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I would add to this by positing this is not just American culture. I think all people are religious by nature, even the most rational scientist has their inexpl

by ravar 9y ago

I would add to this by positing this is not just American culture. I think all people are religious by nature, even the most rational scientist has their inexplicable religious rituals. My thought on this is that the world is simply too complicated to operate in, and everyone is looking for a system that has the answers. It is a form of compression. You don't have to handle the flow of complexity because someone else tells you the correct move. Catholicism did this, it said that it had all the answers. Science wants to provide all the answers, and tries to advertise itself as such. However, as the post modernists identified science only gives you the facts, but there are infinite ways to interpret the facts. You need a value structure, a religion maybe, to interpret the facts. I think this is the religion that you have identified.

nine_k 9y ago
I do agree with the general point: people need answers, so they usually keep some postulates as true without further discussion, and build reasoning on top of them. This makes a lot of pragmatic sense. Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable). So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.
- ravar 9y ago
  Good catch, I did say it wants to provide all the answers, but I guess that wasn't exactly the idea I was trying to get at. I think the more fleshed out idea is that some people want science to provide all the answers. These people, like Sam Harris, advertise science as capable of providing the answers, but Sam Harris is not exactly a practicing scientist, although he does have a PhD. It seems we are mostly in agreement. What I am trying to get is many people do look towards "science" and "reason" as sources of salvation. Regardless of whether or not science advertises itself that way.

by ravar 9y ago

nine_k 9y ago

I do agree with the general point: people need answers, so they usually keep some postulates as true without further discussion, and build reasoning on top of them. This makes a lot of pragmatic sense. Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable). So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.

ravar 9y ago
Good catch, I did say it wants to provide all the answers, but I guess that wasn't exactly the idea I was trying to get at. I think the more fleshed out idea is that some people want science to provide all the answers. These people, like Sam Harris, advertise science as capable of providing the answers, but Sam Harris is not exactly a practicing scientist, although he does have a PhD. It seems we are mostly in agreement. What I am trying to get is many people do look towards "science" and "reason" as sources of salvation. Regardless of whether or not science advertises itself that way.