Stardate 20030523.1241

(On Screen): Donald Sensing has posted the second of his posts regarding his point of view about religion and mechanistic atheism. It's as good as I fully expected it would be, but I did have a few comments to make in response to it.

A theory, then, is not just a guess. A theory is how scientists express the interpreted results of many observations carried out over a long time. A theory is how scientists make sense of their collective experience. ... That some scientific claim is "just a theory," and therefore may be dismissed, is an accusation that actually makes no sense.

What I would say is that science occupies itself with collecting observations, and with attempting to find patterns among those observations, which are sometimes expressed as mathematical equations. Those patterns are the theories. Those two processes, of collecting observations and of trying to find patterns, feed off each other. As new patterns are discovered, they suggest new opportunities for observations which may or may not ultimately support the proposed pattern. Patterns ("theories") get a lot of points for being correct, but they get even more points for being fruitful.

Engineering, in turn, takes the resultant knowledge (both theories and observations) and tries to do valuable things with them, creating what we know as technology. And that, too, feeds back because much of the scientific process of observation relies on extremely sophisticated technology, since what's being observed isn't accessible with the biological sensors we were born with.

There are cases where words have two related meanings but one of them is far more specific than the other. In biology, the term "symbiosis" has two meanings, and this can lead to confusion. The more generic meaning is that it's any case in which two organisms live in very close proximity to one another where one is highly dependent on that. Within that collective there are three sub-cases: "parasitism" where one organism benefits and the other is harmed, "commensalism" where one benefits and the other is neither helped nor harmed, and "symbiosis" in its second meaning where both benefit. If someone uses the word "symbiosis" in the generic meaning and someone else interprets it restrictively, there's the possibility of confusion.

The word "theory" suffers from that problem. As a collective it refers to all descriptions of patterns based on observations. But within that you have conjectures and speculations, hypotheses, and "theories" in a second meaning. Conjectures are little more than hunches, but the more restrictive meaning for "theory" means "a pattern which has been tested and has an inductive value so high as to be practically indistinguishable from absolute truth". (Consider "the Pythagorean theorem"; it's a "theory", but it's also possible to prove it mathematically, as we all learned when we studied Euclidean geometry.)

Which is what Stephen Jay Gould was referring to, in Donald's quote from him about the certainty of theories. It's not a false statement to claim that there is the possibility of doubt about a scientific theory, but the degree of that doubt for many theories is extremely tiny, and it turns out those theories have the same kind of inductive reliability as the everyday facts we all think we know from direct experience. Because what we all think we know is also subject to at least some doubt.

As a practical matter, none the facts we deal with in our everyday lives are completely certain; they all carry a certain degree of inductive certainty which is usually very high but not at the level of mathematical "truth" (which is absolute). For instance, our vision systems perform a great deal of abstraction, and it's well known that because of that we can be fooled by some things we see (a process usually referred to as "optical illusion"). It's been well documented that our memories of events are imprecise and even malleable. There have been direct experiments which showed that subjects who observed a carefully staged event could have their memories of the event altered by the kinds of questions which were asked later about that event.

That comes up all the time in police work. Eye witnesses may have their memory of the crime they observed altered by the way in which the police question them. When they're asked to pick a suspect out of a "line up" there can cues which the police may include (in some cases inadvertently, in other cases apparently deliberately) which will suggest which of the people is the one they're suspicious of, and the eyewitness may pick up on those cues without even realizing it. A lot of innocent people have gone to jail due to faulty eyewitness testimony.

Indeed, in some situations it's actually possible to create a memory in someone else of things which never happened. That's also been a legal issue in recent years, when some therapists in the mental health field had become convinced that their patients were suffering from the effects of "repressed memories" and sought ways to "recover suppressed memories". It's true that some people can suppress the memories of traumatic events, but what's come out is that the processes these therapists used seem in some cases to actually create extremely vivid memories of events which never took place.

Unfortunately, a lot of families have suffered pain and anguish because of this. Grown children have been under the treatment of therapists who suspected the existence of repressed memories of childhood molestation, and will help their patients "recover" memories of having been sexually abused by their parents when they were young, after which the patient will confront their parents with this false accusation or may refuse to ever talk to them again.

Of course, in our everyday lives these kinds of things don't come up much, but all of us have at least a few memories of events which didn't really happen the way we think they did. For many of us, accessing a memory is an experience similar to watching a film, but to assume that human memory is like film is wrong. The actual physical representation of memory is a complete mystery, but what is beyond dispute is that it is abstract and coded and not a biological equivalent of video tape. It's "good enough" for purposes of inductive reasoning in most cases. The point I'm trying to make is that a claim that a scientific "theory" is open to at least some doubt isn't interesting, because everything we all know is open to at least some doubt.

Donald describes what he refers to as "scientism" (as distinct from science) and it's not dissimilar to what I call "mechanism", though I don't fully agree with his statement. I would most strongly disagree with any contention that scientific knowledge is "exhaustive". It isn't now, and I don't think it ever will be.

Donald talks about some of the potential consequences of a "scientist" view of the world. In so doing, he's perilously close to making an "appeal to consequences". It's not that what he's saying is necessarily wrong, but rather that it's irrelevant to the fundamental question of whether mechanism is the best explanation. The fact that you don't like a conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong.

If a doctor tells you that you have cancer, it's no use to argue that he should rather explain your pain as being the result of a strained muscle due to the fact that if it were really cancer then it would mean you were probably going to die. The fact of cancer is unrelated to the danger it represents.

He doesn't actually go so far as to claim that someone should eschew a mechanistic view of the world because of the consequences he describes, but that argument has been made by other Christians who are less intellectually disciplined than Donald is.

The consequences of mechanism are something I did have to deal with early on. There's no question that it's much less comfortable and much more uncertain. But that doesn't directly argue against mechanism; the fact that it's a less pleasant choice doesn't mean it's wrong. And underlying it is a deep philosophical question I wrote about last year: Do you prefer unpleasant truths or pleasing falsehoods?