On Scientific Authoritarian Faith
On the issue of whether many people believe what scientists tell them on faith on a par with religious faith some interesting statements are made:Sam Harris states:
“I think we just touched upon an issue that we should really highlight. This whole notion of authority, because religious people often argue that science is just a tissue of un-cashed checks, you know. We’re all relying on authority, how do you know that the cosmological constant is, whatever it is? You know? So I think you two are well-placed to do this, differentiate the kind of faith-placing in authority that we practice without fear in science and rationality generally, and the kind of faith-placing in the preacher or the theologian that we criticize.”
Prof. Richard Dawkins responds thusly:
“Well, what we actually do when we who are not physicists take on trust what physicists say is we have some evidence to suggest that physicists have looked into the matter, that they’ve done experiments, that they’ve peer-reviewed their papers, that they’ve criticized each other, that they’ve been subjected to massive criticism from their peers in seminars and on lectures and things. And they’ve come through with_”
Prof. Daniel Dennett interrupts to make this point,
“And remember the structure that’s there, too. It’s not just that there’s peer-review but it’s very important that it’s competitive.”
Here we must carefully distinguish what is meant by “science” and also discern the individual opinions of scientists, there are issues of hard versus soft science, science as method, as a body of knowledge, as a profession, as a facade for atheism, there are issues of observation and reproducible experiments, there are issues of interpretation of data (such as inferring atheism from biology), another issue is that what we are told is the empirically verified scientific truism of today may be the quaint theory of yesteryear1 (many of these are evidenced in my posts under Scientific Cenobites).
One biologist, namely Prof. Richard Dawkins, denies claims of authority in science while another affirms it, namely Prof. Richard Lewontin (Harvard University Professor of zoology and biology):
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural_we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door_.scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution_In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand.”2
Ultimately, Christopher Hitchens provides the most myopic statement:
“I’ll take things you and Richard say on the human and natural sciences, not without wanting to check, but I’m often unable to but knowing that you are the sort of gentlemen who would have checked. If you say, ‘the bishop told me it so I believe it’ you make a fool of yourself it seems to me, and one is entitled to say so.”
Of course, taking Prof. Richard Dawkins’ word for anything would be a very difficult pill for me to swallow for various reasons and on various topics: on religion/theology I would double check even if he told me that Islam was monotheistic considering that, sadly, he has a reputation for being demonstrably ignorant of such matters. On science, such as his field of biology, it is difficult to say since he mixes repeatable-experimental observations with his absolutely materialistic atheist worldview and so one must constantly parse the two while reading him on science.
Later on, Prof. Richard Dawkins makes this statement,
“I want to live in a world where people think skeptically for themselves, look at evidence_ if you go through the world thinking that it’s okay to just believe things because you believe them without evidence, then you’re missing so much.”
I could not agree more and it would actually be refreshing if he practiced this. This is particularly so when he is dealing with a subject such as the Bible which is not within his field of study. Rather and for example, he relies on “Hartung’s interpretation of the Bible.” He is referring to the anesthesiologist Prof. John Hartung, Prof. Richard Dawkins’ comments about certain Bible texts are discredited because he, apparently, blindly accepted what an anesthesiologist told him (I make this very clear here).
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