Unsettled Christianity

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August 26th, 2011

Doubting in Science

I really liked this article:

To be fair, though, we might call this humanism or secularism, President Eliot did this out of an abiding faith. However, this is the story of science. As history tells us, there was a period from the mid 1600s through the early 1800s called the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason — modernism. It is epitomized in Francis Bacon and the instantiation of the scientific method. The scientific method is a set of steps which starts with a question after which a hypothesis is proposed and tested. Finally the question is answered. In the engineering version of the scientific method, a problem is presented, and by the final step it is solved.

Victor Udoewa: The Roles of Doubt in Science and Faith.

Science has, for some, because the ‘god’ of their life, and by that, I mean, that for some ‘science’ remains unquestionable, which, in my opinion, will harm science as much as it has harmed faith.

Explore and doubt and believe. That’s my motto, I think. For now. Now, I’m not sure

Tags: doubt, faith, Francis Bacon, Scientific method
Posted in Science | No Comments »

January 11th, 2011

Is Nature destroying the Scientific Method?

: Image via Wikipedia

Something strange (odd, unexplainable, due to the fact that the tool used to explain such instances is itself the heart of the problem) in the neighborhood (the scientific community, across the several disciplines of science):

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Now what?