Odds and Ends
It’s been a pretty “hectic” few days recently. I put hectic in quotes because it’s not in so much a busy way as a preoccupied way. Anyway, a few little seeds that might have grown into blog entries in more fertile times…
Mainstream introductory Biology as taught in schools is not a science. Microbiology? Science. Neurobiology? Science.
Science is a “how,” philosophy is a “why,” but the “what” is just knowledge. Memorizing animal and muscle names is not science. Understanding and theorizing on how the animals grow or the muscles work, that’s science.
We have a lot of liberal arts majors writing science stories right now entitled, “Was Einstein wrong?” Unless you forget to carry an x somewhere, you can’t be wrong in Physics (then you’re wrong in Math, actually). Your theory just fails to be predictive over a range of values. Newton wasn’t wrong in Physics terms once Einstein came along. We still teach his theories because they are predictive over a vast range of useful circumstances.
Now, in metaphysical or philosophical terms, the worldview prompted by Newton’s theory was less than accurate. But that doesn’t make his equations any less “correct,” except when they are proved not to be predictive (photons, black holes, etc.).
You have the same thing with Einstein. Unless our measurement instruments are proven systematically wrong, nothing will ever make Relativity less predictive where it has shown itself to be predictive.
If you say, “Nothing can travel faster than light,” and then something travels faster than light, you have found a limitation to the applicability of your theory. Quantum Mechanics contradicts Relativity all over the place. Einstein died still trying to reconcile them, as far as I recall.
So, you might say Einstein’s conclusions are wrong, that he stretched his theory out farther than it ended up being valid, but that doesn’t do anything to his theory but put a warning label on its usability at a certain point.
People seem to think that God has his calculator out figuring out gravitational forces based on equations developed during the last millenium. These formulas are nothing but descriptors of the magic that is life. Those frictional “angels” in pre-Newtonian Physics could be pushing away on the planets and airplanes and photons as we speak. We don’t know. All we know is that we have a handful of equations that can predict how those angels will operate under given conditions.
This, I believe, is the fundamental arrogance and oversight in “scientific atheism,” we might say. The idea that we can truly explain things is hogwash; we can only do our best to predict.
“Wealth” is the height of the water in the bathtub. “Income” is the flow out of the spout. Taxing wealth is hard, so we just leap over that and assume high-income people are wealthy, and that wealthy people are high-income. Like above, you might have a strong correlation, but the angels will do what they do.
When you raise the tax rate, you might or might not increase “revenue.” Saying you are “increasing revenue” is, therefore, a statement of faith rather than fact. Even if you levy a fixed-value “citizenship fee” shakedown on the public, you might actually lose revenue with administration costs and people renouncing their citizenship. Angels again, or maybe just the Invisible Hand.
Believing in “settled science” is a very bad religion. Science is a process that starts with a question. If you stifle questions, you no longer want answers. You will find yourself in a new Dark Age prompted by your own religion, not that of those clinging to their guns.
If you want to be an atheist, do it on philosophical terms. And don’t evangelize or pontificate, for Pete’s sake. It makes you look self-conscious. Wear your God-given free will with pride.
If you are an agnostic, be ever listening and rarely speaking. If we wanted to hear theories about uncertainty we would just ask an economist.
If you are an economist, it would be hard not to believe in some kind of god. You can’t look at the way chaos working together makes something wholly different and useful without seeing some vision of a creator and a universally common spirit over it all.