

Of Two Minds – A neuroscientist balances science and faith - milkcircle
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2006summer/newsome.html

======
acct_0053
That's nice. In a sense he's rationalizing away the need to apply the same
rigorous requirements to the existence of a god (and therefore whether or not
obedience is necessary, followed by a source from which to gather his sense of
morality) that one would apply to any other fantastical claim. So what?
Nothing wrong with that. So long as he's not applying that same mode of
thinking to the actual science he does (which he apparently does not), doesn't
negatively impact others with that morality which he derives from his beliefs
- or the source of those beliefs, and doesn't demand that others respect or
accept those beliefs. Doesn't appear from the article that he's guilty of any
of those actions. Then again, I'm unfamiliar with his name or his work.

*Edit: rephrased "...or acceptance of..." => "...or accept..."

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cicero
This is a great explanation of how faith and reason operate together. I have
degrees in computer science and theology, so I don't have the scientific cred
of a neuroscientist, but I can say this piece does a good job of articulating
my own experience.

~~~
danbruc
It captures what happens but I find the conclusions wrong. Yes, we are often
unable to act with complete scientific rigor because the systems we have to
deal with are way to complex and so we use our intuition and the like to deal
with the situations, but this does not at all mean that this is a good or
useful way to understand our world - after all our intuition and common sense
is exactly what gives us a wrong picture of our world. Only scientific rigor
was able to teach us that the world is very different from what we usually
see, from space and time over energy and matter to the dynamics of life, the
earth and the universe as whole.

~~~
cicero
I am not saying, and neither is the author, that we should reject scientific
rigor in the cases where it can be applied. Rather, we should not limit
ourselves to only asking questions that can be answered by science. Indeed, it
is impossible to live that way. Therefore, the rejection of religious claims,
such as the existence of God, on the basis that they cannot be scientifically
proven is not reasonable. If all questions of life were subjected to the same
standard of proof that some people demand of religious claims, we would not be
able to function.

I used to be an atheist until I realized that my rejection of religion was
intellectually dishonest. I therefore decided to investigate religion with an
open mind, and that eventually led to my belief in God.

------
altrego99
Admitted I didn't think he would be sensible when he said he is a minority
being "serious Christian" in a community of scientists, he turned out not to
be sensible.

------
jabelk
"It hinges on a gut-level judgment about what sort of universe we inhabit."

The thing is, I don't think a gut-level judgment is the best course of action
here. Similarly, I don't make gut-level judgments about whether I believe in
gravity, or whether I believe in evolution. In my mind, the nature of the
universe falls squarely under "science."

~~~
waps
TLDR: Science is inconsistent, and so is faith. "Gut-level judgements" are all
we have, both in science and in faith. Can people please stop ignorantly
claiming otherwise ?

The laws of mathematics actually prohibit anything other than a "gut-level"
judgement. Let's take one problem (but go ahead and take 5 books about
"constructivism" out of the library and you'll get to 50 problems soon).
Godel's theorem, because it's the most generic, but there's plenty of them.
Assuming you believe in any science that uses natural numbers, rational ones,
or real ones (ie. all of them), then there's 2 possibilities :

\- you're not convinced that there are no contradictions. In this case, what
do you have that faith doesn't ?

\- you're convinced that there are no contradictions. In this case you can be
sure : you're wrong. Either because you don't realize there are
contradictions, or because you've got a wrong theory.

So how exactly is science better than faith ? It's not.

Here's how this argument evolved :

1) Faith does not follow reason ! It kind of does, or rather we can't find
good examples of obvious inconsistencies. (the bible was written by people who
had studied under Greek philosophers, so it really is quite consistent. It's
not perfect, but compared to say, the quran or the vedas, it's bloody hard to
find conclusive contradictions. Whereas the quran simply says that it has
inconsistencies and you shouldn't care about that, for example, and points out
a specific inconsistency in itself. But this was not a real argument at the
time)

2) oh-oh the vatican claims they do follow reason. They have some good
arguments on that too. But they don't follow reason entirely !

3) oops ... science doesn't actually follow reason either. We don't actually
have proofs of consistency, and worse : we don't even construct most
arguments. Let's fix that.

4) (~100 years later) we give up. This is not possible. Let's be brutally
dishonest and at least look for a proof that we could write a constructivist
science and do that. (this is brutally dishonest because it would be a non-
constructivist proof that constructivism could work without actually making it
work)

5) (~10 years later) okay, that can't be done either. We can't have a science
without pulling new concepts out of thin air without any real reason to assume
they work other than that we haven't found any mistakes !

6) (~20 years later) This idiot "Godel" comes on stage and claims if you have
a proof that a scientific theory is consistent you can rewrite that into a
proof that that theory is wrong ! Prepostrous ! Let's pelt him with tomatoes !

7) (1 day later) "Say guys ... I've been looking through that proof of Mr.
Godel and I can't seem to find a mistake" ... followed by 1 month of doing
nothing but looking for errors in that proof.

8) (1 month later) Success ! Godel made a mistake.

9) (2 days later) Godel writes an article fixing the mistake

10) (~2-20 years later, depending on who you ask) Okay, we give up. Science is
not consistent and can never be consistent. "We cannot pull ourselves out of
the mud".

Given this history, can we please drop the argument that science is consistent
and faith is not ? (Christian faith, because it is the only one that claims
and tries to be consistent, not saying you couldn't create others, but no-one
did)

Science is inconsistent, and so is faith. Can people stop claiming otherwise ?

~~~
danbruc
I have to disagree, science is not inconsistent. Science, more precisely
natural science, is in the business of building models of our world and if the
model is any good it is consistent with our world. Some models are precise to
10 digits, some models only describe the behavior of a school of fish on
average. If a theory is found to disagree with reality it will get modified or
maybe get abandoned and this is no problem because natural science never
claims to provide any truth but only a good model of our world that may have
to change in the future.

Religion is similar in the regard that it provides a model of our world but a
very poor model under scientific standards like verifiability, predictability
and falsifiability. While science constantly challenges its own results and
even methods religion is far, far more in the eternal truth corner.

Finally mathematics is a very different thing and comparing it with physics or
religion may be misleading. Like religion but unlike natural science
mathematics is in the eternal truth business but unlike religion and natural
science it is not in the describing the world business. Mathematics is used to
describe the world but does not so on its own. And things like Gödel's
incompleteness theorems are not a weakness of mathematics but a strength -
knowing in principal limits is something that seems completely out of reach
for everything but mathematics.

~~~
waps
There is a mathematical definition of consistency that I was referring to. It
basically means that you can prove that a model can't be used to create a
contradiction. In maths, any model where you can't prove that is disqualified
for most work.

Problem is, the numbers we use don't actually satisfy that standard. There is
at least a chance that it isn't possible to create a correct model at all
using what we generally call "numbers". If someone were to stand up and
"complete" Godel's work, so to speak, that would invalidate all of science
(Godel proved it isn't possible to prove science correct, so completing his
project would be to find an actual deep, unsolveable problem with numbers. A
number of good candidates have crept up over the years, famously the axiom of
choice debacle, and a lot of interesting paradoxes, like "does the collection
that contains every collection that doesn't contain itself contain itself ?"
(last 4 words - not a typo))

There's actually 3 different consistency standards for models (and number 4 is
that it's not consistent at all):

1) consistent <\- we can prove it !

2) inconsistent <\- we don't know, but we may find out at some point in the
future

3) inconsistent <\- we don't know, and we can prove we don't know, that we
will never know

4) inconsistent <\- we have an actual counterexample, and thus a proof that
it's inconsistent

Science falls in the third category. So does (Christian) religion [1]. There
is no real difference in consistency between science and faith by this
standard. Problem is that other standards have similar problems. Again a
distinction should be made between different religions, as there's only one
where I've ever seen any serious discussion on the side of the religion.

a) verifiability : faith is not verifiable. A Christian would say that's part
of the point. Of course, neither are most sciences. Certain aspects of
mathematics are not verifiable (the other godel theorem), either not at all,
not by any finite procedure, or not by any reasonable amount of effort. For
physics there is actually only a relatively small portion that is directly
verifiable, and once you go down the ladder ... verifiability becomes a
distant memory by the time you get to things like history.

Btw: a misconception you seem to have is that theories get modified because of
inconsistencies. Well, I'm not saying it never happens, but in practice
theories get modified because there's a need for it. Architecture, for
example, works with pre-Newtonian physics (buildings architects calculate on
stand on a disc suspended in space, with a constant gravity vector straight
down, in a barely viscous liquid. Has been that way since before Newton was
born, and there's no good reason to change it, so nobody did (in fact there's
good reasons not to change it, complexity for one)). Yes this is the
utilitarian argument, but it's true. It may not control all academic activity
but it controls 99.99% or more. If anything, it's been getting worse.

An illustration of that fact can be found in physics for example. Relativity
was discovered because of the black body problem. You see, Newtonian physics
predict that if you heat up any object, the universe should explode. Obviously
it doesn't, and this was an eyesore. Now keep in mind that Einstein was a
patent office clerk with a weird hobby, and this is no coincidence : there
wasn't all that much attention going to that problem. Every theory has
eyesores. Currently there are 2 huge established theories, and one that
everybody believes in but no convincing predictions have been made using it.
Here's the current eyesores : relativity theory only has gravity, doesn't have
particles or any force (gravity's not actually a force in that theory), has a
continuous infinite universe that is either flat or just ever so slightly bent
(like a millimeter per lightyear or so). The standard model doesn't have
gravity, yet things fall, it has a discontiuous universe that is bent twisted
and shifting beyond recognition at small scales, it fails to predict large
scale objects in any reasonable manner (e.g. large scale universe is obviously
mostly flat ... why ? How does the shifting particle soup that is the standard
model's playground become the flat expanse we call space where a photon can
fly undisturbed for millions of lightyears ? This, to me, is not a small
detail you can just gloss over), yet we can design things like cell phone
radios and cpus using it. Then there's string theory ... string theory however
is a theory with so many open ends that you can do pretty much anything what
you want with it. It answers the question "hows does the universe work", by
giving you a brainfuck compiler and get cracking on a simulation, stating that
the answer is in there (and of course, it is, in the sense that you can
probably write a correct simulation in it). Those are current eyesores. I sure
hope some people at the patent office are about to fix them, because I doubt
significant heyway will be made any time soon.

b) predictability. I would argue that religion makes predictions, and I would
argue that, averaged, they're pretty good. E.g. islam says camel piss is good
for you [2]. This sounds ridiculous of course, but taking 2 facts into account
it makes sense, somewhat. First urine is the one bodily liquid that is
sterile. If you care about disease spreading, you can't eat or touch the same
food as someone else, you can't drink the same water, you of course can't have
sex or other things that exchange bodily fluids, certainly not with animals,
but urine is an exception, it's fine, it's sterile, it's safe. If you don't
have a water source you trust, camel piss may be preferable. Knowing that
poisoning water supplies was standard Roman army practice, it may make sense
if you're waging a war on them. Eventually of course, it'll kill you, but only
after months of drinking it. But it's not a stupid, random piece of gibberish
either. And religion certainly makes predictions about what will happen, most
of which you'll find yourself in agreement with.

A lot of sciences don't care about predictability. Maths would be one example.
We study models, because of their implications, and because we like the idea
of, shall we say, "classifying" logic. This is a fool's errand, but it's fun.
"This does not predict a thing" is a perfectly valid criticism of all but one
project I'm involved in, and that's because it's beside the point.

Obviously predictive ability is one aspect of the utilitarian view of science,
so it can't be ignored completely. But most physics theories that are being
actually worked on (in other words : string theory and nothing else), do not
have any demonstrated predictive ability that I am aware of.

And how does e.g. history fit in with predictability at all ? I would argue
that religion definitely scores higher on predictive ability than the
humanities, somewhat lower than most exact sciences.

c) falsifiability. Again most sciences aren't falsifiable. Mathematical models
work with axioms, and falsifying correctly constructed models is impossible
(with of course, the glaring exception of the natural numbers (and thus
rational numbers, and real numbers, complex numbers and anything based on
them), which we know may be falsifiable. This is considered very, very bad)

But string theory for example isn't falsifiable. And again, how does that work
for the humanities ? Any statistical work effectively isn't falsifiable. Take
climate theory for example. It hangs together from approximated differential
equations. The predictions made using them by the IPCC in 1990's ... well,
they were wrong. I mean I'm not saying the earth isn't warming, but the IPCC's
numbers from the 1990s are bullshit, but they correctly point out that that
doesn't actually falsifies their models' claims (although, frankly, it does
prove their error margins calculation is ridiculous). They only claim that to
a best approximation, their model is what should happen to the variables
they're monitoring over time. Medicine is the same. For most medicines we have
a double blind study. Now you should think, really hard, about what the exact
claim is that is made by those studies and how it's verified. You'll see the
truck-sized hole in the thinking.

d) ...

The greater point here is that these are all standards of correctness,
trustworthiness, "truth". They're all different, they all have their uses, and
they are followed in various ways by various sciences. Within individual
sciences, there tends to be a whole spectrum of theories that rank differently
on all of these standards. Religion is no different. It simply has a place on
the spectrum, just like any science does. Various components of religion very
on where they fall on all these standards.

But it is certainly not the case that sciences score higher than religion on
all of these standards, it is simply the case that there is utilitarian need
for both, and for criticism of both. Science has it's uses, and so does
religion. Where things fall on standards of consistency, falsifiability,
predictive ability, ... is simply a property of whatever fills that particular
niche best.

[1]
[https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/RammReconcile.HTM](https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/RammReconcile.HTM)
[2]
[https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201204210704...](https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120421070459AAEj4y6)

~~~
acct_0053
I'm definitely out of my league here, but it seems like you're
overcomplicating the question.

I won't pretend to be qualified to say whether you are right or wrong, but I'd
like to make a few points.

I get the impression that you are trying to address whether science is as
[in]consistent with itself as religion is [in]consistent with itself in their
attempts to land upon some truth or as another commenter put it, "model of our
world".

But the question posed by the article is whether science is consistent with
faith. For the author, it is. At least a few commenters are simply stating
that the reasons given by the author for this consistency don't resonate with
them.

It's also worth noting that while you're using a "mathematical definition of
consistency", the commenters you are refuting are probably just meaning that
whatever conclusions one reaches via the scientific method are often in
disagreement with those arrived at via faith. Now, I don't know what the
Christian faith tells us about String Theory - heck, I don't even know enough
about what science says about string theory to speak of it with any clarity.
But I do know that with the help of science we can figure that the earth we
live on is spheroid and revolves around the sun, and I know that the Bible
hints slightly at a vastly different conclusion, or at least it was
interpreted to do so at one time. On one side of the coin, we can look at
evidence, or at the very least hold a theory as probable - and if it's
falsified - well it's sad, but the theory changes to better suit the findings.
On the other side of the coin, we must take somebody's unchanging word for it,
and maybe revisit our interpretations of the same idea only if we're forced to
- and otherwise, any objections must be false. I just don't see how anyone can
say there's no difference there.

~~~
waps
It's not just about consistency. The post mentioned 5 different standards of
"truth". In reality the method we use to judge something to be true or false
is not uniform : there are lots of variations, even within single sciences.

My point is that for all the methods the parent poster pointed out, science
does not actually fare better than (Christian) faith, barring a few
exceptions.

He cherry-picks little pieces of specific theories that satisfy a high
standard of truth, I merely point out that, first that does not mean science
as a whole satisfies that standard, second you can do the same for the bible.
And, when it comes to historical opinions that were held up using less-than-
gentle means, science also has loads of black spots. E.g.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism),
so again that is not a valid criticism of faith, or at least isn't black and
white.

As an alternative I defend utilitarianism : scientific theories are not true
or false, or better or worse than the bible, but they are more useful in some
cases. Nobody will design a cell phone using the bible. Nobody should base
their moral decisions on biology.

The big problem here seems to be that Christianity uses internally the same
standards of truth to some extent, and so it can be attacked on those points.
It's actually pretty consistent so I think the attacks against it are less
than convincing, because there is no better alternative, there is just a
completely unjustified faith in science that makes no sense whatsoever :
logic, the branch that actually analyses whether science could be wrong and
how and why trust in science should exist, has a simple conclusion since the
1950s or so : science fails it's own standards. Somehow this part is always
missing from these arguments : there is nothing to back them.

------
n0rm
This (short) book gives a sense of the "faith" required for scientists -
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13574594-ignorance](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13574594-ignorance)

------
taksintik
I think "faith" is the operative word here. I don't believe our "religions"
are congruent with science. I have faith in science!

------
SNvD7vEJ
"religious insights" he says ...

"religious delusion" I'd say.

IMHO, thinking that science and religion would not be in conflict is just an
even worse level of delusion.

