The Two Cultures

[nameandnature]

I was part of an interesting discussion last night at a party. We got onto science and religion, and one of our number, who I'll call F, was pretty steadfast in asserting that science and religion were the same sort of thing. Her reasons were partly that science grew out of religion, I think, and partly that both are engaged in a search for truth.

We got side-tracked a bit by trying to define religion in a way which doesn't include ballroom dancing, say (funny clothes, weekly meetings, rituals... hmmm). Like the judge asked to adjudicate between erotica and pornography, we know religion when we see it, so we agreed that Christianity was a religion, say, so we could talk about that rather than religion in the abstract.

The scientists (or at least, people who'd studied science as undergraduates) argued that the methods that religion and science were the key difference between them. Christianity typically begins with the statements of the church or of the Bible, science typically begins with a hypothesis which is confirmed (or refuted) by experiment. While it's not true to say that there's no valid knowledge outside the scientific process, where Christianity does make claims about things happening outside people's heads, those claims are susceptible to science, per Dawkins.

F made the point that we might eventually supersede the scientific method with something else, and that science might lead us to evidence for the existence of God. Both of these are things which are possible but haven't happened yet, I suppose.

She also pointed out that people like Dawkins would want to exclude bad or fraudulent scientists from our definition of science, but were happy to rail at the worst of Christianity, people who most Christians think are crazy. In other words, Dawkins is aiming at straw men. I didn't get a chance to think about this properly, but in the Dawkins case, his argument in The God Delusion is intentionally very broad, and takes in the mainstream version of Christianity as well as the fundamentalists. I'd also add that science is better at correcting for bad science than Christianity is at correcting for bad Christians, precisely because it is actually possible to show someone's science to be wrong.

We then talked about reality as a construct and F said that maybe there wouldn't be gravity if people didn't believe in it. Nobody was willing to jump out of the window and try this, although someone did drop a cracker on the table to confirm that they even keep it on at weekends. We did say that it was easy to see how that might be the case if solipsism were true, but it was hard to see how many minds agreed on a reality if each of them had the power to change it (which sort of begs the question, since we were assuming that people do agree). I mentioned that people on uk.religion.christian who think that matter arises from consciousness, and not vice-versa, who might believe something similar to F.

At the end of it all, scribb1e and I were struck by the failure of the majority, who were scientists or mathematicians by education, to connect with F, a liberal arts person, and vice-versa. I hope F didn't feel too put upon. More than that, though, I wondered how many people hold similar sort of views to hers, who I never meet because I mainly have these sorts of discussions with scientists.



[Poll #855650]

Comments

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Paul, it seems that once again you are more than a little behind the times! The real scientists who accept the truth of God's word have rescued 'gravity' from the hands of those godless commie "scientists" once again:

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

See: America's finest news source (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You can be both a scientist and a Christian (perhaps not all kinds of Christian, but certainly some). But I'm pretty sure you can't be both a Muslim and a Christian. (You could come up with some kind of syncretic combination of the two perhaps, but I'm fairly sure that you'd get called a heretic by essentially everybody.)

[flats.livejournal.com]

Had an Anthropology of Religion course on this very topic last week... Everyone disagreed, it was shit! Anyway...

1. It's impossible to define 'religion'. 'Believing 10 improbable things before breakfast' just doesn't cut it; certain Buddhists don't appear to believe anything much, we all have beliefs as to the nature of human nature, etc, and in lots of places people just aren't sure about whether the ancestors they 'worship' have supernatural powers, or whether they're just paying their respects to granny.

2. Lots of the arguments as to science being like a religion are based on a rather dubious interpretation of Kuhn's idea of paradigms within the history of science; within a paradigm, people aren't actually questioning hypothesis but trying to find supporting evidence for them - and that's like religion. Key problem is that the scientists are still open to the possibility that their foundational ideas (e.g. Newtonian physics) might change or not really be wholly right. Then again, religious doctrine isn't actually set in stone; look at the end of limbo! Perhaps the key differentiation is that science considers the possibility that /anything/ can be superseded, whereas a religion has some basic core tenets that can't be questioned ('there is a god') within that religion. But that's still not bullet-proof...

So I think we have to come back to methodological differences: science has standards for proof and degrees of error, whereas religions are prone to making untestable statements. [String theory's testable in principle, right?] Religion also gets into the business of telling people how to live (morals, ethics, etc) whereas I maintain that science is an exercise in what's possible. Science says "Yes, we have a 13% chance of making this 50-year-old woman pregnant, and the risks of XYZ are this:"; religion says "such medical invasion of the sanctity of life is/isn't acceptable." Problem is that we also have this beastie I call Public Understanding Of Science that does make moral judgements - and it's hard to separate this beastie from Proper Science, where clearly science is culturally/historically influenced in what it chooses to research (e.g. nuclear power) and in thinking its methodology is the best one for producing knowledge in the first place.

An argument I quite agreed with, by Stanley Tambiah, is that at root science and religion are two systems for explaining causality. Science endeavours to use rational logic; religion may explain things in other ways, but essentially these two models of causality are often incommensurable. Where the questions they're looking at are not comparable, there's sometimes no logical way of saying which one's best - it is arbitrary whether you choose science or religion to explain consciousness, perhaps.

[bluap.livejournal.com]

Not having been raised religiously, I've also felt that my belief in "science" was similar to a religious belief. In both cases, there is a model of the world which you take on trust because someone in authority tells you "this is so". There is little difference between believing that the world was created in 6 days because your priest says so, and believing that the universe was created in a "big bang" because your science teacher says so. In both cases, you choose your own world model, based on what feels "right". The closest I've had to a "religious" relevation was on reading a Scientific American article on Chaotic Inflation - the theory was so elegant, and fit so well with my model of the world that I've chosen to believe it to be true, with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

Of course, Scientists tell you that their story of the world is different, since you can apply the "scientific method" and test it for yourself. However, how many of us actually take this option? In practice, 99.9999% of people take it on trust. How is this any different than taking it on trust that Moses parted the Red Sea, that thunder is created by the Hammer of Odin, or that when we die we will be reincarnated as a dragonfly? And a lot of religions have equivalents to the "scientific method": if we pray enough, or drink the shaman's "special potion" , or meditate, or enter the cave that is the gateway to Hades, then we will have proof of their story of the world.

However, now I've spoke to various religious people, I've realised that the "story of how the world is" is only one part of a modern religion. There is also the "how we should live our lives" (eg morals / "christian values" / burning the heathen etc), the "day-to-day worship" (eg not mixing meat and milk / eating the symbolic body of god / sacrificing goats to ensure a good harvest / etc), and the "what will happen if you're bad" (eg go to hell / lump of coal in Xmas stocking / perpetually pushing a boulder up a mountain).

Science represents the "how the world is" aspect of a religion. As a non-religious person, that aspect of a religion is what you are taught at school, so I naturally felt that it was the most important part of a religion. However, speaking to various current (and ex-) religious people, I have found that a lot of them equate "religion" with the "day-to-day worship" aspect, and ignore the other aspects. Others talk about the "how we should live our lives" aspect. However, a moral code cannot be the entirety of a religion: most western "non-religious" people live by the same moral code as western Christians. And this moral code is a lot different from the moral code of earlier Christians ("burn them, God will know his own" etc).

In summary, I feel that science has some aspects of religion. I also feel that the vast majority of people take science "on faith", in the same way as we might take religious teachings "on faith". However, science doesn't have the "day-to-day" aspects of a religion, which many religious people identify as being the core of their faith. Neither does it have a set of moral values, nor a "what will happen if your're bad" viewpoint. As to which parts are necessary to form a religion, I don't think that it's possible to make a firm line in the sand. Many so-called "religions" are missing one (or more) of the above aspects, making classification as a "religion" a matter of semantics.

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

The real split that the discussion revealed wasn't between religion and science but some kind of deep philosophical split - demonstrated by the gravity comment.

I don't know enough about philosophy to label the different viewpoints. Can anyone help me out? Is F's point of view postmodernist? What about ours?

It seemed, as Paul says, a split between Maths/Science and Arts, but I'm interested in how our philosophies got so different that we couldn't really communicate.

My tentative theory is this. There are two 'worlds' in which we usually have to succeed - the world of physical stuff (mostly inanimate) and the world of human interaction. People's beliefs don't affect how most physical stuff behaves (e.g. the orbit of the moon, growth of a tree) but have big effects in the human world. Asking someone to do something for you, giving them gifts etc does wonders in the human world but the lightening tends to ignore you.

If your education means that you spend most time dealing with one of these worlds to the exclusion of the other, you end up thinking that everything works like that. Extreme result - someone who thinks gravity only works if you believe in it or alternatively someone who is unable to relate to other people. Stereotype arts/science students??

[romex1nt.livejournal.com]

I can't help feeling that a lot of people think too hard about this one. IME, religious views are generally based upon certain axioms that are accepted on faith alone. In pure science, there are no axioms at all: everything is just a theory, based on the available experimental evidence to date, and is subject to review in light of future experimental evidence. (Maths is another thing entirely: in maths, we make up our own axioms to create systems of reasoning, but our conclusions in those systems will be valid only where for scientific or religious reasons we believe our axioms to be appropriate to what we're modelling.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think the real comparison is one to be made between historic Christianity and secular humanism (which Dawkins presents as science).

These are the views which do try to describe the entirety of human experience so can at least trying to do the same thing, so can be compared.

But I would argue they are quite fundamentally different as one requires a leap of faith, the other doesn't.

Secular Humanism starts, as Carl Sagan says, with "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be" which is not a statement with any basis which could possibly justify it - it is just stated as an axiom from which to start working, so is effectively a leap of faith with no basis. It can't be questioned.

Whereas when historic Christianity states "And God did......" it is describing historic events which we can then investigate and seek to disprove or verify. Here belief in the Bible is always based in God's revelation, so there is at least some basis for the Christian claims - and the faith required is not a blind leap of faith, but a faith expressing trust in the source of those revelations.


Or course you could then throw the post-modernist view into the mix and say we can't know anything about history, science, etc.. it is all just made up stories to explain the world. So believing anything is true is a leap of faith - but that's another issue altogether....