Follow up to: The Map and the Territory and Understand Your Ally

What is scientism?

Quite often it is used in a very pejorative sense, referring to something of a blind and unthinking allegiance to science. The most basic case of scientism is the idea that facts can only be justified with scientific evidence, but that in itself is an easily destroyed self-defeating mockery of a philosophy, since the fact that “facts can only be justified with scientific evidence” cannot be justified with scientific evidence…

But what about the idea that we should value scientific evidence most highly of them all? What are we to do if science says that there is no need to invoke a soul to explain anything about how the mind works? How do scientific theories interact with religious theories?

Descriptively, religion and science both seek to explain how the world operates, and explain what we should predict about our future interactions with the world. So far, I think it’s fair to say that modern science has been doing much better at increasing our ability to describe and narrate our existence, developing a variety of miracles far beyond anyone’s comprehension. Sometimes, it seems like science is the only worthy religion.

Methodological Naturalism

Now, as I’ve said before in “What is Naturalism-Humanism?”, “Defining the Natural and Supernatural”, and “The Magical Magician: A Naturalist’s Allegory”, I’m a metaphysical naturalist, which means that there is no good reason to believe that (a) something exists which is not solely the result of a combination of matter-energy in space-time, (b) something can happen with no mechanism behind the action, or (c) that it is possible for the laws of physics to be or become suspended or transcended.

I think that this position of metaphysical naturalism is a completely sensical one, a position for which I have argued in numerous essays across my website.

But science itself is not metaphysically naturalistic — science is methodologically naturalistic. This means that science will just never accept a supernatural claim because such a claim can never count as scientific evidence. Why?

Well, first: Because supernatural claims aren’t testable or measurable by scientific equipment, and thus completely outside the realm of scientific examination and argumentation.

And, second: Claims that aren’t based on measurable, analyzable, concrete things have long had a history of being false.

The Need for the Scientific Mindset

Science observes that us humans have been stupendously wrong about a lot of things, and continue to make stupid decisions and hold stupid beliefs even today. There are many ways to explain this, some more eloquent than others, but being a quantitative-oriented guy, I like to think of Type I and Type II error:

Consider any given statement about objective, belief-independent reality. We can either accept it or reject it. We must accept some hypotheses or we would have no beliefs at all, and thus die from being unable to act. We must also reject some hypotheses or we would die, having held the belief that skydiving without a parachute is not only beneficial, but a good source of fiber.

If we accept a statement that is false in objective, belief-independent reality, we have committed Type I error, accepting a false hypothesis (false positive). However, if we reject a statement that is true in objective, belief-independent reality, we have committed a Type II error, rejecting a true hypothesis (false negative). If you’ve literally never heard these terms before and don’t know what’s going on, read more here.

Now we need to add a value. This has to be done as an assumption or condition simply because there’s no other way to do it. Let’s assume that we want to be as accurate as possible with our beliefs. This is a reasonable assumption because our survival depends on predicting the future with some accuracy, and we can only do so with true beliefs. True beliefs help us survive whereas false beliefs do not. False beliefs also lead to us falling prey to scams and such whereas true beliefs lead us to doing well at our jobs.

But how do we get more true beliefs and less false beliefs? To do so, we need to minimize our Type I and Type II errors. The ideal sum of knowledge would contain zero Type I and Type II errors. Of course, we’re not going to get there.

That’s because there’s a giant roadblock: the more we move to minimize our chance of Type I error, the more we increase our chance of Type II error, and vice versa. What this means in plain English is that the more skeptical we are, the more we risk rejecting something true and the more gullible we are, the more we risk accepting something false.

So in the end, we’re going to have to meet in the middle. How skeptical do we want to be and how gullible do we want to be? This is a core question of epistemology.

By Matt Bors

What Information Should We Trust?

So what should we trust when making our beliefs? Should we trust scientific journals? Should we trust our horoscopes? Should we trust Wikipedia? Should we trust the first result on Google? Should we trust the Bible? Should we trust our professor?

I think we should trust whatever information sources have been historically known to be reliable to a certain standard, and then be perfectly consistent with that standard. This second criterion of consistency alone is hard, because it means we can have no double standards with how we treat evidence. But the first criterion is also difficult simply because how high should that standard be? At what level do we have too much doubt?

I’m not really sure right now, but it would be an interesting thing to look into, if there even is an answer. But there quite a few sources of knowledge that have given us very low Type I error. The four that come to mind are science, history, logic, and basic personal experience.

George Smith calls this the habit of reasonableness, and declares it to be the main focus of atheism — we shouldn’t tell people that God does not exist, but rather that there is this optimal methodology everyone ought to use, and this optimal methodology most likely shows that God does not exist (under any meaningful definition of “does not exist”).

Likewise, we shouldn’t be focused as much on what we believe as we are focused on why we believe. If we always believe things for correct reasons, we should only believe correct facts. Likewise, we can believe correct facts for bad reasons — there are plenty of atheists who affirm atheism because it “just feels right” or people who affirm objective morality solely because of its alleged obviousness.

Let us all adopt proper methodologies, whatever those may be, and follow them wherever they go — who knows, it might actually lead us to theism!

Proper Science?

Science? But isn’t that Scientism? And how can science be done properly? It’s one thing to use science, but it’s another thing to use science to affirm astrology and homeopathy.

The first thing we know about science is that it is big. Science covers perhaps tons of information — everything from astronomy to zoology. Science has numerous fields such as biology, chemistry, physics, political science, sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology, and more.

However, there is one thing that relates all of these scientific fields together and one thing that makes science into proper science: the scientific method. Proper science is simply science using the scientific method. This means that we have to:

• Generally, try to go from data to a conclusion, not from a conclusion to data.
• Understand that experiments can be wrong, and need to be replicated.
• Understand that entire theories can be wrong and later overturned with new theories.
• Know that something can only be scientifically true if it (1) doesn’t contradict evidence and (2) makes predictions that are proven true.

In the end, the best way to determine if something is scientifically true is to ask “What would I observe if X is true?” Then you look unbiasedly for what you would expect to observe. If you don’t find what you look for, you reject X, you don’t make up ad hoc explanations for why X still might be true. This is proper science, and something that astrology, homeopathy, and intelligent design all don’t have.

Proper History?

Now that we’re away from science, we need to address some remaining data. History is a broad term that I use to cover all of the objective information that the scientific method leaves out: anthropology and archaeology for example. You can’t preform experiments on the past. Proper history will still rely on some general principles however, such as “going from the data to a conclusion”, “knowing you can be wrong”, and “using a preponderance of evidence”.

Proper Logic?

Logic covers everything objective that history and science don’t tell us, and includes all of mathematics. Logic is mostly about the conclusions we get to draw from science and history — and to make sure that we’re reasoning correctly when we draw these conclusions. We know that, even when faced with perfect facts, we can still do very wrong things with those facts. Using logic properly will allow us to eliminate our biases as much as possible when making conclusions.

Logic also contains everything we know about what words mean. They don’t study how words mean, that would be the job for psychology, part of science. But if we ask “what does science mean?” or “what ideas and concepts are we trying to communicate when we say science“?, that question is answered by proper logic.

Proper logic can also be used to answer the question “Why should we adopt proper logic, proper science, proper history, and proper personal experience for determining what is true, and not other things?”. Because we notice via proper science and proper history that our experiences and intuitions are usually untrue. We then pass this over to proper logic and reason that if we were skeptical, maybe more of our beliefs would be true.

We then pass to proper basic experience and see if proper skepticism works for ourselves in our personal lives. It does. Now we await a confirmation from proper science that proper skepticism works better for everyone, but proper logic tells us there’s no real reason to believe it wouldn’t.

Proper And Basic Experience?

Now I go to the most confusing of the four methods of thought I’m suggesting: proper, basic experience. This covers all of the information we hold that is subjective. We know that we like ice cream not because we learned it through science, history, or logic, but because we know our own personal mind and can interpret our emotions. Again, like the other three we can be wrong here too.

There are two very important limitations on experience here, however, that prevent us from using it as anecdotal evidence. We can only take things in as experience if we state them to be true for us alone. We can not make an inference about a belief-independent objective fact without consulting logic, history, and/or science. This is the notion of only using basic experience. This is the same thing that allows us to believe the food we eat has not been poisoned even though we didn’t preform a personal chemical analysis, but doesn’t allow us to believe there is no such thing as poison.

As an example of the distinction, if we see something we think is a ghost, we can declare “I think I’m seeing a ghost” as a fact because we know it to be so. However we still must not accept “Ghosts are real” as a fact without using science to test for ghosts. Such would be an improper use of basic experience. (Likewise, Platinga was wrong about God being basic experience under his theory of presuppositionalism, but I’ll get to that a lot later in a completely different post.)

In summary, the use of all four of these sources of knowledge is enough to encompass everything we believe. Any belief that comes from outside proper application of these four sources probably ought to be discarded as unreliable. Though disclaimer: I recognize this approach to knowledge as being woefully incomplete, but I think it makes for a compelling starting point. No one said knowledge would be easy.

But another important take away is that there are three other fields of knowledge completely outside of science, which means that metaphysical naturalism, and my more specific individual philosophy, in no way relies on the strange notions of scientism that people seem to enjoy tearing down.

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