there is an interesting section on the philosophy of science in the book 'introduction to robotics' by phillp john mckerrow.
quote:
Historicly, science developed in the christain civilization of western europe, rather than other cultures with similar, highly developed, mathematical systems, owing to the character of the god they belived in. (whitehead, 1925) The chinese, for example, had an early knowledge of the world but lost interest in science because:
there was no confidence that the code of nature's laws could ever be unveiled or read ... there was no asurence that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read (needham, 1969)
The sixteenth and seventeenth century European scientists rejected the world view of aristotle in the favour of a Christian world view. (schaefer, 1976) They believed that the universe was created by a god of order and purpose. Consequently, nature must also be ordered, and therefore, able to be studied and described in an ordered manner,
quote:
The rationalist philosophers of the 18th century sought to develop a closed philosophical system based solely on man with out reference to god <...> This thinking leads to a general relativism where there are no absolutes, and no one is sure what is true. <...> The influence of existential philosophy on modern thought leaves many scientists in the position of having a set of axioms which are based upon a world view that they no longer accept.
An here is a relevent quote from my blog
quote:
Have you ever considered the difference between in what passes for logic in hard sciences such as maths and physics and logic in soft sciences such as sociology and biology? I call it lego brick logic and rubber band logic. A scientist observes the world and tries to imagine how he could build a world like this from the most basic principals. He takes these as his foundation and tries to stack his intellectual lego bricks on that foundation building up to the observations he's made. Then he scrupulously looks for any dissimilarity between the 3D lego model and the 2D picture in the instructions, that is the POV of observation in the real world. If he finds any area in which the model seems to differ then that area must be considered suspect in the model and some refinement of the model is needed to say he understands that area. The other method is that you often see in those 'sciences' that base them selves mostly on statistics and trends amalgamated from many cases rather than careful examination of specific cases. 'Sciences' such as evolutionary biology and behavioural psychology. This 'logic' I equate to rubber bands. The observer believes he has a fixed point, the equivalent of an anker. But this anker is not totally fixed. He can see it is at least some what mobile. So he introduces some tolerance for discrepancies by linking things together with rubber bands. So with these apparent facts in hand he attaches the flexible rubber bands to them and tries to bind these observations together with these lose ideas and then to use more 'flexible' ideas to hang new supposedly more basic 'facts' upon. In this way he tries to build a web hanging down the the ground but in my personal experience they rarely seem to get more than a few lairs down before they, the 'experts', completely diverge in their opinions on the next lair down and throw up their hands in despair and go back to congratulating them selves on how clever the upper lairs they can agree on are. It's the foolishness of the idiot who observes that having lots of birthdays is a statistical cause of ageing and so argues the one is the cause of the other. Statistics are only any good as a test when you can and do examine the full gamut of factors and circumstances in some range in your tests. Take another example. One man famously published a statistical report showing that as a certain country legalised pornography and the national consumption rose the rate of rape fell. The argument was that pornography was not a cause of rape and indeed possibly a control upon it. For all we know that fall in rape could be equally well correlated to the fall in whoppy cushion sails. There is a reason good experiments are supposed to have controls. If some freak factor causes an odd result it will likely cause the control to behave unexpectedly as well. There is no way to tell that the rape rate might not have fallen faster with out the porn. We can't very well set up a parallel control country with the same culture and so on to test against. Who would you trust to tell you how to fix a problem? Our lego builder or our friend playing with rubber bands. Worse still these rubber band argument are very susceptible to circular reasoning. All the points hang in space and support each other. It is too easy to argue that the firmness with which all other 'rubber band' ideas fix some essential fact is a basis for assuming that fact true rather than remembering it was the supposed firmness of this fact that was the argument for the validity of those same 'rubber band' ideas. You can very easily tell when a science is based on lego brick logic. It's the very description of a mathematical model governed by predicate calculus. In a good scientific theory the key facts and theorems should arise naturally from the mathematical model. Basically as far as I'm concerned if the major themes of your 'science' do not arise from a mathematical model but from trends, similarities and comparisons then you are not practising science at all but pseudo science.
So in fact many scientists do have religious conviction. Particularly those who deal with controlled, causality based, experimental testing of firm mathematical laws. Physicists for instance tend to be quite religious.
Do not confuse relativism or post modernism with scientific method. Scientific effort has it's origins in a belief in human ability to know god through his creation.
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