18
Mar
Imagination and the Nature of Science
Joemar

Imagination is both a friend and a foe of science. It is a foe in the sense that it tends to be unrealistic, illogical and anti-scientific. It has a tendency to make something appear appealingly true without evidence. Examples of unbridled imaginations are myths, legends, fictions, and fabrications, among others. What science does is to challenge imagination to be in accord with nature – that is, to conform to that which we can observe and demonstrate through our senses.

At the same time though, imagination helps a scientist to conceive of new ways to interpret a body of data obtained through empirical investigation. The difference is that imagination this time is constrained by what is reasonable, logical and what is amenable to testing.

Therefore, scientists are free to imagine as wild as they can to explain a huge body of findings in a coherent way; but, aside from the fact that it should explain all the findings, it should also make testable predictions. When the predictions are correct, then we have more confidence that the “imagined” explanation is correct. In essence, this is what a scientific theory is. In scientific jargon, it is more than just being a guess or suggestion.

Theories, in fact, make science meaningful and interesting. Without theories, science will just be a boring collection of facts, principles and laws that are not able to explain much, or anything at all. A theory connects all these pieces together and explains their relationships. The most imaginative ones are usually those who come up with the best theories. Think about Darwin and Einstein and the proponents of the Atomic Theory, the Cell Theory of Life, the Germ Theory of Disease, and the Big Bang Theory.

The core of science is actually a collection of interrelated and overlapping theories. Some are already very old and have been continually confirmed by newer findings and these are the ones that we have the highest confidence. It is from this collection of established theories that science draws its power to explain any old or new findings.

Some theories that are new or those that are on the forefront of scientific developments are still waiting for further confirmation; and we are thus less confident of their accuracy (examples are various theories on aging). Oftentimes, as new findings come up, there is a need to revise some aspects of a theory or theories that seek to explain them. It also happens that one of many conflicting theories is favored by recent findings and the others are dropped.

Furthermore, old and established theories can still be challenged and later revised or even discarded in favor of a better one. It is then obvious that with this overall dynamic nature of science, it cannot claim absolute certainty or absolute knowledge of truth. There are only probabilities – that is, the more established theories are those having a very high probability of being right. However, this is in fact the best humanly possible means of knowing the truth. Other means of knowing, like revelation or mystical inner self-enlightenment, offer no rigorous standards and safeguards against error.

Science is never complete and not all questions can be answered through this approach (or at least not yet now). Although it is possible to live life with the bare minimum of science and reason as guiding principles, it is always tempting to go beyond these. After all, our imagination is able to create an unrealistic world that is more dramatic (like, we are saved from the bondage of sin by a loving God), more magical (with the miracles and the angels), more meaningful (everything is an act of worship) and more pleasurable (hmmm…heaven!).

Category: Philosophy, Science  Tags:  View Comments
16
Mar
“Life Could Not Have Come Through Random Mutations”
Joemar

As I survey through different blogs and websites and from conversations with certain friends on the topic of evolution, I can almost always encounter an argument that goes something like, “Life could not have evolved through random mutation”. This is supposed to be a short and crisp evolutionist stumper. Indeed, how could random mutations produce all the biological complexity in nature?

The answer is in fact the major point, if not the whole point, of Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species. He suggested a mechanism that drives the evolution of species to maximum fitness to the environment. Simply put, nature selects the good characteristics or traits from the bad ones in a population of organisms. A portion of the population that that has characteristics that make the species fit for the environment survives and these traits are passed on to the next generation while a fraction of the population that has characteristics or traits that make the species unfit to the environment simply die. This is known as natural selection and is obviously not random at all.

Yes indeed, mutations are random, but this is not the driving force of evolution. It only provides the material for genetic diversity but it is in itself not directed towards any particular purpose. Mutations can be harmful or beneficial. It can even be demonstrated that there are more harmful mutations than beneficial ones. However, natural selection favors the good mutations and perpetuates these more than the bad ones. An accumulation of beneficial mutations can transform a simple organism to a complex one after thousands or millions of generations. Given (1) time, (2) random mutation and (3) non-random natural selection, the seemingly impossible complexity can become possible. With these factors taken together, evolution can never be called random.

There is a huge body of evidence that evolution occurred and that it largely followed the mechanism as described by Darwin, which I don’t intend to enumerate and explain in this short article. It is important that one knows what evolution is and what it is not in order to appreciate the pieces of evidence that will be presented. I personally think, that most people’s ideas about evolution describe what evolution is not. Another example is, “If humans evolved from apes, then monkeys should not be here anymore”, which is rather easily debunked if the concept of common descent is well understood.

Category: Science  Tags: , ,  View Comments
14
Feb
How I Broke Free from Various Belief Systems and Found Myself Agnostic
Joemar

When we were born, we were automatically trapped within a culture with a certain belief system. This shapes how we understand all things around us. In most cases, it also dictates how we should behave. It pervades our whole personality so much that when it is challenged and we realize that something is wrong about it, it can  shatter our orderly understanding of the world and leave us utterly confused.

Once we stand on a new belief system, we will be faced with suspicion, indifference and worse are stigma and discrimination from people that we don’t share the same beliefs with anymore. This is the price each one of us has to pay if we change the way we see things…if we change our worldview. I would understand why many people would just stick to what they were raised with and never dare to challenge it, much less to adopt a better and more realistic one.

When I was a child, I saw things from a blend of animistic Catholic Christian worldview. As early as high school I realized that there is more to reality than what this view can offer.  I began to question my beliefs, I doubted the existence of God, I tried to understand how science can explain how things came about. Hence I became known to be an “atheist”. (I didn’t know then the difference between atheism and agnosticism.) Due to a poor grasp of the science behind evolution and cosmology,  I reverted to the Christian belief system but I struggled to understand what true Christianity really is.

Having no solid catechetical background of Catholic doctrine, I easily fell prey to many “Bible only” Christian groups. I jumped from one of these groups to another in trying to get as close to Biblical Christianity as possible. In the end, I bemoaned the lack of external standards to which “Bible only” Christians can test whether they are interpreting the Bible correctly or not. I sought to study how the Bible came to be and through this I rediscovered my Catholic faith, though not the same Catholicism I used to embrace before. It felt liberating how the biblical message is protected from being messed up by private interpretation through the infallible authority of the Church.

However, this new vantage point enabled me to tackle questions at higher levels. I began to scrutinize the historicity of Jesus Christ, the proofs of his resurrection, and other miraculous claims of Christianity. I realized that the very bedrock of Christianity is actually shaky. It is built on shallow evidence of testimonies of witnesses. These kinds of evidence can suffice to establish murder or any crime in a court but would not be enough if you want to prove a very incredible claim such as the resurrection from the dead. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  The same is true with other religions. Extraordinary claims are proven by testimonies of witnesses, which are accepted by most, despite the enormity of the claims and the conflicts of these claims with reason and science.

Confused once again, I managed to slowly understand things without the baggage of revealed religions. All that was left was my belief in a personal God, which I sought to justify using the often repeated philosophical arguments for God’s existence. Along with my growing interest and knowledge in science, the weight of these arguments began to lighten. The argument from design is not very appealing now as it used to be. Without the need for an intelligent designer, the argument from causation can lead to any picture of the ultimate cause, only one of which is a personal intelligent God. The ultimate cause could then be just energy or some simple but universal physical law.

However, since these are purely philosophical arguments and are beyond what science can prove or disprove at the moment, the only honest answer is that we are not sure…that we actually don’t know, which is what agnosticism is, essentially. As Richard Dawkins pointed out though, agnosticism is actually a spectrum. In one end of the spectrum are those who are 99.9% sure that God exists while on the other extreme end are those who believe with 99.9% probability that God does not exist. For the moment, I am probably lying somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, 50-50. I think it is still possible that we can discover in the future a form of a God governing the universe, maybe (just maybe) the kind of God that Albert Einstein and Baruch Spinoza thought about.

Category: Philosophy  Tags: , , , ,  View Comments
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