Philosophy: A Brief Explanation +50 Insightful Post

Journal GillBates0's Journal: Philosophy: A Brief Explanation +50 Insightful Post 3

Journal by GillBates0 on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:32PM

By 808140 (welcome to my friend's list! BTW, his handle and UID are the same ?! )
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126468&cid=10582302

Re:A Brief Explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
by 808140 (808140) Friend of a Friend on Wednesday October 20, @10:27PM (#10582302)

Your question is a good one, but it has no answer. I'd like to explain why. It's a matter of philosophy.

You see, science (especially in popular consciousness) is seen as the discipline which endeavors to answer the question "why?" with respect to various observable phenomena. These questions have been at the center of human thought for well, ever. We created religion in its various forms to answer this very class of questions.

With the advent of science, it seemed as though we finally had a way to truly answer these questions, but unfortunately this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. Science does not try to answer nor can it answer the why. The why has no answer.

Let me explain. Science (and specifically the scientific method) is designed to determine, through experiment and falsifiability of hypothesis, the way the world behaves and to model its behaviour. Because these theories often have far reaching consequences, laymen (and even scientists, unfortunately) often make the mistake of thinking that their theories explain the why. But they do not; they simply explain the how.

Let's explore this a bit. Newton's law of gravity did not explain why gravity exists. Why two bodies fall together is anyone's guess -- why, as a question, demands a reason. There may very well be a reason that two bodies fall together -- a popularly believed one is that some supernatural being designed it that way -- but physics does not, indeed, cannot, conjure up a reason by simply observing and modeling the way those two objects fall together.

An example of this in more human terms: suppose you have a batty friend, and everytime you say foo, he says bar, like clockwork. You would quickly observe this and would, in your mind, be able to construct a hypothesis based on this behaviour -- when the subject hears foo, he says bar. And you could construct a series of experiments that test this hypothesis -- perhaps you would find that in the presence of blondes, he utters baz instead. This knowledge would allow you to predict his behaviour in certain situations, but it would say nothing whatsoever about his reasons for it. Nor could any amount of observation ever explain the reasons.

Now, in physics this is obfuscated by the discipline's drive to isolate core phenomena. That is, it has been noted that often phenomena we observe are caused by smaller, less obvious phenomena. So, for example, attempts to make gravity fit into quantum mechanics have driven physicists to suggest that gravity as a force is mediated by a graviton, or what not. If this were ever demonstrated by experiment and became widely accepted, a laymen might ask, "why does gravity behave the way it does?" and a physicist might explain that it has to do with property xyz of gravitons. But this is not an explanation.

This is simply telling the listener that the macroscopic observable phenomenon of gravity is actually made up of several, less easily observable phenomena. This is all well and good, but you'll notice that it actually explains "how" gravity works. "Why does my house keep out the rain?" "Because it has a roof." It seems logical, but it isn't. Because the roof is how it keeps out the rain -- the reason it keeps out the rain is something much more subtle, like, "Because the designers felt that the house's inhabitants would rather not get wet."

Science answers the how of things, and it does this exceedingly well. It cannot (and for the most part, does not even attempt) to answer the why. But why and how are so muddled in the way people think that lots of folks (scientists included) are deluded into thinking that science will eventually explain the big questions like "why does the universe exist", and "why are we here."

If you've ever asked a scientist the latter question, you may have gotten something along the lines of "We're here as a result of abiogenisis, followed by billions of years of evolution, catelysed by Darwinian natural selection and occasional random mutations." He hasn't lied to you; there's evidence to support everything he says. But he's explaining how we got here, not why we're here, which is why this answer is somewhat less satisfying than we hoped it would be. He's not answering the question we asked. He probably doesn't even realize it. In fact, we ourselves may not realize it.

When a religious person says, "We're here because God made us in his image", he has no evidence, and is essentially selling you what he believes and so we're often unsatisfied, because we feel that he lacks the credibility of science, which is based on falsifiable principles deduced from observable phenomena. But the religious person is actually attempting to answer the question you asked: he's giving you a reason for our existence, even if it seems to be a facile one.

Religions don't make this distinction easy on themselves because they foolishly get caught up in trying to answer the how, too. So they make up stories about Adam and Eve or Pandora's Box or whatever their creation story is -- this mythology is a primitive attempt at answering the how, and science does this in an infinitely better and more reliable way.

But Science can never answer the why. This is chiefly the realm of religion an philosophy. Who knows why gravity works the way it does? It just does. Obviously, if I drop an apple, it falls. It has done this for all time and I induced from this that next time I drop an apple, it will also fall. I explain at what speed it falls by careful measurement, and find that for bodies with mass that differs enough, the acceleration is relative the masses of the two bodies and inversely proportional to the square of their distance from each other. All good, that. But it isn't why.

I'm agnostic myself, by which I mean that I don't believe in God but don't write off the possibility that such a being could exist (in the days of the luminferous aether, I probably wouldn't have believed that special relativity was true, either, but as I've been shown proof, I've changed by viewpoint -- I suppose I would do the same if "proof" of God could be given). But I think that this subtle distinction between the how and why is one of the reasons that so many of the most brilliant scientists have been religious. Ultimately, you realize that you can never induce intent by just observing operation. At best you can make educated guesses. At best.

So, yeah, to sum up, Science: how? Religion: why? And the two are linearly independent, if you will. And therefore do not conflict. You just need to make sure that you let science answer the how and religion the why, and not get caught up in ridiculous mythologies that are falsifiable by modern science (Noah's Ark, for example, or Adam and Eve).

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