lpetrich

As to religion and geography, there was a saying about it during the Reformation and the resulting Wars of Religion:

Cuius regio eius religio
Whose region his religion

What sect people believed in was often what sect their territory's leaders had favored.

Marlowe

That model worked terrifically - in the Newtonian Universe, where the scientific model was of an essentially unchanging and essentially knowable set of objective facts that humanity could discern with enough time. The Quantum Universe isn't that simple. For one thing, there is something of an object/ ground relationship - you have to choose a frame of reference first, and then talk about interpretations. Since different people can choose different frames of reference, there is room for interpretation. Secondly, there are limits on what can be known and what can't be known that are always going to leave room for interpretation. Third, there has been discovered a level of indeterminancy to the fabric of reality, so the idea that science will march forward finding concrete facts that do not allow for interpretation is not exactly true. Reality has turned out to be a little more 'fuzzy' than that, based more in probablities than in concreteness. This also leaves room for interpretation.

I'm not positive about what point you are trying to get at, but I am trying to get at that there is a point at which a scientific system is similar to a religious system. And it is 'a' scientific system, not 'the' scientific system, as science is a complex adaptive system and thus is tied to historicity - that is, our science has developed in a specific way that is not the only way it could have developed. The historical circumstances are inextricable from the 'conclusions' science comes to. As Werner Heisenberg put it, "What we learn about is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning." Science also takes faith - such as you expressed: "we may not have those facts yet, but it is really just a matter of time". These are both characteristics fundamental to religious worldviews.

I'm not knocking science. I also look to it to form my own view of the world. I have faith in it - but I recognize that it is faith that is in a way similar to religious faith. I agree that science grows via facts that can be quantified and that this is different from the way religions grow via wisdoms that are tremendously more nebulous.

You said originally that there is an automatic appeal to reason in a scientific conflict. There is an assumption there that an appeal to reason will make resolving a conflict easy. I do not believe this. Humans are not perfectly reasonable beings, so the idea that two humans can reason identically is unlikely because issues of emotion and belief are going to get involved even in cases of measurable quantities. Those measureable quantities have to be fitted into an overall theoretical framework and that takes the creative human spark, and that differs from person to person.

lpetrich

I think that Marlowe seriously misunderstands quantum mechanics; he mixes it up with some quasi-postmodernist subjectivism.

I'm familiar with both quantum mechanics and relativity, and although QM especially has some interesting paradoxes, it does not justify the subjectvism that he seems to be advocating.

Marlowe

Please explain how you think I am misunderstanding quantum mechanics. I made no reference to Relativity so I'm not sure how your familiarity with it is relevant. I did include some discussion of Complexity Theory though if you want to talk about that too.

As for quasi-postmodern subjectivity - postmodernism is notoriously hard to define, so "quasi-postmodern" is extremely vague. Perhaps you should be more specific in your critique.

BTW, I am a woman.