===============
What a wonderful mix of articles and editorials in your July 12 issue, talking of challenges to science, to religion, to Darwin, to genetics, and even to the Templeton Foundation.
Indeed, some overly simplistic models of the world need to be challenged. Sadly, as does religion, the institution of science seems to have many such overly simplistic models, the failings of which are quite visible from outside and quite invisible from inside.
For example, on page 5, in your editorial "A lesson in cynicism", you note "the gulf that exists between how scientists perceive reality and how some politicians do." Again, sadly, you seem to miss your own point that, in terms of political and social reality, the politicians are far keener observers than the scientists, and it is the scientists who need to wake up.
Ahh, perhaps some wags would argue that political and social reality are not real at all, but are, hmm, fictions of some kind that simply have observable consequences on everything from funding to global climate change. Well, which way is it folks? Is everything around us real, or not? Are you arguing for two different sets of rules and laws for the parts of reality that involve humans and the parts that do not? How ... 19th century.
Or could it be that the so called "hard sciences", which are really the easy ones, saw that the same mathematical tools were not very successful at predicting much more complex psychological and social phenomena, and therefore, it must be that what is broken is the phenomena, not the tools? Why all the dumping and scorn of the "soft sciences"?
So the parts of the problem that were deemed irrelevant have suddenly been perceived to have the relevance they always did.
I will suggest, as I have before, that there is indeed at least one common ground to the institutions of Science and Religion, and that is in the area of control structures and determination.
Both Science and Religion have a great deal of interest in the nature of causality.
This is highly relevant, because our understanding of the nature of causality itself is in flux. In the field of public health epidemiology, for example, there are the so called "Epi wars", where those who believe in hard biomedical determinism and causality are literally shouting at those who believe in softer, distal determinism on a larger scale, such as the unambiguous observation that "smoking causes cancer."
Where this seems to be taking us is to the idea that causality is not as simple as we thought, and, like a fractal, what you measure depends on what size ruler you use. On the scale of individual people, smoking is not causally related to cancer, by classic definitions; but on the scale of populations, smoking is clearly a cause of cancer.
This scale-dependence is all around us, but not generally recognized. Even indoor plumbing reflects this, where the trajectory of a given water molecule is determined only by the water molecules around it, and yet, seen from afar, it is generally possible to make the water go from the water tower to the kitchen faucet. At a small scale, non-deterministic, and at a large scale, deterministic. That kind of causality is not comfortable to Science, but permeates social-scale interactions.
So, an advertising giant can methodically change the opinions of "people" without being at all causal, or even visible, at the individual "person" scale.
Until Science can recognize good tools for "seeing" and measuring and modeling this kind of causality, perhaps it is premature to make confident statements about whether the Earth is or is not within a larger influence field of some kind and some scale larger than Earth.
We hardly need to invoke "God", given that our sun is a second generation star (containing iron from the first generation), so alien races could have a 5 billion year lead on us, and farming or raising or making planets might be as boring for them as raising corn is for us.
My overall point is that it is a valid question, for both Science and Religion, to look for "outside influences" on life on Earth. Our tools for doing this are sadly lacking, and it seems bizarre to leave this search to Religion.
The technology of detecting and measuring outside influences would be of great interest on a social or national scale. It's a perfectly valid scientific research question.
We should look at it, and invite both the SETI crowd and the religious crowd to come look with us. Let's not make confident prior assertions about what we will see with instrumentation that is not yet even built. Stop bickering, build the tools, and look. Anything else is like Aristotle talking about how many teeth women have without ever looking to see. Let's not commit the sins we accuse "them" of.
=========
No comments:
Post a Comment