It's worse than than. They promote self-destruction in the name of self interest. That is how they promote it "against reason and honor".

Xray machines in shoe stores are not a case of science not being true. They would still work. If you mean that they weren't initially known to be unsafe, that was an additional discovery, not a refutation of xray science.

Agreed (as far as AR; I use the definition in Ringer's "Looking Out For #1" which does not reject hedonism). But the people doing it use their own shallow definitions of their self-interest.

As our knowledge evolves we change our actions. Remember the xray machines in shoe stores? They are before my time but are a good example. Then, nowadays we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of by interests that play on the public's poor knowledge of science. This is where we get into the Objectivist area of "rational self interest". That's good enough for its own thread...

I can appreciate that...

Ayn Rand's concept of selfishness rejects hedonism, including all forms of power seeking and scams. Promoting religion isn't in one's self interest.

The Vatican has always published beliefs about science, and even done a certain amount of investigation (much of which involves things the rest of us probably don't believe in at all -- for example, they have a committee that rules on whether alleged "miracles" by saints are genuine or not).

Of course, their judgment about these questions is mostly going to be guided by whether they believe the resulting publicity will be helpful or harmful to the church. But then, I've seen plenty of similarly self-serving judgments (about questions like climate change) by "real" scientific bodies all over the world. It just goes to show that for most people, selfishness wins, even against reason and honor.

Ok. When do we get beers at Millys?

Yes.

Good point and worth further discussion. I think that the 'gang' mentality is what may lead a large portion of humanity to be predisposed towards communism. And (though I had not thought of it this way before) a religious order is a type of gang.

Thank you for the insight, Thoritsu.

Jan

I just want to make sure I understand your point here. Is it that both limited data AND abstraction that are a challenge? If so, I agree.

The knowledge becomes more difficult as it becomes more abstract. Beyond the level of direct perception new discoveries and their validation are based on indirect measurement, inference and previous knowledge in ever wider abstractions. The "knothole" analogy pertains to identifying and performing the indirect measurements, but there is much more.

The increasing base of technical knowledge makes it harder for a non-scientist to understand it in anything but the crudest terms that would not have been sufficient for the science. That is in addition to the difficulty of the analysis itself -- even if a non-scientist is intelligent enough to follow a difficult analysis, he can't do it if he doesn't have the base of knowledge to understand what is being analyzed. The nature and role of abstractions based on abstractions is a crucial part of Ayn Rand's epistemology.

I think I agree. My point there was that for most of what we are trying to discover next, the ability to sense the facts is very limited, making the conclusions more and more analytical and difficult for non-scientists to get their head around.

The recent Higgs-boson discovery was like determining the winner of a car race using only 37 photons of information at the finish line spread over 30 seconds.

But to the "model" point, the data was correlated to a model, and in the Higgs case, the data matched to support a 99% confidence that that model predicted the results.

It is interesting that this model-prediction concept is lost on the climatologists. I have a friend (actually a guy that works for me), whose wife is a climatologist. I've been trying to get the real technical basis for the human-based global warming. The arguments on the side of the issue are "appeal to the expert", which I find wholly inadequate. The arguments against are honestly more complete. It is amazing to me how many examples of the arguments-for models "backing into" the present data there are. I asked my friend, when someone was going to predict the next 10-20 year temperatures, and lock the model and result down, so it can truly be tested against an experiment. It was amazing that he actually had not considered testing a model against a future (unknown) result as a measure of its accuracy. He agreed, no one would accept models matching known results in our business, because the model would be considered corrupt by known results.

The size of a "knothole" does not change the nature of conceptual knowledge. With much larger sense perception capability we would still have to conceptualize and infer principles. Conceptualization is our form of awareness: The knowledge in the form of general principles is not intrinsic to external reality waiting to be discovered. Only the facts are there. We have to identify and classify them in accordance with essentials, all based on our 5 senses and power to reason regardless of the scope of those senses.

"Believe" in all its forms is something I'm regularly striking from technical documents. "We believe this is the right safety factor for this capacitor". Terrible! It is amazing how colloquial technical communication has become.

A smart guy described science as looking at the world through a knothole and trying to figure out what the whole thing was.

A good example of this is the difference between Newtonian physical transformations (e.g. throwing a rock from a train), versus Relativistic versions of the same. There is a difference, that is larger as the speed get higher. The simpler Newtonian version can be used for about everything in the range of human sense, but not so for very fast things like space communications.

Very well summarized.

Scientific theories are not "models" in parallel with objects. Knowledge is a grasp of reality not a collection of things in parallel with it. See Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for the nature of concepts in particular.

I am going to make a flat statement here. All scientific theories are models that are less complex than the thing being modeled. As such they are incomplete. It is not possible for an incomplete theory to be "settled".

It wasn't that long ago that the church was fighting to stop repeal of the laws banning contraceptives. Now they are whining about 'religious freedom'.

The experiments verifying classical physics are well understood and don't change with time to suddenly become invalid. It continues to be true in the same context it was always true and is a necessary basis for what has subsequently been discovered in modern physics. Established science does not become false when new phenomena are discovered which it does not account for. New discoveries do not mean that what we knew previously 'stopped working'. Scientific knowledge expands, it is not a sequence of exploded fallacies. Skepticism, not established science, is hogwash.

General relativity has been spectacularly successful to great precision but only has a couple of realms of experiments to distinguish it and no underlying explanation integrating it with other knowledge.

This has nothing to do with politicians and theologians acting as authoritarian demagogues. They are not scientists and do not represent science.

What science that you learned is no longer true?

The Papal Encyclicals are still medieval in outlook, and so is much of Catholic indoctrination in this country. Catholicism has traditionally been more intellectual and philosophical than the other sects that split from it, and tends to explicitly follow the original premises closer, though some of the more "holy roller" types are more openly irrational.

The followers in America mostly tend to be better than that, including apparently you, but there is no reason to follow it all. It has nothing to offer. The essence is still rotten to the core and is only destructive, and so is the latest "ecology" nonsense promoted in the name of acknowledging "science", which it is not http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

The Catholic Church was and is no Da Vinci, and Steve Jobs was not a follow up to Augustine, he was the opposite.

If you attracted to the sense of life in Atlas Shrugged you should learn the philosophy that makes it possible. We are not making the same argument for it.

The whole concept of "settled science" is unscientific hogwash. Newtonian dynamics and both special and general relativity have survived countless experimental validations but no physicist would ever consider them to be "settled science". There are simply too many instances where they don't work. However, politicians and theologians will insist that a scientific "finding" that supports their views is "settled" thus cutting off any counter argument. Science doesn't work that way.

You can take the good with the bad. I think the whole seeks to back into a foolish conclusion using selected facts. Not one bit different than 1600, except for a far more limited power...due to the shoulders of giants that stood up to them for the last 500 years.