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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (284628)	12/4/2015 12:03:19 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541853

I think what some people call "faith" in science, is really a reliance on data Yes exactly. But I don't call it "faith" every time I sit in a chair that it won't collapse. Chairs do occasionally collapse, but by experience we know it is generally safe to sit in them. If chairs generally did collapse yet a person persisted in sitting down every time with the expectation that it won't collapse, then that would be faith in action.

To: epicure who wrote (284628)	12/4/2015 12:25:01 PM
From: Cautious_Optimist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541853

Enlightenment philosophers illuminated the problem centuries ago. Unquestioned belief in a supernatural is a vulnerability for being controlled. It BEGINS with an immutable bias to a narrative, that generally serves a powerful enterprise or elite. Often an enterprise or elite exploits the human vulnerability, themselves governed not by a deity, but an amoral "objective" marketplace where as the "winners" they understand how to exploit the faithful believers. (See Trump, Big Oil, Pharma...) Democracy was a revolution, based on reason, distributing knowledge and power, and rejection of logical fallacy which includes a lot of old religious thinking. Understanding math and statistics without bias, casinos make $Billions off our human propensity for logical fallacy - like praying or acting out an OCD behavior so the dice won't be a seven or the slot machine will hit the jackpot. Math and statistics require critical thinking; blindfaith suspends the same. The faithful are exploited by the greedy who's "God" is power and $$$, who buy our democracy for themselves. IMHO

To: epicure who wrote (284628)	12/4/2015 4:15:07 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541853

Sorry, but that is not what faith in science means. To have faith in science means that you believe science will come true and will answer your questions/needs (eventually) even though there are so many things for which it has no answers and there are so many things where the observations are outright contradictory. It also means faith in its "priests" - be they doctors, scientists, or even teachers. We have faith that their interpretation of data and the scripts is the right one, even though so many people are misdiagnosed (through no fault of the practitioner) and so much of science has been revised and discarded. We see the evidence of science to have been wrong before, but we call that progress. "We did not know/have all the facts/understand/...before, but now we know better." I completely agree that updating scientific texts and revising the practice in the face of new discoveries, solutions, etc is the right thing to do. That part is not faith. The faith part is that you are willing to risk your life and more based on the current state of science. Any rational analysis will tell you that science could be wrong now as it has been in the past and that next month this position could be reversed (think postmenopausal estrogen therapy as a small example). But we have faith that science right, or at least is the best way forward.