The problem with science II

In a previous thread Faith tried to explain to us why she has a problem with the scientific approach to life. Quetzal has made a stab at trying to understand what Faith is going on about in the Deep Faith, Deep Science thread, but I think he's got the wrong end of the stick. So here's my attempt Consider the following poem by Emily Dickinson: Although I haven't the foggiest idea what the first line means, and only have an inkling of what she's getting at in the final verse, this poem has a direct, visceral effect on me and stirs up a whole world of images and feelings. That's the effect of the poem itself - like our experience of life, it is rich, complex and ambiguous.Now science is like a literary analysis of a poem. It isolates features of its subject in order to elucidate general patterns. So just as this poem can be analysed in terms of the poet's use of insect imagery, or her use of dashes for punctuation, so human life can be analysed in terms of its biochemistry or its evolutionary history.What Faith objects to, I think (I'm sure she'll correct me if I'm wrong), is what she sees as the attempt by those with a scientific world view to claim that the scientific analysis is more real than the human experience, as if a literary critic were to claim that the literary analysis were more important than the poem being analysed.So is this a real problem with science or just a misunderstanding by someone who doesn't understand how science works?For my part, I believe it's a real problem, not a misunderstanding. Scientists, being human, can often overstate their case and draw general conclusions about human nature that aren't really justified by the evidence. And science, because it operates within a wider society, can be as affected by fashion and political expediency as any other social activity.Sometimes, false scientific generalisations can have such an impact that they may even stifle scientific research for decades. A case in point is the dominance of behaviourism in psychology from the 50s through to the early 90s. The discovery of simple and repeatable mechanisms of conditioning seemed to provide a hard, scientific basis for a discipline that, until that point, had spent its time discussing vague, humanistic concepts such as memory, reasoning, consciousness, etc. In their desperation to appear 'scientific', behavioural psychologists perversely seemed to believe that it would be possible to understand human psychology without understanding what goes on in people's heads. For decades, any psychologist who wanted to investigate cognition was ridiculed as approaching the subject unscientifically.It wasn't until the advent of modern neuroscience that this tyranny of behaviourism was overthrown.Edited by JavaMan, : Admin request

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

If you can change the title, so that it does not read like an attack on Faith, I will promote this topic. Maybe just change the first title word to "The".

Done. I've added a subtitle just to make clear what the context is.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Thread copied to the The problem with science II thread in the Social Issues and Creation/Evolution forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.