Intelligent Design described

But science does have underlying assumptions. Nothing like the stuff you get in religions, but they are there. Assumptions like "The universe will behave in a consistent manner", "There is a real world" and "Our senses provide a fairly accurate picture of the world"

NOTE - I do accept the theory of evolution, and I am an atheist. Just trying to clarify.

James Picone:

No. The statements you refer to are learned. We learn these things as children. We learn them by experiment as we interact with the world. As we study science we find that they are not, in fact, absolutely true everywhere and at all times.

"The universe will behave in a consistent manner" was pretty much given up (at small scales, at least) when quantum mechanics was discovered.

"Our senses provide a fairly accurate picture of the world" is hardly worth considering, because the qualifying term "fairly" admits too broad a range of interpretations.

"There is a real world" is perhaps interesting. In Plato's sense, I'm pretty sure that there isn't a "real" world. Certainly, many philosophers have considered the possibility. Most people don't worry about it because you don't really learn anything from it. If somebody could show significant advantages in assuming "there is no real world," most scientists would certainly consider adopting that position.

Both of the above posts makes good points. Science must have some basic assumptions, or we would be stuck in a cave of Platonic doubt about every observation we make, but the ones first listed don't appear to be precise enough. If "the universe will behave in a consistent manner," why won't my girlfriend? But we do assume the universe exists, and that we exist in it together, and that we can all observe it in similar ways.

Assumptions like "The universe will behave in a consistent manner", "There is a real world" and "Our senses provide a fairly accurate picture of the world"

I discussed this issue a long time ago with some postmodernists and I have a pretty good answer.

Science, like any other endeavor, requires a few basic assumptions. The difference is that the "basic assumptions" made by scientists consist of the absolute minimum assumptions necessary to get through the day. We "assume" that because the sun rose on every previous day that it will *probably* rise tomorrow. However, we are prepared to abandon our assumptions the moment we get evidence which contradicts it (for instance, maybe I just moved North of the Arctic Circle, and I'll get some evidence against that assumption about the sunrise).
We assume that our senses are giving us accurate data -- until they start giving us inconsistent data, and then we consider the concept of mental illness.

If I may borrow some words from the previous poster: if we didn't make extremely basic provisional assumptions about consistency and repeatability, none of our expectation-based behavior would work, let alone science. Can you imagine waking up in the morning and going "Gee, I wonder whether my muscles will move when I try to get out of bed. Who knows?" Instead, you assume they will (until you try and fail). "I wonder if the sun will rise this morning. Who knows?" "I wonder if gravity will still work today. I know my 'memory' claims that it worked all my life, but who knows; I'd better not depend on it."

Really, it's quite impossible to imagine living without this sort of "assumption". And these sort of extremely minimalistic assumptions -- the ones which you are using every day even if you deny that you believe in them -- are what scientists try to stick to.

It may seem on first glance that minimizing assumptions to that kind of extremely low level -- the minimum necessary assumptions which people absolutely must use to function -- would lead to very few conclusions. But those conclusions are far more reliable and useful than any results based on more assumptions, and this method has proven its power over many generations.

We "assume" that because the sun rose on every previous day that it will *probably* rise tomorrow.

Science is all a posteri. Philisophical sludge can be sidestepped by a pragmatics of sorts: ideas which work; which can be built upon and remain internally consistent, which can in principle have evidence for or against, and which have a greater supporting body of evidence than other ideas and no evidence which is a death knell to it, will prosper and lead to greater understanding simply because they more accurately reflect which is there than other ideas.

Asking whether the universe or our general sensory perception of it are real is a bit academic and, in the end, doesn't matter, rather like asking whether the universe truly is this old or whether it was absolutely seamlessly created to look this way. Ultimately, either way, for all intents and purposes the universe is this old to us, and ideas starting with the presumption that it was created with this apparent age simply won't work any differently from the thinking that it truly is this age.

There's no way to tell if the universe is real or not, if our sensory perceptions do generally genuinely reflect it, or whether the universe is this old or just apparently this old. To cut the clutter, we can always trim those more complicated ideas which share precisely the same explanatory power as simpler ideas with good old parsimony. But it still won't have a jot of importance in our understanding of anything.

-Schmitt.

We're dealing with models of relationships between truth claims. The relationships hold regardless of whether the model is being applied to a "real" world or a solipsistic fantasy or a world filtered through a lossy sensory apparatus or a virtual world being fed to a brain in a vat; such metaphysical issues factor out.

I think that Nathanael Nerode, the poster above, needs new postmodernists. The ones he used were clearly broken.

His problem seems to be that he's using the word "assumption" when he clearly means "theory". Sure, science has at its core the theories of consistency and repeatability, but those are theories based upon observation. Not assumptions without basis. And there's nothing wrong with using theories as an underlying basis for researching other theories.

In contrast, there is no observational basis for God, and so He is an assumed entity. There is no theory to test Him, or argument which can deduce Him. By definition, He is a faith-based entity, and belief in Him has at its core no other basis but assumption; and that is a fundamental tenat of Christianity. And that's not what science does at all.

There are no sacred beliefs in science, and no untestable ideas. Everything is fair game, including the theory that perceived reality is real. Were we to wakeup tomorrow in some alien's lab and be informed that everything we've experienced was fake, we would simply realign our theories to this new information (after testing it as much as possible, of course). And that is the basis of science; not assumptions, but theories based on observation.

But science does have underlying assumptions. Nothing like the stuff you get in religions, but they are there. Assumptions like "The universe will behave in a consistent manner", "There is a real world" and "Our senses provide a fairly accurate picture of the world"

Science is all a posteri. Philisophical sludge can be sidestepped by a pragmatics of sorts: ideas which work; which can be built upon and remain internally consistent, which can in principle have evidence for or against, and which have a greater supporting body of evidence than other ideas and no evidence which is a death knell to it, will prosper and lead to greater understanding simply because they more accurately reflect which is there than other ideas. Asking whether the universe or our general sensory perception of it are real is a bit academic and, in the end, doesn't matter, rather like asking whether the universe truly is this old or whether it was absolutely seamlessly created to look this way. Ultimately, either way, for all intents and purposes the universe is this old to us, and ideas starting with the presumption that it was created with this apparent age simply won't work any differently from the thinking that it truly is this age. There's no way to tell if the universe is real or not, if our sensory perceptions do generally genuinely reflect it, or whether the universe is this old or just apparently this old. To cut the clutter, we can always trim those more complicated ideas which share precisely the same explanatory power as simpler ideas with good old parsimony. But it still won't have a jot of importance in our understanding of anything.

Were we to wakeup tomorrow in some alien's lab and be informed that everything we've experienced was fake, we would simply realign our theories to this new information (after testing it as much as possible, of course). And that is the basis of science; not assumptions, but theories based on observation.

"They use God in the same way that the ancient Greek dramatists did: to circumvent an otherwise insoluble problem in the final act."

Deus ex flagellum! (flagella?)

One of my closest friends is the founder of the Minnesota Christian Apologetics Project, and while he is not a "creationist" in the pejorative sense, he does, naturally, believe that God created the cosmos and life. Coincidentally, yesterday we had a discussion very much like the one going on here. This is an excerpt from a reply I sent to his charge that science, like religion, makes foundational assumptions:

The evidence of science is that science works and is self-correcting, a continual feedback loop that sharpens its own focus and intuitions over time. The evidence of science is that it leads to advances in our knowledge and understanding, by fits and starts and up blind alleys and through fruitless deserts, but by a sort of Darwinian process of theoretical competition, the methods of science confirm and correct our knowledge about the world. The...methods of science have expanded our horizons and provided us a world of medical and technological wonders, and an ever-expanding view of the universe. The suppositions of theology give us only an entrenched defensiveness about religion's intuitions. Theology succeeds as Vaudeville; it fails to move beyond its own suppositions to anything that has proved useful.

That response by Adam Moline was to Unintellignet Design, a Cornell Sun Opinion piece by Will Evans which was critical of IDC, but was a wee bit sloppy.

Yawn. It's the old confusion about deductive vs inductive reasoning. People wrongly argue that science is based upon assumptions that, if incorrect, invalidate some/most/all of the conclusions of science because these conclusions follow deductively from the assumptions. Instead, science is inductive, so the arguments just demonstrate ignorance.

Deus ex flagellum! (flagella?)

— Dan S.

Those are empirical observations, not assumptions.

This reminds me of an interesting philosopher's essay on The Matrix.

it would explain the obsession of creationists with flagella

LOL!

This has been echoed but I don't think explicitly stated: As fond as the creationists are of attacking scientists for "using" "assumptions", the epistemology that any humans, including creationists, base their existence on is not really so different from that used by scientists. That should always be thrown back at them. They should be asked if they really want to go down the road that they can't really know anything, and if they truly live their lives as if that were true?
Paul

That response by Adam Moline was to Unintellignet Design, a Cornell Sun Opinion piece by Will Evans which was critical of IDC, but was a wee bit sloppy.

So, let's talk about what is really going on here: the faith-based community wants to do everything it can to bring God back into the school system. Here, the issue gets trickier because science, like religion, is based on a few fundamental assumptions, the first of which is that God or any other supernatural being does not exist. No scientist can conclusively prove that, it must simply be taken on faith. Why, then, should our society prize one set of initial assumptions over the other if choosing between them is arbitrary? Why not present religion as a pure alternative to science in schools?

Although I think the essay is great this one misrepresented zinger about god is enough to derail the whole thing.

Science is based unabashedly upon the fundamental assumption that induction will continue to work. This is not something that is possible to learn from induction, which is how science 'learns' things, therefore it must be assumed.

Szostak recalled that he had been surprised to see his own research, which he interprets as progress in understanding life's origins, on religious websites, which cite the work as evidence of how difficult it would be to create life without a designer -- because, Szostak said, "not even Harvard scientists can do it."