Is science a type of faith?
Donald Sensing makes the claim in a post called Science and religion? No, science is a religion
Emphasis mine. In 1988 Princeton University did experiments on telekinesis. They had a pegboard that they dropped ping pong balls into and charted the results. Every Statistics student has seen this same model and the result is always a standard curve. In the study, subjects were asked to stand in front of the board and move the balls in one direction or the other by force of will. The results?
Bottom line: telekinesis exists and they've proven so.
Did you ever hear anything about this? What reputable scientist would argue that it does? If not, why not?
More from Sensing:
In that, there is no difference between the religious leaders and the scientific ones. DO NOT challenge our long held beliefs. They underpin everything and if you shake the foundations, those in the tower may fall out.
The Marxists are quite near the truth in saying that in demanding freedom we merely seek to establish our own orthodoxy. The only valid objection to this is that our fundamental beliefs are not just one orthodoxy; they are true beliefs which we are prepared to uphold. This true vision also happens to open greater scope for freedom than other, false visions; that is so, but in any case, our commitments to what we believe to be true comes first.
Islamists are much more ferociously anti-science than even the most rabid creationists in America. Science in the Western tradition claims to investigate, discover and know the “really real.” Over the last century-plus, science has displaced religion as the arbiter of the ultimate, according to Carl Sagan (in Broca’s Brain). Sagan told the story of Napoleon’s complaint to the Marquis de Laplace about Laplace’s work, Mecanique celeste. “Napoleon complained to Laplace that he had found no mention of God in the text. Laplace’s response has been recorded: ‘Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis.’” The idea that God could be hypothetical is a product of modernity, says Sagan. People who ask him whether he believes in God, he says, are really asking for reassurance that their belief system “is consistent with modern scientific knowledge.”
And so, following Polanyi’s line, we have a culture that is scientistic as well as scientific. Scientism is faith in science. As the dominant world view of of the West, it is considered self-validating. Scientism makes two major claims, neither of which, however, are testable using the scientific method:
(1) only science reveals the Real and only science can discover truth;
(2) scientific knowledge of reality is exhaustive, not inherently limited, is holistic and sees reality as reality really is.
Early modernity’s mechanistic view of creation was originally proposed as a way to preserve God’s agency. This view was soon supplanted by the view that knowledge about the world beyond the self was limited to what could be known through sense-perception of material things. The materialism of the modern world view is its central feature. Thus, “the modern world view simply has no natural place for God in it,” as philospher of science Langdon Gilkey put it.
Modern science has had a much more difficult time being accepted in Muslim lands than elsewhere in the world. In an article, “The Religion of Modern Science: Roots of modern God-free thinking,” published in the western-based Islamic Journal, Muslim author Harun Yahya wrote of Western scientific absolutists who
… regard modern science as absolute and true religion, and want to impose this view to all humankind. . . . However, the question is not that whether Islam is in line with science or not, but whether science is in line with Islam. What needs to be approved is science, not Islam.
There are many points of contention and conflict between Arab Islam and the West, but the chief religious contention between Islamists and the West is not really between Islam and Christianity but between Islam and Western scientific-materialism.
Because of the supremacy of the sciences in western thought, Western culture has become caught in a cycle of ever-increasing changes. Western societies contend with an exponentially increasing pace of cultural changes. The pace and kinds of changes that we adapt to (with greater or lesser difficulty, to be sure) are exactly the changes that Islamists correctly believe would destroy basic structures of their society which they believe are the divinely-commanded.
In their view, certain social structures (such as the status and role of women) are absolutely essential, required by Allah’s command as revealed in the Quran. Without those structures, a society is wholly corrupted. We see them as hopeless religious fanatics; they see us as godless and degenerate.
The tension between Islam’s historic traditions and modern pressures of scientific modernity is found throughout the Muslim world. Many Arab intellectuals know that their countries have fallen behind most of the rest of the world. They want to gain the benefits of technological society, but without the cultural baggage that comes with it. They want to modernize their societies but not Westernize them. Their vision of modernization is mostly technological, such as communications, medical science, education, transportation, and consumer goods. They want our DVD players but not our DVDs. Even al Qaeda will accept the trappings of tecnology, they just reject the foundation.
The war between Islamists and the West is fundametally an inter-religious war. It does not spring from grievances that can be resolved to mutual satisfaction of all concerned. It is a dynamic struggle between two irreconcilable world views and understandings of reality.
Polanyi concludes,
We are entering in this century into a period requiring great readjustments. One of these is to learn once more to hold beliefs. Our own beliefs. The task is formidable, for we have been taught for centuries to hold as a belief only the residue which no doubt can conceivably assail. There is no such residue left today, and that is why the ability to believe with open eyes Must once more be systematically re-acquired.
Dare I say that what we must recover is not merely “belief,” but faith itself.
So said Michael Polanyi, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester in an article entitled, “Scientific Conventions and the Free Society,” linked to by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The article is based on a previous work of 1949. Polanyi writes,
" Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete and a false pretension. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific statements, and this is untrue. To show the falsity of this pretension, it should suffice to recall that originality is the mainspring of scientific discovery. Originality in science is the gift of a lonely belief in a line of experiments or of speculations, which at the time no one else had considered to be profitable. Good scientists spend all their time betting their lives, bit by bit, on one personal belief after another. The moment discovery is claimed, the lonely belief, now made public and the evidence produced in its favor, evokes a response among scientists which is another belief, a public belief, that can range over all grades of acceptance or rejection. … Let me show how this works or has worked in some instances. Take the reception accorded to two papers published by two authoritative scientists in Britain at about the same time, not quite two years ago. One of these was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in June, 1947, by Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished Fellow of the Society. It described some simple experiments which proved in the author’s opinion that a hydrogen atom impinging on a metal wire could transmit to it energies ranging up to one hundred electronvolts. Such an observation, if correct, would be of immense importance. It would be far more revolutionary, for example, than the discovery of atomic fission by Otto Hahn in 1939. Yet when this paper came out and I asked various physicists’ opinion about it, they only shrugged their shoulders. They could not explain the results stated; yet not one believed in it, nor thought it even worth while to repeat the experiment. They just ignored it. Since Lord Rayleigh has subsequently died, the matter seems to have been already forgotten."
Emphasis mine. In 1988 Princeton University did experiments on telekinesis. They had a pegboard that they dropped ping pong balls into and charted the results. Every Statistics student has seen this same model and the result is always a standard curve. In the study, subjects were asked to stand in front of the board and move the balls in one direction or the other by force of will. The results?
Of the 25 operators who have completed
one or more experimental series with this device, four have achieved anomalous
separations of their right and left efforts, and two others have displayed
significant separations of either their right or left efforts from their
baselines. The overall mean difference of right versus left efforts concatenated
across the total data base of 87 series (3393 runs), has a probability
against chance of <10-4, with 15% of the individual series significant at p
< .05, and 63% conforming to the intended directions.
The concatenated results display a stark and curious asymmetry,
Bottom line: telekinesis exists and they've proven so.
Did you ever hear anything about this? What reputable scientist would argue that it does? If not, why not?
More from Sensing:
Polanyi recounts the history of science’s treatment of hypnosis, beginning with the thorough discrediting in the late 18th century of “Friedrich Anton Mesmer, a Viennese medical practitioner, whose hypnotic cures had spread his fame all over Europe” and whose name is the source of “mesmerized”). Hypnosis, says Polanyi, had been practiced for centuries throughout the world but had been dismissed as part of the realm of superstition that science sought to overwhelm, Other scientists investigating the phenomenon were scornfully dismissed for 100 years by their peers, including a professor of medicine at the University of London who was so professionaly persecuted that he resigned his position.
The hatred against the discoverers of a phenomenon which threatened to undo the cherished beliefs of science was as bitter and inexorable as that of the religious persecutors two centuries before. It was, in fact, of the same character.
In that, there is no difference between the religious leaders and the scientific ones. DO NOT challenge our long held beliefs. They underpin everything and if you shake the foundations, those in the tower may fall out.
The Marxists are quite near the truth in saying that in demanding freedom we merely seek to establish our own orthodoxy. The only valid objection to this is that our fundamental beliefs are not just one orthodoxy; they are true beliefs which we are prepared to uphold. This true vision also happens to open greater scope for freedom than other, false visions; that is so, but in any case, our commitments to what we believe to be true comes first.
Islamists are much more ferociously anti-science than even the most rabid creationists in America. Science in the Western tradition claims to investigate, discover and know the “really real.” Over the last century-plus, science has displaced religion as the arbiter of the ultimate, according to Carl Sagan (in Broca’s Brain). Sagan told the story of Napoleon’s complaint to the Marquis de Laplace about Laplace’s work, Mecanique celeste. “Napoleon complained to Laplace that he had found no mention of God in the text. Laplace’s response has been recorded: ‘Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis.’” The idea that God could be hypothetical is a product of modernity, says Sagan. People who ask him whether he believes in God, he says, are really asking for reassurance that their belief system “is consistent with modern scientific knowledge.”
And so, following Polanyi’s line, we have a culture that is scientistic as well as scientific. Scientism is faith in science. As the dominant world view of of the West, it is considered self-validating. Scientism makes two major claims, neither of which, however, are testable using the scientific method:
(1) only science reveals the Real and only science can discover truth;
(2) scientific knowledge of reality is exhaustive, not inherently limited, is holistic and sees reality as reality really is.
Early modernity’s mechanistic view of creation was originally proposed as a way to preserve God’s agency. This view was soon supplanted by the view that knowledge about the world beyond the self was limited to what could be known through sense-perception of material things. The materialism of the modern world view is its central feature. Thus, “the modern world view simply has no natural place for God in it,” as philospher of science Langdon Gilkey put it.
Modern science has had a much more difficult time being accepted in Muslim lands than elsewhere in the world. In an article, “The Religion of Modern Science: Roots of modern God-free thinking,” published in the western-based Islamic Journal, Muslim author Harun Yahya wrote of Western scientific absolutists who
… regard modern science as absolute and true religion, and want to impose this view to all humankind. . . . However, the question is not that whether Islam is in line with science or not, but whether science is in line with Islam. What needs to be approved is science, not Islam.
There are many points of contention and conflict between Arab Islam and the West, but the chief religious contention between Islamists and the West is not really between Islam and Christianity but between Islam and Western scientific-materialism.
Because of the supremacy of the sciences in western thought, Western culture has become caught in a cycle of ever-increasing changes. Western societies contend with an exponentially increasing pace of cultural changes. The pace and kinds of changes that we adapt to (with greater or lesser difficulty, to be sure) are exactly the changes that Islamists correctly believe would destroy basic structures of their society which they believe are the divinely-commanded.
In their view, certain social structures (such as the status and role of women) are absolutely essential, required by Allah’s command as revealed in the Quran. Without those structures, a society is wholly corrupted. We see them as hopeless religious fanatics; they see us as godless and degenerate.
The tension between Islam’s historic traditions and modern pressures of scientific modernity is found throughout the Muslim world. Many Arab intellectuals know that their countries have fallen behind most of the rest of the world. They want to gain the benefits of technological society, but without the cultural baggage that comes with it. They want to modernize their societies but not Westernize them. Their vision of modernization is mostly technological, such as communications, medical science, education, transportation, and consumer goods. They want our DVD players but not our DVDs. Even al Qaeda will accept the trappings of tecnology, they just reject the foundation.
The war between Islamists and the West is fundametally an inter-religious war. It does not spring from grievances that can be resolved to mutual satisfaction of all concerned. It is a dynamic struggle between two irreconcilable world views and understandings of reality.
Polanyi concludes,
We are entering in this century into a period requiring great readjustments. One of these is to learn once more to hold beliefs. Our own beliefs. The task is formidable, for we have been taught for centuries to hold as a belief only the residue which no doubt can conceivably assail. There is no such residue left today, and that is why the ability to believe with open eyes Must once more be systematically re-acquired.
Dare I say that what we must recover is not merely “belief,” but faith itself.
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