Senior Scholar Jeff Schloss Reviews “Faith vs. Fact” by Jerry Coyne in The Washington Post | The BioLogos Forum

Faith & Science Conversation
164

But you’re sounding a lot like one if you are rejecting the scientific method and portraying science as backing up a claim with studies or as different people with different “worldviews” sifting through precisely the same pile of data (who produces the data, btw?).

The way one does real science is by actively and relentlessly trying to disprove one’s own hypothesis. That’s precisely how science (most of the time) prevents us from fooling ourselves, and that essential component is utterly missing from your description.

If I’m reviewing a National Institutes of Health grant application, I have two primary criteria:

  1. Is it hypothesis-driven or is it merely descriptive?
  2. Is the applicant proposing the best tests of her hypothesis, IOW the ones that are best designed to falsify it if it is incorrect?
165

[quote=“aleo, post:147, topic:2392”]
Trying to explain altruism as having ‘survival value’ in a Darwinian sense has not met with much success.[/quote]
How exhaustively have you looked?

[quote]Richard Dawkins…
[/quote]Has not been an active scientist for many years now. Maybe you should consider looking beyond popular books written by retired scientists before making such a bold, sweeping claim?

166

More of your competing of objectivity against subjectivity to the complete destruction of subjectivity. And society is full of the educated science minded people going out of their way to brutalize emotions of people. The guilt is with the scientific community and especially the evolutionists.

It is just the same as the Sheldon character in the sitcom Big Bang theory. Only on a societal scale in real life it is not funny to have to deal with all these people who reject subjectivity.

Subjectivity is an inherently creationist concept, based on the mechanism of creation, which is choosing (in a spontaneous sense).

And there is no excuse of ignorance, because the knowledge about how choosing and subjectivity works is inherent in common discourse.

167

Not exhaustively, I’ll admit. Its my personal judgement that when you exclude kin selection and reciprocal altruism, there is not much good evidence for ‘true’ altruism in the animal kingdom. And I mostly side with the critics of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. Perhaps I do look too diligently for evidence that supports human exceptionalism. There are many atheistic scientist who do the opposite–Richard Dawkins, for one. But read the first chapter of his “The Ancestors Tale”. I admire his frank admission (p,34-35) that he has no evolutionary explanation for The Great Leap Forward taken by Homo sapiens some 40,000 years ago. Of course a few years later he becomes an ‘evangelist for atheism’, writing ‘The God Delusion’.

Al Leo

1 Like
168

[quote=“aleo, post:167, topic:2392”]
Not exhaustively, I’ll admit.[/quote]
I admire your frank admission.

I’m not following you. How can you make a personal judgment about the existence or nonexistence of good evidence without going to the evidence itself?

I don’t see the relevance of citing what people write about other people’s work when you are making explicit claims about evidence.

[quote]Perhaps I do look too diligently for evidence that supports human exceptionalism.
[/quote]I’m not seeing any evidence that you’re looking for evidence of anything, frankly. You only appear to cite hearsay. Can you point to a single case in which you’ve gone to the evidence?

169

I was never intending to claim that other, not hard science fields (sociology, philosophy, theology) rely exclusively on the scientific method. I was claiming that other fields can arrive at true claims. But they are not “objectively true” claims, because some degree of subjectivity is always involved. I was arguing with was the idea that “truth” can only be arrived at scientifically and that there is a binary division between subjective and objective realities. Scientific truth is arrived at via the scientific method. I think there are other genres of truth and other modes of accessing truth, and varying degrees of subjectivity involved.

If a person’s definition of truth is “a fact completely uncolored by worldview, culture, expectations, or any other subjective factor” then what constitutes truth is a very narrow set of purely objective matematical or logical statements. Almost everything we call truth involves subjective interpretation and “meaning making” to some degree.

It is not testable in the same way a chemistry hypothesis is testable. You can never completely isolate your variables in a society. You are always going to have to rely on subjective interpretations to some degree.

My whole point in addressing the topic was to point out that most of the world that I interact with does not view subjective and objective truth as black and white opposites. That’s all. I am not disputing the scientific method or rejecting the scientific consensus. But ,many of you scientist types would make terrible literature teachers or playwrights or comedians because some of you think science is the only way to arrive at and present true things.

170

[quote=“Christy, post:169, topic:2392”]
I was never intending to claim that other, not hard science fields (sociology, philosophy, theology) rely exclusively on the scientific method.[/quote]
I’m not following you, because that wasn’t my problem with what you wrote at all.

My criticism is that you took a sociological hypothesis and completely misrepresented how the scientific method would be applied to it. Sociology is much more scientific than you seem to think.

The hard/soft science dichotomy is a false one, by the way. There are plenty of important problems in hard science for which good, testable hypotheses have yet to be found, and the converse is also true.

Yes, but you were equating objectivity with reduction to a mathematical statement or formula. To illustrate the problem with that equivalence, I’ll invite you again to explain how “RNA is the genetic material of rabies virus” is either not objective or reducible to a mathematical statement or formula.

I don’t see any support for your claim as someone who does science. As you said, “To communicate and convince, you have to understand where another person is coming from and say something that makes sense to them.” Science (biomedical research) is where I’m coming from, but I don’t see that you grasp the basic idea of science.

I understand that, but my argument is that you were doing so by grossly misrepresenting the scientific method and using IMO an utterly false equivalence between “objective” and “mathematical.”

Absolutely not! Scientific conclusions are always provisional. That’s precisely why it is so powerful!

[quote]I think there are other genres of truth and other modes of accessing truth, and varying degrees of subjectivity involved.
[/quote]Fair enough, but you were presenting things as much more black/white and hard/soft than I have observed in my professional experience.

171

[quote=“Christy, post:169, topic:2392”]
It is not testable in the same way a chemistry hypothesis is testable.[/quote]
It is testable in exactly the same way: what empirical observations are predicted if the hypothesis is false?

Correct, but what you are missing is the fact that lack of correlation is very strong evidence against causation. What you presented as sociology was polemics, not science. Can you at least make some attempt to see that?

Not really. You predict the purely empirical observation(s) before you have it to remove subjectivity. That’s my point.

I think you did a lot more than that!

I didn’t claim that you were doing either. I pointed out that your representation of sociology suggests a huge misunderstanding about how science works. You conflated the scientific method with the polemic method.

[quote]But ,many of you scientist types would make terrible literature teachers or playwrights or comedians because some of you think science is the only way to arrive at and present true things.
[/quote]Which of us “scientist types” here has done anything of the sort, Christy?

172

How it works with sociology is that in principle (but not in reality) you can get all the facts about how decisions are made, but all agency of any decision is categorically a subjective issue.

And even if you did get all the facts about how decisions are made, which is impossible, then you would still have to consider what other ways it might have been decided, which is impossibility squared.

So there are 3 main areas of subjectivity for sociology. Subjectivity proper, the agency of decisions which is categorically impossible to make any factual statement about.

And then there is more subjectivity because of it being practically impossible to know all the facts about how things are chosen, which means that in effect the scientist is making an aribitrary choice on what relevant facts to accept and which not.

And again, there is more subjectivity because an arbitrary choice is made on what relevant facts to accept, about what other ways people could have decided.

But it is totally mistaken to say there is no black and white distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. And any work that is based on there not being a distinction can be rejected because of that. It is anti-science to regard good and evil as matters of fact.

173

RNA can be reduced to letters (measured objectively) so it is possible to compare genetic material in an objective, mathematical way. You are basically measuring the degree of difference between one chemical and another and could express that using chemical formulas and math.

To come up with a hypothesis, you have to make inferences. Inferences are based on experience and therefore involve a degree of subjectivity. There are warranted inferences and unwarranted inferences, but there is no such thing as a purely objective inference.

I don’t disagree that the “soft” sciences are scientific or employ the scientific method to obtain data. I was only trying to point out that it is often easier to see the role subjective interpretation plays when we look at soft science questions. I am arguing that there is always subjectivity in hard sciences too, it is just not as obvious.

This whole train of through started because someone farther up in the thread was insisting that philosophy, religion, worldview, culture, ethics, have no part in science, because science is only about objective truth/realities. I am arguing with that assertion. A good deal of science touches on subjective areas, or it is useless to society.

Scientific hypotheses are based on subjective inferences. I reject the idea that was presented above that objective=fact and subjective=opinion. That is an over-simplification. To me, subjective means that your perspective and experience influence your perception of and interpretation of reality. Almost all meaningful facts are subjective to some degree, because they are an explanation or an interpretation, not just raw data or measurements.

When we ask the question “What do we do about the Ebola crisis in Africa?” epidemiologists had better have more to offer than a description of the genetic material of the virus, or a list of symptoms, or a table of the average time from infection to death. In order for science to make recommendations to solve a human problem, the epidemiologist needs to take into consideration the ethics of who gets and who provides care and for how long, they need to understand the cultural and religious customs of the affected populations (how are the dead mourned, what are the beliefs about medicine and sickness), they will need to understand how politics, communication, and social networks in the society.

These are all complex areas where you aren’t going to have a bunch of quantitative data that can be manipulated into an objective “answer.” The scientists are going to have to make some subjective recommendations. The fact that subjectivity comes into the situation doesn’t corrupt it or anything, it’s just reality. Science is always touching on non-objective areas. Hopefully, if they are good scientists, their subjective interpretations will be informed by good data and well-designed experiments, but at the end of the day, they are definitely going to be wading into the waters of ethics and philosophy and culture as they do their science.

That was to Mohammad who believes every discussion can be reduced to choosing or not choosing, and some binary subjective/objective division of all reality. That doesn’t make sense to me from a post-modern perspective that rejects that binary division. I was trying to kindly point out that the constant repetition of this refrain is not going to resonate with people who don’t see the world in those terms.

174

It’s totally mistaken. Subjectivity has it’s own rules. You have to choose in forming an opinion, and the resulting opinion must refer to agency of a decision. Otherwise your subjectivity is in error.

All the social darwinism where the worth of people was asserted as fact are in error. (which in your view would be acceptable, because you regard facts as inherently subjective). One cannot state what should as fact, which is implicitly what you are doing when you refer to agency as fact.

The schoolbook for the Hitler youth, it starts out with the title “a factual outlook on life”, and then proceeds to note the spiritual and mental attributes of various individuals and races as fact. It is a scientific error, no need to look any further.

The mechanism of creation is choosing. If there is no acceptance that choosing is a reality, with the logic as it is in common discourse, then there is no basis to biologos, or any other science and religion in harmony idea. Science and religion in harmony is objectivity and subjectivity in harmony. And that requires absolutely distinct categories for each, distinct mechanism. Facts have the mechanism of cause and effect, and opinions have the logic of possibility decision.

175

How do you explain the fact that many of our opinions and reactions are formed subconsciously based on our social conditioning, and there is very little decision-making involved? (For example, consider filmmaker Kiri Davis’ 2005 recreation of the Clark’s 1940s study that asks young black girls which doll, a black baby or a white baby is good or pretty. Forty years after desegregation, 15 out of 21 black Harlem school kids picked the white doll.) You really think those children have agency in forming that subjective assessment?

176

[quote=“Christy, post:173, topic:2392”]
RNA can be reduced to letters (measured objectively)[/quote]
Hi Christy,

No objectivity there at all. The letters we use are completely arbitrary.

I routinely compare/contrast sequences with each other using mathematics. However, there remains subjectivity in the the algorithms and thresholds we use, so your “objective” fails completely.

That being said, you’re moving the goalposts because in this case we aren’t comparing sequences at all! We are simply answering the question RNA vs. DNA. The answer is completely objective, but in no way is it reducible to a mathematical statement or formula.

[quote]You are basically measuring the degree of difference between one chemical and another and could express that using chemical formulas and math.[/quote]But I don’t, because doing so would be silly. I make an objective statement using words, based on nonmathematical information. Not a formula in sight!

Not at all. I can come up with testable hypotheses all day without making a single inference.

So hopefully you now understand the vehemence of my very specific objection: that you misrepresented sociology as simple polemics. My point is that the spectrum of grays is greatly skewed away from your description of it; even the softest science is far more objective than you seem willing to admit.

My objection is that you weren’t looking at the soft science question scientifically at all to make it look far more subjective than it really is. That’s what I’m pointing out. Is that at all clear?

What’s obvious to me is that you don’t understand the scientific method. I find your statement that “Once you get beyond things that can be reduced to math or formal logical notation, you are dealing in subjectivity to some degree since all “objective observations” are fundamentally perspectival.” to have zero validity, as there are many objective observations that cannot be reduced to math or formal logical notation. My point about the rabies virus genome demonstrates that.

177

It’s obvious to me that we define objectivity and subjectivity differently. So lighten up a bit. It doesn’t work for you to impose your definitions of words on what I said and then object to the meaning as if it was my meaning.

It’s also obvious that you are trying to “win” something here. I don’t really care who wins, but if you feel victorious, more power to you. I expressed my view about the fundamental subjectivity of human knowledge. You disagree. Cool beans. Nothing you so vehemently object to changes my overall perspective on the nature of truth. You also can’t really draw conclusions about my understanding of the scientific method based on the fact that our epistemologies differ, but whatever. :smirk_cat:

178

Christy, why is it that, when I scroll down all these replies, yours are the only ones that make sense and that directly deal with the practical problem of trying to find out what God wants of us? Many decades ago I ceased trying to use scientific methods to justify a belief in God. I’ve welcomed Him into my life, and never regretted it.
God bless,
Al Leo

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179

It is a matter of logic. The logic is that the agency of any decision cannot be identified other than by choosing what it is. That is simply 1+1=2, it is incontrovertible fact that the conclusion can only be reached by choosing it. That the agency of a decision can only be identified by choosing what it is, by expression of emotion with free will, is the proper root meaning for opinion, as categorically distinct from fact.

Only opinion in identifying agency can leave the freedom in the concept of choosing in tact. Facts use a logic of being forced, cause and effect. Evidence forces to a conclusion, resulting in a 1 to 1 model of what is evidenced. Obviously the concept of choosing requires freedom, so to propose agency as fact, is to impose the logic of being forced on the concept of choosing, which breaks down the concept. The force inherent in facts, is a logical contradiction with the freedom in choosing.

And agency is where the spirit is at, the soul, so … what are you doing circumventing it? Sociology inundated with atheists / materialists much who don’t like to hear of the soul or spirit? Tough luck for them, then they can only focus on cause and effect mechanisms in human behaviour, not on choosing.

All subjectivity has this logic, including taste and whatnot. When we look at the physics of tasting, then we will find that it operates by choosing. That is what common discourse says, it is how common discourse functions.

You just use a wrong concept of choosing, which is based on sorting out the best result. The correct definition of choosing is in terms of spontaneity. And that means there is all sorts of freedom at various levels, down to freedom in the way cells do stuff.

If the weather can turn out several different ways, then it means it is decided. This is only weird to you because you conceive of choosing as sorting out the best result. With a sorting algorithm, the result is forced by the sorting criteria, and the data to sort.

What you conceive of as choosing, is a complicated way of combining choosing with sorting. First it is chosen what is good (spontaneously), and then these chosen goods serve as sorting criteria.

So as a sociologist you might be interested in these sorting criteria that are used, values, which are highly manipulative in forming opinions. Do people have sorting criteria in which black is bad, and white is good, or something. Yes probably, children generally are scared of the dark, so that provides a sorting criteria for black as bad, which can then be used for black skin color as bad, or something like that.

180

Yeah, that’s not at all what a sociologist would claim. I don’t think we have enough intellectual common ground to have much of a discussion.

181

[quote=“Christy, post:177, topic:2392”]
It’s obvious to me that we define objectivity and subjectivity differently.[/quote]
How so? Are you saying that trying to support one’s hypothesis is just as objective as trying to disprove it?

I don’t see how I’ve done that. I see that I’ve explicitly disagreed with your definition of “truly objective.”

I don’t think it’s that simple. Are you claiming that I am denying subjectivity altogether? Or am I disagreeing with your claim about the nature of true objectivity: “for anything to be truly objective, it must be something that can be reduced to a mathematical statement or formula”?

[quote]You also can’t really draw conclusions about my understanding of the scientific method based on the fact that our epistemologies differ, but whatever.
[/quote]Are you saying that your scientific epistemology excludes the most objective aspect of science, hypothesis testing?

182

No.

It’s not really about agreeing or disagreeing with claims. It’s about your attitude toward the certainty and objectivity of human observations. You put much more confidence in the possibility that they can be unbiased and complete.

I wasn’t talking about scientific epistemology or how a person arrives at scientific conclusions. I was talking about overall attitudes toward truth and knowledge and what those things are at their essence. I believe “absolute” truth exists. I just think almost everything we call truth and knowledge and fact is an imperfect approximation of absolute (truly objective) truth.

As for forming and testing hypotheses, I think there is always a degree of subjectivity involved, because unless it is a matter of simply taking measurements and doing calculations, there is always a human element involved, and humans cannot step outside their cultural and experiential perspectives to some neutral place where complete objectivity is possible. We are limited in many ways.

There is a big difference between what I am trying to say and saying “All science is just opinion.” or “All scientific conclusions are equally valid.”

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184

But that’s their job. They draw salaries and receive benefits for their services:

And animals can also exhibit altruistic behavior where they put themselves in danger in order to help someone else. You should have read the link I provided earlier more carefully:

“If one dolphin were injured, another might stay behind to act as a guardian, potentially exposing itself to predators… Dolphins have come to the aid of one another, but also other species, including humans. There have been numerous stories of pods of dolphins rescuing humans from sharks, such as surfer Todd Endris who survived an encounter with a great white in 2007 or long-distance swimmer Adam Walker who was stalked by a shark on a swim to raise money for whale and dolphin conservation in 2014.”
http://news.discovery.com/animals/animal-altruism-lending-a-helping-paw-or-wing-or-fin-photos-150604.htm