How Science Became A New Religion

reply to post by Phage


Yes science does and maybe so do you.

But many do not and that is who this thread is directed at, and I believe that you already knew that.

reply to post by sacgamer25

and I believe that you already knew that.

Your belief is baseless.

It is the contention of the OP that science has become resistant to new ideas. Beside the fact that scientists have always been reluctant (to put it mildly) to accept new hypotheses without evidence, the foundation on which science is based is evidence, not faith.

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by sacgamer25

 

and I believe that you already knew that.

Your belief is baseless.

It is the contention of the OP that science has become resistant to new ideas. Beside the fact that scientists have always been reluctant (to put it mildly) to accept new hypotheses without evidence, the foundation on which science is based is evidence, not faith.

edit on 6/10/2013 by Phage because: (no reason given)

My apologies for assuming you knew what the point of the OP was. It was baseless as you asserted.

The OP is clearly talking about those who suppress new knowledge in favor of what is currently accepted. Many of these people are in the science community according to the OP.

Would you have preferred him say?

"Some people have used science to create a new religion based on scientific theory that they believe is fact" That would create a rather long title to a thread.

If you did not understand that he was directing his OP at those who would suppress knowledge and blaming them for the foundation of a new type of Atheist Religion where theory is accepted as fact, then maybe you should read the OP again, as I think by your responses you are merely defending the "word" science.

The OP is not about the definition of a word but about those who suppress new knowledge in the same way Religion did for the last few thousand years.

Maybe you would like to comment on those people and what you think about them, rather than trying to firm up the definition of the "word" science.

I am pretty sure that Swanne is capable of understanding the definition of the word since he is pointing out those who choose to ignore the definition and still claim that they are preaching science.



Why do I capitalize and use ""?

Because this is an open forum and I like to point out the themes of my post using capitalization and "", so anyone who is quickly browsing may be able to quickly get the point of my post. In most cases it is intentional.

reply to post by sacgamer25

My apologies for assuming you knew what the point of the OP was. It was baseless as you asserted.

I am humbled by your wit.

The OP is clearly talking about those who suppress new knowledge in favor of what is currently accepted. Many of these people are in the science community according to the OP.

Yes. I know that. However, his equating that "supression" with religion is groundless except on a superficial level. Science, even if as ossified as the OP believes, is not based on faith. It is based on evidence. That simple concept keeps science separate from religion.

A question to you. Do you think that every hypothesis offered should be given equal consideration in the scientific world? Do you know how many papers are published on an annual basis? Don't you think that it is inevitable that some new ideas, even those which may be ground breaking, are overlooked in the massive flow of ideas? Do you think it must be intentional "suppression"?

reply to post by Arbitrageur


What looks like evidence of an old earth to you, looks like a hill to me.

Since I make no further claim about the hill it is just a hill.

But for you the hill becomes part of your belief system.

Some people will go as far as to claim that God created that hill that and that is their belief system.

The hill is beautiful, that is my belief system.

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by sacgamer25

A question to you. Do you think that every hypothesis offered should be given equal consideration in the scientific world? Do you know how many papers are published on an annual basis? Don't you think that it is inevitable that some new ideas, even those which may be ground breaking, are overlooked in the massive flow of ideas? Do you think it must be intentional "suppression"?

edit on 6/10/2013 by Phage because: (no reason given)

The absolute truth YES. I wish we would pay our young men to research every possibility to define life. I suggest we use the money we currently use to research every possible way to take life.

I know I am asking for too much, but I would at least like to see us model some things that seem a little to fabulous to be true.

It may be impossible to ever prove "Evolution vs Creation", but sometimes when you look closer at the other side of the coin you actually receive the answer you were looking for the whole time.

When we teach kid's evolution at an age where everything is the truth, whether we like it or not there is a tendency to put on the evolutionary glasses when we look at what we see, which is fine but we fail to even acknowledge the coin has two sides.

It might just be that when we truly research a young earth theory outside the confines of evolution, we might just prove that the earth is indeed as old as science predicted, merely by ruling out all possibility of a young earth.

If someone finds what they believe to be the answer I will be the first skeptic there, ready for anything I might find. Until then I am humble in my faith towards God,

Thanks for being so cooperative, I apologize if I offended in anyway. I got a little over excited about the topic.

Originally posted by sacgamer25
we might just prove that the earth is indeed as old as science predicted, merely by ruling out all possibility of a young earth.

If someone finds what they believe to be the answer I will be the first skeptic there, ready for anything I might find.

Finding something is a lot easier if you look for it. You aren't looking hard enough when you say:

Originally posted by sacgamer25
The hill is beautiful, that is my belief system.

The hill isn't a belief system. It's a series of rock strata that got where they are for a reason. Critical thinkers realized this long before radiometric dating was used. If you were really seeking truth you'd try to look a little harder than just saying the hill is beautiful.

If you have 3 minutes or so to watch a video, watch this from a little before 2 minutes to a little after 5 minutes and you will hear the story of how a critical thinker named Hutton was able to determine the Earth had to be much older than 6000-10,000 years. At this time, Hutton wasn't thinking about either radiometric dating or evolution, so they seem like "red herring" arguments when you present them. Darwin didn't publish his theory of evolution until over 60 years after Hutton died, so evolution theory played no part in Hutton's observations. Actually the reverse is probably true, that Huttons work in geology influenced Darwin.



There are answers in rocks. But you don't get them by saying "The hill is beautiful", or "God did it". You have to actually look for the answers to find them.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I know you don't follow me, but I typically stick to the religious forums.

So I might suggest that the philosophical view that the hill is beautiful contains more wisdom than anything else one could know about the hill.

I am a seeker of truth and knowledge, and I find greater knowledge is found within.

I am a child at heart and a philosopher in mind. I always seek new information to help me establish my truth. If someone provides proof that my thinking is incorrect than I will accept both the old and new as necessary and beautiful.

I only came to this post to aid in a philosophical discussion on science and religion. I was hoping to come out a little wiser. Thanks to Phage and others who honored me with a spirited debate, I have a new appreciation for those who truly have a scientific mind. Those who can disagree but still appreciate the abstract thinking of others.


BTW I do believe that currently an Old Earth is the most realistic viewpoint, but I do not feel as strongly about Evolution. I still believe there are way too many holes in evolution making it no more likely than Creation or ID.

Originally posted by Kaone
reply to post by Phage

 

Right and the people that get access to perform the necessary test on those theories usually work for the... oh right the government or some other agency that we as a public have no access to. You yourself cannot go test most of the theories put out by mainstream science. I wonder why? Phage I respect you and members like you very much, so don't get me wrong but the education system does not exactly let us use our own mind does it now?

Actually, most of the research from the US comes from Universities. The professors, at least from the university I graduated from, which was a Division I State University required the professors to publish papers within a certain time frame as part of their tenure. They taught classes but they were all researchers and scientists. They also all had an area of expertise. In general, you're not going to get a political scientist arguing the finer mathematical points of M-Theory.

You are right though. I'll take the consensus from those in that field because it is being debated by people that actually understand the complexities of the subject, which I, personally,cannot test because I don't have the knowledge to do so. I also understand any information that is put forth will go through the scientific process and will either fail or pass until such time as information refuting/changing the prior conclusion occurs.

Also, the school system is designed to give you a basic education to live on, designed around where the consensus sits at this moment on general topics. Some material changes rapidly and require textbooks to be update every couple years. Other subjects don't change. No need to rush out and update a book on say introduction to trig. It's not designed to have high schoolers writing thesis papers on cutting edge particle physics.

Originally posted by Grimpachi
reply to post by swanne

 

It just seems you are basing this off of a forums rules somewhere. Your theory may be sound I don't know I am not saying it is or isn't.

If I didn't read the excerpted stuff, then I might think that what you're suggesting here is true, but I did read the excerpted stuff. You're either incapable of connecting with the obvious point of this thread, or you're purposely playing the common forum game of dismissing someone's entire argument by disingenuously focusing solely on an ancillary point that you feel that you can challenge successfully.

Anyone who's been on one of these here forums for more than a few weeks knows exactly how pathetic that ploy is, so you're not being effective in challenging the OP's presentation. Maybe in 2003 you might've scored a point or two with this approach, but that was a decade ago, and we've all grown up since then.

Science - specifically physics - has gotten pretty irresponsible and in both directions (hidebound as well as faithbased) in recent decades. According to Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of Science, and What Comes Next it's even worse than the OP suggests. They are, and have been, "tweaking dials" to absurd degrees to try and allow Supersymmetry, String Theory and even major portions of The Standard Model to survive the problems that experimentation (and years of theory contradicting results) have been presenting to these theories. From some published accounts, Supersymmetry may not survive the most recent CERN collider season's data, and the "Higgs" boson they found has all but debunked what it was supposed to confirm about the Higgs Field.

I guess that we'll just have to see how science deals with what seems to be obvious about these two theoretical mainstays. I also suppose that the fact that String theorists are allowed to simply pile on as many universes and dimensions as they need to keep their own little slice of foolishness afloat and funded will necessarily delay that inevitable crash until long after we've all moved on to other Internet hangouts.

Science is a dog chasing a car. It wouldn't know what to do with the damn thing if it ever caught it.

I think my main amusement about threads like this is the people nodding heads with the statements always try and suggest that they know better, or can do better.

The language used is rather strange also. "Theoretical physics being allowed to pile up extra dimensions" Well yeah? is there some kind of law saying no more than one dimension. The main problem with this is that most who are opposed to mainstream science actually know very very little about it. While many believe they are well read and understand it, the truth is the vast majority of ATS science thread users will do approximately the following...

-Read for about 20 minutes, cover about 0.1-1% of the basic material
-Read something they dont understand
-Cry fowl and that science is wrong
-Make a statement along the lines of "Does science know (insert some contrived fact-like sounding statment), and that they are doing it wrong and have been for so many years"
-Ignore actual honest debate, because they don't actually want to listen to any reason
-Following the above, state that scientists really dont follow reason either.

Apologies to sound like a moaning mini but i see this all the time on ATS, the same threads reborn, the same incorrect assumptions repeated and recycled until the people who are here trying to be reasonable and to try and help people understand simply get to frustrated to care anymore... Has science become a religion? No absolutely not, anyone who has actually worked in the field or knows anyone who is an actual scientist and not some bitter twisted person could see that.

reply to post by Budapest

It gave the causes of excitation by naming the energy source and the procedure of how it works. It was like looking into the gearbox of evolution - no waffley bits or guesstimations - but rather a simple 1-2-3-4 process. I loved it - still do.

It actually does sound very intriguing indeed!

I tried to explain it to other people, but for some reason the theory of evolution does weird things to people - it's like talking politics, it's not to be discussed in public!! I bring it up and people think I'm trying to undermine the very fabric of science.

Tell me about it. I've experienced the exact same thing in physics. I'm currently investigating simple gravity but I'm apprehensive about sharing my result, in case they vary from mainstream's orthodox models. If they do, mainstream physicists are going to be on me like wolves, call me heretic, or as they sometime do tell me my model doesn't matter because they are faithful that other physicists already considered that part in their equations (although they'll find no evidences ever to back such faith).

So I gave up talking about it years ago. Lately though, things are changing. One of the refreshing things about the explanation is that it makes predictions (like all good theories should do!!) and those predictions are coming true.

That's actually the sign of a very promising theory.

You must think I'm overstating my case. I'm not. I'm understating.

Don't worry - I actually can't wait to read more from it!

If you're interested I'll send you the explanation when I finish putting it together.

Interested is an euphemism! I'll be keeping an eye on my U2U inbox. But take your time, I'm in no hurry - science is a passion, not a chore.

Originally posted by ErosA433
I think my main amusement about threads like this is the people nodding heads with the statements always try and suggest that they know better, or can do better.

The language used is rather strange also. "Theoretical physics being allowed to pile up extra dimensions" Well yeah? is there some kind of law saying no more than one dimension. The main problem with this is that most who are opposed to mainstream science actually know very very little about it.

Has science become a religion? No absolutely not, anyone who has actually worked in the field or knows anyone who is an actual scientist and not some bitter twisted person could see that.

If you have to toss in 26 dimensions to make a theory tweakable (not even a stand-alone resolution) then all you've done is "assign God" to micro-managing yet another version of biblical reality. All you've done is invented the tools by which He must work by way of your own imagination and inane hubris. If that's science, then I guess I've never actually understood the term.

In 1914, a Finnish physicist named Gunnar Nordstrom found that all you had to do to unify gravity and electromagnetism was increase the dimensions of space by one. He wrote the equations that describe electromagnetism in a world with four dimensions of space (and one of time), and out popped gravity with electromagnetism that was also perfectly consistent with Einstein's special theory of relativity.

But, if this is true, shouldn't we be able to look out in this new dimension, as we look out in the three dimensions of space? If not, then isn't this theory wrong? To avoid this troublesome issue, we can make the new dimension a circle, so that when we look out, we in effect travel around it and come back to the same place. Then we can make the diameter of the circle very small, so that it is hard to see that extra dimension is there at all. To understand how shrinking something can make it impossible to see, recall that light is made up of waves and each light wave has a wave length, which is the distance between peaks. The wavelength of light limits how small a thing you can see, for you cannot resolve an object smaller than the wavelength of the light you use to see it. Hence, one cannot detect the existence of an extra dimension smaller than the wavelength of light one can perceive - excerpt "The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of Science, and What Comes Next" - Lee Smolin

The author then goes on to examine exactly how ludicrous such a work-around actually is - as if that were necessary. Of course, tossing extra dimensions into an equation to make the math work out is ludicrous. Especially tiny circular ones that do nothing more than unify gravity with electromagnetism on a chalk board to prop up a weakness in an Einstein theory.

It may not be religion, but it's just as pathetic.

Originally posted by NorEaster
If you have to toss in 26 dimensions to make a theory tweakable (not even a stand-alone resolution) then all you've done is "assign God" to micro-managing yet another version of biblical reality. All you've done is invented the tools by which He must work by way of your own imagination and inane hubris. If that's science, then I guess I've never actually understood the term.

Lee Smolin wrote 18 papers on string theory so you can't really say he knows nothing about the topic, and he's now apparently one of the biggest critics of the field. Not everybody agrees with him of course but it seems to me like the status of string theory is probably one of the most controversial areas of science.

But I can't lump the other 99% of science in a bad category just because 1% is controversial, not exactly like but along the lines of this thought:

Originally posted by mbkennel
If they find some of the 1% which is not fully explained by science to the standards of the rest of the 99% which is well explained, they take that as justification to dump the 99%, plus the 1%, and the method to figure it all out in favor of unsupported nonsense.

I think most science is pretty darn good, but obviously there is a percentage that's highly controversial. I can't let the highly controversial areas disproportionately taint my view of the entire field, which some people seem to do.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by NorEaster
If you have to toss in 26 dimensions to make a theory tweakable (not even a stand-alone resolution) then all you've done is "assign God" to micro-managing yet another version of biblical reality. All you've done is invented the tools by which He must work by way of your own imagination and inane hubris. If that's science, then I guess I've never actually understood the term.

Lee Smolin wrote 18 papers on string theory so you can't really say he knows nothing about the topic, and he's now apparently one of the biggest critics of the field. Not everybody agrees with him of course but it seems to me like the status of string theory is probably one of the most controversial areas of science.

But I can't lump the other 99% of science in a bad category just because 1% is controversial, not exactly like but along the lines of this thought:

Originally posted by mbkennel
If they find some of the 1% which is not fully explained by science to the standards of the rest of the 99% which is well explained, they take that as justification to dump the 99%, plus the 1%, and the method to figure it all out in favor of unsupported nonsense.

I think most science is pretty darn good, but obviously there is a percentage that's highly controversial. I can't let the highly controversial areas disproportionately taint my view of the entire field, which some people seem to do.

I agree, and was mainly addressing the irresponsibility of simply fudging the parameters to get a theory to work. In the kind of science that those guys are dealing with - primordial fundamentals - you can't fudge the parameters. They should be treated as the foundations that they are and must be (if they're primordial fundamentals, of course). Tweaking the parameters in that case is not science at all, and that was my point in bringing up those specific examples.

reply to post by swanne


Take any sample of leading scientists and you will see how much disagreement there is, furthermore how much they all will try and falsify any new theory. Einstine and Bhor debates are a good example of this as are the criticisms of string theory or the many research scientists proposing and trying to prove alternative theories.

However I do believe that in some circumstances some older generations, who are not researchers ie their work depends on today's principles, may be reluctant for major change. Especially if such change will require retraining, or even losing their position to a new graduate who has been trained in the latest principles. You see this in most professions, such as engineering or medicine, for example a surgeon trained today is going to be far more capability than one trained, 5, 10 or 20 years ago.

That said no incentives for people working in the application of established theory, does not prevent breakthroughs, for the simple reason that such are vital to the development of technology, which among other things is the basis of our economy. Even a seemingly unrelated discovery can have an unforeseen application at a future date, for example no one could have known that relativity theory would be essential for our GPS system.

The sole purpose of scientific theory is for prediction, ie 1 + 1 will equal 2, if I mix A with B I will get C. It is for this reason that dominant theories are always going to be hard to challenge, their predictions, the math, have been proven by observation, for all intents and purposes this is fact. Any new theory is will not only need to explain all observation but better explain it. Which may solve one hole in the theory may create another. With the big accepted theories also it is not really accepted that they are absolute, Hawkings described the more like maps, that each theory explained its own field adequately in that it can make predictions.

If a person could genuinely discredit relativity for example I feel that he would have no problem getting published.

reply to post by ErosA433

Has science become a religion? No absolutely not, anyone who has actually worked in the field or knows anyone who is an actual scientist and not some bitter twisted person could see that.

I am close friend with a physicist who also specialized in calculus and philosophy. And I've read tons of papers and lenghty books from PhD doctors, Nobel-prize winner physicists, and even archeologists, who all voiced the same complaints about the mainstream's resistance to alternatives than those in my OP. I think your attack on such people was harsh. I am starting to feel your post was more of a kneejerk reaction, as you tried to accuse some very respectable scientists just because you had bad personal experiences in the past and felt frustration. If you can't withstand debate, then what is your purpose amongst the science community?

reply to post by Phage

Science, even if as ossified as the OP believes, is not based on faith. It is based on evidence. That simple concept keeps science separate from religion.

Correction: Science, even if as ossified as the OP and a big chunk of science community (again, read my OP) believes, should not be based on faith, It should be based on evidence. That simple concept keeps science separate from religion. But more and more science evolves and touches politics, more and more it stops relying purely on evidences and more and more on assumption, or "faith" (again, I am tired of excessive quoting from my own OP, so I'd encourage you to simply read the OP). According to your own definition, to which I am glad to agree, the current mainstream system is, thus, starting to be less and less "separate from religion", and less and less scientific (from latin "sciencia", "knowledge").

Do you think that every hypothesis offered should be given equal consideration in the scientific world? Do you know how many papers are published on an annual basis? Don't you think that it is inevitable that some new ideas, even those which may be ground breaking, are overlooked in the massive flow of ideas?

Should they be given equal consideration? Er, Yeah!, every hypothesis is supposed to be given equal consideration, until we can be 100% sure that some of these said hypothesis can be falsified. Yes, the number of possible hypothesis is staggering. But one of these hypothesis is bound to be the correct one. Now you see where politics and economy clashes with the search for truth. This is what many scientists are exposing. As soon as science started protecting itself from new hypothesis (to avoid having to spend into even more investigations and thus limit economical impact), in favour of some theories which are assumed to be solid, it started crystallizing into "preferred ideas", signatures of a dogma. And many feel that this dogma will, if not already, behave in a fashion which is/will be not so different than some more or less liberal religions.

And BTW, In the scientific method, evidence in favor of an hypothesis doesn't equate (as you seem to imply) automatic confirmation of such hypothesis (this is to prevent things like the geocentric model from coming back) in favour of others. Even Eros knows that:

If for example an experiment presents evidence for dark matter discovery, it wont be accepted unless it can be repeated and possibly performed with a different detector technology also.

Yet, many hypothesis in mainstream (not just Dark Matter) are now considered confirmed, simply because a couple of evidences were in favour. This is NOT the scientific method. The real method is something like:

If evidences in favour: theory is not rejected.
If evidences for falsification: theory rejected.

But when it comes to core mainstream theories, the current mainstream method is:

If evidences in favour: theory accepted and/or presented as nearly factual.
If evidences for falsification: theory not rejected, and evidences rejected instead.

Remember the Sticky Problem in the Big Bang theory (currently presented as factual in schools) that arose when some researchers discovered evidences that time was not quantized?

Do you think it must be intentional "suppression"?

Well one thing is for sure: it's not unintentional suppression. You don't simply suppress tons of possibilities just by "accident". The reason behind such action is very real and people would be naive to think some modern science institute have absolutely no bias whatsoever.