If you agree with these premises then it is only logical to presume that Atheists, by nature are going to have a stronger knowledge pool then religious people because they are questioning the beliefs and opinions of the majority. It would be social suicide to attempt to go against the majority without at least have some strong arguments supporting your belief. Given this information. It would be a logical fallacy to presume that an average statistic of a well-educated minority’s beliefs is valued more highly than a predominately uneducated majority.
The reason for this is my use of the word "predominately" If I took one in ten "Christians" and had them debate against one in ten "Atheists" the atheist would most likely win his argument. That however, is not substantiated proof of a more accurate belief because of the base pool of individuals. One more educated on a percentile the other not. This does not in any way imply that there are not intelligent and logical Christians at a potentially even greater flat population amount. That being said, both arguments should have a fairly intelligent group of individuals on either side of the argument and both sides should have a credible and well accepted opinion on the principles for and against Religion with the inclusion of the assumptions used in both Religion AND Science. I hope you never make another that is based upon the credibility of your opponent as that is a severe argumentative flaw by the name of Ad Hominem.
@DukeOfNukes - As an atheïst, I will say that you're idea is right, but your examples might not be the best ones. All your examples will probably be answerd at some point by science. As for 1+1=2, this is a thing where you are wrong. It is as if you are asking us to prove that a circle is round. We don't have to do that, because our defenition of a circle is something round. by saying it is a circle, you have given us proof that it is in fact round (same goes for our defenition of 1,2,+ and . But science has a big limitation, which is that in many occasions it can only say yes. For example: ask science to proof that something does NOT exist.
And while science does start from observation, we must have faith in that our eyes are telling us the truth (a smarter being might be changing our vision to keep us from finding more truths and becoming smarter than him or whatever).
In short, while I don't believe in any religion, it's easy to proof that it does have it's place (that place being the questions that can't be answered, a place wich will always exist)
wiltingI had fun once and it was awfulRegistered Userregular
edited January 2013
*sigh* You guys just don't get it. Well done on labeling people simply stating that faith is not the same thing as science as absolutists etc. Pot, meet kettle. All you had to do was say 'scientists can have faith, but that does not make science faith' and this would have been far less of an issue. I'm not sure where you were going with the geometry bit, science adapted when the evidence didn't fit the model, the dictionary opposite of faith.
Yes, scientists can take things on faith. Yes, faith doesn't necessarily involve religion. I get it. We can talk about this without talking about religious belief or lack thereof.
But that does not make science faith, or faith based.
If you wanted us to delve into interesting discussion of faith and/or religion in games, you should have stuck to that topic.
faith [feyth]
noun
1.
confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
3.
belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
4.
belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.
5.
a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.
sci·ence [sahy-uh ns]
noun
1.
a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.
2.
systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.
3.
any of the branches of natural or physical science.
4.
systematized knowledge in general.
5. knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study.
@Duke of Nukes
1+1=2 the proof is in the Principia Mathematica, a quick Google search should provide you a synopsis, and wikipedia will provide you links to the text should you feel the need.
The big bang was 'caused' by a whole of stuff being present where it could not fit. What lead to this situation is a whole lot more complicated, and will not be answerable by our science for a long time, as none of the basic concepts by which we measure the universe ( time, space, matter, energy ) were present prior to the big bang occurring.
Chemical reactions are caused by Valence Bonding, very loosely that atoms seek to have stable electron 'shells' surrounding them. Hydrogen bonds with Oxygen because it has an unstable shell, and seeks to gain an an additional electron to stabilise it. It can do this by 'sharing' one of the oxygen atoms spare electrons ( another hydrogen atom is required to stabilise the oxygen ).
Random mutations in genes are the product of imperfect replication, or a result of radioactive bombardment.
This is all well understood science, and you should have learnt it in high school. Failing that simply Googling your questions should have thrown enough information your way that you would realise that they are understood.
@pharous
Saying that religion can fill the space where answers don't exist ignores the fundamental danger of religion, that it can be used in place of asking the questions in the first place.
Look, EC, I love you guys, and I've watched every single episode and agreed with 95% of them. But you've gone totally the wrong way here, twice in a row. Honestly, I think you should have used this episode to address the flaws in your own reasoning, and instead you've used it as, basically, an attack on a large percentage of your audience. I think an apology is in order, and I think so strongly enough that I've signed up to say so. Apologies for not having signed up before, but I tend towards lurking. I don't like it when I feel the need to sign up for something just to criticise.
You've totally ignored the fundamental thing that many commenters were saying on the last video, the thing I think is A) critically important, and undermines your argument from first principles:
Assumptions != faith.
You ASSUME postulates, axioms, validity of observation etc. You do not have FAITH in them. Faith means you honestly believe they are true. Assumption means you are hypothetically taking them to be true for the sake of the experiment, regardless of your personal belief. The experiment is designed to test the truth of the assumption.
You may or may not personally believe your postulates are in fact true. But that's irrelevant to the scientific method. You do not need to believe them to test them. So faith is a separate issue. You can have faith in whatever you like. It's just not part of the method.
It's that simple. Seriously, I really hope you read this and understand what people have been getting at. Again, I love you guys, as do most of your audience, and we want to help you out on this. I hope that doesn't seem condescending, cos it's not meant to be.
P.S. I don't mean to try and speak for all the commenters. Many would disagree with me, and many were making similar but separate points. But from the fundamental theory and philosophy of science, it's my view that the above is the single clearest and most important point to be made.
Pretty good episode and all. I think the main reason you got such a negative reaction, even from me is that you drew parallels between religion and science ("both involve faith") without noting a fundamental difference. As you noted, science's starting points do change. Science revises itself if finds something incorrect, and tries to come up with a new system that exlains everything new, with all the old true stuff still working. Religion does not do that. I'm not saying religion doesn't have place in the world, it certainly gives guidelines to people who need it. But science and religion, while they both involve faith in some way, use this faith in very different ways, and you can't say that "religion is just like science, because there's faith in them".
But I have to say, I'm disappointed that you guys dismissed ALL of the comments as flame wars and hate. This was not true at all, there was a LOT of intelligent and good debate here, and many comments that simple pointed out your errors, or at least how your terminology was misleading and you didn't clarify.
By not reacting respectfully to any of that you risk insulting your viewers and fans. You don't want that.
@radian angle I have to disagree with your comment "postulates are not arbitrary", and while this holds true for many postulates, there are core postulates in science and faith that are arbitrary. Even the justification "because it just works/does/is" is an arbitrary justifcation for a postulate, since it only states a result, not provide any logic itself. Eventually there are postulates that must be taken on faith eventually, postulates such as "this math is correct" or the more common "the laws of science are equally true and repeatable in all of the universe".
If you are really, really bored, heres one postulate that might settle this argument:
If the human mind is truly limited, if it is humanly impossible to understand the entire universe then it is impossible to understand any of the universe without having faith in postulates without an explanation
Eventually there are postulates that must be taken on faith
I'm probably going to end up replying to a lot of posts with this point, so apologies in advance. But you are not talking about faith. You assume those postulates; whether you personally have faith in them is irrelevant to the scientific method.
This is not just semantics. The difference between believing in something, and using something, is critically important to the difference between religion and science.
@Vinnie555, I think 1+1=11. Prove me wrong. Go back to what gpsdevice said and play the game "why?" You said "Random mutations in genes are the product of imperfect replication, or a result of radioactive bombardment."...ok, but why? Why does radioactive bombardment cause mutation? When you get an answer to that, ask why again, and again, and again, and eventually you'll get to a question you don't have an answer for. At that point, it's just as reasonable to say "God is responsible" as it is to say "science will find an answer."
There's so much about this universe that, yeah, likely has a scientific answer...but until such time as there IS an answer, saying that God is not responsible, is a fallacy, and as a scientist, you should be ashamed of the bias you're showing.
@pharous, prove to me that a circle is perfectly round. Space is curved, so maybe you PERCEIVE it as round, maybe you can even measure it as round, but then you have to prove that you are capable of what "round" is in a 3 dimensional space. As I said before, with 1+1=2...that statement is based on some pretty bizarre assumptions that we take on faith.
"I think, therefor I am", is the only absolute in the Universe. I know I exist, thus I exist. Everything else is theory. I take it on faith that you exist, that life exists beyond my disembodied consciousness floating through emptiness...but I don't know for sure that you do.
I think that a lot of the hate that came out of the episodes resulted from people not liking the way you used "faith" - because while you guys just meant it as "something we hold as true", I reckon a lot of people just saw it to mean "religion", and it's easy to hate religion, especially when it's seen to be interfering with the scientific method and scientific progress.
You seem to be defining faith as simply what inevitably happens when human intelligence interacts with reality - intelligence is about abstracting data and making decisions based on incomplete information. That seems to be also what you say faith is, so then faith is identical to intelligence. Before you dismiss me out of hand, is there any activity you can envision not based on faith? I don't think there is. So with that definition of course science is based on faith. Breathing is based on faith that I need oxygen. Reading the newspaper is based on faith that I actually understand language. Thinking about the world is based on faith that I'm not in the matrix.
If this is really what you were going for then you've taken the word faith and made it meaningless - if anything is faith, then the concept of faith is no longer useful. Yet faith isn't meaningless, in that it carries a strong connotation of religion and of a personal relationship with a god or at least believing-strongly-without-reason that a god exists. In this way it is severely inflammatory to silently change the definition of faith to apply to everything and then say "science is based on faith".
I think you don't understand why it is inflammatory because you yourselves all have or had had faith of the religious kind so your connotations of the word "faith" are completely different (see my post to the second faith episode). I don't think you understand the image that you are projecting because you are not in a position to receive that image as it is perceived by a large group of people. To atheists religious people appear to be believing something "just because" and they call that faith (I'm not saying that's really true, I'm saying what it appears is happening to a group of people). That is the opposite of what science is supposed to be about. You don't have to accept that definition of faith, no one would expect you to do that. However, if you want to have a learned debate rather than a flame-fest, you really need to be crystal clear and explicit in how you are disentangling faith and religion and why you are doing that. Trying to explain yourselves by invoking famous scientists only makes matters worse.
To me, especially this final episode appears to be about you simultaneously being frustrated while also playing games with the definition of faith in order to give religion the kind of legitimacy that science has (religion may have its own kind of legitimacy, but that kind of legitimacy is different than the kind that science has). Somehow I expect that that is not what you were really going for. So either I'm an idiot or there is something about your episode that is genuinely inflammatory but that you don't understand. Now I've been known to be an idiot sometimes, but perhaps that other option is also somewhat true anyway?
my head hurts from this one. i can break games down pretty well and keep it digested but the science talk is a little over my head. nothing wrong with it just over my head.
@Duke Of Nukes
Your thinking about probability all wrong. The odds of producing someone with your precise genetic pattern when your parents combined their DNA were astronomical. The odds of two adults repeatedly having unprotected sex resulting in pregnancy however are quite a bit higher.
Your right saying that God is not responsible, is a fallacy. Its impossible to prove a negative. By the same token its also a fallacy to say that lepricons are not responsible or that superman isn't responsible.
Just because we can't rule something out completely doesn't make it a reasonable assertion.
I am a religious person who believes that science is the most important thing that mankind has accomplished, I believe in God but beyond that I also believe in humanity is wonderful not because we were created in 6 days by that god, but because of the process of evolution that got us to where we are now and where we will be in future. As a religious person I'm really grateful for the atheist movement because it presents me with an opportunity to critically analyze my own beliefs and to add more context to my own subjective reality but I am saddened by fundamentalism anywhere. I love this show, not simply because of it's subject matter but because at the core of it it promotes unity, and it is my belief that any attempt at reason that does not promote unity, theistic or otherwise, is flawed. I guess I just want to say thank you for promote a discussion that has the potential to allow unity in diversity to flourish. Have a really wonderful 2013.
Science is based on the belief that induction is possible. That it is possible to say that if A then B (e.g. if I throw an apple up, it will fall down). If we do not accept this idea, then we reject the possibility that people have control over what they do. Now, we do accept this one rule based on belief - it is, by its very nature, unprovable - but I have yet to run into someone who lives their life without quietly assuming they can predict the results of what they are going to do. Everyone put one foot in front of the other in hope that it will make them move.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
It's disappointing that Extra Credits attacks its community for rightly rejecting the outright falsehoods from their last video, when they could have posted a retraction instead.
People in the forum have already posted definitions of faith and science. I encourage the Penny Arcade staff to actually understand those definitions, instead of continuing to claim that faith and science are equal players.
In short, get back to the games. I was looking forward to a nice series of videos exploring how faith and religion have been explored in games; instead, we got this insidious message that science is really 'no better than' religion in exploring the universe.
I'm not "hostile to religion," I am hostile to lies and the outright rejection or undermining of science and the observed; this is exactly what Extra Credits has been doing the last two episodes, and it needs to stop. Now.
Uhm... ok, let's see. You reference faith multiple times in your discussion. Let's differentiate our semantics a bit then; from now on, I will define the following two concepts:
FAITH - the conscious decision to believe something is true without looking to prove it.
QWERTY - the act of accepting something as true and unquestionable.
Now, science has faith as defined above. Science does not have qwerty though. Qwerty is the reason religion is so wrong. The unquestionable part is the problem. You can spend thousands of episodes discussing on the fact that science has faith, but people will not understand you unless you make a distinction between faith and qwerty.
Do not mud the bondaries. Do not call qwerty faith and faith faith if you want to walk that line. People will get mad - and rightfully so, as qwerty is pretty bad.
+1
Hmuda"What other game lets you kill a Giant Spider and use its body to make soap?" - Dwarf FortressRegistered Userregular
This is now just arguing over semantics. What the EC guys call faith, some people would call trust. What they think is one scientist's faith in his own observations, is actually the collaborative observation of several scientists, most of whom are out to disprove the ideas of the other part of said group of scientists.
If one disproves a tenant of an actual faith, then his words are met with fingers in ears and mouths yelling "LA-LA-LA-LA". If one disproves a scientific theory, then a wordview will be changed and all sorts of fields of study will be opened for further exploration.
Space Engine videos with appropriate music. Enjoy.
Ugh. No EC, no. Postulates or axioms as the basis for logical reasoning are not taken on faith. Instead they are just stepping stones that we can build logic off of (as you said). They don't need to be assumed true or even ultimately usable for the logic to be completely valid. All they tell us is that, in a system that abides by these basic rules, our developed logic will hold.
Let's use a stupid example here. Say I use the axiom that the universe is made of jelly. Now I don't think our universe is made of jelly, or that this axiom is true in any fashion, I just think that it would be interesting to assume the universe is made of jelly and see where we get from there. With a bit of thinking, I can say that if the universe were made of jelly, and basic physics still applied, I (as a non-jelly person) would have trouble walking as my feet would not have the required surface area to disperse my weight across the surface evenly. If I were to flesh this out rigourously and made sure that the math that follows from the axioms does back up this hypothesis, I could say that me sinking to my knees in jelly is an unavoidable outcome of a jelly universe and physics.
So my set of axioms (jelly, physics, logic) would imply that I would lose my shoes trying to walk. None of this is faith. If it does not line up with experimentation, then either my logic was not sound (which is why we have the peer review process to correct these human errors), or one (or more) of the axioms is not true in this universe (so the ground is chocolate, not jelly, or the physics are different, or some of my assumed logical laws do not hold). If the logic is sound, but the axioms don't line up, it doesn't make the reasoning any less useful should we find a universe where all the axioms are in place. And if one of the axioms (i.e jelly) becomes inconceivable in the light of overwhelming evidence later, it doesn't make that research wrong, just impractical to use.
Really the only faith here is that of the researcher who dedicates their life to the furthering of the jelly-based sciences, only to find out that people have been walking around on the earth for some time quite easily. Picking sets of axioms to work in requires a belief that the work you produce from these axioms will be useful, and that your field won't be supplanted by a more general theory down the track and render your work somewhat impotent. It does not affect the logic in any way. If it's correct, it will continue being correct no matter how much the universe is discovered to digress from the logic's axioms. But it may affect the well-being and livelihood of the researcher.
So, in all, logical reasoning does not care what axioms you pick or how correct they are. All it states is that if these things are true, then these other things hold. Which is different from if it were taken on faith, as it would then say, these things are true so these other things follow. What set of axioms the researcher picks, however, is based on what they believe to be important to explore, and this decision can be based on any reason, including faith. The axioms and logic don't care if they are true or practical, but you probably will if you want funding. This is why logic does not need faith, but you might.
Those so called "haters" are people who *have* explored religion more than the average believer, there have been studies showing atheists usually have a better knowledge of religion than most religious people. Also, "Faith" is fundamentally the rejection of exploration so it is arrogant and insulting to accuse people who disagree with you of "not exploring enough". Consider the possibility that they might actually be aware of aspects that you are not. Also be aware that it is perfectly natural to overlook the negatives of any person or idea that you are in love with. Anyway, hope to see more of your excellent videos about game design soon.
They weren't trying to comment on how much people may have explored the issue outside of the thread. They were looking at the dialogue within the thread, and seeing, instead of intelligent discourse and the exploration of ideas, rather the staunch opponents on each side drawing battlelines and slandering each other. They're not accusing anyone of ignorance, they're just wishing that the ball had been played more instead of just being lit on fire along with most of the pitch.
So, after 3 episodes worth of comments filled to the brim with ignorance, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and arguing of semantics all from both sides, I hope you people at EC now have a better understanding of why video games tend to avoid tackling the concept of faith. People are just plain unable to talk about religion civilly.
The short version of my post is that if we're going to use "faith" to mean "believing that you are real", "believing in math that works based on our observations of the universe", and "believing in the supernatural, the existence of which cannot be proved" then the meaning of "faith" is being stretched so thing that is becomes meaningless. The ineffable feeling that there's more to the universe than we can know is a wondrous thing, and has been a massive part of the human experience since the beginning. Games should absolutely explore that, while recognizing that many people have faith in things that actually can be proved to be untrue.
That said, we shouldn't engage in the "everyone does it" logic that creates false equivalences between disparate acts and ideas. We get enough of that in the political media.
Huh, I had a very long, and I thought thoughtful, post that seems to have been eaten by the comments section. Oh well, I guess we'll have to rely on the shorter one that I just posted. The bottom line is that the faith we see in religion is a great topic for games, but is not the same thing as the things we take for granted in science.
One does not have to know that science works, or even have faith in it, for it to actually work. David Hume effectively showed that induction (including the scientific method) is epistemically unjustifiable. However, Hans Reichenbach showed that there are pragmatic reasons for using it over any other method: if observation and induction will not work at making accurate predictions, then no other method can, because if another method DID work, then one could observe that it worked, and therefore, observation and induction works as well. What this all means is that one does not have to have faith to justify using science, just the logical fact that if it does not work, then nothing will.
there is a lot of anger about what faith and religion have to do with science. i think the big problem here is that the axioms of religion have no worth as building blocks. maybe they did but they have shown that "religious cannon" as a stepping stone for knowledge is as a concept flawed.
i think your right though i dont think people know what they are arguing about but maybe they do and dont know how to express themselves.
i think its a given that people of deep religious belief do not see the "logical pathway" in the same way as a scientific person does and this comes across as blindness and ignorance. to be honest this often is because it is in a sad few (though far from all) cases a deliberate willful ignorance. a belief outside of faith and in truth we are arguning about belief not faith.
poeticmatter quoted tim minchin earlier where he said "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved". this is important though because we know what he MEANS as opposed to what he specifically SAYS.
we get caught up in wording. we say "faith" and it means different things to different people so inevitably saying faith as a believer is different to faith as a scientist. faith for a blind believer is undeniably as the great minchin describes: its a blindness.
i suppose the argument of faith is one of definition.
ill give you an example the old quesiton of "if a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to hear it does it make a sound?" forever i have seen people scientific or not who argue this and that but in the end its NOT a question about sound or even our concept of sound and hearing its about the WORD "sound". our language has evolved to make that word like so many ambiguous and as we inevitably connect our personal slant of the concept of sound to that word out perception of what that concept means to the world changes too.
So either I'm an idiot or there is something about your episode that is genuinely inflammatory but that you don't understand.
You're not an idiot. You're absolutely right, it is inflammatory. They attempted to make parallels that don't exist, and in the process, severely misrepresented science and given legitimacy to faith.
We don't need faith to be explorers, as Extra Credits asserts. Quite the contrary. "It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us." - Carl Sagan
What's worse, is instead of address the fallacies revealed by community posts, they dismissed the bulk of criticism as "unquestioned absolutes" akin to Creationism. No, that's not the problem here. "I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed." - Carl Sagan
Sagan, the best ambassador to science we've ever had, gave some value to faith. But that value was in humanity, not science. And that praise was lukewarm, as it also came with the severe warnings of what fundamentalist faith could do to our existence. To attempt to weave a thread through both faith and science demonstrates an elementary understanding of the subject and paints people of science with a brush they have worked a lifetime to keep away from their work.
OK .. while I understand where you are coming from and I defended a lot of your views in the prior episode on the forums, I can't but agree that as an exploration of faith in videogames, it was quite weak.
That was one of the major points of most people criticising. Not that the discussion couldn't be had, but that it was not a thoroughly researched episode.
Nevertheless, I do think this episode shows in greater depth what the reasoning process was behind the last episode (which I personally did understand and mostly agree with from your initial exposition), and in that sense it's great, but I doubt that it will solve the conflicts.
About the topic of faith and religion and science. I feel that although some people had some extreme views, we did get to a few really cool question:
Does religion really support itself in faith?
Is religious belief accepted as unquestionable, or is it a metaphysical ("pseudo-scientific") theory that hasn't been disproven in the eye of the religious?
Does human experience require faith?
Can science exist without Humans observing it?
Can a certain observation be objective?
Is science really possible when dealing with subjective beings?
Its hard to answer those when taken to the extreme, I'm inclined to think that perfect "faith" as in acceptance without searching for any proof is not actually real. Even the most surreal unscientific religious/spiritual belief have experiential validity for the believer. They see the effects of it in reality, even if it is not directly quantifiable for traditional science.
Thing is, a lot of people are considering faith as an illogical unchangeable imposition taken as truth, with no bearing or resemblance in reality. This is a mistake, this is only a very westernised contemporary and rarther ignorant look on religion as a whole, which leads to very defensive observations. However, to be fair, sadly, it is how a lot of "believers" make faith look (I once knew a "christian" girl that told me with a straigth face that -obviously, dinosaurs were a lie from the government and the non-believers to make us doubt the truth of god-, this was an average girl that had gone through highschool, worked as an office clerk, just "normal" in every sense. I could not believe she was being serious, I thought people like that only existed in a remote energy deprived country town, but she looked at me as if it was evident). The thing is that I'm certain that this is NOT religion or faith (like creationism - intelligent design), it is ignorance and lazyness, and it is observable everywhere, not just in fanatic or religious groups.
The problem is that people with these various biases will not abandon them, and that's where the miscommunication begins.
On the other hand, it is clear that science as a method, has no ethical, ideological or technical directives. But when being utilized by a human, it is unavoidably tarnished by personal views, as much as the observer might try not to influence the observation. As a consequence, it seems also impossible to have perfect science untouched by perspective or local beliefs.
Anyhow, I would personally recommend letting it go. I don't think you are actually addressing many of the issues most of the people were criticising the episode for... Just adding fuel.
It was an interesting topic, an interesting first episode, and a rather weak conclusion. I say, cut your losses and follow to the next topic.
(although I suppose another flame war does increase extra credit's overal popularity. Hey, no such thing as bad publicity, right?)
If we had faith in euclidian geometry then there would be Euclidianists, who would still believe in euclidian geometry, even after we had discovered the universe didn't work that way. This is why faith is ultimately incompatible with science. Start with faith and eventually you will go wrong. Don't hold any concepts dear, question even the starting assumptions and then you can learn.
The sad part is, despite noting that people had the unfortunate reaction of getting defensive and striking back, rather than examine their own assumptions or take a more even-handed look at the assumptions of others, the bulk of responses here seems to be, yet again, people lashing out because taking time out from games to address the butthurt apparently only resulted in more butthurt.
There seems to be this huge effort to create new ways to define "faith" as it applies to science, in order to discredit the idea that there can be any reconciliation at all between naturalist absolutists and those who have the "gall" to believe the universe has a spiritual dimension to it. Instead, maybe explore the possibility that all the new words you're trying to contrive, can be reduced simply to "faith", while the kind of "faith" you're lashing out against is something different which already has ITS own term: dogma.
And if that possibility exists, then perhaps one can extrapolate the further possibility that the kind of faith EC was talking about, is the same kind of faith you're defending, and not dogma. You know, shifting the window of perspective and seeing if that alters the context in which this is being taken.
the ambiguity of the word "faith" means that to a scientist it can mean one thing and to a deep theist it can mean something completely different. simply by using the word faith EC you are creating an ambiguity that CANNOT be introduced into the subject without an argument ensuing.
think about it for a second. while you may say "look we have joined belief and science!" what you have actually done is drive a wedge. faith as you describe it or more importantly as you MEAN to describe it is that of trust in the nature of reality which is fair enough but on a very fundamental level most scientists DONT trust it.
however but using "faith" to describe the trust you are giving a certain leeway that undermines the concept of trust in reality into the more film flam ideas of spirituality and uncertainty and indeed organized belief. theists see the word faith and think about their beliefs and in their constructed idealism and so by using "faith" in science you create a situation where they see science not as a tool for understanding but instead as a competing constructed idealism and reject it outright.
faith in science is better described as trust. we have a weary trust that reality isn't going to do a back flip at any second and that we can determine the rules around us as best we can. but that requires us to build axioms and more important destroy them any way we can....we DONT take them on faith.
Posts
Also, Character limits be damned...
And while science does start from observation, we must have faith in that our eyes are telling us the truth (a smarter being might be changing our vision to keep us from finding more truths and becoming smarter than him or whatever).
In short, while I don't believe in any religion, it's easy to proof that it does have it's place (that place being the questions that can't be answered, a place wich will always exist)
Yes, scientists can take things on faith. Yes, faith doesn't necessarily involve religion. I get it. We can talk about this without talking about religious belief or lack thereof.
But that does not make science faith, or faith based.
If you wanted us to delve into interesting discussion of faith and/or religion in games, you should have stuck to that topic.
1+1=2 the proof is in the Principia Mathematica, a quick Google search should provide you a synopsis, and wikipedia will provide you links to the text should you feel the need.
The big bang was 'caused' by a whole of stuff being present where it could not fit. What lead to this situation is a whole lot more complicated, and will not be answerable by our science for a long time, as none of the basic concepts by which we measure the universe ( time, space, matter, energy ) were present prior to the big bang occurring.
Chemical reactions are caused by Valence Bonding, very loosely that atoms seek to have stable electron 'shells' surrounding them. Hydrogen bonds with Oxygen because it has an unstable shell, and seeks to gain an an additional electron to stabilise it. It can do this by 'sharing' one of the oxygen atoms spare electrons ( another hydrogen atom is required to stabilise the oxygen ).
Random mutations in genes are the product of imperfect replication, or a result of radioactive bombardment.
This is all well understood science, and you should have learnt it in high school. Failing that simply Googling your questions should have thrown enough information your way that you would realise that they are understood.
Saying that religion can fill the space where answers don't exist ignores the fundamental danger of religion, that it can be used in place of asking the questions in the first place.
Look, EC, I love you guys, and I've watched every single episode and agreed with 95% of them. But you've gone totally the wrong way here, twice in a row. Honestly, I think you should have used this episode to address the flaws in your own reasoning, and instead you've used it as, basically, an attack on a large percentage of your audience. I think an apology is in order, and I think so strongly enough that I've signed up to say so. Apologies for not having signed up before, but I tend towards lurking. I don't like it when I feel the need to sign up for something just to criticise.
You've totally ignored the fundamental thing that many commenters were saying on the last video, the thing I think is A) critically important, and
Assumptions != faith.
You ASSUME postulates, axioms, validity of observation etc. You do not have FAITH in them. Faith means you honestly believe they are true. Assumption means you are hypothetically taking them to be true for the sake of the experiment, regardless of your personal belief. The experiment is designed to test the truth of the assumption.
You may or may not personally believe your postulates are in fact true. But that's irrelevant to the scientific method. You do not need to believe them to test them. So faith is a separate issue. You can have faith in whatever you like. It's just not part of the method.
It's that simple. Seriously, I really hope you read this and understand what people have been getting at. Again, I love you guys, as do most of your audience, and we want to help you out on this. I hope that doesn't seem condescending, cos it's not meant to be.
P.S. I don't mean to try and speak for all the commenters. Many would disagree with me, and many were making similar but separate points. But from the fundamental theory and philosophy of science, it's my view that the above is the single clearest and most important point to be made.
By not reacting respectfully to any of that you risk insulting your viewers and fans. You don't want that.
If you are really, really bored, heres one postulate that might settle this argument:
If the human mind is truly limited, if it is humanly impossible to understand the entire universe then it is impossible to understand any of the universe without having faith in postulates without an explanation
I'm probably going to end up replying to a lot of posts with this point, so apologies in advance. But you are not talking about faith. You assume those postulates; whether you personally have faith in them is irrelevant to the scientific method.
This is not just semantics. The difference between believing in something, and using something, is critically important to the difference between religion and science.
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
There's so much about this universe that, yeah, likely has a scientific answer...but until such time as there IS an answer, saying that God is not responsible, is a fallacy, and as a scientist, you should be ashamed of the bias you're showing.
@pharous, prove to me that a circle is perfectly round. Space is curved, so maybe you PERCEIVE it as round, maybe you can even measure it as round, but then you have to prove that you are capable of what "round" is in a 3 dimensional space. As I said before, with 1+1=2...that statement is based on some pretty bizarre assumptions that we take on faith.
"I think, therefor I am", is the only absolute in the Universe. I know I exist, thus I exist. Everything else is theory. I take it on faith that you exist, that life exists beyond my disembodied consciousness floating through emptiness...but I don't know for sure that you do.
If this is really what you were going for then you've taken the word faith and made it meaningless - if anything is faith, then the concept of faith is no longer useful. Yet faith isn't meaningless, in that it carries a strong connotation of religion and of a personal relationship with a god or at least believing-strongly-without-reason that a god exists. In this way it is severely inflammatory to silently change the definition of faith to apply to everything and then say "science is based on faith".
I think you don't understand why it is inflammatory because you yourselves all have or had had faith of the religious kind so your connotations of the word "faith" are completely different (see my post to the second faith episode). I don't think you understand the image that you are projecting because you are not in a position to receive that image as it is perceived by a large group of people. To atheists religious people appear to be believing something "just because" and they call that faith (I'm not saying that's really true, I'm saying what it appears is happening to a group of people). That is the opposite of what science is supposed to be about. You don't have to accept that definition of faith, no one would expect you to do that. However, if you want to have a learned debate rather than a flame-fest, you really need to be crystal clear and explicit in how you are disentangling faith and religion and why you are doing that. Trying to explain yourselves by invoking famous scientists only makes matters worse.
To me, especially this final episode appears to be about you simultaneously being frustrated while also playing games with the definition of faith in order to give religion the kind of legitimacy that science has (religion may have its own kind of legitimacy, but that kind of legitimacy is different than the kind that science has). Somehow I expect that that is not what you were really going for. So either I'm an idiot or there is something about your episode that is genuinely inflammatory but that you don't understand. Now I've been known to be an idiot sometimes, but perhaps that other option is also somewhat true anyway?
Your thinking about probability all wrong. The odds of producing someone with your precise genetic pattern when your parents combined their DNA were astronomical. The odds of two adults repeatedly having unprotected sex resulting in pregnancy however are quite a bit higher.
Your right saying that God is not responsible, is a fallacy. Its impossible to prove a negative. By the same token its also a fallacy to say that lepricons are not responsible or that superman isn't responsible.
Just because we can't rule something out completely doesn't make it a reasonable assertion.
Maybe Einstein was blinded by his faith in determinism, but science as a concept does not build on faith.
As Tim Minchin said: "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved".
Source:
People in the forum have already posted definitions of faith and science. I encourage the Penny Arcade staff to actually understand those definitions, instead of continuing to claim that faith and science are equal players.
In short, get back to the games. I was looking forward to a nice series of videos exploring how faith and religion have been explored in games; instead, we got this insidious message that science is really 'no better than' religion in exploring the universe.
I'm not "hostile to religion," I am hostile to lies and the outright rejection or undermining of science and the observed; this is exactly what Extra Credits has been doing the last two episodes, and it needs to stop. Now.
FAITH - the conscious decision to believe something is true without looking to prove it.
QWERTY - the act of accepting something as true and unquestionable.
Now, science has faith as defined above. Science does not have qwerty though. Qwerty is the reason religion is so wrong. The unquestionable part is the problem. You can spend thousands of episodes discussing on the fact that science has faith, but people will not understand you unless you make a distinction between faith and qwerty.
Do not mud the bondaries. Do not call qwerty faith and faith faith if you want to walk that line. People will get mad - and rightfully so, as qwerty is pretty bad.
If one disproves a tenant of an actual faith, then his words are met with fingers in ears and mouths yelling "LA-LA-LA-LA". If one disproves a scientific theory, then a wordview will be changed and all sorts of fields of study will be opened for further exploration.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Hmuda
Let's use a stupid example here. Say I use the axiom that the universe is made of jelly. Now I don't think our universe is made of jelly, or that this axiom is true in any fashion, I just think that it would be interesting to assume the universe is made of jelly and see where we get from there. With a bit of thinking, I can say that if the universe were made of jelly, and basic physics still applied, I (as a non-jelly person) would have trouble walking as my feet would not have the required surface area to disperse my weight across the surface evenly. If I were to flesh this out rigourously and made sure that the math that follows from the axioms does back up this hypothesis, I could say that me sinking to my knees in jelly is an unavoidable outcome of a jelly universe and physics.
So my set of axioms (jelly, physics, logic) would imply that I would lose my shoes trying to walk. None of this is faith. If it does not line up with experimentation, then either my logic was not sound (which is why we have the peer review process to correct these human errors), or one (or more) of the axioms is not true in this universe (so the ground is chocolate, not jelly, or the physics are different, or some of my assumed logical laws do not hold). If the logic is sound, but the axioms don't line up, it doesn't make the reasoning any less useful should we find a universe where all the axioms are in place. And if one of the axioms (i.e jelly) becomes inconceivable in the light of overwhelming evidence later, it doesn't make that research wrong, just impractical to use.
Really the only faith here is that of the researcher who dedicates their life to the furthering of the jelly-based sciences, only to find out that people have been walking around on the earth for some time quite easily. Picking sets of axioms to work in requires a belief that the work you produce from these axioms will be useful, and that your field won't be supplanted by a more general theory down the track and render your work somewhat impotent. It does not affect the logic in any way. If it's correct, it will continue being correct no matter how much the universe is discovered to digress from the logic's axioms. But it may affect the well-being and livelihood of the researcher.
So, in all, logical reasoning does not care what axioms you pick or how correct they are. All it states is that if these things are true, then these other things hold. Which is different from if it were taken on faith, as it would then say, these things are true so these other things follow. What set of axioms the researcher picks, however, is based on what they believe to be important to explore, and this decision can be based on any reason, including faith. The axioms and logic don't care if they are true or practical, but you probably will if you want funding. This is why logic does not need faith, but you might.
They weren't trying to comment on how much people may have explored the issue outside of the thread. They were looking at the dialogue within the thread, and seeing, instead of intelligent discourse and the exploration of ideas, rather the staunch opponents on each side drawing battlelines and slandering each other. They're not accusing anyone of ignorance, they're just wishing that the ball had been played more instead of just being lit on fire along with most of the pitch.
That said, we shouldn't engage in the "everyone does it" logic that creates false equivalences between disparate acts and ideas. We get enough of that in the political media.
i think your right though i dont think people know what they are arguing about but maybe they do and dont know how to express themselves.
i think its a given that people of deep religious belief do not see the "logical pathway" in the same way as a scientific person does and this comes across as blindness and ignorance. to be honest this often is because it is in a sad few (though far from all) cases a deliberate willful ignorance. a belief outside of faith and in truth we are arguning about belief not faith.
poeticmatter quoted tim minchin earlier where he said "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved". this is important though because we know what he MEANS as opposed to what he specifically SAYS.
we get caught up in wording. we say "faith" and it means different things to different people so inevitably saying faith as a believer is different to faith as a scientist. faith for a blind believer is undeniably as the great minchin describes: its a blindness.
i suppose the argument of faith is one of definition.
ill give you an example the old quesiton of "if a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to hear it does it make a sound?" forever i have seen people scientific or not who argue this and that but in the end its NOT a question about sound or even our concept of sound and hearing its about the WORD "sound". our language has evolved to make that word like so many ambiguous and as we inevitably connect our personal slant of the concept of sound to that word out perception of what that concept means to the world changes too.
You're not an idiot. You're absolutely right, it is inflammatory. They attempted to make parallels that don't exist, and in the process, severely misrepresented science and given legitimacy to faith.
We don't need faith to be explorers, as Extra Credits asserts. Quite the contrary.
"It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us." - Carl Sagan
What's worse, is instead of address the fallacies revealed by community posts, they dismissed the bulk of criticism as "unquestioned absolutes" akin to Creationism. No, that's not the problem here.
"I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed." - Carl Sagan
Sagan, the best ambassador to science we've ever had, gave some value to faith. But that value was in humanity, not science. And that praise was lukewarm, as it also came with the severe warnings of what fundamentalist faith could do to our existence. To attempt to weave a thread through both faith and science demonstrates an elementary understanding of the subject and paints people of science with a brush they have worked a lifetime to keep away from their work.
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
That was one of the major points of most people criticising. Not that the discussion couldn't be had, but that it was not a thoroughly researched episode.
Nevertheless, I do think this episode shows in greater depth what the reasoning process was behind the last episode (which I personally did understand and mostly agree with from your initial exposition), and in that sense it's great, but I doubt that it will solve the conflicts.
About the topic of faith and religion and science. I feel that although some people had some extreme views, we did get to a few really cool question:
Does religion really support itself in faith?
Is religious belief accepted as unquestionable, or is it a metaphysical ("pseudo-scientific") theory that hasn't been disproven in the eye of the religious?
Does human experience require faith?
Can science exist without Humans observing it?
Can a certain observation be objective?
Is science really possible when dealing with subjective beings?
Its hard to answer those when taken to the extreme, I'm inclined to think that perfect "faith" as in acceptance without searching for any proof is not actually real. Even the most surreal unscientific religious/spiritual belief have experiential validity for the believer. They see the effects of it in reality, even if it is not directly quantifiable for traditional science.
Thing is, a lot of people are considering faith as an illogical unchangeable imposition taken as truth, with no bearing or resemblance in reality. This is a mistake, this is only a very westernised contemporary and rarther ignorant look on religion as a whole, which leads to very defensive observations. However, to be fair, sadly, it is how a lot of "believers" make faith look (I once knew a "christian" girl that told me with a straigth face that -obviously, dinosaurs were a lie from the government and the non-believers to make us doubt the truth of god-, this was an average girl that had gone through highschool, worked as an office clerk, just "normal" in every sense. I could not believe she was being serious, I thought people like that only existed in a remote energy deprived country town, but she looked at me as if it was evident). The thing is that I'm certain that this is NOT religion or faith (like creationism - intelligent design), it is ignorance and lazyness, and it is observable everywhere, not just in fanatic or religious groups.
The problem is that people with these various biases will not abandon them, and that's where the miscommunication begins.
On the other hand, it is clear that science as a method, has no ethical, ideological or technical directives. But when being utilized by a human, it is unavoidably tarnished by personal views, as much as the observer might try not to influence the observation. As a consequence, it seems also impossible to have perfect science untouched by perspective or local beliefs.
Anyhow, I would personally recommend letting it go. I don't think you are actually addressing many of the issues most of the people were criticising the episode for... Just adding fuel.
It was an interesting topic, an interesting first episode, and a rather weak conclusion. I say, cut your losses and follow to the next topic.
(although I suppose another flame war does increase extra credit's overal popularity. Hey, no such thing as bad publicity, right?)
There seems to be this huge effort to create new ways to define "faith" as it applies to science, in order to discredit the idea that there can be any reconciliation at all between naturalist absolutists and those who have the "gall" to believe the universe has a spiritual dimension to it. Instead, maybe explore the possibility that all the new words you're trying to contrive, can be reduced simply to "faith", while the kind of "faith" you're lashing out against is something different which already has ITS own term: dogma.
And if that possibility exists, then perhaps one can extrapolate the further possibility that the kind of faith EC was talking about, is the same kind of faith you're defending, and not dogma. You know, shifting the window of perspective and seeing if that alters the context in which this is being taken.
think about it for a second. while you may say "look we have joined belief and science!" what you have actually done is drive a wedge. faith as you describe it or more importantly as you MEAN to describe it is that of trust in the nature of reality which is fair enough but on a very fundamental level most scientists DONT trust it.
however but using "faith" to describe the trust you are giving a certain leeway that undermines the concept of trust in reality into the more film flam ideas of spirituality and uncertainty and indeed organized belief. theists see the word faith and think about their beliefs and in their constructed idealism and so by using "faith" in science you create a situation where they see science not as a tool for understanding but instead as a competing constructed idealism and reject it outright.
faith in science is better described as trust. we have a weary trust that reality isn't going to do a back flip at any second and that we can determine the rules around us as best we can. but that requires us to build axioms and more important destroy them any way we can....we DONT take them on faith.
EC = bad at telling their audience what "faith" means
You're losing me.