PoodleLovinPessimist

Wow, what vitriol. And what a paucity of evidence.

First, we need a definition of "cult-like" behavior. I've seen only one by the proponents of the "science as cult-like" position (from the OP).

(1) Anytime human beings follow something without using their own minds and questioning things, it is in danger of spawning a cult.

So the question is, does the ordinary and accepted practice of professional scientific inquiry entail following things without "using their own minds and questioning things?"

It's trivially easy to make the case that scientists do not have absolute meaningful freedom of inquiry; they cannot arbitrarily pick an hypothesis and be assured of funding to investigate it.

If absolute freedom of inquiry is your standard, then yes, science is a "cult". :snooze: Everything's a cult. My IT department is a cult: If my IT director proposes that we build an entirely new infrastructure architecture rather than buying a bunch of Windows/Intel/Cisco hardware off the shelf, I'm going to refuse him. Am I thus politically defending Microsoft's Hegemony and dismissing his paradigm-shifting innovation without testing it empirically? Perhaps.

Absolute freedom of thought is and can only be a moral and legal principle. No one is going to be jailed for investigating a geocentric flat-earth model. I'm not going to fire my IT director because he describes a non WinTel infrastructure architecture on his personal web site (although I would probably deny him the right to use the company website to do such a thing). But when you throw economics into the mix, no one has absolute freedom.

So, the question is, is the lack of absolute freedom on economic constraints a necessarily bad thing? Given that absolute freedom is impossible, should we differentiate between how those constraints are justified? Should we differentiate by the level of constraint? These are important questions, and need a full accounting.

For instance, in the Catholic church, the investigation of a new theological paradigm is often restricted for no other reason than that it contradicts the current paradigm.

We might find in science, by contrast, that the investigation of a new scientific paradigm is restricted because there is no good reason to suppose that the existing paradigm will fail to answer any interesting questions. The restriction is still in place, but the justification for that restriction is different. The paradigm is (in my hypothetical example) not being preserved for its own sake, but for the sake of its perceived usefulness.

Consider also the level of restriction, again vis a vis the Catholic Church. Church dogma is pretty well laid out: To be a "good Catholic", you must accept a fairly thorough and detailed world-view; thinking about anything in the dogma is not useful.

Again contrast what we might find in science: That political protection of ideas gets weaker as you move farther away from the paradigm. It's almost impossible to challenge Naive Realism. It's very difficult to challenge the heliocentric and Newtonian paradigm of celestial mechanics. It's hard to challenge the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system. But as we get farther from the paradigm, accepted ideas, for instance on the origin or composition of Titan, become easier to challenge. And it's trivially easy to bring new evidence into the discussion.

Consider also the standing and authority of the protection of the paradigm. In the Catholic Church, if everyone disagrees with the Pope on a matter of doctrine, the Pope wins. Everyone in the church will, in practice, shut up and repeat the Pope's opinion. In science, this state of affairs might not be possible: There is no one person who can establish "accepted" scientific opinion.

Consider also the stated motivations. The Catholic Church has the stated motivation to preserve existing dogma for its own sake. In science, we might find a tension of motivations: To produce new information given an existing paradigmatic structure. On the one hand, a science administrator wants to generate new results; no one gets a Nobel Prize for replicating another's experiement. OTOH, she might often judge that the investigation of a whole new paradigm might fail to generate new results, and prefer to fund easier, non-paradigm-busting, lines of inquiry.

I have explicitly proposed these differences as hypothetical. I have not done any sociological surveys to determine whether or not the practice of science actually does show these differences. For all I know, the practice of science might have rigidified to the level of the Catholic Church. I strongly suspect it has not, but I can't prove it.

However, it's important to ask whether the above noted differences--justification, level, authority and motivation (and perhaps others)--would constitute a meaningful difference in the evaluation of science as "cult-like"? This is, of course, a matter of opinion. In my opinion, they absolutely would make a meaningful difference. If they don't make a difference to you, all I can do is agree to disagree, and insist that you make your criteria clear when you call science a "cult".

Duck!

Are you joking or are you actually claiming that Hindus invented the General Theory of Relativity?


Duck!

Dharma

well that's the biblical version of understanding the universe. Eastern systems simply state you're in a really bad virtual reality movie, that you can play around in and if you get to play human, try to exit the movie...we simply percieve time, and time is simply defined by the changes we see...i.e. past, present and future. These three have been defined in Hinduism as differentiated forces (Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma), So if I say, Time = 1, well too bad, by the time I noticed T=1,time is already equal to 2...in other words, observation is an error in itself in which you are pretending to freeze time and define observations from T=0 to T=x, you are observing an illusion...your sensory perception is not fit to observe, it is too slow, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are simply pretending to be three when in fact they are singular, Brahm, when there is actually no forces, only PERCEPTION of the forces due to some sensory perception that even atoms possess (atoms "feel" forces of attraction and repulsion)...heck, even God doesn't exist...nothing exists without our senses...we overcome our senses, Moksha, Nirvana we have.

The uncertainty principle, pretty much states that at the atomic level the observer will change that which is observed, thus never getting any instantaneous observation...so currently they are trying to simulate some sort of steady state, or absoute 0 environment or doing observations in a vacuum and have discovered that there are particles that come in and out of observational existence so quickly they can't possible track them...

mirage

Well if by "advanced" you mean any testable useful concepts then no, they didn't. I don't see e=mc^2 anywhere in the vedas. I don't think Minkowsky spacetime is really well explained in Sanscrit.

They didn't even come up with a theory in a scientific sense. They certainly didn't come up with the idea that we have a single common biological ancestor.

Far more vague terms you mean. This sort of pseudo science is just utter worthless crap that you think sounds deep. These broad brush superficial resemblances mean nothing. I'm afraid the value of scientific theories is more than the sound of the terms used. It is much harder won, and much harder to understand.

Dharma

theory of relativity? "We" did something better, "we" experienced it...I personally haven't...
gotta keep on meditating though...In India we have a saying, "there are those who talk about the Theory of Relativity, and then there are those who experience it for themselves"...ME...

I heard Europeans say that Irish people have a leprechaun fetish and can't get over those little green men and their pot of gold whenever they meditate... :rolling:

Capn_Danger

The problem with the word cult is it's ambiguity: it can has a wide variety of meanings. If you define it as a group where people follow authorities without thinking for themselves, then a whole lot of things can be called cults. Parent-child relationships, prisons, most blue collar jobs, fox news, the army, religions, sports teams, the pyschic network, the shopping network, and mob violence, just to name a few. The word really loses it's meaning in this instance.

The thing about science is that we don't have to take it on faith: we can learn about it, and see for ourselves why it works. Read about the scientific method. Learn about the theories, and the evidence for them. Any scientist worth his wieght in dirt would love for everybody to read about science, critically examine it, and come to an informed conclusion themselves. If people accept what someone says just because they're wearing a lab coat, they're an idiot: you can call that cultic if you want, it really doesn't matter what word you use.

But science as a methodolgy and an institution does not fit your definition of a cult (or any other meaningful definition, either). Science teaches us to not have faith in anything: we believe in science, and it's methods, because we have good reasons to do so. If you want those reasons explained in gory detail, read Thomas Kuhn's works on the philosophy of science, or take some courses at your local university.

Dharma

Perhaps you do not understand the Sanskrit and the meaning of the Gods...? All the dieties are describing specific forces, it is not my problem <edited> that just because a group of scientists say it is hogwash, that I will say so as well...E-mc2....that's nothing to what is written in Sanskrit which uses precise sound waves to develop human energy systems...


You are under the assumption that one can only test things using mathematical tools and models...Meditation is a fine way of knowing...don't take my word for it, do it yourself...

Eastern systems have NEVER separated man from the forces that created him , thus meditative practices were born, which prepares man's body to observe himself...and the ups of meditation is that you might even end up "ever living", I think Einstein just died like an ordinary mortal, and currently they have found that the speed of light is not in fact constant.

Now will you have the arrogant temerity to say that Hindus and Buddhists and Jains got their advanced concepts of time and space and matter through sheer luck, something modern science has discovered by using the very mathematical tools that makes it that easy to express such complex ideas that comes from this very tradition?

The very number system that is in current use is actuallly the Buddhist/Hindu model of the universe...from 0 everything expands and cancels into 0.. 0 is the "jokers wild"...all observable measureable and quantifiable things can come out of it...

Dharma

yes a "group of unthinking people" who can be led into anything which ends up as fads and maybe even dangerous movements...Nazis, monotheistic fanaticism, communism, fanaticism in general....one might describe these very non-religious political movements too as "cultic" or cultlike...Nazi stuff was based on purely genetic science on the superiority or inferiority of some strange concept called "race", which was considered "scientific"...so science does and can spawn a poltical cult or even social movements and fads...

Dharma

How can you not have faith in anything...even scientific observation requires some faith in your ability to observe, that your senses are correct...science also requites having faith in your own mind to come up with a correct conclusion based on several observations...science can only be built upon precepts which are deemed "correct".

I think a good example of a philosphical/meditative tradition which is now classified as a religion is Buddhism in which Buddha said, don't have faith in anything or take anyone else's word for it...test it yourself...however, even that spawned such cultic ideas of "pure land Buddhism" where you can cry out the name of the Buddha and you'll be saved...

Capn_Danger

The problem with meditation as a way of knowing is it's inherent subjectivity. There's no way to know that the "information" you recieve is an accurate depictions of reality, unless you go out and empirically test your ideas.

What makes you think that the hindus, buddishts, and jains had an advanced (or accurate) concept of space-time? References, please. More especially, what makes you think that the "mathematical tools" that scientists use today come from these traditions? Our theories of math and science come almost exclusively from the greeks, renassiance-era scientists/mathematicians, and more modern folks expanding on their ideas.

Are you simply saying that hindus used the decimal system, and ascribed some sort of religious meaning to it? I really have no idea of what you're talking about when you say all observable things can come out of zero. Though, I'm not sure I really want clarification...