I am commonly asked if I believe in relativity, or if I believe in evolution.
I answer, no. I say I don’t believe in anything, but I do trust that they are right. Or, I say that as a scientist, it’s more a matter of my drawing fact-based or evidence-based conclusion. Awkward, but there you go.
But Sean at Cosmic Variance also tackled this matter, and does so very well, with excellent examples of proof versus belief. We can’t prove anything to be true in science, but sometimes, you know, it’s the way to bet. If I hold a rock over my toe and let go, I can pray all I want, but in the end gravity wins.
Believe it.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Nice link.
Reasonableness comes in degrees. The greater the concreteness in our scientific foundations, the higher we can build. Of course, when the concrete cracks, far greater is the joy of the scientist than the building contractor.
Did you mean you don’t believe in any thing (not “anything”, such as people)?
May 21st, 2007 at 8:04 pm
“Belief gets in the way of learning.”—Robert Heinlein
May 21st, 2007 at 8:10 pm
I don’t think the BA quite nails it. It’s probably a question that has puzzled philosophers for millennia.
How do you distinguish between a belief without good evidence and a confidence (or whatever you wanna call it) based on good evidence?
How do you know what you know is true? There are plenty of people with quite crazy ideas who ‘know that they know’, even though their ideas are quite wrong.
Even biblical, talmudic or quranic scholars can do mountains of research and uncover evidence that seems quite supportive of their beliefs.
I’m not sure what the answer is. I have a good deal of confidence in the reality of global warming for instance, but I haven’t done the research or understand the field well enough to be sure that it’s anything more than belief and trust. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but it seems to me that I just have to trust that the experts know what they’re talking about in some areas.
It worries me that creationists can be so certain in their beliefs. It’s obviously possible for someone to almost completely delude themselves without realizing that they’re involved in a delusion at all.
No matter how smart or reality based you are, can you know what you would be like if you suffered late-onset schizophrenia? Is there any evidence that us so-called skeptics are less-prone to delusions brought on by mental illness?
May 21st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
What if my lightning-fast reflexes move my toe before the rock arrives?
May 21st, 2007 at 9:58 pm
I recall, when I was learning advanced calculus during my second year at the university, we were being taught the method of Lagrangian multipliers. The professor asked us if we understood why the method works. “No”, someone told him, “we don’t. But we believe you that it does”. The professor laughed and then said: “That’s wrong of you. This is math, something you can prove. So you’re not allowed to believe in. You are only allowed to believe in the things that you can’t possibly prove”.
May 21st, 2007 at 10:36 pm
I have a PhD in applied maths and no matter how many proofs you give me, I _still_ think that Lagrange multipliers work by some sort of sympathetic magic.
May 21st, 2007 at 10:52 pm
I go with Christian Burnham on this one. Never underestimate the headache that a philosopher can give you. I am a astronomer too and I do believe that science gives us some insight on the way things work in the physical world. However, I still think that Eddington was right in stating that all we do in physics is subject to “selective subjectivism” and that the laws we in nature find are simply a reflection off the way humans think and percept their environment.
Or to put it another way : science can give you an insight into critical thinking, but unless you have extensively studied the philosophical problems (especially of science itself) and are aware of their ramifications, you are only touching the surface. Science delivers arguments for critical thinking, but philosophy is critical thinking in its most evolved form.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Sceptics and Schizophrenia, interesting question. The thing with SZ is that victims don’t stop being able to think logically, it’s more that they loose the ability to spot real evidence vs coincidence that just seems to support their ‘theories’. They will ignore even the most obvious facts against and pick up the most outlandish ‘signs’ in favour of their delusions. Come to think of it they’re a LOT like Creationists just with worse social skills and personal hygiene. In fact really, what’s called mental illness and what’s not is just a matter of degree and how socially acceptable the delusions are.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:13 am
This is a good point BA and I wish it was in the public consciousness. We really shouldn’t believe things instead we should accept things. We always need to be aware that science is a state of the art type of endeavor. What is fact one day may be fallacy the next.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:36 am
odified
I have a good deal of confidence in the reality of global warming for
instance, but I haven’t done the research or understand the field
well enough to be sure that it^^sanything more than belief and
trust. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but it seems to me that I just have
to trust that the experts know what they’re talking about in some
areas.
I second Mr.Burnham. I’ve been thinking about this for sometime, too.
IMHO, life cannot proceed without some kind of belief. What rational
basis does the theorist have that the results from the experimenters are
right? It’s not like there haven’t been scientists who have fudged
results in the past, albeit only a few. These days, science is so varied
that a person from one sub-field cannot possibly completely verify the
claims of a scientist in another.
And substituting ‘trust’ in place of ‘belief’ doesn’t help much.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 am
Hey hey, “I don’t believe in anything”. How about your lovely wife? Your children, eh? Or that yu can do it etc etc
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 am
Hey hey, “I don’t believe in anything”. How about your lovely wife? Your children, eh? Or that you can do it etc etc
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:03 am
Ah, the slippery slope of belief. “I believe in facts,,,”,,,is that a given?
Just because something has always been, doesn’t mean it will continue to be. Just because the rock has always smashed my toe, doesn’t mean it always will, but eventually even the most stubborn of us will accept the pain and go on from there.
How do we know that what we know is true?
Well, we don’t actually. What we CAN know is what is UNTRUE. Which is, of course, the essence of scientific methodology.
The Persian who came up with that idea changed the world, but I guess it was just ripe for change, because as has been pointed out here, the Greeks had some formal understanding of that method, but for some reason it didn’t really catch on.
Any question put to nature will be answered in an honest way, as long as the question is properly phrased. The statement,”There is a god,,,” assumes it can eventually be proven true, if we’re just “good” enough to earn gods trust,,or something,,,
however, if the god in question is a sneaky, lying buzzard, we can never disprove the accuracy of the question, since the god involved will ensure that our test results are deceptions.
Why would ANYONE want to worship such???
Ah, schizophrenia, the tendency to detect causality in coincidence,,,
Well, what IS coincidence? How many times do we need to observe a phenomena before it becomes something more than a coincidence?
Three times might be a beginning,,,if you heard the voice of God telling you to sacrifice your child, then heard the voice of an angel saying “stop”,,., who do you heed, God or angel??? Quite a connundrum for,,,,was it Abraham,,,well, whatever, the story is a classic example of schizo. He should have asked for three repeats, to confirm receipt of message,,,
The scientific method works, even for schizophrenics,,,you just have to use it consistantly.
GAry 7
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:18 am
It’s just semantics and language imprecision. For hard core religious people, the word “belief” is directly tied to “faith,” and for scientists it’s directly tied to strong, predictable evidence. At the end of the day, it just means that you trust that something is true even though you, as an individual, may not be able to directly prove it (until it happens).
I believe my friends & family love me and will always be there for me. I believe that scientists have good evidence for the theory of evolution. Etc., etc.
As a scientist I prefer to avoid the terms “facts” and “truth” and “law” and instead use “data” and “evidence” and “theory” because the first three are considered too absolute by many people. True proponents of the scientific theory know that any evidence that leads to a theory is ALWAYS open to rework (or to be thrown away) if new evidence shows up, or predictability based on the current theory fails.
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:29 am
I think it is correct to equate “belief in” with “trust in”. If you act as though the statement were true in the absence of absolute proof, one could say that you “believe in” the proposition.
But, I would probably recommend clarifying that you believe in the evidence and in the correctness of the theory devised to explain the evidence.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:19 am
Please read Eliezer Yudowsky’s “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning” and, even better, “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation”. Then you will have a firmer grasp of what it means for a belief to be “reasonable.”
And his “The Simple Truth” is kind of fun, too.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:42 am
That goes philosophical, I bet, or should I say: I believe?
In Germany we have a word that is “Wortklauberei”, a translation I (surprisingly) found is “finickiness”, and I think that is going on here!
And of course gravity wins. But that is NOT the point if you really believe in god (or whatever you believe in).
For me the point to believe in god actually IS that it is a support in my life, to go inside myself and talk to “god” when I am in trouble helps me up again. Maybe that is just psychological but that does not matter in any way.
And also I am glad about it and about this one “fact”: No science will EVER rule out an existance of a god. I cannot “proof” it but also nobody can prrof it wrong! It is and will always be a matter of “believing”.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:59 am
If you are asked whether you believe in relativity or evolution, you already know it is a loaded question. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with the concept of belief: It’s what probability theory is all about (check out E.T. Jaynes if you don’t believe me!).
Consigning a perfectly good word to the scrapyard is silly, and it won’t endear you to the people who would otherwise share the underlying sentiment.
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:20 am
As far as I can see, science requires three “beliefs”, or better yet “axioms”:
1. The universe exists
2. The universe as we perceive it is at least a close approximation of the real universe
3. The universe follows invariable rules
As long as these three axioms hold, science works. The first two axioms are required to do anything, they are not particular to science. The third is more specific to science, but accepting it, at least mostly, is required for everyday life as well. For instance you have to accept that if the floor was solid yesterday you won’t fall through it tomorrow. You have to accept jumping in a lake will make you wet. You have to accept that a wood fire will be hot and water ice will be cold. These are all assumptions people make in their everyday lives. Science merely requires believing that this sort of thing is true, that there are rules of the universe that are fundamental and unbreakable.
The difference with religious belief is really in the third axiom. They accept the axiom hold except when it comes to very specific supernatural phenomena. So really you could say science requires no more “belief” than is required to live your everyday life. Invoking anything supernatural, anything outside of nature, requires adding additional assumptions, additional beliefs, that exist beyond those absolutely necessary to function in our world.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Excellent link, really worth the read. Thanks Phill!
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:02 pm
http://members.aol.com/darrwin/believe.htm
The above is a clear and simple explanation that made me smack myself when I read it. It expresses what we think, believe, and ultimately know.
I love the rest of the site too, by the way.
“Concentrate on the believe in: no, I don’t believe in evolution. Think of how that phrase is often applied. Little kids believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. We often judge their maturity by finding out which things they still believe in and which they have “grown out of” (“Aren’t you a little old to still believe in the Tooth Fairy?”). The phrase believe in in common parlance seems to mean to take something literally for which there is little or no objective evidence. You must believe in the Easter Bunny, because you’ve never seen the real one yourself, there’s nothing he has done that couldn’t be simply explained by ordinary phenomena (parental trickery), and there’s no objective, physical, replicable (in other words, scientific) evidence that he’s real. If you had those last things, then you wouldn’t have to believe in the Easter Bunny, you would know he was real.
…
As a matter of fact, I have more down-to-earth proof of the reality of evolution than I have of the other things mentioned above, which I know to be real. I will never see an electron. How would I ever come close to accurately measuring the speed of light? My chances of ever getting far enough away from Earth to actually see for myself that it is round are practically nil; and I don’t have the equipment or the expertise to ever really prove for myself that a particular breed of bacteria actually causes a particular disease. Then don’t I just take those things “on faith”? Don’t I believe in them, rather than actually knowing them? NO . As a society, we have hired specialists to find out these kinds of things. We’ve done everything we can to assure that they are highly trained, that they are objective (not letting their philosophies or beliefs get in the way), that they are honest, and that their answers are true (they constantly check on each other, compete, and repeat experiments to make sure the results are real). We’ve set up a system ( science) in which wrong answers are quickly thrown out, all answers are tested over and over in every imaginable way, right answers get righter all the time (e.g., relativity doesn’t “disprove” Newtonian mechanics, it just improves on it; punctuated equilibrium doesn’t “disprove” Darwinian evolution, it just clarifies it further), and the best way to make a name for yourself is to disprove an older idea (with enough proof of your own to stand up to the toughest tests). And finally, that system works far better than any other way mankind has ever tried for finding out about the physical world.
So what science knows, I know. They are my agents for finding out things I can’t find out for myself. Science knows (and tells me) that there are electrons and what the speed of light is. I would be foolish to reject that knowledge. Science also tells me, with just as much assurance, that living things have evolved. I know that knowledge has been tested, tried, experimented with, and applied to real situations, and has proven its “fitness” by growing stronger through 150 years of severe testing. I would be foolish to reject that knowledge.”
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Thanks for that post Jennifer, really hits the nail on the head.
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:47 pm
I used to work part-time in a grocery store. When I mentioned my intrest in evolutionary theory, my customer said something like “It takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution.”
I said that the only thing I have to take on faith is that the laws of the universe are observable and don’t change from one day to the next. The rest follows.
For me it’s about reliability. If I were lucky (?) enough to be in orbit around Jupiter and was plotting a course home, I could choose between two (or many more) methods. If I use classical mathematics and a modern understandng of orbital mechanics, I get home. If I use “Afrocentric” mathematics and Feminist alternative “ways of knowing,” I get dead.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:42 pm
People here might like to check out this hilarious essay by philosopher/logician/mathematician Raymond Smullyan:
“An Epistemological Nightmare”
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/epistemologicalNightmare.html
It should make you think twice about belief, logic and science.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Gary Ansorge:
This is a lame question, and off-topic, but seeing the effect yet again in your post (I feel so lame and out-of-touch for asking; I’m a computer person, for the sake of Pete!
):
When you have an ellipsis, I see three commas instead of periods.
Different keyboard layout? Or?
Just curious. Thanks for answering if you feel so inclined!!
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:57 am
Larzluv:
Three commas merely indicate a “pause for thought or comment,,,”
It’s a poetic device used when trying to communicate verbal emphasis in a written format. Then again, my reading glasses are sometimes so filthy I have trouble seeing what I’ve just typed. That’s a problem with far sightedness. We can’t see the dirt on the lenses but it still interferes with visual clarity.
In other words, same keyboard layout, just a slightly different way of writing.
GAry 7
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:21 am
Belief has its place among rational people and within rational society. If we could prove the best candidate for a given position, we would forever rid ourselves of elections where the margin of victory is slimmer than the margin of error.
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” cannot be proved or disproved. “Give me liberty or give me death,” is not a hypothesis.
It was not meant to be an accurate appraisal of Britain’s status in the war with Germany, but a defiance of it, when Churchill said, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
It was unscientific, but when we consider that Nazi “science” was working on the rationale and methodology for genocide, I’m glad it bought us some time.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Gary:
Thanks for your reply; I’ve always been curious… (
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Gary:
Thanks for your reply; I’ve always been curious… {{== that showed up as three periods, right?
I’d suspected there were settings differences somewhere between you, The Site In Question, and me that translated “.” into “,”… yeah, I asked myself why wouldn’t the single comma/period get xlated…
Eh! Idly curious and thought I’d ask…!
Cheers, and see ya ’round!
-Larz
(Sorry about my [partial
] double-post; seems the site interpreted my arrow above as an HTML tag [it was originally with less-than symbols 
]…!)