What does it tell you when someone says "I don't believe in evolution"?

boing
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Actually, no, our objection in on the grounds of context, and we’re arguing that the context informs (if not, indeed, trumps) the semantics. Semantically, okay, we can define “faith” or “belief” or many other words synonymous with those to mean something very close to “belief without proof”. Though from your own use you’re actually arguing that it means something slightly more specific - “belief without proof personally verified by the believer”.

Our argument is that, in context, “faith” in science (as defined by theories already having survived the scientific method and the scientific community which includes peer review) is not equivalent to “faith” in religious assertions, because of the fundamental difference that scientific theories are can be challenged and tested empirically, whereas with any religious faith this is untrue. “Faith” in religion requires blind belief, indefinitely. Faith in scientific theories includes the faith that the theory can and will be continually tested, updated, and/or overturned, possibly even by the individual proclaiming their “faith” in it.

Sure.

Yet, you can’t be sure even if you did. That’s why theories are theories and not incontestable facts forever and ever. YOU could have made a scientific error, whatever your own verification attempts conclude. With science, group consensus via repetition of experimental results (emphasis on repetition of results) are key, not individual verification. No matter what your own attempt concludes, you’d have to face the pool of results that came before you, and then after you, and reconcile them all. You own personal attempt would still be just a single drop in the larger verification ocean. That’s how and why science rises above the “he said, she said” conundrum of other kinds of faith challenges.

Yes, but with important caveats: 1) the learned scientist “authority” has already been and will continue to be challenged by other learned scientist “authorities”, which can not be said about religious faith. 2) The “authorities” have also documented their evidence in ways that you (and all others) can replicate if desired, another thing untrue about religious assertions. Regardless of lack of personal verification, we understand that verification is possible, personally, if desired, and that many others who are not the original authority have done so and will continue to do so. The knowledge of this changes the quality and make-up of the “faith”. Knowing that verification is possible, and available, is significant. Knowing that the “authorities” will always have to answer any challenge given to them, or surrender their platform, is also significant. None of this exists in regards to religious faith.

Yes, but that statement, without all the additional information I mention above, is simplifying the distinction between what goes into this “acceptance”. It isn’t blind, or without safeguards or options, as it is with religious acceptance. Think of it as the difference between believing someone when they say they just put a million dollars into a back account for you vs. someone who says this and also gives you the info on the bank and account #. Both require faith until you see the money for yourself, but someone giving you the account info goes a long way toward justifying said faith via extant logical conditions. Especially since without the bank account info you could never verify even if you wanted to. The two faiths may be “faiths”, but they are not equivalent, and should not be treated as such, not even semantically. That would be simplifying to the point of being disingenuous.

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There isn’t. With the former, you’re trusting someone else. With the latter, you’re trusting yourself. People make mistakes of their own, delude themselves, lie to themselves, and/or see what they want to see vs. what the evidence should actually tell them all the time. If you want to argue that trust/faith is involved in all belief on a fundamental level, yes, agreed. But then all belief being equal on THAT level, the distinctions are what other factors are involved in any given belief from there.

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The beauty of science is that you don’t need to believe in it for it to be true.

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Hm. I guess, but only in the same way that I ‘believe’ that I exist. The word starts to lose meaning when you’re talking about something demonstrable.

If nobody believed in God, he would cease to exist, or return to not existing, depending on how you look at it. If nobody believed in gravity we wouldn’t float away. The two are very different.

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Sure. But at least if you verify the result for yourself you have an opportunity to find mistakes that the original experimenters made whereas if you simply trusted their results you would not even have that opportunity. Not only that, but verifying the result for yourself gives you the opportunity to make sure you understand the chain of reasoning involved in deriving the result. It seems to me there’s a big difference in simply believing a physicist who says nothing can go faster than the speed of light versus using the special relativity equation for motion to derive the fact that when v=c mass is infinite.

Let me switch to mathematics instead of science since scientific epistemology is really problematic in a lot of ways. I think there’s obviously a difference between trusting a mathematician who says any map can be colored with five colors* versus reading and comprehending the proof for myself. You don’t see the difference there?

*Yes, it can actually be done with four colors but the proof for that is intractable for an individual human being whereas the proof for the five-color theorem is not.

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That’s awesome. I kind of wish I did, too.

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You hope. What if he started kicking asses instead?

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Yes, but I also have the opportunity to introduce my own mistakes. Under your view you regard yourself as more reliable than others, but since I am not you, shouldn’t you agree with me that I am better off taking your word for it than figuring things out myself? I’m sorry if that sounds facetious, but I don’t understand how you can be empirically more reliable to you but not to me.

Your use of the five-colour/four-colour proof seems ironic to me. I can understand the five-colour proof but not the four-colour one, but the four-colour proof is still a proof. And while it is possible that the four-colour proof has a flaw in it, it is also possible (I would say less likely) that the five-colour proof has a flaw in it.

You place a good deal of value on verifying things yourself. One thing I have thoroughly verified for myself is that I can make mistakes and be wrong, and so having verified things for myself doesn’t mean they are right. Have you not had similar experiences?

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Come at me bro

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One of my programming assignments at university was to write map colouring software that would use recursion to find the minimum amount of colours necessary.

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First of all, I never said anything about regarding myself as more reliable than others. The distinction I’m making is not one of reliability. Put it this way: I assert some scientific principle X but you disagree and assert not X. Now, if I believe X only because it is a matter of scientific consensus then the best I can do to convince you of X is simply to argue: “Well, X is the scientific consensus.” Whereas if I believe X because I understand the evidence and reasoning that provide the basis for that scientific consensus then I can actually explain to you why X is true. That seems to me a glaring difference between understanding a principle for oneself and simply accepting scientific consensus on a principle. The actual explanation why X seems to me a stronger argument than simply saying “X is scientific consensus.” And I think I’m more justified in believing X if I’ve taken the effort to understand the reasoning and evidence than if I simply accept X due to an argument from authority.

Second, try to follow your reasoning through to its conclusion. If no one believed themselves competent to investigate scientific principles for themselves then it would be impossible to arrive at any kind of scientific consensus because scientists would be trying to defer to other scientists who in turn are trying to defer to other scientists. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it has to stop with someone who thinks they understand the scientific principle and are competent to test it themselves. It seems rather obvious to me that such a person is in an epistemically different position than someone who simply defers to a scientific authority. Even if you don’t want to concede there’s a difference between a non-expert understanding a principle for themselves versus trusting someone else on it surely you must concede that there’s a difference between the expert who personally tests it as compared to the non-expert who accepts the experts’ results?

That’s actually been a matter of debate among mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers of mathematics for decades. The possibility of a flaw in either of the proofs is quite besides the point. The point is that when I studied discrete math there was a qualitative difference in my experience of the five color theorem between hearing about the theorem and actually reading and understanding the proof. I directly experienced that difference and trying to tell me there really is no difference between hearing there is a proof and understanding what that proof is is going to be pretty much like banging your head against a brick wall. I know there is a difference between those two states because I have experienced it for myself. So it’s bizarre to me when someone tries to tell me that no, those states are actually completely interchangeable. Going back to my first paragraph of this comment, there is at the very least a difference in being able to explain the proof to someone versus simply being able to tell them that such a proof exists.

Of course I have. That I am capable of making mistakes and being incorrect has little bearing on the fact that understanding why X is true (or believed to be true) is a manifestly different state of being than simply believing that X is true on the basis of an argument from authority. This state of being is different both subjectively (in that I actually feel a difference between the two states) and behaviorally (in that in one case I can explain the reasoning and in the other I can only appeal to authority).

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Most of your comments are wasted on me. I am an atheist and believe that science is the best method for deriving reliable knowledge about the world. I’m relatively scientifically literate and do a fair amount of reading in philosophy of science. It’s really a waste of time to try to convince me that scientific reasoning is a more reliable guide to the world than religious faith.

[quote=“Dave_Baxter, post:103, topic:18722”]
Yes, but that statement, without all the additional information I mention above, is simplifying the distinction between what goes into this “acceptance”. It isn’t blind, or without safeguards or options, as it is with religious acceptance.[/quote]

It isn’t always blind but it’s certainly possible – and I believe almost certainly happens in at least a few cases – that the acceptance of science actually is blind on an individual basis. I believe scientific methodology to be reliable because I have studied it and have some understanding of why it is reliable. But take a hypothetical person who believes scientific results only because they have been acculturated to accept scientific results without ever having questioned the epistemic basis for doing so. I think that such a person would believe in science just as blindly as someone who believes in religion. They might be correct to defer to scientific expertise, but they are correct for the wrong reasons.

There is quite obviously a difference between being able to explain the reasoning behind a principle X and only being able to make an argument from authority for X. Furthermore, there must be some difference between an expert who personally tests X versus a non-expert who accepts an argument from authority for X (otherwise no one would be able to test X in the first place and no scientific consensus could be reached).

Trying to assert exact equivalence between the two cases seems even more absurd to me than asserting there’s no difference in epistemic justification between religious claims and scientific claims. (I think the latter is absurd, just not quite as absurd as the former.)

I never claimed they are equivalent any more than I would claim that electric guitars and acoustic guitars are equivalent. However, despite the lack of equivalence between electric guitars and acoustic guitars there are nonetheless similarities and I see no problem to referring to both classes collectively as simply “guitars” unqualified. It does not seem to me “disingenuous” to refer to electric and acoustic guitars collectively as guitars. This is exactly analogous to my use of the word “faith” in this discussion. If you have a problem with it, please understand that it is entirely your problem. I leave you to cope with it as you see fit.

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Science is an epistemological praxis, a technique for discovering what is (at least subjectively) true or false. Science itself cannot have a boolean true/false value. It’s a tool. Saying it’s “true” is like saying “the Bible is inerrant” - it’s a vaporous statement of faith, and not scientific :wink: at all. The word you want instead of true is probably reliable? Or something like that.

[quote=“NathanHornby, post:106, topic:18722”]
If nobody believed in God, he would cease to exist, or return to not existing, depending on how you look at it. If nobody believed in gravity we wouldn’t float away. The two are very different.[/quote]

Nathan, you’re ignoring pantheism again, an ancient religion still followed by millions of people, obviously including me. If you don’t believe in our god, nobody will cease to exist, because God doesn’t care that much whether you understand that you are a participant and not a supplicant of divinity. You are the eyes of the world, my friend. God is all there is, and God loves you if anybody at all loves you.

I consider myself a scientist, but frankly I use my religious beliefs to guide my actions; science is too slow and cumbersome for most everyday uses. I can’t eat fifty sandwiches and compare outcomes in order to change my lunch plans today. Luckily my religion is completely 100% compatible with science, yay!

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Yes, that is badly worded, sorry! “Science is true”. Ha :slight_smile:

‘You don’t need to believe in it for it to exist’ is more what I was going for. But I do mean the ‘contents’ of science, what it encompasses and represents, rather than the concept itself.

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And this is our fundamental disagreement - not whether or not there is a difference between being told something and finding the truth for yourself, but whether or not directly experiencing something lets you know it is true.

You really think that if you have directly experienced something then you know it is true. I think that if I directly experienced something then that is one piece of evidence that might lead me to believe it is true. You think I am foolish for not recognizing the truth of my experience and I think you are foolish for not recognizing that people are wrong about things they directly experience every day.

You say that trying to convince you otherwise would be like banging my head against a wall. That, to me, is faith. After all, the consensus definition among a quick survey of dictionaries (ignore those that specifically mention religion or god) is that faith is “complete trust or confidence in someone or something.” Your faith that there is an important epistemic difference between knowing something by report and knowing something by direct experience, by your account, is akin to a religious faith. After all, trying to convince a person who has a personal relationship with Jesus that there is no God would also be like banging my head against a wall. Trying to convince me, however, that there really is a huge difference between observing something yourself and being told about it would be a matter of conducting experiments that demonstrate this and that outweigh other evidence I’ve seen to the contrary.

In trying to get to the truth, direct experience of any individual, myself included, is not at the top of the totem pole.

As for being able to explain it to others, I see that as a sideline. It is unrelated to the question of whether you require faith to believe and explaining things to others is heavily dependent on the other (who may respond better to authority than reason anyway).

Edit: I want to note that this is why I “accused” (for lack of a better word) you of thinking you were more reliable than everyone else. To me, believing that your direct experience leads you to truth is an assertion about your own reliability, and if you aren’t taking other people’s word on their own direct experience, that tells me that you don’t think they are as reliable.

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No I don’t. I have never claimed this and don’t see from where you’re making this inference. In fact, I’m not even sure I believe there is such a thing as “truth” in the sense you’re using it here.

No, I don’t think you’re foolish. I’ve already gone on at great length about the possibility of error and fraud in epistemology so I don’t see how you could possibly infer that I don’t recognize that people are wrong about things.

Then you misunderstand what I was saying. Let me try to explain. Suppose I have tinnitus and I tell you “I’m hearing a ringing sound.” You can try to convince me otherwise by proving there is no ringing sound for me to be hearing. I could quite plausibly accept your demonstration that there is no ringing sound and yet still factually maintain that: “Despite the absence of an actual, physical sine wave-shaped pressure gradient traversing the local atmosphere, I am nonetheless subjectively experiencing a ringing sound.”

You can doubt I’m lying but you’re in absolutely no position to provide any evidence one way or the other regarding the assertion that I have the experience of hearing a ringing sound. Similarly, I personally, subjectively experience the difference between simply knowing of a proof and actually understanding a proof. Now, you could find some flaw with my understanding of the proof – I don’t dispute that my understanding of the proof might be wrong. Nonetheless, I still have the experience of understanding the proof and that is different from not having that experience.

No it’s not. It’s based on evidence. I’ve already explained this evidence to you. There is both the subjective experience of a difference between the two cases and the behavioral difference of being able to explain something I know by direct experience whereas I am only able to provide an argument from authority for something I know only be report.

I have just provided some evidential basis for thinking this distinction is legitimate. More importantly, you’ve ignored my question about whether you think there is an epistemic difference between the experts who establish a scientific consensus and the non-experts who simply believe it. Obviously someone has to make the discovery first-hand before anyone can learn about it by report. Is that not obvious? Is that not an important difference between the two cases? Perhaps even more importantly, if second-hand knowledge is just the same thing as first-hand knowledge, how can science ever progress? For science to progress scientific consensus must be challenged. But what will it be challenged by? It has to be challenged by first-hand scientific discoveries. The scientific consensus cannot be challenged by itself, it must be challenged by a principle derived from some method that is not an argument from scientific consensus. If you’re right and there’s no difference between first-hand and second-hand accounts then there should have been no way to replace Newton’s theory of gravity with General Relativity.

“The question of whether you require faith to believe” is, as I see it, a sideline. The ability to explain something is, as I see it, a definite distinction to be made between believing that thing on the basis of authority vs. actually having some understanding of that thing. You are claiming that understanding something first hand is the same as understanding it second-hand. I am showing that they are not the same because there is at least one difference between the two cases.

If I demonstrate that A is different from B in any respect then I have shown that A is not the same as B. I don’t know of any other way to prove that A is not the same as B. If you cannot accept that any difference between A and B shows they are two different things then I’d have to say your position is much more akin to religious faith than is mine. At least my position is logically consistent – yours violates the law of non-contradiction!

So, to sum up, here is a list of differences between belief due to first-hand experience and belief due to second-hand experience:

  1. There is a subjective difference; it feels different to have some understanding of a subject X (even if that understanding is incorrect or flawed) than it does to have no understanding of X and yet believe it anyway on the basis of an argument from authority.
  2. There is a behavioral difference: if my belief that X is challenged then in one case I can provide definite reasons for my believing X besides trust in an authority outside of myself.
  3. There is a difference in priority. Knowledge of X cannot come into being without first-hand experience of X but it can come into being without second-hand experience of X.
  4. There is a difference with respect to discrediting current consensus. Second-hand reports cannot be used to discredit the current consensus because second-hand reports are justified by that very consensus. Only first-hand reports can be used to challenge the current consensus. Science can’t even progress without recognizing the difference between first-hand and second-hand claims of knowledge.
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Is “faith” in science misplaced? Is control of the natural world impossible without certain knowledge unobtainable through scientific observation?

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Yes, I agree with this statement entirely. But I think that having this piece of evidence (direct experience) is different from not having this piece of evidence (no direct experience). If we can agree that it’s reasonable to have different degrees of confidence in different claims based on the evidence we have and if we can agree that having direct experience of something should affect our degree in confidence in claims about that thing then we essentially agree.

My impression of your argument to this point is that you’ve been arguing there is literally no difference between experiencing something first-hand and hearing about it second-hand in terms of epistemic reliability. But the notion you state above that directly experiencing something constitutes evidence for that thing contradicts that – it is a definite difference between experiencing something first hand (having the evidence) and not doing so (not having the evidence).

Is this not the case? Can we agree that having first-hand experience of something should actually affect your degree of confidence in believing that thing? I’ve never argued that second-hand reports shouldn’t influence our degree of confidence in believing things; all I’ve argued is that experiencing something first-hand should influence our degree of confidence in believing it and you seem to admit as much in the statement above.

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That question is the origin of the entire discussion! If you don’t think there is an important distinction between: a) most people need to use faith to believe most science; and b) most people do not need to use faith to believe in most science then what on Earth have we been arguing about?

You said that most people basically have faith in scientific conclusions, other said that’s not faith, argument ensued. If you think the question of what to call “faith” is entirely beside the point then we aren’t talking about anything.

If your point regarding direct experience is that you had a subjectively different experience by learning something through one method than by learning it through another, then I still disagree (I think the depths of self-deceit we are capable of extend to being wrong about our own direct experiences - and that goes doubly for experiences we had in the past; its uncontroversial that I could be very mistaken about whether I was hearing a ringing in my ears yesterday) but I don’t think the point is worth belabouring. My question is, why is that difference in your experience at all relevant to the question of whether:

A) We should call belief based on reports of scientific consensus “faith”; and
B) We should call belief based on direct verification of facts for ourselves “faith”

You feel differently and you behave differently if you have understood the proof. But I feel differently and behave differently if I have a slice of cake in front of me than if I don’t. You have to meaningfully connect that feeling and behaviour to the idea of “proof” if you want to argue that one state constitutes “belief without proof” while the other does not. If you really don’t want to argue that point then I would simply say “case closed.”

To answer your question about the epistemic difference between people who actually do the experiments and people who merely hear reports of them, I would say there is none. It is the method that determines the truth, no the people who do it. The result of any experiment has to be filtered through some medium to get to us and we can’t observe anything without changing it, and more people in the chain of broken telephone means there is more likely to be errors, and certain people have more competency to carry out the experiments than others and lots of other factors go into making a reasonable decision about whether to believe something or not. But it never comes down to taking someone’s word for it.

As I say above, I see points 1 and 2 having no impact on whether or not something constitutes proof. I also don’t see how 3 is relevant. In math you give credit to the person that finds the first proof, but you don’t go on using their proof if a better one is found. We improve things all the time, so priority doesn’t make something better or more proofy.

On 4 you are just wrong. If there is a consensus and a series of experiments are done to challenge it (because people like to see things reproduced) then the consensus will change because of published journals, not because everyone goes and verifies those experiments themselves. Reality is, consensus changes through second hand accounts.

My argument is that there is that the difference between the two things is not that one gives “proof” and the other does not. And thus, the difference between them does not allow us to distinguish between “belief without proof” or not. And thus, if we say that believing in a scientific consensus require “faith” in science then we are basically saying that believing the results of experiment we conduct ourselves in an exercise in “faith” as well. And by doing so, we have reduced the concept of “faith” to meaninglessness.

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And when I said that I put “faith” in scare quotes and clearly indicated that it is not necessarily the only word that could be applied. I also said in the comment that anyone that has a problem with using the word “faith” in that context should feel free to substitute any other symbol string they wish in place of “faith”. From the very beginning I have maintained that whether or not we call unquestioning, blind acceptance of scientific consensus “faith” or not is besides the point. The point is that many people have unquestioning, blind acceptance of scientific consensus and that this is not so different from religious believers having unquestioning, blind acceptance of religious dogma.

It is somewhat different in that in principle the unquestioning, blind accepter of science could engage in study to acquaint themselves first-hand with the justification for their beliefs. This could be direct, first-hand verification of the scientific results in question or perhaps a meta-level first-hand understanding of why scientific consensus is more reliable than religious dogma. But until the individual actually engages in this first-hand study of the epistemic justification for their beliefs they are in the same boat as anyone else who believes things purely on the basis of cultural authority.

Whether we are capable of self-deceit is completely besides the point. I explained this rather clearly in my previous comment. It may be that the ringing noise I hear is not really a sine-wave shaped pressure differential traversing the local atmosphere but I nonetheless can’t deny my direct subjective experience of having heard a ringing sound. Even if I am mistaken that I experienced a ringing in my ears yesterday I nonetheless can’t deny the subjective experience of believing myself to have experienced a ringing in my ears yesterday.

Suppose I had the experience of seeing a ghost. I would be terribly skeptical that I had actually seen a ghost. I would probably lean more towards hallucination or similar as an explanation for my experience. But that my experience was not caused by an intersubjectively verifiable apparition does not change the fact that I had the experience in the first place.

I don’t care what you call it. The semantic debate about whether or not the word “faith” should be allowed to be used in this context is tedious and pointless from my perspective. We can call it “guffle” or “fnord” for all I care. I am only arguing the following:

  1. (A) and (B) are two different things regardless of what we call them.
  2. Someone who accepts scientific consensus simply because they were acculturated to do so and has never questioned the epistemological justification for doing so is in the same position epistemically as a religious believer who believes religious dogma because they were acculturated to do so and has never questioned the epistemological justification for doing so.

OK. Take the team of astronomers who first verified the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. According to your reasoning, it seems to me that this team of astronomers should have concluded that their observations of precession were in error because those observations contradicted the scientific consensus summarized in Newton’s law of gravity: that planetary orbits should not precess. I don’t see any way for those astronomers to maintain confidence in their experimental results unless we concede that in at least some cases, first-hand knowledge should trump second-hand consensus. Can you explain to me why their observations should not have been concluded to be faulty on the grounds that they contradicted the scientific consensus?

It’s like you’re not even reading what I’m saying. I didn’t claim that first-hand reports are necessarily more reliable than second-hand reports. (In fact, I very explicitly said I wasn’t claiming that.) I simply claimed they are different things. To demonstrate that they are different things I supplied a list of differences between those things – that’s the only way I know to prove two different things are, in fact, different things.

You yourself said that first-hand experience counts as a piece of evidence. I agree with that. I think that first-hand experience should affect one’s degree of confidence in the thing they are experiencing. You seem to think that I think first-hand experience is the only factor. I do not and have never argued this was the case. I simply think that first-hand experience is another factor in addition to second-hand reports.

Another straw man. I never claimed everyone has to go verify the experiments themselves. I claimed that some people have to go verify the experiments themselves. Do you deny that some people have to go verify the experiments themselves?