mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
In the same context as the OP. Just read it and check the links.
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"Scientism" on Wikipedia ...
- Thread starter PureX
- Start date
In the same context as the OP. Just read it and check the links.
Koldo
Outstanding Member
It is not that God's "realness" depends on being proven by the sciencies. I have never heard such a claim before.
It is just that people create their gods in their minds and insist that others must buy into that. I don't need nor ask for an actual scientific research to believe in anybody's god, but I am most certainly going to ask for objective evidence.
I feel it in my heart, I had a miraculous experience, my priest said so, the bible says so.... that I own a bridge in London. And I am willing to sell it to you for a bargain. But I am not going to show any objective evidence that I own it. You have to trust me, otherwise you are guilty of scientism. You most certainly are going to buy it, right?
Altfish
Veteran Member
I don't understand it. It is all confusing, for example what does "...the characteristic inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only source of genuine factual knowledge ..." actually mean?
Audie
Veteran Member
Point out an example if you ever find one.
I think we need to replace the word science with empiricism, or else acknowledge that there is both a formal process called science involving laboratories and observatories, and papers and journals.
But science is just collecting data, generalizing by induction, generate ideas that allow one to predict future outcomes, which is validated by doing that. So, what an astronomer does to predict an eclipse is not fundamentally different from you and I do when crossing the street. We look left and right to see if traffic is coming (collect data), conclude that it is safe to cross, and successfully predict the outcome: crossing was safe as the data suggested.
Even with subjective truths, the process is the same. Every time I eat Brussels sprout, I have a bad taste in my mouth. That subjective truth is as reliable and reproducible as any other for me, and also allows me to successfully predict outcomes: If you eat that, you won't like it.
These are truths, too, just not for everybody. But since they are determined empirically, they're science, albeit informal science as I define it.
Finding a piece of art beautiful is also a truth for the individual if that what happens
Solve what? That there are assumptions in science that have been confirmed to be valid empirically (and they have, and that is science, too) by the stellar success of science? The sine qua non of a correct idea is that it works, that it is useful in the sense that it can predict outcomes, like eclipses (for everybody) and the dysphoria of eating Brussels sprouts (for those that have that reaction to them).
I've told you before that I think you make this all too difficult. Ideas that work are correct. If I tell you that I live five blocks north and three blocks east of the pier, and going five blocks south and three west gets me from my front door to the pier, the idea is correct. Is is absolute truth, is it objective reality, can we really know anything, what are the assumptions underlying this belief? How can we knw that the pier is real, or that we aren't in a matrix? I find all of that less than useless. It causes one to be in a state of epistemic paralysis, epistemic nihilism.
What is the benefit to you of this type of thinking and the questions like you ask here? Do you wind up with deeper insights that allow you to make better decisions that make your life better? Are you avoiding mistakes with these ideas?
Audie
Veteran Member
As i said, find an example.
I will bet a $20 donation to charity
we never see one.
Audie
Veteran Member
Terrif. You find an example.
This is answered in the OP...
Probably for the same reason most fundamentalists don't mention fundamentalism much.
Does my personal crypto wallet count as a charity? Asking for a friend.
Secret Chief
Veteran Member
I'm not going to provide an example because my comment is not in respect of one particular poster or post. I'll simply say if you don't see it on here then we're reading two different forums. From some posters on here scientism is positively relentless.
Jose Fly
Fisker of men
Okay.
But someone else will experience that exact same taste and produce the exact opposite result....they're delicious. Further, some folks change their tastes over time. So while science can inform various aspects of the taste of brussel sprouts, it can't tell us whether they "taste good". The best it can do is say "it depends".
Exactly....that's what makes it subjective.
I don't see how whether a painting is "art", or if brussel sprouts taste "good" is determined empirically.
Ok, let's say I accept all of this. What is the problem?
AlexanderG
Active Member
Thanks for the interesting questions! I think you're confusing the distinction between epistemology and ontology, as well as the distinction between analytic and synthetic claims. In the last line of your OP, you express this misunderstanding quite well. For me and other agnostic atheists or empiricists, it's not about whether god is in fact real or not (ontology), because that's an untestable, unfalsifiable proposition. Rather, we are solely concerned with whether there are tools of reason and evidence that can produce a warranted justification to believe that a god is real (epistemology).
We atheists start with epistemology and take it as far as it can currently lead us, for tentative a posteriori conclusions about reality, and we go no farther. Many theists start with the ontology of god being real, and then post hoc rationalize what they see around them to fit with their a priori belief. We don't accept post hoc rationalization, and you don't accept any evidence that your god might not be real. This is why conversations can be frustrating.
A useful paradigm that I like to use is as follows, and this helps with the analytic/synthetic distinction:
1. Conceptual claims must be justified by conceptual evidence.
(Ex: "My favorite flavor of ice cream is strawberry" is a conceptual claim, justified by testimonial evidence which is also conceptual.)
2. Empirical claims must be justified with empirical evidence.
(Ex: "Salty soil stunts the growth of plants, which we can see in this series of controlled experiments where the only variable was soil salinity, and plants grew more poorly as salinity levels increased.")
3. Metaphysical claims must be justified with metaphysical evidence.
(So far, humans don't appear to have access to metaphysical evidence. Other than "I think therefore I am," which is only abosolute justification to oneself, I don't see how any other metaphysical claims can be justified.)
1. Conceptual claims must be justified by conceptual evidence.
(Ex: "My favorite flavor of ice cream is strawberry" is a conceptual claim, justified by testimonial evidence which is also conceptual.)
2. Empirical claims must be justified with empirical evidence.
(Ex: "Salty soil stunts the growth of plants, which we can see in this series of controlled experiments where the only variable was soil salinity, and plants grew more poorly as salinity levels increased.")
3. Metaphysical claims must be justified with metaphysical evidence.
(So far, humans don't appear to have access to metaphysical evidence. Other than "I think therefore I am," which is only abosolute justification to oneself, I don't see how any other metaphysical claims can be justified.)
Claims that a god in fact exists is a metaphysical claim, and claims that we should believe in a god based on evidence in the external world is an empirical claim. However, I have only ever seen conceptual evidence that a god exists. Appeals to personal testimony, appeals to personal ignorance or incredulity about some natural process, emotional appeals, appeals to imagination and definitions, and appeals to distasteful consequences are the usual examples.
So, if you want to claim something about ultimate reality or the world outside our own minds, then you need to bring a higher order form of evidence. Conceptual evidence only justifies the things that we imagine, and so your god currently appears to be imaginary and nothing more.
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Personally I find Popper's critique of logical positivism accurate Logical positivism - Wikipedia given that scientism is defined as extreme logical positivism.
An early, tenacious critic was Karl Popper whose 1934 book Logik der Forschung, arriving in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, directly answered verificationism. Popper considered the problem of induction as rendering empirical verification logically impossible,[41] and the deductive fallacy of affirming the consequent reveals any phenomenon's capacity to host more than one logically possible explanation. Accepting scientific method as hypotheticodeduction, whose inference form is denying the consequent, Popper finds scientific method unable to proceed without falsifiable predictions. Popper thus identifies falsifiability to demarcate not meaningful from meaningless but simply scientific from unscientific—a label not in itself unfavorable.
Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiable—thus unscientific, perhaps metaphysical—concept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific. Popper also found science's quest for truth to rest on values. Popper disparages the pseudoscientific, which occurs when an unscientific theory is proclaimed true and coupled with seemingly scientific method by "testing" the unfalsifiable theory—whose predictions are confirmed by necessity—or when a scientific theory's falsifiable predictions are strongly falsified but the theory is persistently protected by "immunizing stratagems", such as the appendage of ad hoc clauses saving the theory or the recourse to increasingly speculative hypotheses shielding the theory.
Popper's scientific epistemology is falsificationism, which finds that no number, degree, and variety of empirical successes can either verify or confirm scientific theory. Falsificationism finds science's aim as corroboration of scientific theory, which strives for scientific realism but accepts the maximal status of strongly corroborated verisimilitude ("truthlikeness"). Explicitly denying the positivist view that all knowledge is scientific, Popper developed the general epistemology of critical rationalism, which finds human knowledge to evolve by conjectures and refutations. Popper thus acknowledged the value of the positivist movement, driving evolution of human understanding, but claimed that he had "killed positivism".
An early, tenacious critic was Karl Popper whose 1934 book Logik der Forschung, arriving in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, directly answered verificationism. Popper considered the problem of induction as rendering empirical verification logically impossible,[41] and the deductive fallacy of affirming the consequent reveals any phenomenon's capacity to host more than one logically possible explanation. Accepting scientific method as hypotheticodeduction, whose inference form is denying the consequent, Popper finds scientific method unable to proceed without falsifiable predictions. Popper thus identifies falsifiability to demarcate not meaningful from meaningless but simply scientific from unscientific—a label not in itself unfavorable.
Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiable—thus unscientific, perhaps metaphysical—concept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific. Popper also found science's quest for truth to rest on values. Popper disparages the pseudoscientific, which occurs when an unscientific theory is proclaimed true and coupled with seemingly scientific method by "testing" the unfalsifiable theory—whose predictions are confirmed by necessity—or when a scientific theory's falsifiable predictions are strongly falsified but the theory is persistently protected by "immunizing stratagems", such as the appendage of ad hoc clauses saving the theory or the recourse to increasingly speculative hypotheses shielding the theory.
Popper's scientific epistemology is falsificationism, which finds that no number, degree, and variety of empirical successes can either verify or confirm scientific theory. Falsificationism finds science's aim as corroboration of scientific theory, which strives for scientific realism but accepts the maximal status of strongly corroborated verisimilitude ("truthlikeness"). Explicitly denying the positivist view that all knowledge is scientific, Popper developed the general epistemology of critical rationalism, which finds human knowledge to evolve by conjectures and refutations. Popper thus acknowledged the value of the positivist movement, driving evolution of human understanding, but claimed that he had "killed positivism".
AlexanderG
Active Member
I think you're also trying to foist the logical positivist position on atheists, which seems to be a popular tactic. Yes, science cannot provide evidence that the scientific method is "true." That's because the scientific method is a conceptual, analytic proposition. The scientific method provides empirical evidence, however, and can never be used to justify things like how we feel about objects and events, why we prefer the things we do, or how we define words or conceptual frameworks. It was never designed to do so, and modern atheists accept this. We do not embrace "scientism" if you're equating it with logical positivism. Analytic claims are not produced or justified by science. We have other tools for that.
Granted, evolutionary biology as a theory can explain a lot of human psychology, but it can't tell us why we should value thinking or behaving in a certain way. It doesn't try to. I don't think theism can tell us why we should behave in a certain way, either, even though it tries to, but that's a whole other topic.
Edit: Oof, @sun rise beat me to it, with a much better explanation too!
Granted, evolutionary biology as a theory can explain a lot of human psychology, but it can't tell us why we should value thinking or behaving in a certain way. It doesn't try to. I don't think theism can tell us why we should behave in a certain way, either, even though it tries to, but that's a whole other topic.
Edit: Oof, @sun rise beat me to it, with a much better explanation too!
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epronovost
Well-Known Member
If you posit your deity to be something else than a social construct, then this isn't a case of scientism. Scientism is denying the knowledge and merit of non-scientific enterprise like literature, poetry, history and sometime even the results of social and medical sciences. It's basically denying the existence and worth of any sort of self referential knowledge. It's not scientism to ask for scientific proof to answer questions which are within the sphere of expertise of science like the detection of phenomenon or the inner working of the observable universe. That's why scientism can be a term of abuse.
Audie
Veteran Member
Its a matter of honour
Audie
Veteran Member
No example no believe
Secret Chief
Veteran Member
No bovvered
Not much for me to actually disagree with in the OP.
The only slight is maybe against the theist.