What fairy tales are you referring too? I don't follow fairy tales myself anymore than I believe in a bearded man in the sky, I'm a bit curious and so had to ask. I find limited minds to be those who are strictly binary, ON/OFF, and those with absence of imagination. To name but two. Having the brain work in useless data sense without allowing the person to observe his own brain working disables that person, furthermore, it also kills imagination. Imagination has no limits and no boundaries, this is important: Especially in science. It, among other things, paves the way for ideas.
Things like creation myths, miracles, that sort of thing. Yes imagination and creativity are an important aspect of things such as art and science. As a gamer I enjoy fiction. The problem is when imagination starts defining our reality. Then you end up with silly things like scientology and unusual religious ceremonies and traditions.
There is this urban myth that thousands of kids growing up watching Star Trek were inspired by this fairy tale to become engineers, and then make that vision reality. We certainly got flip-top communicators, handheld diagnostic devices, tricorders, tablet computers, and as we speak scientists are tinkering away at interstellar propulsion and teleport technologies (still a long way off, that). On a more mundane basis, electricity coming from wall sockets, light at the flick of a switch, drinking water at the turn of a tap, central heating; all that stuff would be as magic two hundred years ago, and is the product of humanity's wishful thinking. You say that reality is wonderful? Only because we have the imagination to conceive it. Because most of reality is not visible to the naked eye. It is only because we can understand and imagine what really is going on that we experience a sense of wonder. When I look at a beehive, I don't see 60000 stinging insects but a highly organised hive with a Queen laying 1000 eggs a day, complex behaviour patterns interlocking into a perfectly balanced ecosystem. The honey bee has the biggest brain amongst insects. It has spatial and temporal navigation. It sees polarised light and wavelengths we can't. Every spoon of honey it produces contains the nectar of over a million flowers. I can appreciate this reality because I have imagination. With imagination is where it all starts, not with an acceptance of physical reality as being what it appears to be. We think in story, so our imagination creates fairy tales. Then we start trying to make them real. A byproduct of that is religion, which happens to have psychological functions and happens to convey some survival advantages of its own. So like it or not, it's an inevitable part of bring human, and for some people it has a function, so it's here to stay. To rail against it as 'irrational'... lacks imagination.
Imagination good Imagination in place of reality bad. Are you saying we as species are inherently rational then?
As a species we are inherently irrational. It's why we need scientific discipline. You are making the mistake of thinking that religion, being a product of human imagination, displaces reality; that people who conceive of God cannot perceive physical reality. That is nonsense. Generally speaking, religious people have as much or as little grip on reality as non-religious people. We can keep reality and imagination side-by-side in our heads: how things are and how we would like them (or fear them) to be. In fact, for reasons that would take quite a long post to explain, it is absolutely fundamental to how our brain functions, else it would not function at all. It is because of our inherent irrationality that we are able to keep even quite contradictory world views side-by-side in our heads. People can pray to God and take the medication. They can have faith and be scientists. Everything is true, for a given value of 'true'.
No of course not, nothing can displace reality. People who conceive god can of course perceive reality. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to function at all. Not even the slightest little bit. For the most part I agree they have a similar grip on reality. However thinking that they can affect the physical world through the medium of prayer, is an example of where that grip loosens or even just disappears. Its a form of replacing reality with imagination (transubstantiation anyone?) . Again this is quite obvious. Writing a book requires this ability. Or as I posted above preventing imagination from defining reality. In fact being a day to day stable human requires this ability. Its our irrationality that lets people think prayers are helpful, that miracles are real and that you won't see eternal bliss when you die because you had a sneaky hand shandy. This is the side of our irrationality I see as limiting.
We engage in magical thinking all the time. People read horoscopes, wear their lucky underpants to a game, swear at their PC as if it really is going to pull itself together and behave now. We command our pets as if they speak a human language. People who gamble think that they have a system or a lucky streak. We buy lottery tickets, and carefully pick the numbers. We think that although our neighbour got cancer, we will escape it. We are full of delusional ideas about how much we control our environment or how important our decisions are. We are irrational. It is no more limiting than people's crippling self-doubt, or the conviction that their lives are somehow special (it's one of the reasons why people experience PTSD after a traumatic event), or that homosexuality is "unnatural" and shameful. I work every day with people whose lives are ****ed by their dysfunctional beliefs. Very rarely are they religious beliefs--mostly they are about everyday issues of self, life and future.
Yup. The problem is this: we are running on an OS that was randomly bashed out by a million monkeys on typewriters over a few billion years and runs on constantly changing, badly shielded hardware with a lot of legacy design issues. Most people believe all sorts of crazy ****, but they generally are able to keep some perspective. Those who aren't, believe in alien abduction, crystal healing, scientology, fundamentalist religion, political terrorism, White Pride, or David Icke's Lizard Overlords. They all have a hole in their lives that they are trying to fill. Don't overgeneralise the crazies.
The QA process leaves a lot to be desired... Given the variable build quality, how prone hardware and software errors are... I'd RMA the lot tbh...
Totally forgot I had something to reply to in this thread (page 4). The difference between these two species of memes is one of fallibility. While beliefs founded on scientific endeavor can be proven wrong through further evidence, beliefs founded on religion can not. Eugenics, the MMR vaccine scare and any other you care to mention didn't last long. Religious fundamentalism, on the other hand, has been around for millennia. They undermine the memetic immune system, so to speak.
Religion is not unique in that. Any ideology is self-sustaining, cannot be proved and can become pretty fundamentalist. Just look at culture.
I'm afraid that is quite wrong, Science is both a world view & belief system. ...& if Science was not able to upgrade or change these so called facts there would be no progress. These things are an irrelevance & only prove that you misunderstood the point. I type on a keyboard much the same way I walk down the street or any other activity, but this does not prove that Science is not just another world view or belief system
I disagree, before Science 'there was only belief', if Science is supposed to be different from what came before, it's up to Science to make the case why that is so. Who claimed what first on an internet forum does not come into it. You have to make the case from an anthropological/historical context. It's very easy to mistake cultural resonance for logic & anyway all these things are just mind constructs, at the end of the day the Universe is ultimately unknowable, any attempts to claim identity for something that's unknowable will always be an act of faith or belief. The fact is, if humankind progress another 1000yrs then many things we take for fact today will be very different, btw this is logic and reason based on anthropological/historical evidence. The idea that Science is: 'the world view to end all world views because it has stumbled on some absolute truth regarding the nature of the Universe' is faith and belief only(almost every belief system that came before attempts to make the same claim), the historical evidence says otherwise.
Science is a discipline: a way of doing things. It is a process. It is not a world view, belief (system) or a collection of (what are taken at the time as) facts. I think that you are trying to make a distinction between the noumenal world (what is real) and the phenomenal world (what we perceive), alluding to the Kantian view that we inevitably use axioms (mental rules and schema) to interact with the real world to help create the world that exists inside our heads. You could argue that science is another set of axioms, and that the knowledge we obtain through it is inevitably phenomenological. Kant is essentially saying that our perceptions are not wrong, but that the way reason acts on our perceptions alters the way we view the world. We can access the real world of truths, facts and certainties but we can never know what those truths really are. That is true, but some axioms get us closer than others, and are not mere beliefs or assumptions; they are rules based in logic. Maths for instance is a mental construct, but it works when applied as a framework on the noumenal world and moreover like science is able to make predictions about that world that beliefs cannot. Science does not claim to be 'the world view to end all world views because it has stumbled on some absolute truth regarding the nature of the Universe'. It aims to offer a tool for comstructing a useful view of the physical world (not an 'absolutely truthful' one) because its explanations of that world allow us to make reliable predictions of it, and thus manipulate it in a predictable manner. Mere assumptions or beliefs do not allow us to do that.
If we progress 1000 years and what we perceive today as fact is not different then scientists will not have been doing their jobs. Science is the only evidence based methodology we have of observing analysing and drawing conclusions about our surroundings. To say scientists have "stumbled" on information undermines the entire field of science. Science isn't a world view. But you can base your world view on the findings scientists, if you want. You can base it on hansle and gretel too or anything else you might want to.
That is another difference between science and belief systems (thank you for reminding me). Belief systems are self-reinforcing. Science is self-challenging.
One of the things that struck me the most was when a scientists explained how much they try to disprove there own theories. This kinda sums it up http://satblog.methaz.org/?p=302 Sorry if that's off topic, but its always stuck with me
But not all belief systems that extend beyond the purely physical realm go untested. I'm sure most people go through a time of testing or many such times when they question what they believe, when they examine how the things they believe fit with the world around them. I don't know a single mature Christian who hasn't gone through times when their faith has been challenged and seriously examined - even to the point of times when they felt like, or even did, walk away from it. Those people almost always end up with a stronger faith in what they believe than they ever had before. Those beliefs are even refined through these times of examination. On the other hand I completely agree that the ideals of scientific method involve rigorous testing and attempts to falsify the beliefs of the scientists - but that doesn't always happen. Certain areas are too politically charged to even get funding - especially if they're trying to disprove - or may be seen as trying to counter - currently accepted theories (beliefs) on "hot-button" issues. Even if these studies do get funded they usually have a hard time getting published amoung the major scientific publications dealing in that area of science unless the results support the beliefs already prevalent amoung the dominant scientists of the day. Sadly some portion of the results of scientific endeavors is about funding and about what the people in charge of the funding and recognition want to hear. There are times when that's good and keeps out the crazies and times when that stands in the way of discovering and accepting truth. Scientists are not immune to errors in judgment and even fraud to further what they believe or to further their own careers. These errors are even sometimes caused by the enthusiasm of the scientists for what they honestly believe is true. Science should be self-challenging but scientists aren't always. TLDR: You can hold up the beliefs of believers in almost any system of understanding and find faults in the believers and beliefs. You can also find truths and testing of truths there. I believe in the tenets of science. I also believe in a Creator God who wants to have a relationship with me and you. I see no conflict in these two beliefs.
It seems odd that you say "scientific method involve rigorous testing and attempts to falsify the beliefs of the scientists - but that doesn't always happen." While its true all science start with a belief, that belief is then refined into a hypothesis, and further refined to a theory, until eventually reaching a conclusion. Other systems also start with a belief, but this belief is rarely refined into a hypothesis, and never further refined into a theory, or a conclusion.
