Serendipity is grand, ain't it? 8)

You'd a thunk someone woulda thought of it sooner. 17 pages! Crickey!

You're still not up to the 20 page Crop Circle thread yet, and that's not counting the 5 pages in the first Crop Circle thread that mr arriba made.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Nope. it was 20pages and 20pages.... And at the end of it we established the mr arriba did not speak for himself.

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bunk: Empty talk; nonsense.
de·bunk: To expose or ridicule the falseness, sham, or exaggerated claims of.
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At 15 pages its a classic and 25 pages its an antique? How about that sitchin thread over on the PX forum that's up to ~ 50 pages? Is that a fossil?

Past that. It's a coal deposit.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

OK ... everybody may want to take a deep breath before reading this one.

A book I have on my shelf is "The Scientific Approach: Basic Principles of the Scientific Method" by Carlo L. Lastrucci (1967). This is an outstanding book that describes the process and logical reasoning of science.

So I was reading the section on assumptions and I came across this (I've added bold for emphasis):

Then there is this (Italics are authors. Again I've bolded for emphsis):

First it is important to note that the key distinctions between science and religion which we've stressed are still present in these statements and in other passages in Lastrucci's book. But Lastrucci is using a slightly different language in that we have insisted that science is not a belief system where as he says it is, but that it is a different "referent".

So now that most of us have agreed that science is not a belief system and faith is not an appropriate word for the process of science what are we to say about Lastrucci? Are we wrong? Or is Lastrucci wrong? Who's using the vocabulary most appropriately?

I kinda miss the crop circle thread though. You learn the most from a thread where one side refuses to bow down before the weight of evidence before them. The other side keeps digging up more and more facts to throw at them, and thus the less-hard headed posters can learn a thing or two.

Plus it's fun to listen to the bad logic they use to defend their "claims".

Mr arriba might be gone, but I think Christian is going to provide some fun for a while.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Mr. Arriba is gone? I saw a new user, arriba superstar...one and the same?

Seems that way to me. He's just shifted his focus to Stonehenge. :roll:

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

I was going to wait a while before I made that conclusion, but it is possible they are the same. He seems to like to skirt the rules here.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

I'm not going to go searching the thread, but I most certainly HAVE pointed that out before. It generally dismissed as a personal attack though. Don't you remember the 3 pages or so we spent trying to get Soup to tell us what he hoped to accomplish if he proved science was a belief system? I think we covered that one too. You certainly CAN choose to take science on faith, but that is NOT practicing science. Choosing to believe that the bridge will not fall is NOT using the scientific method, its trusting that someone else used the principles of science and engineering to build the bridge. Big difference. If you want, you CAN run all sorts of scientific tests on that bridge yourself and prove that it will support itself.

I noticed superstar as well, but he's only made one post. It's not like mr arriba to be quiet for such a long period of time.

And I didn't see any BLT stuff either

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

I bet he gets back to crop circles considering how many of them are created around Stonehenge. :-?

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

Actually, I think a member of BLT probably stopped by the forum (after searching for BLT on Google), read his posts and then hired arriba on the spot.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

If you go back through this thread ( ), you'll find that I also supported the idea that science was a belief system, if you used the appropriate definition. However, under the OP's definition, and under the usual definition, it's not. It is a matter of which referent you are using.

I have faith that you are correct when you say that. :wink:

You know, I've found that to be one of the funniest things about this thread. We've never really had any agreement on a definition of belief system. When I asked Soupdragon about that he just said something about how the philosopher picks the definition appropriate for the scenario. So as you point out, his original definition does not fit science and he really selected a definition which he felt makes science a belief system.

dgruss23
Mayby people can just put down there difintions from a dictionary instead of making up what they think it is.

Encarta® I am comfortable with believing in science as the context from number two.

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I am so excited about Canadians ruling the world.
- John Diefenbaker

Well that's certainly one way to solve the problem - at least then we'd all be working from the same definition. Does anybody have a definition of "belief system" from a philosophy textbook?

You can take science as a faith just like mainstream religion.
I had faith this morning my car would start.

However if i chose to not just rely on the word of others i can find out for myself the workings and proof regarding any particular scientific 'faith'.

The same cannot be said for mainstream faith.

Faith by definition is a means to deny the need of evidence.

Arriba for president. :wink:

Did i have said that? 8-[

RickNZ, your example provides a good illustration of the difference in the definitions of "faith" in science, and religious faith.

If you have faith that your car will start but it doesn't, the whole framework of science does not collapse, you just get your car fixed. If you have faith in God but no God is evident, where's the deity repair shop?

If you lose your faith that your car will start, it will probably still start. If you lose your religious faith, you join the enlightened minority (if you're lucky) or burn at the stake (if you're not).

Still here.

Are you talking about pure scientifik process or the one conduct by humans,hehe?

Did i skip the part where everybody goes with its misinterpretation of some word?

Science,as a process,doesn't need to be believed in...trust me.(hehe)
It is only a question of evaluation of the result...

#-o not again...

"We must cling to a God who approves of blasphemy because he hates Jehovah & Nobodyaddy & Zeus...all the other kings of terrors and tyrants of the soul. To a God who appreciates obscenity because he looks not into the secrets of our hearts, but into the hearts of our secrets, and knows that our bloodfilled guts and cocking guts are the real battlefield..." Northrop Frye. With a god like this who needs to believe in anything? Or, with a god like this you can believe in anything that is TRUE.

Now now snocelt. Those comments don't really belong in this thread, now do they? I only brought up my criticism in response to a post about how the Bible was portrayed, not to criticize what's in it. I do try to keep those ideas off the BABB unless there is something very specific I choose to make referrence to.

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I am not trying to state anything less than what we have stated before---except that even a god wants not surity. Payment in kind produces no absolution. Belief is but a word. Over a period if 20 pages none can prove what belief is. Maybe it is time to look at what all the predicates mean. I am not trying to be obtuse; but, maybe I can throw this dead-end argument into a direction where all can see the premises.

I was away a couple of days and things sure have moved on! Let me drag you back . . .
Something like that, but let me state how I see the matter from my own anthropological/psychological perspective:

Behind belief in a particular religion is something much more basic. It is the belief that the hand of God (or the activities of multiple Gods, perhaps in conflict) can be seen in the wonders of nature, in the blessings of providence, in great events, in the fortunes of nations and tribes, of families and individuals.

To contrast the progress of science with the stasis of religion is to get a false picture. In some settled societies, religious belief can be just as static as everything else. But in changing times, religious thought is generally volatile. The theologians of the past have been skilled practitioners; learned and intelligent people. (And anyone familiar with the Jewish community, at least, would not speak in the past tense.) There are rules of the game – constraints, ways of making a point – just as with science. There is the same intent on understanding; of making best sense of things; of drawing forth conclusions.

[It is worth stating that what religion is chiefly about is prescribing the righteous path; of proclaiming not the laws of nature but the laws that people should follow. In this realm, the conservative element found in religion is valuable: it preserves tried-and-tested past wisdom. This law-giving aspect of religion is being pushed aside by belief in human rights and democracy - rather than by science.]

With a greater understanding of the natural world, the role of ‘the hand of God’ diminished – for many, to the point of extinction. By the end of the 19th Century, the picture was a simple one. There was no problem in believing in (what John Gribbin would call) ‘universal causation’. This was the BELIEF that had replaced God, and it underlay and powered the high tide of Classical Science that so successfully advanced physics and chemistry.

I simply make the point that belief in ‘universal causation’ is a BELIEF (which, taken away, challenges the role of science as the ‘universal explicator'). It puts trust in a particular basis for understanding how stuff works. In this sense, it is a BELIEF that compares with belief in ‘the hand of God’.

I would say there is an enormous QUALITATIVE and INTELLECTUAL difference between belief in ‘universal causation’ and belief in ‘the hand of God’ – let alone in an unreasoning acceptance of an inherited faith. But we are still talking BELIEF – something quite different from the mere EXPECTATION that one’s car will start in the morning.

Let me meet some of my critics half way by sticking to the word BELIEF – instead of FAITH, which has too much of a whiff of the religious about it.

That’s enough for one post. Apologies to those I have not replied to directly. I'll be back for more!

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"True skepticism encompasses not dismissing evidence because it seems to defy rational explanation."

Most religions and certainly all major religions have things in common that are not shared with science. That includes a history which while modified all the time as societies evolve, is still the basis of the belief.

If you are Christian or Muslim, additional information was introduced in the form of the New Testament or the Koran, (Quoran). If you are Morman, the Book of Morman was added. But the rest is just societies' changing interpretation of those texts.

What do you propose is the equivilent in the model of science as an alternative religion or belief system?

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Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

Postmodernism?

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"True skepticism encompasses not dismissing evidence because it seems to defy rational explanation."

Rereading my post isn't as clear as my thoughts. What I meant was, a religion is determined either by written or oral history. In the case of modern religions the written histories comprise a description of the religion and its associated actions like rules and rituals.

That written text remains as the basis of the religion though there have been several major additions to some like the New Testament added to the Old Testament.

So what is the equivalent text in science?

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~~ ><>><> ~~ ><,,> ><,,> ...`;=;p d;=;' /\/\^/\ ^^ ^/\/\_
Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

Sounds like science theory (Popper, Occam et al). But even though this is very important stuff, most people don't bother with them. You don't need any particular text to do science - all it takes is a certain frame of mind.

In addition, science theory has changed a lot, and will continue to change.

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"