[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 8:23 AM +0100 5/12/07, Mark Smith wrote:
>On 05.12.2007, at 07:30, David Cake wrote:
>
>>  A person can believe in something
>>  personally, while acknowledging that it cannot be
>>  proven to others. Such a person remains a
>>  scientist as far as I'm concerned.
>
>At the very best, this person is a part-time scientist and I would 
>argue, that as long as the person is "susceptible" to belief, that 
>they are susceptible to being non-scientific.
>
>You cannot be a real dyed-in-the-wool scientist and really believe in 
>anything of this type.

	Depends what you mean by 'belief'. I agree that if someone 
says 'and this is not open to doubt, because I have faith', then they 
are unscientific. But if you mean 'I cannot logically prove it in a 
falsifiable way, and know that it may be unprovable, but my intuition 
is that it is so', fine.
	Certainly for belief used in the way that it is used in 
normal conversation, belief is fine. I believe that the new 
government of my country will be better than the old one. I believe 
this quite strongly. I could point to some evidence, but ultimately 
its subjective and based on unverifiable/unfalsifiable beliefs of 
mine, or my interpretations of complex arguments - that doesn't make 
me unscientific or irrational. And similarly, you can have strong 
intuitions or such about spiritual things, and that can still be 
quite compatible with the scientific worldview.

	I accept that if a person has beliefs that are both 
falsifiable, and provably false, then that is unscientific thought no 
matter what its about, and the sort of thinking that makes people 
susceptible to being non-scientific, sure.
	But if you think a person can't hold strong beliefs about 
nonfalsifiable things, or things that are falsifiable but not yet 
proven either way ('my sports team will win the competition'), 
without being non-scientific, you have either a weird definition of 
belief (in which strong confidence in an unproven/unprovable 
hypothesis isn't belief, even though we use it that way all the 
time), or a weird definition of scientist (in which a scientist isn't 
allowed to have beliefs about, say, literature or politics, and 
definitely nothing spiritual).
	Cheers
		David