Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
Perhaps science relies upon "faith" to a degree.
Science must have some faith in the prospect of the Higgs field etc and if not it would seem we have spent a lot of time and energy for no reason whatsoever. I doubt if the project would proceed if the hope of finding the HB had only a 1% chance ..elimination is useful but the hope presumably was that they would find it..not that they can eliminate it from the model.
Someone must have faith that the idea has merit such that resources are mobilised to confirm the theory...this suggests faith is an operative in the process.... At the least those involved must have faith that negative or positive as to the hunt some good or forward progress will be part of the outcome...is this not faith?
My point is faith must play a part in selecting how to spend research dollars. The science may be supportive but at some point the decision process possibly calls upon faith in the work to date.
The SETI project calls upon faith one could think... If no faith in the prospect of a result why would folk involve themselves in the project.
I suppose the dollars one is paid releases one from having faith but the folk providing the dollars must they not have faith..
Faith need not be a word only used to describe hope in spiritual beings and its use can happily extend to a hope of the existence of many things that support or move back a scientific theory.
alex   
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Precisely, Alex. You hit the nail on the head rather elegantly there
Scientists are human, and despite all the protestations to the contrary that have been brought up in this forum, ad infinitum, "faith" plays a part in science. You want rigorously "pure science"...leave it to robots. They care not for anything. Neither the theory, the experiment or the outcome. They just take data and spit out answers according to their programming. The answer they give is the answer they give. The scientific method is all about testing hypotheses in order to be able to falsify them and therefore either reject or accept their veracity. But to say that faith plays no part in the process is showing one's actual ignorance of what science is because despite the method, scientists do have hope (and faith) in the veracity of their pet ideas. Most do give them away if they're shown to be incorrect but some cling onto them like leeches (witness Hal Arp and the EU fools). When it gets to that stage, that's when the science become pathological, inconsistent, incoherent and illogical.
The politicians that fund the science projects (and that includes many uni admins) have to have faith in what the scientists are doing because they haven't a clue about anything that they're doing. 99% have had little or no science training whatsoever. You only have to look at the parlous state of funding for science and both the public and private pronouncements of many of them (especially in the US) to see what I mean. Having a ultra-conservative, far right wing, evangelical god botherer who privately believes the planet is only 6000 years old running for president (Mitt Romney) is not a good omen for the scientific community....nor for anyone else for that matter.