I guess most people could and would understand if the matters are explained using neutral words. It demands some skill and knowledge of sensitive words to be able to explain the matters in a neutral way. Don’t use the e-word when talking with antievolutionists, use simple words, take your examples from the everyday life of the person, do not try to justify your opinions by invoking the conclusions of an unknown scientist or theologian, etc.
3 Likes
You could … and do say lots of things. And in this case would be wrong if you said it. I would a thousand times more trust James’ theology than that of someone who doesn’t accept basic, verifiable corrections; and I say that without even recalling what all James’ theology may include. But this I do know about him: He’s concerned about being truthful with the reality that we do have empirical access to … and can even measure. And that already puts him (and his theology) on better footing than others who won’t do that. He who can be trusted with “little things” … like truthfulness about things of the created order … will be more trustworthy with the larger things too … like spiritual experiences and realities.
But I only see one strongman in the room. James is concerned for accuracy and truth. When you can’t even pass that bar, why should I believe you have anything substantive to offer scientifically or theologically? On what basis could one build trust? There is no “both sides” here - just one side who is concerned about truth and accuracy, and a challenger who apparently isn’t.
3 Likes
I want to soften my harsh criticism of you above. Not that I will give an inch toward those who want conspiracy conjectures and such to be granted any equal footing with actually evidenced things. I have no intention of that, and recognize your post wasn’t about that but about theology and its place in the world. On that, I retract my seemingly complete refusal to trust anything others have to offer. I do think that you have a strong faith, Adam, and I have things to learn from you and people who think as you do. I still maintain that James continues to have the upper biblical hand on this issue, but I shouldn’t use that to cast blanket disparagements on your own faith journey and offerings. Sorry about that.
1 Like
I think “measurement” or what I prefer to call “quantification” is a necessary component of science (don’t get me wrong) but as @mitchellmckain stressed, not the only feature. E.g., one could apply the catch-phrase “Baking is the art of measurement” or “architecture is the art of measurement” to many human activities as well as physics. And indeed, one hears common aphorisms such as “she’s got baking down to a science”, implying that one is able to fill up measuring cups with flour to a high degree of precision and follow a recipe (a “method”) to add things in a precise order… involving applied science (applied chemistry in this case), perhaps, but I think different than doing science itself.
A related challenge with stressing to the common public that science is “measuring stuff with a high degree of accuracy and precision” is that the image that comes to most lay-peoples’ minds is high-tech laboratories and (men) in labcoats using expensive and sophisticated equipment to “measure stuff”.
In my research area (behavioural ecology), a scientist might test a prediction like “a bird population that has evolved while being exposed to a brood parasitic species will be better able to discriminate its own eggs than a population that has evolved in isolation on an island without such brood parasites”. To test this prediction, one could design an experiment to add “foreign eggs” to the nests of females in the two populations, and count the frequency at which the females eject the foreign eggs. This “counting of egg-ejecting females” is certainly quantification, but something that can be done using only eyeballs and direct observation, while wearing gum boots and taking notes with a pencil. And the accuracy of the data relies on a simple yes versus no. Eventually, ecologists will do statistics on the observed frequencies—this involves simple math for sure, but usually not the complex modelling and calculus that the ordinary public might assume.
A key and necessary component of science, I think, involves proposing falsifiable hypotheses which can be tested by physical (empirical) measurements. In science, one proposes a physical cause for a physical effect “the hypothesis” which is only a scientific hypothesis if it can make a prediction that can be tested and falsified. How to explain that in simple terms to common person on the street??? It’s difficult… 
5 Likes
What with the current skepticism towards science, perhaps it would be better to look at it at the level of “cause and effect.” One can perhaps not imagine how mutations change species over time, but have no trouble understanding how a broken fuel pump makes their car engine starve for fuel and stop running. Ultimately, that approach gives room for God acting in the world as well, as the ultimate cause.
Perhaps even that is too great a gap for some to span, but spending more time on explaining, for example, how a virus causes infection, and how a vaccine helps the body produce antibodies and immune cells to fight the virus might be more productive than just presenting a vaccine as a miracle of science to prevent disease.
I don’t know. Making an argument idiot proof greatly underestimates the power of idiots it seems these days.
4 Likes
Not a direct response to what was asked but I think an important consideration nonetheless. The amount of science a person should be expected to understand should increase in proportion to the amount of use they wish to put it to. Anyone wishing to assert that science agrees with a point they make should be completely competent in their understanding. Otherwise, just donning a white lab coat for a photo shoot or misrepresenting science degrades the very authority they are misappropriating.
4 Likes
Yes some measurements require an understanding of physics. But you can say that for just about anything – even football. Physics does apply and therefore there are cases where an understanding of physics is needed for a play in football.
2 Likes
Religion?
I will admit that my understanding of physics is almost essential for the occupation I am currently engaged in, but (The understanding of) science does not rule the roost, nor does it underpin all of life.
To clarify, we do not need to know the science of a microwave or light switch to use it. The science may be there but our ability to function does not rely on understanding it…
Richard
No but you might need to know the science to troubleshoot it if it goes wrong. Or to stop things from going wrong in the first place.
https://jamesmckay.net/2021/11/the-time-i-forgot-about-the-speed-of-light/
3 Likes
I think that the ability to be discerning consumers of media claims and sources is one of our most grievously lacking areas where better science awareness would have helped and where our culture has experienced great amounts of self-inflicted harm due to science ignorance.
3 Likes
OK. Let’s trade a random football player to an engineering firm, and assign him the very simplest measurement in a day’s work, generally temperature. RTD or thermocouple? Local transmitter or home run to cabinet? What is the response time to step change? Which installation detail does he select? Where are the thermowell resonance frequency and flow Strouhal Frequency (missing this caused a nuclear reactor incident).
The physics of the material being measured is part of the measurement. Is a mixture miscible? What is the dielectric? What are the phase triple point and critical points? Do you expect choking, flashing, or cavitation, and to what degree?
All this explicitly requires the ability to deal with concepts and equations of physics beyond routine life.
I might hesitate to say that physics is only measurement, but the reverse is mostly true.
2 Likes
In my line of work I get more problems from people who have tried and failed to repair something that from those who just brig it to me.
As Dirty Harry once said
A person needs to know their limitations
I would say this is more about clever advertising and gullibility than science. You can blind people with science quite easily… I just loved Maccoy on the Long journey home when he gave a fantastic Latin name for cramps.
Everything in its place. Some things are best left to the professionals.
Richard
Yes that’s one of my biggest concerns too.
It scares me just how gullible some Christians can be, falling hook line and sinker for the most blatantly ridiculous and easily debunked falsehoods and conspiracy theories imaginable. But when you’re being taught that “becoming like little children” means embracing wilful ignorance, that “reason” and critical thinking are the enemy of faith, that science is something “secular” that is not to be trusted, and that appearing “odd” or “unintellectual” is a virtue, that is basically what you are being trained to do.
I think a better definition of physics is formulating mathematical models to describe reality and then using measurement to establish their validity.
You can also teach people the basic principles by which science works. Measurement, basic maths, critical thinking and logic.
4 Likes
I’m possibly among the people you have in mind. But the simple question you asked is not simple to answer. Even if one is talking about scientists. When I was only a year away from my last biology, computer science and calc classes, I spent a year as a German language and literature undergrad in a dorm where my closest neighbors were really, truly brilliant PhD students in Physics and Math.
They demonstrated an absolute disconnect between the sciences they were studying, and the ones they weren’t. Oma’s home remedies were foolproof medicine in their eyes, and basic safe kitchen practices were incomprehensible. Laws of thermodynamics seemed to have no application regarding ventilating the dorm. The relationship between evaporation, air pressure and cooling made no sense out of the lab, when applied to actual human body’s experience; and the concept of muscular work in counteraction to gravitational pull was baffling until I explained it.
More directly to your question, though, because so much of science education is NOT hands on, and many kids don’t do activities that are really hands on – even messing around with scrap lumber and tools in the garage – there is a serious lack of understanding that or why SCIENCE isn’t just magic. You spend a year or more learning Latin vocab that sounds very much like “Charms and Spells” in Harry Potter. The Physics teacher explains that the relationship between the thickness of thin films and color was understood by measurement – which will not be demonstrated in this class; so just memorize the table, Miss Reimann. Etc, etc.
But in the “low level” Earth Materials class I took in 9th grade for fun, we watched a movie about water columns and molecular bonds in water. 20 years later I was contemplating how to start a siphon to empty my daughter’s toddler pool. That video was the key. I figured it out, and I understood why.
In brief, unfortunately, I think it’s more complicated than seeking “the most elementary basics that everyone should be able to understand.” You will be dealing with misunderstanding, values, motives, poor critical thinking skills, false paradigms and the like.
I will look over the thread again later, though, and try to pull out what seem to be reasonable assumptions from the perspective of a broad on the bus.
In spite of my pessimism, @jammycakes, I think your question is really worthy.
7 Likes
Kendel, you’ve reminded me of some of the characters who I studied science alongside at university. One of them was into crystal healing and New Age stuff, another was fine with reading his horoscope. One guy in our Christian Union who lent me some YEC literature at one point was an engineer. And this was Cambridge!
Maybe I am expecting too much of people. Or maybe I’m missing something about how most people think.
6 Likes
No it is not.
To be sure the measurements in physics often require an understanding of physics. But measurement is used in many things like cooking. No, I don’t think that makes it physics.
Ok. Let’s trade a random cook to an engineering firm, and assign him the very simplest measurement in a day’s work, generally temperature. RTD or thermocouple? Local transmitter or home run to cabinet? What is the response time to step change? Which installation detail does he select? Where are the thermowell resonance frequency and flow Strouhal Frequency (missing this caused a nuclear reactor incident).
(font of mockery)
I do not think anyone here is claiming one needs to be a physicist to read a bathroom scale. A cook hardly needs to be “an expert in measurement” - the original point of discussion, to use a measuring cup, and the precision required is not demanding. A football player traded to an engineering firm is not likely to waltz in and be able to design typical industrial measurement, and the engineer sent to the football team can walk again with assistance.
2 Likes
Another example might be knowing that it is really the methodology of science not the specific theories or ideas in science that make it science. Without the scientific approach of making observations, forming hypotheses, testing those hypotheses with predicted observations or experiments, etc., science is just another mythology. Biologists are not required to accept evolution as an article of faith. If convincing evidence appeared that disproved evolution tomorrow, biologists would be obligated as scientists to reject evolution. The reason biologist embrace evolution is because it explains the evidence better than non-evolutionary explanations. There is always the possibility of bias, but science is inherently self-correcting and the correct ideas will eventually win out in the end. This has been borne out historically as in the case of continental drift and plate tectonics. On a larger timescale, it was also true of heliocentrism.
3 Likes
As always, missing the point of what was said. And to think others liked it…that tells me they understand the point even less than you do.
See now thats an interesting point because what it highlights is that one may claim to be scientific and yet isnt capable of even the most basic mechanical fixes…things that individuals like myself do in our sleep. Thats also exactly tue reason why i scoff at so called scientific experts. If they really were as good as they believe they are, then their science knowledge would cross over into changing out the flat tyre with a spare. Unfortunately the real world doesnt correlate with so called theoretical scientific knowledge…if it did, roadside assistance wouldnt be necessary would it!
If one cannot think any more deeply about how long it takes the claws to grow on a T Rex other than to say “that’s a red herring” (as another post on this topic has stated), well perhaps the next time one passes by a road side assistance service vehicle down on one knee undoing wheel nuts for a helpless individual owner who is watching on dressed in a suit and tie, one might think perhaps all the theoretical knowledge that individual has…and yet they cant change a car tyre! I see the inconsistency there with red flags waving all over the place. But then again, I’m old school so there’s that i suppose.