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Re: Science - what is it?

By: Armp in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Fri, 24 Jul 15 3:54 PM | 168 view(s)
Boardmark this board | The Trust Matrix 		Msg. 17198 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 17193 by Cactus Flower)
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Alea

After signing off here last night I began reading this book based by a David Munchin based on his doctoral thesis.

Is Theology a Science?
The Nature of the Scientific Enterprise in the Scientific Theology of Thomas Forsyth Torrance
and the Anarchic Epistemology of Paul Feyerabend
ISBN 978-90-04-19459-5
He reviews the history of the term. One thing it cleared up for me is his saying that in some cultures it is assumed that the term applies only to theistic formulations of spirituality.

From the preface
“Contemporary culture’s preference for simplistic and antithetical disjunctions – fact and value, fact and opinion, faith and reason – is deeply pervasive and damaging. This book is concerned with a further dichotomy. “To assert that a person, or his idea, is ‘unscientific’ is the severest charge.” Faith and science have become antithetical terms, the former often lazily assumed to be simply a series of pragmatic psycho- logical projections. Such a dichotomy is dry and potent fuel to the gospel’s modern day cultured despisers, grown fat upon the legacy of centuries of supposed conflict between science and religion. However the conflict hypothesis ignores the work of philosophers of science, who note that ‘scientific’ is a contested notion. What counts as ‘scientific’ or often ‘scientific evidence’ is itself conditioned by political, philosophical and cultural factors. Examination of the notion of the ‘scientific’ reveals that our lazy dichotomy will not do – faith is not opposed to science, and by implication scholarship, warranted knowledge and ultimately truth.
From the introduction
“Theology must take account of and account for, the shifting nature of scientific knowledge, as well as respond to pressures, discoveries and fashions within its own discipline. Indeed the fact that natural science is constantly changing, sometimes in a way which repudiates previously strongly held theories, should serve as a warning to those who criticize theology for not having an easily identifiable and unshifting core paradigm, by demonstrating that change and revision is always a product of the scientific method.
Not only does the content of natural science change, but particularly in the past century, there has been an increased interest in the distinct discipline of the philosophy of science. Such a discipline deals with questions concerning the nature and the boundaries of the scientific enterprise: what are the defining characteristics of a science? How has science functioned (descriptive)? How can we tell good science from bad (prescriptive)? Also, particularly since the controversy surrounding logical positivism, it seeks to evaluate the relative epistemic value of the findings of the various sciences and non-sciences, however those taxonomies are drawn up. Theologians have therefore found it fruitful to use the categories of the philosophy of science to answer questions relating to the scientific status of their own discipline, and its relation to those disciplines considered exemplarily scientific. This raises both a semantic problem – what activities fall under the scope of the word ‘science’? – and a more epistemically substantive question about the nature of the scientific enterprise.

Adding to your reply I feel a need to clarify one point - I am not trying to convince people that their understanding of the scientific method is outdated. I'm wrestling with the notion myself.

What I am failing to communicate to you in the nature of current scientific studies is the distance between observation and hypothesis. When observing a falling apple and forming a hypothesis the two are closely connected. Whereas when devising a device to perform a function on objects too small to be seen or measured one can only measure the aftermath in some second order removed feature. The device itself operating on the objects is also too distant to be seen and operates at a scale too small to be measured and too quickly to be observed. One can proceed by the brute force old method of science, iteration upon iteration, until data emerges that feeds an interpretation. Or, one can and usually does, form a model and tests the efficacy of the model while at no time being able to measure or see or observe anything directly. Why is this method suddenly rejected as valid if it is used by a theologian?

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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Science - what is it?
By: Cactus Flower in ALEA
Fri, 24 Jul 15 6:30 AM 		Msg. 17193 of 54959

Is it possible that the reason you seem to be having a hard time convincing some people that their understanding of the scientific method is outdated is because they actually think they are observing its elements in your business model?

Some quotes from your post appear to suggest a more traditional approach than you otherwise suggest:

"I employ people with keen observational skills to discover the leading edge, to keep pushing the boundary."

"Its strength is in an improved (broadened in this case) ability to predict outcomes in new territories where my model failed to make useful predictions."

"Then the PhDs follow behind with an explanation that sometimes is immediate and at other times takes many years. The success of the PhDs (called scientists) allows my engineers to better apply and refine applying the results thereby leading to new technology."

From these lines of your description, it looks to me that observation, prediction, hypothesis, disproof, adaptation and explanation are parts of your improvement process. And I am not sure how you capture improved outcomes from predictions without measuring them.

For another perspective, here's how the UK science council defines science:

"Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Scientific methodology includes the following:

Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)

Evidence

Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses

Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples

Repetition

Critical analysis

Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment"

Having observed all of this, the initial process of creativity, scientific and otherwise, is as close to magical as we come. Where do ideas emerge from?

For me, that part of the process is probably impervious to a general explanation for the moment. How did Einstein think all the way up to his equations? How did Michelangelo know David was inside that block of marble? I dunno. Science tests creative thinking of certain types. But the scientific method doesn't explain the origin of ideas.

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