{"id":470,"date":"2010-01-18T12:44:20","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T12:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/2010\/01\/science-and-religion-a-reply-to-the-skeptics-ii.html"},"modified":"2010-01-18T12:44:20","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T12:44:20","slug":"science-and-religion-a-reply-to-the-skeptics-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2010\/01\/science-and-religion-a-reply-to-the-skeptics-ii.html","title":{"rendered":"Science and Religion: A Reply to the Skeptics, II."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I slightly revised this second part of the WACCO<\/a> list discussion<\/a> to try and provide more
\nclarity, but the arguments have not been changed (though I added one paragraph to develop a thought more.) This post argues against the adequacy of scientific standards for
\nknowledge as such.<\/p>\n

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

                                                                                            -Hamlet (Shakespeare)<\/font><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/span>
\n<\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

Paul<\/p>\n

Thanks for the kind words
\ndespite our frequent disagreements on this topic.  <\/span>To carry our discussion farther I want to focus on your
\nconcluding paragraph.<\/span><\/p>\n

“To sum up, my main point is
\nthat all scientists know that phenomena that are reported outside of science
\n(no measurements, no reproducibility, no way to study them) are not provable or
\ndisprovable. And even though scientists may get carried away and claim the
\nability to prove universals, mostly they know that isn’t right and they soon
\nback off. This uncertainty that annoys you mostly doesn’t exist. What we do
\nhave are extremely likely negative explanations. But those are not certainty.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I have been getting
\nfrom previous posts is NOT this paragraph, which I think is a very reasonable
\none for a person who has not had a spiritual experience (no matter how defined)
\nand who regards science as the only source of knowledge. The message I have
\nbeen reading is that such and such does NOT exist.  <\/span>If the final paragraph captured the tenor of the discussion,
\nI would not be getting involved even though I do not agree with it
\nentirely.  <\/span>Let me give a perhaps
\noverly long response to this paragraph but with a very different spin on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am as perplexed as anyone
\nthat some phenomena happen when they are not tested and seem not to when they
\nare.  <\/span>I think that realm is smaller
\nthan you do – Dean Radin<\/a>  has some very interesting findings in this area – but it certainly exists.  <\/span>That is I and others say that such and
\nsuch happened, but when an experiment is tried, it does not.  <\/span>I therefore do not put these events in
\nthe category of truth in a strong scientific sense.  <\/span>Does that remove them from truth in every sense? <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To take a very mundane example, not in the anecdotal sense,
\nand while anecdotes are prone to being misunderstood by the person having them,
\nso also are scientific observations as my previous examples from Alfred Wegne<\/a>r  <\/span>and J. Harlan Bretz<\/a>  illustrate.  <\/span>The facts never speak
\nfor themselves but require an interpretive framework.  <\/span>In retrospect what seems obvious may have long been staring
\nearlier generations in the face and been missed because they interpreted it
\nusing very different assumptions about reality.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is repeatability and
\ncontrollability that enables scientists to weed out lots of bad theories. This
\nquality distinguishes scientific knowledge from anecdotal knowledge.  <\/span>The assumption that I question is that
\nnot only are these good methods for discovering error, which is true, but that
\nanything not amenable to these methods does not exist.  <\/span>This does not follow.<\/span><\/p>\n

The difference between
\nscientific knowledge and knowledge based on anecdotes is that the former is
\namenable to scientific examination, has been subjected to it, and has, so far,
\nsurvived the examination.  <\/span>As physicist
\nJohn Ziman<\/a>   <\/span>puts it, scientific knowledge is
\n“reliable knowledge<\/a>.”  <\/span>But anecdotal knowledge
\ninvolves most of what we know that gets us through life.  <\/span>It is less reliable but nonetheless
\nessential to us.<\/span><\/p>\n

You might respond that if we
\nwanted we could subject any anecdotal knowledge claim to scientific
\nexamination.  <\/span>Some would pass, and
\nso be regarded as true, provisionally, whereas that which could not be tested
\nwould not be regarded as knowledge. 
\n<\/span>That would be true for much of it, but not all.  <\/span>Consider intentions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Human beings have develop a
\nvery reliable way of grasping the subjective intentions of others, human and
\noften animal, even though they have never ‘seen’ an intention, never measured
\none in a mathematical sense.  <\/span>Often
\nwe can predict intentional behavior, but with nothing like certainty.  <\/span>Our friends and loved ones still
\nsurprise us, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes unpleasantly. But how do we know
\nthat so and so is good natured, prickly, honest, or flighty?  <\/span>Anecdotally.  <\/span>Yet do we know our friends and loved ones?  <\/span>Do we have true knowledge about
\nthem?  <\/span>I would say yes.<\/span><\/p>\n

So claims to having
\nspiritual experiences are anecdotes: untestable accounts that cannot be
\npredicted.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish to make one basic
\nempirical observation with which I hope you will agree.  <\/span>There is no very interesting
\ncorrelation in any direction between people who report spiritual experiences
\nand their ability to manage day to day life successfully, make important
\ndiscoveries in science, do sophisticated mathematics, or be loving and moral
\npeople.  <\/span>Nor is there such a
\ncorrelation between these issues and those who do not.  <\/span>So there are no external behavioral or
\notherwise measureable factors that enable us to distinguish the two
\npopulations.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I have had certain
\nexperiences you have not.  <\/span>I cannot
\nargue that you should believe in the phenomena I have experienced.  <\/span>To do so would be unreasonable.  <\/span>But I argue it is equally unreasonable
\nfor you to say my experiences were misunderstandings or fantasies or evidence
\nof mental breakdown or laziness when you can point to no independent evidence
\nthis is so beyond the fact that you and others you know have not had them and
\nthe model of reality you use cannot explain them.  <\/span>If we have learned anything this past century, it is that models
\nof reality, even scientific ones, can change drastically and we have no reason
\nto believe the current stage of having two models irreducible to one another,
\nas we do in physics, is the last word. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I take the testimony of
\n‘sacred scriptures’ with as much confidence as you do.   <\/span>That is, very little if any. I
\ntake the testimony of my own eyes a good deal more confidently than you do, and
\nit would be very weird if I didn’t. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, if such phenomena
\nexist, as I have reason to believe they do, they are extremely unlikely to be
\nsubject to scientific standards of examination because some involve the
\npresence of other and possibly superior intelligences that may not be confined
\nto time and space as we are in our normal lives.  <\/span>The problem of devising a double blind experiment gets
\ninsurmountable.  <\/span>It rests on
\nassumptions about reality which are contradicted if such phenomena exist. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The visibility of other
\nphenomena that I have seen but that do not necessarily rely on such
\nintelligence, such as auras, seems to me to fall along a bell shaped
\ncurve.  <\/span>That is, I have met people
\nwho see them far more easily than me – including one woman student of mine who
\ngraduated summa cum laude in mathematics and economics and wrote the best paper
\nof the year in my department at a good liberal arts school back east –
\nGovernment – while she was at it. 
\n<\/span>She told me she had seen this stuff since childhood and had learned to
\n“keep my mouth shut.” <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have frequently met people
\nwho I could teach to see some of these things, but, like me, they had not seen
\nthem until taught.  <\/span>This includes
\nat least one physicist.  <\/span>And I have
\nmet people who, try as they may, could not see them.  <\/span>Perhaps it is sort of like color blindness.  <\/span>Of course light waves can be measured
\neven by people who cannot distinguish colors, but that simply brings us to my
\nearlier point about radiation existing before we could measure it.  <\/span>That we cannot measure something does
\nnot mean we will not be able to in the future.  <\/span>Scientists rightly used that argument for criticizing the
\n“God of the gaps” claim but the logic works both ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Further, it is obvious to
\nanyone who has studied either the history of science or the history of ideas
\nthat many insights have been available for centuries and not been picked up on because
\nthey did not fit in with the received model of reality.  <\/span>Gravity, for example.  <\/span>Aristotle saw something trying to get
\nto the ground rather than being pilled to the ground.  <\/span>Even sights such as that are theory impregnated.  <\/span>When one model changes to another, the
\npreviously ignored or explained away insights are immediately accepted.  <\/span>It’s messy – but where is the document
\nthat says life has to be neat and tidy?<\/span><\/p>\n

This does not mean stuff
\nthat does not accord with traditional models of reality cannot be studied rationally.  <\/span>But the means of study should leave
\nopen the nature of their reality, and then see what can be learned from
\ncomparative cross cultural studies and the like.  <\/span>For example, there is David Hufford’s The Terror That
\nComes in the Nigh<\/a>t<\/i><\/span>.  <\/span>This study is a wonderful example of
\nhow nightmares can be subjected to disciplined study while taking no side at
\nall as to what it  <\/span>really is. (It
\nis not simply a bad dream.) <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I think as a culture we have
\ngotten confused by the following line of reasoning:  <\/span>What is real = what is true = what is scientifically
\ndefensible.  <\/span>Therefore what is real
\nis what is scientifically defensible. 
\n<\/span>Therefore the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are things around us
\nthat are real but not true or false as we usually use those words<\/i><\/span>.  <\/span>Is
\nBeethoven’s music true or false? 
\n<\/span>It can be true or false that Beethoven wrote it, but that is not what I
\nam getting at.  <\/span>Do those categories
\nmake any sense when we experience Beethoven’s music?  <\/span>It is true that we have a certain experience and that it is
\nreal.  <\/span>But is what we experience
\ntrue or false?  <\/span>Is the meaning in
\nBeethoven’s choral part of his 9th<\/sup> Symphony the meaning in
\nSchiller’s poem?  <\/span>Certainly not,
\nfor the piece is beloved by people who speak no German.  <\/span>But the meanings fit.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The experience is real but
\nit takes us to something that cannot be adequately encapsulated in words.  <\/span>It is an arrangement of sound waves
\nthat most of us find beautiful, meaningful, in a nonverbal sense, and can add
\nimmeasureably to the importance and quality of life.  <\/span>But it cannot be reduced to sound waves because sound waves
\ndo not encompass the experience of meaning.  <\/span>Meaning can not be deduced from the physical attributes, the
\nmeaning cannot be put into words or subjected to logical analysis, yet thousands
\nand perhaps millions of people have derived meaning from Beethoven for hundreds
\nof years.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a prosaic example of
\na point that I think covers a wide realm of human experience. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

An added part from the
\noriginal post<\/b>: We are taught in this society that subjectivity is more like the imaginary and arbitrary than like the real. 
\n<\/span>I suggest that the experience of music indicates there is much more to
\nthe issue.  <\/span>Further, I think our
\nstandard definition of ‘real’ carries with it a philosophical bias that real is
\nsomething that things<\/i> have in so far as they are things, objects.  <\/span>That is, reality is inert to minds and
\nwithout intrinsic meaning of its own. 
\n<\/span>When we look at human beings through those filtering lenses we can get
\nknowledge of them that fits that<\/i> definition of reality.  <\/span>But we miss an enormous amount of
\nknowledge about them.  <\/span>The best
\nexample is our loved ones.  <\/span>A
\npolice report is a standard objective account of a person as an object to be
\nidentified and located.  <\/span>But a
\npolice report of a loved one does not even scratch the surface of what they are
\nto us.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back to the original…<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Given this extraordinarily
\nwidespread human experience of meaning in the world independent of the stance
\nwe take towards it, and the lack of any evidence that people like Newton or
\nLeibniz or Bohm were inferior in their critical faculties to people like Hobbes
\nor D’Holbach or Sam Harris, assigning reality only to what can survive
\nscientific investigation through experiment, measurement, and prediction seems
\npretty arbitrary. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A skeptic would leave the
\nquestion open and, it seems to me, only get involved when someone uses
\nnonscientifically derived arguments to try and impose his or her beliefs on
\nothers as “objectively true” or true for those who have never had the
\nexperiences that lead someone to regard it as true to the best of their
\njudgment.  <\/span>i.e. the “Christian”
\nright is fair game, and with them I wish you good hunting! <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I slightly revised this second part of the WACCO list discussion to try and provide more clarity, but the arguments have not been changed (though I added one paragraph to develop a thought more.) This post argues against the adequacy of scientific standards for knowledge as such. 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