Sam Harris has written a terrific response to this year's Edge question: "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"
He proposes that we discard the notion that science is only something that physicists, biologists, chemists, and other obviously science'y types do. Rather...
We must abandon the idea that science is distinct from the rest of human rationality. When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically. And when you’re not, you’re not.
I don't want to quote much more of the piece, because you really should read the whole thing. It isn't very long. I'll include it below in case it ever disappears from Harris' web site and Edge.
Great ideas here. The second time I read it, I got even more out of Harris' essay.
He has helped me better understand what is meant by a scientific worldview. This extends way beyond what most people consider to be in the domain of science. To all of life, really.
(I've added some paragraph breaks to make the essay easier to read.)
From Edge.org:
Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?
Ideas change, and the times we live in change. Perhaps the biggest change today is the rate of change. What established scientific idea is ready to be moved aside so that science can advance?
Our Narrow Definition of “Science”
Search your mind, or pay attention to the conversations you have with other people, and you will discover that there are no real boundaries between science and philosophy—or between those disciplines and any other that attempts to make valid claims about the world on the basis of evidence and logic.
When such claims and their methods of verification admit of experiment and/or mathematical description, we tend to say that our concerns are “scientific”; when they relate to matters more abstract, or to the consistency of our thinking itself, we often say that we are being “philosophical”; when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests “historical” or “journalistic”; and when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he is being “religious.”
The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture. Is the Shroud of Turin a medieval forgery? This is a question of history, of course, and of archaeology, but the techniques of radiocarbon dating make it a question of chemistry and physics as well.
The real distinction we should care about—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones.
The scientific attitude can handle whatever happens to be the case.
Indeed, if the evidence for the inerrancy of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus Christ were good, one could embrace the doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity scientifically. The problem, of course, is that the evidence is either terrible or nonexistent—hence the partition we have erected (in practice, never in principle) between science and religion.
Confusion on this point has spawned many strange ideas about the nature of human knowledge and the limits of “science.” People who fear the encroachment of the scientific attitude—especially those who insist upon the dignity of believing in one or another Iron Age god—will often make derogatory use of words such as materialism, neo-Darwinism, and reductionism, as if those doctrines had some necessary connection to science itself.
There are, of course, good reasons for scientists to be materialist, neo-Darwinian, and reductionist. However, science entails none of those commitments, nor do they entail one another.
If there were evidence for dualism (immaterial souls, reincarnation), one could be a scientist without being a materialist. As it happens, the evidence here is extraordinarily thin, so virtually all scientists are materialists of some sort.
If there were evidence against evolution by natural selection, one could be a scientific materialist without being a neo-Darwinist. But as it happens, the general framework put forward by Darwin is as well established as any other in science.
If there were evidence that complex systems produced phenomena that cannot be understood in terms of their constituent parts, it would be possible to be a neo-Darwinist without being a reductionist. For all practical purposes, that is where most scientists find themselves, because every branch of science beyond physics must resort to concepts that cannot be understood merely in terms of particles and fields.
Many of us have had “philosophical” debates about what to make of this explanatory impasse. Does the fact that we cannot predict the behavior of chickens or fledgling democracies on the basis of quantum mechanics mean that those higher-level phenomena are something other than their underlying physics? I would vote “no” here, but that doesn’t mean I envision a time when we will use only the nouns and verbs of physics to describe the world.
But even if one thinks that the human mind is entirely the product of physics, the reality of consciousness becomes no less wondrous, and the difference between happiness and suffering no less important.
Nor does such a view suggest that we will ever find the emergence of mind from matter fully intelligible; consciousness may always seem like a miracle. In philosophical circles, this is known as “the hard problem of consciousness”—some of us agree that this problem exists, some of us don’t. Should consciousness prove conceptually irreducible, remaining the mysterious ground for all we can conceivably experience or value, the rest of the scientific worldview would remain perfectly intact.
The remedy for all this confusion is simple: We must abandon the idea that science is distinct from the rest of human rationality. When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically. And when you’re not, you’re not.
Read 170 other responses on Edge.org.
Nope, science is different from philosophy - the distinction being that science is based in evidence. In effect, therefore science is limited by what we know.
Philosophy is based in speculation - like mathematics, a branch of philosophy, may even be based on logic, but just because something is logical does not mean it is necessary real.
Science is limited by the evidence and that is why it is the knowledge which is most accurate or that we can be most sure of, yet still it is fallible and constantly being refined and overturned.
Analytical Philosophy based on logic its also limited to only logical possibilities
continental philosophy is pretty much a free for all sett of beliefs not dissimilar to religion - pure speculation, completely unlimited and often completely wrong
It seems the more unlimited the method used to try understand reality, the more inaccurate but conversely its also true that done of sciences greatest theories have started as precisely that, an unsupported hypothesis which goes completely against the conventional wisdom only later to become a scientific theory when the evidence arrives to back it up.
Posted by: George peorgie puddin n pie | January 17, 2014 at 06:03 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS1x-6al2pE
check this out.
it's called
"The Signs of God's Existence"
a scientific look at the issue
Posted by: TheScientist | January 17, 2014 at 10:59 PM
Nice try, "The Scientist". Most readers of this blog will listen to the first 2 minutes of that video and shut it off.
Then, life will go on - as it always has.
Posted by: Willie R. | January 18, 2014 at 07:37 AM
Hi TheScientist. I checked out (some of)‘The Signs of God’s Existence’. It seems to be another re-hash of much of the arguments supporting a God designer - together with accusing science (or whoever) of secularisation of the world through propaganda and programming.
A few points: - It (the intelligent design video) talked of the theory of evolution as a way of denying God. Evolution by natural selection has just provided the evidence that plants and creatures evolved over millions of years – which is not denying God but just presents the facts. If it does not fit in with religious scriptures that is not the fault or intention of the theory.
The Cambrian explosion is instanced as some sort of proof that no life existed before that period insinuating that God created all life then. The evidence show that there were primitive worms, molluscs, jelly fish and sponges emerging many millions of years before that in the Ediacaran Period where many soft bodied fossils have been found.
The question is I feel, “why do faith-based believers in religious scriptures get so defensive and angry to the point of denying facts”? I can only deduce that they have such huge psychological, emotional and cultural investments in their various beliefs they have become part of their identity of ‘who they are’ and to suggest anything that threatens their beliefs in effect threatens the very ‘self structure’ that their lives are based on.
Posted by: Turan | January 18, 2014 at 08:49 AM
"Philosophy done well is science. Philosophy done poorly is .... well ... philosophy."
Posted by: david lane | January 18, 2014 at 02:22 PM