Science: Do we believe or do we accept?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by citybutch

Would you use the phrase: "I believe in science"..?

I said 'no' but did not expound on that subject in the "Would you date someone who didn't believe in God" thread. I will expound on it here.

Belief is not the word I would use in regard to science. Saying "I believe in science" would be like say "I believe in chemistry" or "I believe in mathematics" or "I believe in history". What would it mean to say that? I accept that on any given subject X, where X is some feature of the natural world we might find interesting, science is going to provide us the best, most reliable suite of tools to understanding that phenomena. That does not mean the process will work perfectly nor does it mean that it will work in every single case, there may be features of the world we might *wish* to explain but which are beyond are ability to grok.

If I have a 'belief' that is connected to science it is in the, overall, regularity of the Universe. By that I mean that for the most part, certainly at the macro level, the Universe is going to behave in a more or less predictable fashion. For instance, on Earth the Sun is *always* going to come up in the East and *always* going to set in the West. It is going to behave that way because the Earth is turning on its axis. There will be no days where the Sun rises in the West the first three days of the week, sets in the North two of those days, rises in the South at some random interval and sets in the East once every random 100 days. That might seem a trivial example so let me give a deeper one. I believe that the universe is *so* regular that Hydrogen always has an atomic weight of 1. It will *always* have one proton and one electron and no neutrons. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is definitional that any object with one proton and one electron is a Hydrogen atom.

Even before we had either the physics or the chemistry to even conceive things like electrons, protons or any other part of the atomic model it was true that there was an element called Hydrogen and that this element always has one proton and one electron. That's what I mean by regularity.

Now, is that a belief? From a strict philosophical standpoint it is. I have absolutely NO proof that the Sun will set in the West this evening and rise in the East in the morning. I do, however, have rather good reason based upon past experience and evidence that this is going to happen. Science is simply the suite of tools we use to explain those features of the Universe that we have some desire or need to explain. But I don't believe in science anymore than I believe in any given tool in my toolkit or in my Magic Trackpad or keyboard.

The other reason I think that belief isn't accurate when applied to science is that science routinely requires us to accept things we would just as soon not be true. The Sun is going to burn out sometime in the next 5 billion years. All stars die. The Sun is a star. We have observed other stars, very much like our Sun, in various stages of life so we have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen. I don't *want* that to happen but I have to accept that given the evidence currently in hand the smart money gets laid on it happening. Another example is that species go extinct. Again, I would just as soon that not happen because we are just another species and so the smart money is that, at some point, we will go the way of the dodo, the dinosaur and, interestingly, every OTHER hominid that has ever walked the Earth (we are the only surviving member of the hominid clade). I accept that but it is not what I would prefer.

The scientific method works for a specific but broad class of problems and it has *some* utility as a general problem solving strategy within a slightly larger domain of problems but it is not a set of beliefs. If you accept that the world is a pretty regular place--and the fact that you did not wake up on the Moon, or fall *through* (not out but through) your bed, or that you did not see a tree walking around is pretty strong evidence that the world operates in a more or less regular fashion--then it follows that one might have some questions about how that regularity manifests itself. Science is going to provide the suite of tools with the best chance of answering those questions. But I wouldn't say that is a belief.

Cheers
Aj