[Dragaera] agnosticism (no flame) (was, long ago: (no spoilers) The 17 [Great Weapons])

[Maximilian Wilson]

On 5/22/07, Will Frank <wmfrank at stwing.org> wrote:
>
> People can come to either of those philosophical positions, theism or
> atheism, from any number of philosophies, approaches, or reasons. Many
> people come to atheism through scientific reasoning, in the style of
> Richard Dawkins, whose rigid following of the observable evidence in
> the proper forms of the scientific method (which is not a
> philosophical position, but a way of looking at the world and drawing
> conclusions from data) leads him to conclude that there is no such
> being as a god, because if there was, there would be evidence of
> it. One of the principles of science is to conclude only from the
> data.
>

This is probably a tangent, but I'm not ready to concede that the scientific
method does not imply a philosophical position, namely a confidence in the
repeatability of phenomena and that the past is a good guide to the future.
There's no intrinsic reason this should be true--it's a conscious bias. In
fact, there's a proven result from learning theory that says no learning
algorithm is better than any other; if A is better than B on problem X, Y,
Z, there exist problems S, T, V on which B outperforms A. Nevertheless
humans seem to learn successfully in the real world, which must mean that
their bias somehow matches up with the bias of the problems they actually
face, and a lot of people suspect that this involves repeatability. (Or does
this just mean we ignore the large class of problems that we're not good at
solving? Hard to say.)

Or to put it another way, it's obviously futile to not believe in the
scientific method. It's another thing entirely to refuse to believe anything
which isn't proven by the scientific method. Judith Harris has done a
convincing job of showing that there exists no credible scientific evidence
that human parents can influence the adult personalities of their children
(outside of the family context), but there are scientists within her field
who nevertheless work hard at teaching their children certain principles,
while struggling with the philosophical dilemma that science says what they
do with their kids doesn't matter. I feel a certain amount of sympathy for
those people, but I'm not going to wait until I have a
statistically-validated longitudinal study with 2000 children over 20 years
to teach my kids about kindness and hard work, and I'm not going to abandon
them and their mother just because Judith Harris hasn't found convincing
evidence that dads matter. The evidence will come someday, would come faster
if someone were looking for it in the right way (the studies that have been
discredited usually involve looking for correlations with *personality*
rather than the things parents consciously teach), but I'm not going to wait
for it because I have to act in the present. That's a kind of faith, and I'm
glad so many people feel similarly and DO love their children without
scientific evidence because being human would be so much less enjoyable
otherwise.

-Max

-- 
Be pretty if you are, be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Everything in Windows is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
    -Clausewitz