Religious Science

I recently wasted a good part of two days in fruitless argument with another blogger. The subject of the argument was a speech by the science fiction writer Michael Crichton, in which he cited SETI and global warming, together with some other once popular but now discredited ideas as examples of "consensus science," which he called not science but religion. More broadly, he claimed that believing something untested was religion not science.

Anyway, with that as prolog, I was very interested to see this article in the NYT, in which several scientists answer the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" A lot of the usual suspects showed up - god exists, god doesn't exist, true love exists and rats have feelings. A few that caught my eye were:

Roger Shank
...I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.

This might explain why my debate opponent and I couldn't find common ground!

Phillip W. Anderson
Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.

My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance...

Anderson is a Nobel prize winner, and one of the most creative physicists of his generation. He also has a long standing beef with particle physics, and many think his opposition might have been fatal to the Super Conducting Super Collider, the giant accelerator that was killed when partially built. Weinberg even joked that they should have named the "Higgs" particle the "Anderson" particle and then he might not have been so intransigent.

I personally will be disappointed if Anderson turn out to be right and string theory turns out to be completely wrong, or, even worse, completely untestable.

Alison Gopnik
I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are...

Amen to that! I recall my then 17 year old son and I watching some young children play in a park once. After several minutes he said: "You know, only little kids are truly alive."

Besides being one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, Neil Bohr was famous for his subtly barbed aphorisms. One of my favorites goes something like this: There are two kinds of truths, ordinary truths and great truths. Ordinary truths are just those statements whose opposites are falsehoods. The opposites of great truths are also great truths.

All the statements above (and the others in the article) fit in the great truth model - at least for now.

Many years ago, I bought a book by George Santayana called Skepticism and Animal Faith. I can't recall ever reading it, but somehow I formed the impression (quite likely wrong!) that part of his point was that skepticism can only take you so far - ultimately you have to fall back on some prerational, instinctive ideas to operate in the world. I really like this notion, whether or not it was really Santayana's. I think that is part of what Roger Shank was talking about.

Which brings me back to my starting point: Intractable disagreements, I guess, have their origins more in the irrational than the rational. People may think they know why they are Democrats or Republicans, Liberals or Conservatives, string theorists or LQGers, but the real roots are in the subtle texture of instinct and experience, not reason.

It might have been Bertrand Russell (I can't tell English Lords apart) who said that he thought that honest men couldn't disagree if the terms were defined carefully enough. Of course none of us is completely honest and it's pretty hard to define terms that precisely - didn't it take Russell and Whitehead something like 348 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2?

I've got a lot of these prejudices myself, of course. My favorite one is that intelligent people can change their minds.

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