-- Posted by Event Horizon at 5:31 pm on June 16, 2009 It's been said many times that science is a much better system of truth-finding, rather, truth knowing than faith because science adapts to new knowledge, whereas faith remains stolid and resolute.   Despite being a fan of science myself, I can't help but realize that rather than being a positive trait, that willingness to change is instead a negative characteristic of science. A certain faith has at least one possibility in some outrageous number of possibilities to be actually correct. Science,on the other hand is malleable; if science can change given new evidence, then it is reasonable to assume that it is possible that science has got it completely wrong--that, given a whole mess of new evidence, we might find it to be invalid altogether.   And with each given change, we can be no more sure that it has gained any actual possibility of being right, since it is always open to new evidence; effectively rendering the possibility that science is valid: zero.   Faith 1 :: Science 0 eh? Though, I still believe I'm on the losing side. Edit: When I speak of science as "it" I mean everything scientific, anything we consider "science" and "truth". Everything that we trust because of evidence. Excluded are the absurd: the faiths. held for no reason at all but just because. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 8:07 pm on June 16, 2009 To clear up any misconceptions about what I mean... I believe that science, being our best guess, actually has merit. While I admit that it is possible that all of science is wrong, I do not subscribe to the notion that that is very plausible. I think subscribing to an idea that is stolid is less...creative. It uses less of the potential of man. We are an inquisitive people, and I think we should use our abilities to try to learn as much as we can. I don't think settling on one idea is a good thing. Though, nor do I believe we should rid ourselves of the spiritual, the meaningfulness. Not necessarily a god or anything, just something divine--some divine intrigue. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 2:43 pm on June 17, 2009 No replies? I figured there would be at least some... -- Posted by Mein Alias at 9:23 am on June 27, 2009 Your original post basically states what all Religious people have always said: "What if there IS a God? Then you're screwed." Anything is certainly possible: I could be in a coma dreaming about posting this, atoms could be unicorns, everything we know via science could be absolutely false and the Bible could be a history textbook. The reason no one responded is because there is no "intellectual" way to say "Yeah, maybe, but I'm not going to spend time worrying about that." -- Posted by Event Horizon at 5:41 pm on June 27, 2009 That's not what this is about. At all. I'm not talking about believing in the God, I'm talking about possibilities. It is a response to those who say that science is a more probable choice in the "TRUTHS" category than a specific faith. -- Posted by penumbra at 8:27 pm on June 27, 2009 But shouldnt we consider a basis of probability? Science, being malleable provides us with the most reasonable and likely answers given all the inputted information we have available. Yes we may find a mess of new evidence which disproves all of our scientific "progress," but on a probabilistic level it was most reasonable to believe in the merit of that progress at the time. Comparatively, faith has less merit. -- Posted by penumbra at 8:28 pm on June 27, 2009 Sorry if i stated something redundant, i kinda skimmed your post. -- Posted by Mein Alias at 9:31 am on June 28, 2009 Quote: from Event Horizon at 5:41 pm on June 27, 2009 That's not what this is about. At all.   I'm not talking about believing in the God, I'm talking about possibilities. It is a response to those who say that science is a more probable choice in the "TRUTHS" category than a specific faith. I re-read it, so lets see if this makes more sense. You say that Science is ever-changing, yet religion stands the test of time. From what I remember in my Chemistry Classes, Science has three classes of ideas. Hypothesizes, which are like hunches, Theories, which are not totally proven but has absolutely no flaws so far, and a Law, which is true and cannot be disproved - ever. Only our understanding of a law can change. Then we have Religion. Religion is like a Chinese Buffet. People go through, pick and choose what they want to believe in. Nothing in Religion is static, not even the book itself. The Bible used to be much larger, but a lot of the books were removed. Then we have people like Joseph Smith writing about Jesus' adventures with the Native Americans. Most Christians don't think we should stone disobedient children, sell our daughters into slavery, and use rape as a commodity, but all scientists believe in Inertia. I think it was Ben Stein that did a movie on people who were criticized and criticize others in the Scientific community because they did not believe in Evolution. Evolution is considered a theory, and religious folk often point that out as a "just a hunch!" It's not. As far as the Scientific Community is confused,  the theory is without flaw, or it would have been trashed by now. -- Posted by Moridin at 1:20 pm on June 28, 2009 You reposed this nonsense here? Sad. I said it before and ill say it again: science is backed by evidence, faith is not. Therefore, science beats faith every time. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 8:26 pm on June 28, 2009 Quote: from Moridin at 4:20 pm on June 28, 2009 You reposed this nonsense here? Sad. I said it before and ill say it again: science is backed by evidence, faith is not. Therefore, science beats faith every time. Posted it here first. got no responses. You've misread the post again. I'm not sure it's valid, but the objections you've raised have been less than convincing for why this is wrong. Prior to our knowledge of gravity wells, we thought that masses simply attracted. while our predictions and calculations were close approximations, and newtonian mechanics still worked pretty well for large, slow bodies, the overall understanding of the reality of things was wrong. This is what I'm talking about. -- Posted by Mein Alias at 9:29 pm on June 28, 2009 Quote: from Moridin at 1:20 pm on June 28, 2009 You reposed this nonsense here? Sad. I said it before and ill say it again: science is backed by evidence, faith is not. Therefore, science beats faith every time. I'm assuming you're talking to me. I'm more than willing to fight about what I've said over PM. Prior to our knowledge of gravity wells, we thought that masses simply attracted. while our predictions and calculations were close approximations, and newtonian mechanics still worked pretty well for large, slow bodies, the overall understanding of the reality of things was wrong. This is what I'm talking about. Look, I'm not going to rephrase this anymore. Gravity is a Scientific Law, because it exists and that can never be disproved. Gravitational Theory is how we explained that apples fall from trees. Someone put some heavy duty maths together and disproved that theory, now we have another one. Religious Texts are books written by story-tellers. They wrote down how they though the Earth was made off a hunch and then they wrote down what they thought was fundamental to being a human as expected by their God(s). Things like "Murder is Bad." Still, there are exceptions to these. In self-defense, is murder wrong? What about during a war, where our government forces our hand to the trigger with threats of imprisonment? Hypocrisies are everywhere. There are no exceptions to Scientific Law. There are exceptions to Scientific Theory. There are exceptions to Faith, but you don't see fine print in the back of the Bible saying "the things written in this book are open to interpretation," where as the Scientific Community welcomes all intelligent input. -- Posted by Audioblood at 1:44 pm on June 30, 2009 I'm gonna try and humor the OP, here. You could very well be right. But as Alias has said, there are some things which are proven as factual. The only thing that could change is how we perceive the facts in the over-all picture. For example, gravity has been proven, but what is the purpose of it? We understand its effects, but not necessarily why it does what it does. To take it even further, we could go so far as to look at human existence. We know we exist. "Cogito ergo sum." But do we actually understand our over-all function? Similar to cells. Cells in our body understand their individual functions, but it isn't likely that they understand how they individually play a conglomerate part. Why? Because they probably simply don't have the capacity. This same concept could be true of nearly anything. For example, what if humans are mere miniscule parts of a whole body, the whole body being the universe, which is constantly growing? What if we are to the universe what atoms are to us? How are we supposed to prove/disprove that? We simply don't have the ability. So yes, even science in all of its glory is open to new interpretation. Remember that quantum mechanics suggests that by simply conceiving something, you have given it the possibility, no matter how far-fetched, of being real/true. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 6:19 pm on June 30, 2009 Quote: from Mein Alias at 12:29 am on June 29, 2009 Quote: from Moridin at 1:20 pm on June 28, 2009 You reposed this nonsense here? Sad. I said it before and ill say it again: science is backed by evidence, faith is not. Therefore, science beats faith every time. I'm assuming you're talking to me. I'm more than willing to fight about what I've said over PM. Prior to our knowledge of gravity wells, we thought that masses simply attracted. while our predictions and calculations were close approximations, and newtonian mechanics still worked pretty well for large, slow bodies, the overall understanding of the reality of things was wrong. This is what I'm talking about. Look, I'm not going to rephrase this anymore. Gravity is a Scientific Law, because it exists and that can never be disproved. Gravitational Theory is how we explained that apples fall from trees. Someone put some heavy duty maths together and disproved that theory, now we have another one. Religious Texts are books written by story-tellers. They wrote down how they though the Earth was made off a hunch and then they wrote down what they thought was fundamental to being a human as expected by their God(s). Things like "Murder is Bad." Still, there are exceptions to these. In self-defense, is murder wrong? What about during a war, where our government forces our hand to the trigger with threats of imprisonment? Hypocrisies are everywhere. There are no exceptions to Scientific Law. There are exceptions to Scientific Theory. There are exceptions to Faith, but you don't see fine print in the back of the Bible saying "the things written in this book are open to interpretation," where as the Scientific Community welcomes all intelligent input. I'm not denying that things fall down. I'm saying that with the possibility that ever new evidence exists to change our understanding of why they do, our theories on the workings of the universe are subject to change. Things still fall, but we may be wrong about why. I didn't argue anything but that point. I'm just saying, probabilistically speaking, if we are to assume infinite possibilities, religious ideologies have a chance of correctly describing the universe, where-as the scientific method, by definition, does not allow for any specific theory to be 100% valid. There is always room for error in the theory of things, and because of that--with respect to the infinite possibilities--science can never be actually correct. Again, not arguing that things don't actually fall down, only arguing that the reasons why this happens are subject to new evidence, of which there is possibly an infinite amount of. It's just an intellectual curiosity, I'm not trying to redefine some philosophic school or anything. -- Posted by Audioblood at 8:27 pm on June 30, 2009 The chance that any one religion will it get it totally right in our lifetime is about as good as the chance that I'll have a heart-attack before finishing typing this sentence. Maybe one day. But not soon. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 8:35 pm on June 30, 2009 Quote: from Audioblood at 11:27 pm on June 30, 2009 The chance that any one religion will it get it totally right in our lifetime is about as good as the chance that I'll have a heart-attack before finishing typing this sentence. Maybe one day. But not soon. I'd say far less likely, in fact. -- Posted by Moridin at 10:19 am on July 1, 2009 Quote: from Event Horizon at 6:26 am on June 29, 2009 Quote: from Moridin at 4:20 pm on June 28, 2009 You reposed this nonsense here? Sad. I said it before and ill say it again: science is backed by evidence, faith is not. Therefore, science beats faith every time. Posted it here first. got no responses. You've misread the post again. I'm not sure it's valid, but the objections you've raised have been less than convincing for why this is wrong.   Prior to our knowledge of gravity wells, we thought that masses simply attracted. while our predictions and calculations were close approximations, and newtonian mechanics still worked pretty well for large, slow bodies, the overall understanding of the reality of things was wrong. This is what I'm talking about. Since they where close approximations, they where not wrong. That's the whole point. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 2:52 pm on July 1, 2009 Quote: from Moridin at 1:19 pm on July 1, 2009 Quote: from Event Horizon at 6:26 am on June 29, 2009 Quote: from Moridin at 4:20 pm on June 28, 2009 You reposed this nonsense here? Sad. I said it before and ill say it again: science is backed by evidence, faith is not. Therefore, science beats faith every time.    Posted it here first. got no responses.    You've misread the post again. I'm not sure it's valid, but the objections you've raised have been less than convincing for why this is wrong.  Prior to our knowledge of gravity wells, we thought that masses simply attracted. while our predictions and calculations were close approximations, and newtonian mechanics still worked pretty well for large, slow bodies, the overall understanding of the reality of things was wrong. This is what I'm talking about. Since they where close approximations, they where not wrong. That's the whole point. Yup. 2.8 = 3 -- Posted by Audioblood at 10:12 pm on July 1, 2009 I know, right?! Totally the same thing. I mean, it's not like anything actually happens within a fraction of a second...oh...wait... Wikipedia: Today, time intervals can be measured extremely precisely, to the point where the metre is now defined officially as the distance light travels in "vacuum" in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. -- Posted by Event Horizon at 8:16 pm on July 8, 2009 Quote: from Audioblood at 1:12 am on July 2, 2009 I know, right?! Totally the same thing. I mean, it's not like anything actually happens within a fraction of a second...oh...wait... Wikipedia: Today, time intervals can be measured extremely precisely, to the point where the metre is now defined officially as the distance light travels in "vacuum" in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. I'm not sure I get it...? -- Posted by Ken01 at 3:08 am on July 16, 2009 Personally I believe faith cannot be compared to science. Although they are both belief methods, faith is outside the realm of science. I consider religion science plus some. Religion is the entire Oreo cookie and science is the cream. No matter how much to try to explain and describe the outside cookie, you can't if you only know cream. In even simpler terms, comparing science to religion, mysticism, faith, is futile because they're not comparable. Even though faith can operate with much of science, science cannot with faith. Therefore trying to explain faith in scientific terms is also futile. That is why you can't PROVE or DISPROVE a religion; because you're trying to use science to do so. I suppose this is much more of a rant than a coherent thought, but try to understand. :) -- Posted by Event Horizon at 7:26 am on July 18, 2009 Quote: from Ken01 at 6:08 am on July 16, 2009 Personally I believe faith cannot be compared to science. Although they are both belief methods, faith is outside the realm of science. I consider religion science plus some. Religion is the entire Oreo cookie and science is the cream. No matter how much to try to explain and describe the outside cookie, you can't if you only know cream. In even simpler terms, comparing science to religion, mysticism, faith, is futile because they're not comparable. Even though faith can operate with much of science, science cannot with faith. Therefore trying to explain faith in scientific terms is also futile. That is why you can't PROVE or DISPROVE a religion; because you're trying to use science to do so. I suppose this is much more of a rant than a coherent thought, but try to understand. :) Comparing the principles of science and faiths often leads to nonsense. But that does not mean that they are not comparable.