Science: Do we believe or do we accept?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Toughy

Somewhere on UTube in the last couple of days I ran across all the contestants from the recent Miss USA pagent answering a question. The question was 'Do you think evolution should be taught in public schools?' Some of them said no, some said maybe, and some said yes. That's right, some of them said evolution should not be taught. Another one said evolution should be taught only in college and the students could decide which one to believe. Some said they believed God created them and evolution was just wrong. None of them thought evolution should be taught without also teaching the creation story in the Bible.

Aj.........don't go find it cuz you will break your computer.....I nearly broke mine.

Too late! My honey, in her never-ending quest to find things that break my brain, played it last night while I was brushing the dog.

The thing that struck me, was this idea of belief. Almost every single one of them used the idea that science is a belief. Evolution is a theory and not fact. None of them seemed to understand the difference between belief and fact. None of them understood what a scientific theory is and what it means.

I'm not sure where I am going with this, except it is what came to my mind when citybutch asked you if you believe in science.

Like you, I was struck that not a single one of them seemed to grasp what a scientist means when we use the word theory (it is not 'guess') nor did any of them, as you said, seem to draw a distinction between a belief and a fact. These are non-trivial distinctions. One might, if they wish, hold the belief that Earth is flat, rests on the back of four elephants who, in turn, stand upon the back of a gigantic star turtle named A'tuin. One might hold that belief but that doesn't make it a fact.

I think a useful working definition of a fact is this: a statement about the world that is such that the world is obliged to actually be that way. To give a couple of examples: Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. Earth orbits a yellow, main sequence star named Sol. F=ma*. For these things to be facts, we should be able to query the world and ask if there is such a thing as the United States and if so, what is the name of the head of state and/or head of government. We should then be able to determine how many people have held that position before the current one, do the math, determine the name of the current person holding the office and by that method decide if the world is, in fact, in agreement with our statement. The same applies to the other two statements.

Now, I might have a *belief* that Hillary Clinton is the 43rd President of the United States but that does not make my belief factual, it just makes it a belief. Nothing will ever make my belief factual because we've already had a 43rd President and much to our regret as a nation, it was Bush the Younger. These women seem to confuse belief (i.e. how they might wish the world to be) with fact (how the world actually is).

In the physical sciences there's a phrase "your theory is not in agreement with observation (or experiment)". That means that no matter how beautiful it might be, no matter how much you love it, your theory is wrong. It simply doesn't matter what one believes about one's theory, if it is not in agreement with observation or experiment then it's wrong. If there is no way to articulate how the theory might be shown to be wrong, then it is not even wrong. It's definitely not science.

What struck me was how utterly unconcerned these young women were with the truth. I did not hear any of them say that, ultimately, if evolution is true it is true and it should be taught because it was true. Instead, their beliefs (what they wanted to be true) trumped how the Universe might actually work.

A long time ago, I read a phrase that really stuck with me over the years. It was, I believe, Sagan (or it might have been Dawkins) talking about the work of a scientist. The first task was to 'be humble before the data'. What that means is that even if the data leads you someplace where you discover something you would much prefer were not true, one must be humble before the data, admit that Nature always bats last and conform yourself to what the data dictates.


Cheers
Aj