Science vs Religion

The correct way forward builds on errors

Most scientific claims made on the frontier will ultimately be disproved, due primarily to bad or incomplete data, and occasionally to blunder. But the scientific method, which allows for expeditions down intellectual dead ends, also promotes ideas, models, and predictive theories that can be spectacularly correct. No other enterprise in the history of human thought has been as successful at decoding the ways and means of the universe.

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Ignorance = motivation

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

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A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him-the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

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‘Bafflement’

If the writers told the whole truth, they would instead report that all astrophysicists are baffled daily, whether or not their research makes headlines. Scientists cannot claim to be on the research frontier unless one thing or another baffles them. Bafflement drives discovery.

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Seek to falsify

Science is supposed to advance by erecting hypotheses and testing them by seeking to falsify them. But it does not. Just as the genetic determinists of the 1920s looked always for confirmation of their ideas and never for falsification, so the environmental determinists of the 1960s looked always for supporting evidence and averted their eyes from contrary evidence, when they should have been actively seeking it. Paradoxically, this is a corner of science where the ‘expert’ has usually been more wrong than the layman. Ordinary people have always known that education matters, but equally they have always believed in some innate ability. It is the experts who have taken extreme and absurd positions at either end of the spectrum.

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Overturn established paradigms = achievement

  • Inversion of typical authority structures (especially religion), where challenging the foundational beliefs is punished or suppressed.

    Science

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Not necessarily performing experiments

Science is often misrepresented as “the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.” Actually, science is something much broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

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Self-critical of methods

There is a large scientific literature on the obvious pitfalls of that comparative method, and on how best to overcome those pitfalls.

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Chess rule analogy of advancement

Richard Feynman, the celebrated twentieth-century physicist, humbly observed that figuring out the laws of physics is like observing a chess game without knowing the rules in advance. Worse yet, he wrote, you don’t get to see each move in sequence. You only get to peek at the game in progress every now and then. With this intellectual handicap, your task is to deduce the rules of chess.

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Advancement is piecemeal

  • Past norms gets destroyed, new norms established
  • What’s radical/poorly understood now, will become norm in the future, such as Determinism
  • Already impressive, not aimless
    • Lest I leave you with the impression that the behavior of research scientists is indistinguishable from that of freshly beheaded chickens running aimlessly around the coop, you should know that the body of knowledge about which scientists are not baffled is impressive. It forms most of the contents of introductory college textbooks and comprises the modern consensus of how the world works. These ideas are so well understood that they no longer form interesting subjects of research and are no longer a source of confusion.

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神奇 vs 有趣
神奇有种微妙的表达不理解且不追求理解放弃更进一步的了解的感觉,好像是超出理解范围的
有趣则体现出求知欲和好奇有种已经知晓的信心并有继续了解更多的吸引力

与想象力不冲突