This is fairly funny:

You know, this does illustrate the problems with false binaries in a lot of ways. The comments on Youtube, however, are not funny. It brings me to another point. There a few basic rules I have in life. Here are two of them: never engage in a land war in Asia and never read the comments on YouTube.

Sometimes we do win

Thanks to Americans United for informing me:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State today praised a federal appeals court decision barring Bible distribution in a Missouri public school district.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the South Iron R-1 School District may not allow distribution of Bibles to children in elementary school.

Americans United, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, hailed the ruling

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What Science Can Answer and the language of scientific enterprises

So Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance posted an essay on “What Questions Can Science Answer”? I call it an essay and not a blog post because it is more substantive in both contact and form than most of what shows up on blogs. Carroll gets to many points on the language of science and on the epistemology of science that many people miss. Take this point, for example, which makes us semiotic-loving types gush:

I can think of one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question: first, attempt to distill the essence of “science” down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been “the Baconian scientific method” or “logical positivism” or “Popperian falsificationism” or “methodological naturalism.” But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures. A much better strategy, I think, is to consider specific examples, figure out what kinds of questions science can reasonably address, and compare those to the questions in which we’re interested.

Not technical language is organic, and thus sloppy. What we call science–which is really SEVERAL methods for transcending the historical gap between empirical and rational ways of approaching knowledge of the world–is messy. When you see its the scientific method only, you realize that non-experimental sciences don’t really have every single field of observational science. For example, strictly speaking, Darwin did not work that way. While I think Popperian falsification and Methodologically naturalism ARE essential all scientific endeavors, it may be fair to say that those two ideas are NECESSARY, but NOT SUFFICIENT. I can think of many things that are falsifiable and many people who limit themselves to questions that within a naturalistic framework who aren’t doing what many of us would call science exactly.

Carroll gets to another point about this that makes this hard:

Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let’s ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? Or, to make it slightly more empirical, was the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision within one percent of the magnitude of the total momentum before the collision?

This isn’t supposed to be a trick question; I don’t have any special knowledge or theories about the interior of Alpha Centauri that you don’t have. The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.

A stickler might argue, well, you shouldn’t be so sure. You didn’t observe that particular event, after all, and more importantly there’s no conceivable way that you could collect data at the present time that would answer the question one way or the other. Science is an empirical endeavor, and should remain silent about things for which no empirical adjudication is possible.

But that’s completely crazy. That’s not how science works. Of course we can say that momentum was conserved. Indeed, if anyone were to take the logic of the previous paragraph seriously, science would be a completely worthless endeavor, because we could never make any statements about the future. Predictions would be impossible, because they haven’t happened yet, so we don’t have any data about them, so science would have to be silent.

While Carroll doesn’t say this in the philosophical terms, I think this is a key point. Science assumes that deduction, induction, and abduction are valid forms of reasoning. Strictly formally speaking, inductive logic has problems as Hume pointed out, but if one does state things probabilistically, Carroll is absolutely correct: when there is no reason that we know of to doubt our current laws and observations, it is perfectly reasonable to assume as a form of extrapolated knowledge that it applies in the same circumstances elsewhere.

Yes, in absolute terms as Hume pointed it, assuming consistency is just that, assuming, and thus in the logic of empiricism problematic, but there are NO pragmatic reasons not to do this UNTIL we have either a model that works better than illustrates that consistency between circumstances does apply or we observe that the qualitative parameters aren’t the same. As a friend of mine points out, if we accept Hume’s critique of induction while denying the use probability in justifying extrapolations, we can’t have science. In short, it is completely crazy not to use deductive reasoning because we have no evidence empirically that probabilistic induction is completely invalid even if it doesn’t always follow that way in formal logic.

It’s an old question in philosophy. This brings me to Carroll’s thesis:

All that is completely mixed-up, because science does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data. The definition of “better” is notoriously slippery in this case, but one thing is clear: if two theories make the same kinds of predictions for observable phenomena, but one is much simpler, we’re always going to prefer the simpler one. The definition of theory is also occasionally troublesome, but the humble language shouldn’t obscure the potential reach of the idea: whether we call them theories, models, hypotheses, or what have you, science passes judgment on ideas about how the world works.

I could pick on Carroll’s language here: “Science” doesn’t do anything, its an abstract. Scientists pass judgment. Still, Carroll’s point is well-taken. While people have misused Kuhn’s concept of paradigm as a means of invaliding scientific models and claiming some kind of relativistic “all things being equal” ideas to ideas, this is wrong. The shifts in scientists relation to theories and models have a lot to do with either simplification or falsification–previous models prove false because of new data (until Australia was discovered our definition of Swans excluded black ones), a new model is simpler (dropping the ether), a new model predicts things of more useful outcomes (evolution in biology). While it may be true that some models are never fully explored because of the cultural limitations at the time they are conceived (No one will fund them, you’ll get burned at the stake, it does fit a prior paradigm), this is not a criticism of science but of the culture scientists must exist operate in.

Carroll continues to explain the subtly of the situation:

Furthermore, these theoretical frameworks come along with appropriate domains of validity, depending both on the kinds of experimental data we have available and on the theoretical framework itself. At the low energies available to us in laboratory experiments, we are very confident that baryon number (the total number of quarks minus antiquarks) is conserved in every collision. But we don’t necessarily extend that to arbitrarily high energies, because it’s easy to think of perfectly sensible extensions of our current theoretical understanding in which baryon number might very well be violated — indeed, it’s extremely likely, since there are a lot more quarks than antiquarks in the observable universe. In contrast, we believe with high confidence that electric charge is conserved at arbitrarily high energies. That’s because the theoretical underpinnings of charge conservation are a lot more robust and inflexible than those of baryon-number conservation. A good theoretical framework can be extremely unforgiving and have tremendous scope, even if we’ve only tested it over a blink of cosmic time here on our tiny speck of a planet.

I can’t say it better and give a better example of that how different frames have different scopes and different domain validity. Still, this has implications for many questions that people won’t like. Carroll continues,

Now let’s turn to a closely analogous question. There is some historical evidence that, about two thousand years ago in Galilee, a person named Jesus was born to a woman named Mary, and later grew up to be a messianic leader and was eventually crucified by the Romans. . .

One approach would be to say: we just don’t know. We weren’t there, don’t have any reliable data, etc. Should just be quiet.

The scientific approach is very different. We have two theories. One theory is that Mary was a virgin; she had never had sex before becoming pregnant, or encountered sperm in any way. Her pregnancy was a miraculous event, carried out through the intervention of the Holy Ghost, a spiritual manifestation of a triune God. The other theory is that Mary got pregnant through relatively conventional channels, with the help of (one presumes) her husband. According to this theory, claims to the contrary in early (although not contemporary) literature are, simply, erroneous.

There’s no question that these two theories can be judged scientifically. One is conceptually very simple; all it requires is that some ancient texts be mistaken, which we know happens all the time, even with texts that are considerably less ancient and considerably better corroborated. The other is conceptually horrible; it posits an isolated and unpredictable deviation from otherwise universal rules, and invokes a set of vaguely-defined spiritual categories along the way. By all of the standards that scientists have used for hundreds of years, the answer is clear: the sex-and-lies theory is enormously more compelling than the virgin-birth theory.

On these questions, as Carroll is pointing out, there is a likely answer and even accepting that we cannot know with absolute certainty, we can know with a STRONG probability that which one a scientist should favor. If we give this sort of question as special out–like on does in Gould’s NOMA–then we are compartmentalizing our experience of the world and the uses of science in a way that seems arbitrary.

But this brings Carroll to a point that I hadn’t considered about methodological naturalism:

One of the nice things about science is that it’s hard to predict its future course. Likewise, the need for a supernatural component in the best scientific understanding of the universe might evaporate — or it might not. Science doesn’t assume things from the start; it tries to deal with reality as it presents itself, however that may be.

This is where talk of “methodological naturalism” goes astray. Paul Kurtz defines it as the idea that “all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events.” That “explained and tested” is an innocent-looking mistake. Science tests things empirically, which is to say by reference to observable events; but it doesn’t have to explain things as by reference to natural causes and events. Science explains what it sees the best way it can — why would it do otherwise? The important thing is to account for the data in the simplest and most useful way possible.

There’s no obstacle in principle to imagining that the normal progress of science could one day conclude that the invocation of a supernatural component was the best way of understanding the universe. Indeed, this scenario is basically the hope of most proponents of Intelligent Design. The point is not that this couldn’t possibly happen — it’s that it hasn’t happened in our actual world. In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena.

Carroll seems to implying that scientific thought COULD posit something supernatural as a theory, but doesn’t because the evidence does fit. Carroll admits that one could define either supernatural or religious claims in a way in which they don’t make predictions about anything that can be seen empirically, but then it, I think rightly, uses that there is no pragmatic justification for that: such definitions almost don’t say anything and don’t correspond to the most expressions of religion. All that said, I am hard placed to imagine where the supernatural–because its definition is so vague and deliberately placed outside the realm of the observable–can be meaningfully tested. So we have to rely on Occam’s Razor. The Supernatural explanation does not appear to most to be necessary and this gets a seeming critique of Carroll made by Tom Clark in Carroll’s blog.

Tom Clark says,

Seems to me that scientists would need some positive evidence for supernatural agency and its specific characteristics and modes of operations to justifiably say that there’s a supernatural component in an explanation. The default position in the absence of actual evidence for supernatural causation, which necessarily involves specifics of some sort, has to be that naturalistic explanations are incomplete, not that the supernatural exists.

I don’t know if that’s actually a substantive criticism of Carroll, but its a valid point.