Not really. I've just been busy, doing research, pulling together manuscripts, doing illustrations, and being homeless and poor. Now I am more or less stationary in Salt Lake City for a while, I feel for the first time in a year like I have something resembling a routine, so I want to start writing again.
One of the big motivators for me going back to blogging was a message I received from a fellow (we'll call him "Martin") involved in a long-term debate over evolution with his parents, who believe that the Bible is a historically accurate account of the history of the world. At one point, he and his mother engaged in a three-hour discussion with a creationist with a PhD who is a faculty member at a university (I don't want to say who), and I've been asked to provide an alternate perspective based on actual evidence and reason. I received quite a lengthy transcript of the original discussion, and have been crawling through it. The creationist in question has backgrounds in both biology and geology, and draws a lot of Biblical scripture into it, so it makes for pretty interesting reading. As I started writing up my responses to Martin, I realized that it was good stuff to blog on. Some of of this material is probably better being discussed over at "Flying Blind," the blog I created specifically for discussing the specific claims and reasoning of creationists. However, there is a lot of material on the more general nature of science and faith that are suitable to talk about here.
One subject I've been addressing in my responses deals with what science is actually trying to do, and what scientists mean when they talk about "proof." From the creationist transcript:
"anytime you hear a scientist say that something is true or proven, you know he is talking philosophy, which is the same as religion in that context. Only in logic and mathematics can you really say something is 'proof'. And even there that can be challenged.”
The argument that science in general or evolutionary science in particular is a type of religion is a common one, but since it wasn't elaborated on, I won't get into it here; AronRa has a perfectly good dissection of it anyway. I want instead to focus on the statement that science doesn't "prove" things. I've talked before about how science is fundamentally based on the recognition of human fallibility, and want to elaborate a bit about what this means for knowledge, and what we can actually "know."
Science certainly does not “prove” things beyond any doubt, and there is always the provision in science that ideas, even well-accepted ideas, can change. The most extreme version of this philosophy, advocated by Karl Popper, is that a single piece of falsifying evidence can destroy and entire theory, no matter how many tests that theory has previously survived. This is an oft-repeated bit of bullshit which deserves an entire post, so I won't get into what I call "the Myth of Single Bullet Falsification" here. Sufficient to say, the more general claim that any idea can be shown to be wrong is correct.
However, the same thing is true of real life. That doesn’t stop us from forming opinions, and being reasonably certain about them. I’m pretty sure my mother isn’t a robot. She looks and acts human, and everything I know about modern technology and artificial intelligence indicates that building a robot as human-like as my mother is impossible. That’s the evidence I have at my disposal, so that is what I base my opinion on. And I am pretty confident about it, so confident that I would stake my life on it if I really had too.
Of course, I STILL could be wrong. There might be some secret lab somewhere that can make super realistic robots that no one knows about. And if I saw a reputable news story about such a lab, or caught my mother changing her batteries, I would revise my opinion. However, I have not been presented with that evidence. Right now, it exists only in my imagination. The real world evidence I can point to is what I listed in the paragraph above. So for the time being, I’m sticking with that. This is what scientists usually mean when they use the word “proof”; not absolute certainty, just certain enough that they don’t have any real doubts about it (for now).
There are different levels of certainty of course. I’m pretty sure (though not as sure as I am about my mother not being a robot) that my car will run tomorrow, that I will not be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, or that a comet will not hit the Earth tomorrow. My current plans revolve around these things being true…but I could be wrong. Indeed, I'm much more likely to be wrong about these things than I am about the existence of lifelike androids. That doesn’t stop me from making plans. It doesn’t stop MOST people from making plans, most of the time, and when it does we tend to throw around terms like "mental illness." Part of being a sane, reasonable, and functional human being is whether or not you can distinguish between probabilities, possibilities, and pure imagination. The same thing is very much true of science, where there are also many levels of certainty. The basic difference between speculation, hypotheses, and theories has to do with how much evidence they have supporting them (speculation has the least, theories the most), and how certain we can therefore be about them.
Anyway, the point is that being really sure about something doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind, and accepting that you can change your mind doesn’t mean that you can’t be really certain. We all juggle this conundrum in our day-to-day lives, and seem to do just fine. I’m really sure Mom isn’t a robot. I’m also really sure I could change my mind if the right evidence was presented. This may seem like a contradiction, but it doesn’t keep me from having an opinion or making specific plans about whether to take to a doctor or a mechanic if she is feeling poorly. The same thing is true of science. We can’t really “prove”, but we can be certain enough. I’m about as certain that evolution is a real thing, and that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, as I am that my Mom isn’t a robot.
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