is defined by the victim´ s genetics – high risk genes, for example – and her access to abortion, functional antibiotics, and other EARLY available treatment, law enforcement effectivity, a form of crisis intervention and psychotherapy that does NOT enforce heterosexuality and having children, etc), euthanasia, suicide.
In my time I did not have any help from science, on the opposite: THE authority back then was Konrad Lorenz, (I have no access to translations of his books, but “Man möchte ein Häuschen, eine Frau, zwei Kinder…” – a HORRIBY sexist stance I will never forget), although I do not remember his exact wording at dismissing feminism and the very idea of a woman´ s reproductive health decisions).
I did not have time to comment on dimorphism, it is a similar problem: Acceptable emotionally only if individual measures to counter what feels not pretty: early childhood protein intake, what about the effect of ever earlier puberty, because oestrogens end bone growth and testosterones do not, but there is some medication for the young to delay puberty, even if this weird timing has not yet any scientifically sound answer.
I do not understand why patterns of coping with evolution´ s problems meet with macho-and rich-people-propaganda in scientific discourse as well as religion-influenced legalese!!!
HORRIBLY, it should have been.
Dunning-Kruger?
That’s one of the challenges for sure: most of us are really terrible at evaluating how little we know and how much of what we “know” might be inaccurate and/or badly sourced.
I’ve run across a lot of definitions of science, but one of the most intriguing is this one:
“Science is respect for the critical opinions of other people.”
This I think highlights the central significance of science’s communal aspect. Religious people reason their way to God. Spiritual people reason their way to nonduality and metaphysics. Pseudoscientists reason their way to their cargo cult systems of explanation. They observe, experience, think hard, and come up with explanations.
But you’re not really thinking hard until you take your conclusion to your harshest critics and say “ok, show me where this is wrong.” And listen to the answers… and answer back and forth till you hopefully achieve consensus and find something out and make progress together on the common ground.
ALL the other ‘ways of knowing’ fail to respect the critical opinions of others. I don’t mean that pseudo-respect where you’re supposed to smile and agree to disagree. I mean the real respect where you WANT to test your beliefs and WANT to change your mind if you’re wrong and therefore you keep the topic on the actual topic.
Instead, the “other ways of knowing” interpret rational criticism as interference coming from the unenlightened. They don’t keep the topic on the topic because they think all you need to see the truth is to open your mind, open your heart, open your spiritual eye or use some method other than reason. For those who don’t believe — who don’t WANT to believe — no evidence is possible. Reason won’t work for the perverse. Thus a story is told and the critical opinions of other people are dismissed as unworthy of debate or discussion.
Respect for the critical opinions of other people is what gives the check to personal bias.
What do you mean by a “critical opinion”?
I must say that’s a very strange definition of science, as science deals with data not opinions.
Roughly speaking, I mean peer review — the checks and balances of a network of colleagues who are better at catching the mistakes of other people than they are their own. A good critic will point out when you’ve left your data and are only giving opinions.
Only Mad Scientists working alone in underground laboratories and muttering about how they laughed at me at the Academy but soon very soon THEY WILL SEE HOW WRONG THEY WERE bwahahaha ever come up with something completely novel which really works.
“Roughly speaking, I mean peer review — the checks and balances of a network of colleagues who are better at catching the mistakes of other people than they are their own. A good critic will point out when you’ve left your data and are only giving opinions.”
But what constitutes the input from the reviewers must be grounded in science, not mere “opinions”. If someone comes up with the evidence invalidating my theory I have to respect the evidence, not that person’s “opinion”.
Exactly: expert opinion.
I think term “opinion” has been tainted in a way similar to the word “theory.” A “view or judgment” can be based on fact and reason. It doesn’t always mean it’s pulled from the nether regions.
A fine definition.
While personal intuition may in some people be well-honed, as a way of knowing it is never publicly verifiable.
Nor should one trust the intuitions of anyone who places trust in an infallible book or tradition.
Sadly, ‘different ways of knowing’ aren’t exclusive to the religious: epistemic relativism is also rife among political ideologues.
I’d say there is a distinction between scientific knowledge, which is theoretical but supported by observation and potentially open to endless refinement; and mathematical truth, which is purely theoretical but not empirical and pretty much carved in stone once something has been proven.
In ‘Women’s Ways of Knowing’ (1986), Mary Field Belenky et al. proposed, based on psychological surveying and interviews, that women ‘know’ differently from men. Women rely on their ‘radical subjectivity’ to understand the world (this is really a reformulation of ‘women’s intuition’)and therefore don’t need ‘male’ empiricism/objectivity to arrive at knowledge. And their subjective knowing was to be taken as coeval with men’s. Indeed, as superior in many cases.
If this seems quaint today, I can assure you that it was a hotly defended position among feminists, especially in academia. Could tell you some stories about nasty arguments in the coffee lounge. . . .
And writer Agatha Christie denied this stance in most of her novels, the eariest from 1932!
Macho (in scientists, too) stances DENY personal decisions in females (can I hope that this is changing now, on this website, too? Oldtime gentleman Charles Darwin was able to overlook that human females had no choice in his time and culture)
And the rest is imprint (Konrad Lorenz defined this for behaviour, although the insofar known ways, of methylisation etc, would be a way imprint is being made, not an opposite).
The problem is that it is difficult, nearly impossible, to change a childhood imprinted behaviour. Learning can be changed – “only” experience.
Except she biased her data, amongst other things – at least according to C.H. Sommers’ analysis. So even if it were quaint, it would also be false.
I have found Isaiah Berlin’s characterization of knowledge having two forms — empirical (science) and formal (mathematics)– compelling, but as a non-scientist, would appreciate comments. Thanks. 🙂
Math and logic are themselves based on the empirical observation that they work.
It’s trivial to develop mathematical or logical systems that work just fine in their own isolation but which are utterly useless as descriptors of reality. Aristotelian Metaphysics and Platonic Idealism are perfect examples of such. Or, you could build a complete geometry based on the assumption that the angles of triangles sum to some arbitrary figure other than 180°.
It’s also quite common to have some pure formalism that’s useful in a limited sense but worse than useless as a generalized universal tool. Euclidean geometry is great, but only a small subset of Newtonian Mechanics. Newton is also great, but nowhere near as universal as the pairing of Quantum and Relativistic Mechanics.
So, how do we know that this mental construct is quite handy but this other one is pure shit?
Well, that’s what observation is for….
Cheers,
b&
Thanks, Ben, I’ll have to revisit Berlin’s writing to clear up the fog. It made sense at the time, but as one with an engineering mindset, breadth rather than depth is my province. I think he was making reference to the relationship between math and science, but that’s only a feeling. I’m off to Berlin!
As you do so, keep in mind that even things so intuitively obvious as arithmetic are really still nothing more than empirical observations. You could, for example, trivially build a video game in which you had to put two apples in a bag for every one apple you withdraw; in such an universe, “1 + 1 = 2” would seem idiotically incoherent.
…and, indeed, in our very own universe, there’re all sorts of examples where regular arithmetic doesn’t work. If you’ve got a spaceship going a quarter billion meters per second and another one in front of it going a quarter billion meters per second faster than the first, that front-running spaceship is’t actually going half a billion meters per second.
And, if you really want to bake your noodle…consider Quantum Mechanics, where apples can just pop into and out of existence for no good reason. How’re you supposed to even count them in such situations, let alone do math on them?
Of course, at human scales, putting two apples in the bag really does mean you’ve got two apples. But my point still stands: our expectations don’t even hold for all parts of our own universe, let alone all universes one could plausibly construct.
To check my claim: look at all the brilliant math that’s out there that has no bearing on reality whatsoever. Sure, it’s self-contained and internally consistent…but, then again, so were the abortive ancient Greek attempts at physics, and so are their intellectual descendants like Christianity….
Cheers,
b&
Thanks again… wallowing in uncertainty can be enjoyable, too… 😉
My understanding is that analytical (or formal) truths like math and logic are absolutely true in defined systems without any ambiguity. They can be technically correct even if they don’t mesh with any of our observations of reality. Empiricism comes in only when they’re taken outside the closed system and applied — or vice versa.
You’ve got it perfectly correct.
What I’d add to that, first, is that such “pure” truths are not only always limited in scope, the most famous effort to make such systems universal itself demonstrated that no such universality exists — see Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
Second, we also have hard empirical evidence that, though such systems can be powerfully useful approximations of observations, those same observations also support Gödel’s conclusion of incompleteness. That is, no matter how far we push our horizons and no matter how well we manage to model what’s within those horizons, at least to date there’s still no sign of a universal solution.
Of course, it’s still damned fun searching for better and better solutions; that’s what science is all about. And, all things considered, I think I’d rather live in an universe I could never outgrow than one whose walls I’d eventually bump up against.
b&
Thank you, Sastra, That refreshes my recall and makes sense. still, I am on my way to reading Berlin again.
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The conflict is always evidence verses not, so we know which way to go on that one. Faith based means there is no evidence.
No, there’s always evidence — even if it’s only a feeling or subjective experience. Faith-based means you will see the evidence — or interpret it the right way — only when you are biased. Only they don’t call it “bias” — they use terms like “open” or “seeking” and mix it up with humility.
The conflict then is between systems which require privileged positions and systems which strive to be objective.
Can you tell me what evidence YECs have for the 6000 year old earth?
Among other things, they have the account written in the Bible and layers of fossils in the rocks. And so they do. Yup, we see those things, too.
They then misinterpret the goddam hell out of this empirical evidence.
It doesn’t really point where they want it to point. An objective analysis shows this. But they want to start off from a privileged framework of faith, pretending that’s just a minor little jump at the end instead of a major distortion from the very beginning.
It’s not as if they themselves think they’re simply pulling their ideas from nothing and nowhere on a whim. They’re drawing conclusions … badly.
“They then misinterpret the goddam hell out of this empirical evidence.”
They don’t misinterpret evidence. They don’t give a shit about the evidence (pardon my language).
And no, sorry, the Bible doesn’t constitute evidence for the 6000 year old Earth — those who claim that their holy book says so are simply using an argument from authority.
Sastra’s dead right.
The Bible is, indeed, evidence for the claim that the Earth is 6,000 years old. The best evidence that claim has, in fact.
The question isn’t whether or not it’s evidence for that claim.
The question is whether or not the evidence is credible.
And Sastra would be the first in joining me in noting just how incredible the Bible is as evidence for the claims it’s commonly called upon to support.
b&
“The Bible is, indeed, evidence for the claim that the Earth is 6,000 years old. The best evidence that claim has, in fact.”
If I wrote in a book that the Earth was 20k years old, would you consider this “evidence”?
Again, the Bible is an argument from authority, nothing more.
For you (and us) – being able to identify logical fallacies – yes. But to (some) believers… it’s incontrovertible evidence.
/@ / 29 Palms
Yes, of course. Just as if you got on the witness stand in court and said as much.
Would I find said evidence credible? Not a chance. Would it be trivial to discredit the evidence? Absolutely.
But it’s still evidence.
b&
Ben,
I didn’t know that revelation is now treated as evidence in court. It looks like the justice system embraced “other ways of knowing”. Oh, well..
Remember, just because something is introduced as evidence doesn’t mean that it’s trusted or considered trustworthy. It just mean that it’s something used to support a case. Or even that the evidence must be interpreted in the manner indicated by the person who puts it forth.
For example, if you’re accused of some crime, you most certainly can take the stand in your own defense and say anything you wish. And part of your testimony could well include the channelling of G’zrikjkjk*j-phterp, the spirit of a 420,000,000-year-old strawberry. And that would be evidence, and the jury would consider it. But if you think the jury would consider it anything other than a display of mental illness, quite likely faked, you yourself are suffering from mental illness.
Of course, there are various standards of evidence that come into play. An expert witness, for example, would not be permitted to introduce such evidence.
But, even if one side managed to sneak something like that under the judge’s nose, any later court references to it would still describe it as evidence that the jury should ignore — not as something that’s not evidence.
b&
But of course the faithful, when pressed for evidence – indeed proof! – are usually able to supply it: scripture, love and altruism, feeling the “presence” of god at church, etc.
Shifting sands of contradictory, learned assertions which are not thought-through, combined with a definition of “evidence” that is an absurd misuse of the term.
“There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.”
I LOVE that. It’s perfect.
I’m not sure those are the only two options in this world. In fact, I’m pretty sure they aren’t.
Agreed, There’s knowing with evidence, not knowing with no evidence and suspecting with incomplete evidence (that’s where engineers like moi live)… 😉
” . . . and suspecting with incomplete evidence (that’s where engineers like moi live)… ;-)”
Well, evidence/knowledge is never complete. Science, is tentative, provisional. But not so incomplete or tentative or provisional that engineers can’t sufficiently and confidently rely on natural/scientific laws, principles and theories to design, launch and successfully land a probe on another planet tens of millions of kilometers away. 😉
On of the great engineers of all time, Charles Kettering developed the two stroke diesel engine. When critics told his they would never have designed pistons and crank shafts like his, he replied, “Neither did I. All we did was imagine different pistons and cranks, make them, install them in the engine and let the engine tell us what it thought.”
Yep, what good has a Kettering ever done for human flourishing, compared to, e.g., a Kardashian?
(When I first heard “Kardashian,” I thought it was “Cardassian.”)
His first patent in 1911 was for the electric starter for the car which allows my wife to go shopping alone.
As for your confusion, are you sure the Kardashians aren’t Cardassians with an accommodationist spelling?
“As for your confusion, are you sure the Kardashians aren’t Cardassians with an accommodationist spelling?”
I’m not sure whom or what I would possibly be accommodating regarding the above-referenced spelling.
What I was actually doing after a fashion wasconfessing that I was more informed about and interested in a group of characters in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” than in the tawdry, shallow, banal celebrity minutiae of this noble, “exceptional” Amuricun mass pop culture.
Ah… I’ll drink to that. Since I am not a Treker or Trekie, I had to look it up an thought you were pulling a Norm Crosby, The Master of Malaprops, on me.
So, is that an example of MALE intuition?
I would say your are a bit less than half right… 😉
Good luck with actually selling a product that actually does something. Of course the religious have been pawning ‘selp helf’ books since the dawn of time…the irony today is that they float their feces onto iPads via technologies that must appear like magic to them.
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Excellent as usual by Pliny the In Between. 🙂
Am I missing something? It seems obvious that there are other ways of knowing besides science. I know when I’m hungry without needing to conduct science; I just sort of know. When my child tells me he wants to go to Disneyland, I know it’s true without science. Insects, birds and crocodiles all know how to do certain things very well without the slightest understanding of science.
Instincts are certainly a way of knowing without science. Science may be a good way to “explain” instincts, but I wouldn’t consider just naturally going along with an instinct to be “knowing” through science.
You just sort of know you are hungry because of evidence…. your stomach rumbles, you may feel lightheaded, it has been several hours since your last meal… all these are evidentiary and you are so used to interpreting them as “I am hungry. I must eat” that you don’t really see that they are definite indicators to a state of your body… science.
Ok, I guess as an adult you could say the rumbles of your stomach are a kind of “evidence”, but there is still plenty of instinctual knowledge that doesn’t require science. Babies knowing how to swallow food, and be afraid of snakes for example. Also ants knowing how to build ant hills etc.
Or know that your (here: my, a whole life´ s experience) feelings of hunger are not very reliable!!!
With an acknowledgement that there are the binge eaters and the cannot-eaters under stress conditions, differences in gut bacteria – being influenced in only 2 days of changes in eating, and different metabolism rates for individuals, it would be possible to get a coping-system even for grown-ups, of everything that was denied since I can remember.
And the rest is lookism…
For sure lookism is a fad, NOT science.
But for babies there is also a reflex to shy away from dark regions on a glass plate, in an age they cannot sustain their body and especially head weight well enough to move away from what seems to be a pit. (That was in a lecture, where I had quarrelled with the scientist about all above, some 20 years ago)
So there is something more complicated than knowing and not-knowing (even if for a cartoon it is nice)
A showy meme or concept for this would be useful.
Love the cartoon!
Why people believe things that aren’t so, especially without evidence, has been discussed often on this list. One of my favorite sources is Thomas Gilovich’s book How We Know What Isn’t So. Excellent discussion of some of the cognitive fallacies.
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I wonder why the theologian always looks like WLC?
We need only to look at Darwin to know someone who knew how to know.