"The good thing about science..."

[avevale_intelligencer]

"...is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

I woke up this morning (please stop strumming that guitar) and practically the first thing I saw when I looked at the net was tthis statement, attractively printed on a t-shirt and attributed to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the darling of the Smart Set.

You have to admire it. It's textbook. The perfect example of the stealth insult. On a personal level the equivalent would be something like "the thing I love best about my mom is that she's not a cheap whore." It's got absolute plausible deniability. Hey, the guy's just talking about his mom. Implying? He's not implying anything. What you choose to read into what he's saying, why, that's up to you. Geez. Touch-eee. Maybe, you know, if you're so sensitive about it, maybe there's something about your mom you don't want people to know, hmmm?

And of course, it's perfectly true. Isn't it?

Well, let's just examine it for a moment.

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

For a start, it's badly phrased. "Science" cannot be true or false. It's a method, a methodology if you like, for finding and communicating facts. It cannot in itself be true or false, any more than "language" can be true or false in itself (Gödel). The statement should, I think, read "The good thing about the things science tells us is that they're true whether or not you believe in them." Yes, I think that's better. Not so good as a soundbite, but more accurate, and undeniably true. Isn't it?

I wonder, was it true in the sixteenth century? The seventeenth? The eighteenth? The nineteenth? I don't think so. What science told us then has since been revealed as only partially true, if that. Even what science told us in the twentieth century has been called into question in light of facts we couldn't discover, or prove, in previous epochs. Science is an ongoing process, every true scientist will tell you that.

So can we go with "The good thing about the things science tells us now is that they're true whether or not you believe in them"?

You know, I'm not sure we can. I'm not sure that, without cognisance of what science may tell us in the future, we can thus privilege its utterances now. If they had tried that in previous centuries, after all, they would have been embarrassingly wrong about a lot of things. But let's not get too bogged down in details. The scientific method is, after all, one of proven reliability, all our technologies are based on the things it has told us that have by chance turned out to be at least apparently true, and I'm sure it will one day come up with definite answers to our questions that will not be superseded by later discoveries. So we can arrive, finally, at an unchallengeable reformulation of Dr Tyson's statement:

"The good thing about the things I believe science will tell us one day is that they'll be true whether or not you believe in them."

Now that's a true statement, and I do believe it.

But we're not done yet. What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and all that. Is there such a thing as a statement that is true if you believe in it and not true if you don't? Dr Tyson seems to think there might be, but I'm not so sure. I'm a simple sort of soul; to me there is true and not true. If my shirt is green, no amount of belief on my part will make it red. If there is no invisible unicorn in this room, no amount of belief on my part will make there be one. I'm not in a position to prove either of these things--you might all believe my shirt is green, just as I do, but that doesn't constitute evidence that it is, and I don't have the kit for spectral analysis of the dyes--but that has no bearing on whether they are true or false. If there is an invisible unicorn in this room, then there is, just as there were (presumably) quarks and Higgs bosons and dark matter in Galileo's time even though they had no way of knowing it, or proving it with their science. If there is something true that science cannot prove right now, then it is true nonetheless, and belief is as irrelevant to that as it is to the things that it has (provisionally) proved.

The good thing about things that are true is that they are true whether or not you can prove them, with science or in any other way.

I ought to put that on a t-shirt.

Comments

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

And maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about science in the abstract - the scientific method and so on - not the results it has produced so far. Mr Tyson is a good scientist and would be fully aware of the falseness of the idea that what we know now is the Truth.

The point he is trying to make, I think, is that science is demonstrable in this Universe, whereas most (all?) other systems of belief are dependant on us assuming things like - for example - the fact we didn't have a bad harvest this year is because everyone behaved themselves and prayed to the deity(ies) correctly. Scientific research - done correctly - produces consistent results, praying to the deity(ies) doesn't seem to.

Of course, that inconsistency may be because humans are praying to the wrong deity(ies), or doing it the wrong way, or something similar.

Hmm, now here's a thought. Has anyone done a comparison of (say) incidence of famine for areas worshipping different deities - or worshipping the same deity(ies) in different ways? If there is differences, that would be interesting. Though taking factors like differences in population and agricultural practices might be difficult. And I'm not sure what it would mean if the different areas had the same incident of famine. Though I do know how it would be interpreted by certain groups (including atheists).

And yes, I know that is applying the scientific method to religion, but so what. Contrary to what is often claimed, science does NOT require the non-existence of a godhead to work. The inability of (for example) literalist christians to accept scientific results (though they often seem happy enough to accept the resulting technology) is because there are glaring gaps between what they interpret the Bible as saying is true about the universe and its history and what Science claims to be true about them. In other words, the discrepancy is in their particular beliefs, not inherent in the idea of a deity.

By the way, I don't know whether you saw someone claiming that the earthquake near Thanet in Kent was a result of the local council in Thanet changing hands - to UKIP - on May the 7th? Makes a change from the gays (and same-sex marriage) being blamed for everything nasty nature throws at us.

And you are right, the Truth, whatever it is, is true no matter what we individually do or don't believe. Whether it be what is revealed by the scientific method, or by some (already known, or as yet unknown) "holy" text.

This was going to be a one line comment, but it seems to have got away from me. Sorry about that.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Not at all. I always enjoy your comments and find them thought-provoking. And the fact that you couldn't debunk my entire argument in one line gives me hope for myself. :)

Science is very good at doing what science does. Praying to deities, admittedly, is apparently seldom effective, but perhaps that's because it's rather like millions of people all trying to do different experiments in the same laboratory, with the same equipment, and hoping for different results. It's entirely possible that when one small god was worshipped by one small tribe who all wanted the same relatively small things, it worked a lot better. I find that far more plausible than the idea that people just carried on doing something that they could see wasn't working. I don't believe in the "everyone but me is stupid" line so popular among modern, er, thinkers.

It's also possible (though less likely, I admit) that the various nasty things nature throws at us, or the ones that aren't our fault, are some god's way of trying to tell us to STOP SHOUTING AND LET IT THINK.

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

You say the nicest things. :-)

I wasn't trying to debunk you, just to point out that there is another reading of the quote you had omitted.

As for people not keeping on trying the same thing if it doesn't work? Not sure I agree with you on that one.

Historically, many religious groups like to keep their followers separated from their non-believing neighbours, and often damn them (literally) as some sort of monster. Indeed, if one sees the blood-libel, historically common in Europe, as a claim of child abuse (amongst other things), then I would point out that the tradition is still alive and well in Christianity's outer areas - there are many christians who genuinely have been taught that homosexual should be spelt paedophile (or pedophile, though I've always suspected this is from the latin podus - foot - as opposed to the greek paedo - boy). And it is hard to choose an alternative explanation when you have no opportunity to learn of any alternative.

Also it is worth noting that many religions have get-out clauses built in. Christians claim God moves in mysterious ways, that there WILL be justice, even if only in the next life, and that God knows what is best for you (even if that best is a slow and agonising death from - say - cancer).

And there is always the good old fashioned it's a punishment for your past sins (or maybe for Adam's sins). On this last point it is worth pointing out that (a) Jesus - if the Gospels are correct, seems to have believed this and (b) this is a favoured even when the "sin" is being born infected by HIV somewhere where there is little chance of access to treatment.

Islam certainly seems (as far as I can make out from chatting to muslims) to have a similar range of justifications/excuses.

Nor is the argument limited to Abrahamic religions.

The "in your best interest" argument, actually about cancer, was once used to me by someone trying to convince me to try Nichiren Buddhism.

And I recently was told by someone trying to persuade me to worship Lord Krishna, in as many words, that the suffering of the people who were sent to Auschwitz, Belsen, Mathausen and the like, was their just karmic reward for sins in their past lives. Yes, he said almost exactly those words.

When you accept that sort of belief, I don't honestly think it is hard for them to accept that the latest misfortune (broken down car, poor harvest, loss of a child, diagnosis of a fatal disease) is your just deserts, and that worshipping ((insert deity or deities name(s) here)) is working fine. For the priest, at least.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, as I said, I reject the idea that the majority of humanity is softer in the head than I am, or has ever been in the past. Even were it true, it would be a pernicious thing for me to believe, and I never will.

The common factor in all your examples is that they all happened after Christianity went big time and religions began to think global. The suggestion I made in the comment was referring to a time before that, starting with, say, the wolf god of the Red Rock people, who only had to ensure good hunting in one fairly small valley, and ending somewhere between ancient Egypt and ancient Rome. That's enough of a span of time for the idea that praying to gods worked to become established in people's collective unconscious or whatever. And as I say, I find it impossible to believe that people carried on doing something that never worked for thousands of years. (We aren't still using square wheels...)

I agree that the rationalisations people manage to come up with nowadays for things like that are fairly startling, but that's true of everything, not just religion. The Green Party discussion groups were full this past month of people coming up with reasons why we did so badly that didn't boil down to "nobody wanted to vote for us."

Robert Anton Wilson described the human mind as consisting of the Thinker and the Prover; one part thinks of things and the other comes up with ways to prove them, and it always does. When it comes to physical phenomena, the scientific method is a good way to stop the Prover getting away with it too easily, but when dealing with things that can't be proved or disproved by physical observation, scientific method can't get a grip. Which is why, while it's a good thing, it's not everything.

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

I'll try and make this short.

I know what you meant that about small tribes, but my point is that people thought it their religious practices did work, and rationalised away (or had rationalised away for them by their soi-disant elders and betters) the bad results. Unlike us they didn't (or weren't allowed to) see them as failures. So they had no reason (as we understand the term) to abandon their beliefs.

To take an example outside the mainstream of religions, everyone in the Aztec Empire "knew" that it was necessary for some people (often children) to be sacrificed in order for the rains to come. And so, when people were, and the rains came, it was seen as proof that the sacrifice was effective.

Oh, and a correction (as I can't edit the last entry I made for some reason, in paragraph 4 podus should read pedus and paedo should read paedos. My own fault for trying to show off without checking my facts first. :-(

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I don't agree. Rationalisation on that order requires a degree of intellectual sophistication (*not* the same as intelligence) to which we are thoroughly used, but which I think would have been completely foreign to people in that time, and obviously counter-productive. I don't believe they would have allowed themselves to be so easily fooled, whereas we of course do so every day.

The Aztecs were perfectly capable of assassinating an incompetent ruler, as they in fact did in 1486 according to Wikipedia. Would they have put up with an incompetent god? I don't think so. It may not be very nice to think that their god actually sustained them in return for human sacrifices, but it's not very nice to think about Stephen Fry's famous burrowing flies either. Maybe it's a good thing that the Aztec gods were unable to deal effectively with smallpox and sophisticated Spanish weaponry.

Pedophile meaning foot lover would be a Latin-Greek hybrid, so you were more correct the first time. :) But we seem to be less careful about Latin-Greek hybrids these days. I blame television. :)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

(LJ doesn't let you edit a comment once it's been replied to. Sorry about that.)