Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

tech_fan
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:44:47 +0000

I agree with the analogy of a club. But those criteria that you don’t think are good enough ARE the rules made by the club.



Jessie – you spent a lot of time around professional scientists in college; how many times did you hear this definition of science or any other discussion of the scientific method? That is a more common thing in grade school, I think… professional scientists just don’t spend much time talking about what rules make their work uniquely scientific because each field passes on these rules like a guild, in an unspoken way through a long and complicated apprenticeship.

The reason is not hard to see. It seems to me that the state of the art analysis of this issue is that rules like the ones you quoted don’t quite produce the boundaries that are, in fact, used to demarcate science. String theory in physics is science, whereas certain crank physics is not, and it’s hard to distinguish between them on grounds other than sociological ones.



How about, evolution is falsifiable, whereas the notion of a creator is not?

That’s certainly not true in general. If a theory posits that some force decreased the entropy of some system a large amount on a short time scale at a particular time a long time ago, that theory can be tested and falsified in the same way that we falsify other theories whose primary evidence is historical (like evolution). That entropy-decreaser is the creator posited by ID.

There are people who are professionals at defending ID based on these objective criteria, and they will beat you both because they are better at arguing and also because they are right on the merits. The boundaries of science are sociological, not logical. That’s not a problem with science; it’s a virtue. I wish scientists were more forthright about that. (Though I can see how the apparent elitism would draw political protest.)