The self-understanding of theists regarding religion doesn't distinguish between normative and descriptive statements. I'll also note that Crane isn't saying that the truth or falsity of these beliefs doesn't matter (in fact, he seems to be saying the opposite), but that showing that we don't have good scientific grounds for accepting them doesn't matter, at least to the religious person.

the choice of what a scientist pursues he may decide by flipping a coin, it is not part of the science, otherwise coin-flipping is now connected to stem-cell research. cheeeez.
Analogies are not congruencies they are pattern comparisons, pointers. There needs to be no resemblance other than that, although obviously there can be.
Doing science is an activity. When you are talking at the scientist level then you are talking about the activities and the reasons for them of the scientist. He may ride in a marathon because his son has leukemia, he may study human cells because his son has leukemia. His bicycle mechanics does not have a connection to his motivation, nor does his scientific output.
I know scientists that are no longer active in their field ..well, that's how they put it and I'm not going to correct them on your advice either.
Their field of science is a field of knowledge, not influenced by coins or sons. You're making a category error here.

he lost me at NOMA -
Gould's NOMA statement wasn't confusing.
Crane's last sentence either says nothing or has nothing to do with NOMA. Even if we restrict religion or numerology to opinions on meaning, they can still run into scientific analysis. Unless we take meaning to a level where it is meaningless.

I don't think that Crane is claiming that scientific and religious beliefs cannot conflict. Rather, he is claiming that it is misses the point to show that religious beliefs cannot be demonstrated on scientific grounds. People's motivation for accepting religious beliefs is different from their motivation in accepting scientific ones.

*Shrug* Science also includes the interpretation of data, which relies upon people's perspectives. That you think you can draw a clean line between them is fine, but I don't think that this is really the most fair rendering of science possible.

Analogies use objects which carry content similar to that which you are trying to describe. On the basis of how you presented things, you could have used X and Y and still failed to portray the failure of the link between the knowledge and those who pursue it.

Correct. DOING science is an activity. Your analogy is talking about the activities involved, not the actual content involved. Here's what you said:

You have two distinct objects here: The one who does and the knowledge that results. There is NO correlation between this and the idea of cycling and whistling. This is why your analogy fails.

Category error? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? I also suggest you look up the definition of "influence."

I've done this exercise before. I claim that I have just clapped my hands. This is a factual claim, but this is not a scientific hypothesis. You can run a scientific analysis if you want, but it will turn out that you can determine no useful information that will determine that I did clap my hands.

Does this mean that I didn't clap my hands?

There are true factual claims that lie outside the realm of scientific analysis. The inability to provide a scientific analysis to verify the claim does not negate the factual nature of the claim. This is the emphasis of what Crane was talking about.

What if instead of clapping your hands you said you levitated across the room. Could i use science to disprove your statement then?

Nope. You could not prove that it happened, and you could not disprove that it happened. You can assert that it didn't happen, and then support that assertion with statements of physical laws and so forth, but this does not prove that it didn't happen. All it does is create an argument for why you believe it did not happen.

Notice that this is different from the claim that I *CAN* levitate across the room on command. This is a claim that can be challenged demonstrably (by having me do it under certain controlled circumstances). This is where the claim does become scientific insofar as it is directly testable now.

The underlying idea is that there are factual claims that are outside the realm of science.

I agree i was just being a wise ass. But if you did tell me that i would disbelieve you. And rightfully so imo, even if i cant prove it.

I am covering this point, made by Hoodbhoy in a review of the book "Hindu Mathematics - How Original Was It?"
You're confusing the first paragraph with the second.
The mathematicians area of interest was influenced. The mathematics wasn't. Same goes for anything that influences a scientist, either the output is done scientifically or it isn't. motivation-smotivation.

You seem to failed to grasp my claim about your position:

You have reduced science to something smaller than what it is. This is a common tactic that I find consistently falls short. You cannot divorce the knowledge from the knowers in the sense that you're trying to do without distorting that which science is.

For example, Greek notions of mathematics are dramatically different than our modern notion of mathematics. According to the Greeks, all numbers were representable by physical lengths, and the ratio of lengths was an important feature of numbers. They did not have the abstract concepts that we have in math today. And we also reject those concepts as the proper primitive concepts that we should work with in terms of "doing math."

Now, it is true that they discovered a lot of math "facts" and derived a lot of results. But in order for your position to make sense, you can only accept those "facts" as math, and throw the rest of it out.

But what would this say about our current state of math relative to the future state of math. Are there concepts that we use today which is central to our concept of math that may not exist in the future? I do not know. But if it did happen, then your understanding would be the claim that we aren't actually doing "math" today.

You *CAN* do this, but as I said above, I don't think this would be a fair rendering of mathematics (either historical or philosophical). I think the same can be drawn for science in general.

Why I play poker the way I did today depends on the rules of the game in force today. 50 years ago I'd have played differently. 50 years from now I may play differently again. Each time I will be "doing poker".
The fact I am at the game today motivated by a desire to get away from my wife, or influenced by a desire to skip work has nothing to do with the fact that I played the game by the rules in play at the time.

Do you have an argument that contradicts what hoodbhoy is saying?

Science was done before Kuhn and Quine and will be done after the current crop. The "since time immemorial" view of fields of study is a mythological way of looking at things. Science is done by the current 'rules' of science, personal motivations for the scientist doing it is only that.

Perhaps you're more a hands-on person so I'll try this - we may consider the quality of measurement of a former experiment insufficiently precise to draw the conclusion it did, but if it was done according to the understanding of the rules and the understanding of the universe at the time, then it was 'doing science' at the time. Science done using Newtonian physics did not suddenly become non-science because we'd apply some relativity calcs in there today.

I don't really understand that - by the time I get to the end of the paragraph, I have to start again. I was responding to:

And in terms of 'how most theists think' I think there are religious beliefs that people consider to be unimportant. I know several who wouldn't care if the plagues of egypt were shown to be allegorical, despite currently believing they were literally true, historical events. They would be distressed by (and I don't think would accept) any argument which suggested the same about the resurrection.

Although I think the original quote was normative, it could perhaps be interpreted in this second way. That what matters in criticising christianity is not disproving the veracity of the egyptian plagues (since if my friends are representative, it isn't very important anyhow) but rather in addressing the central beliefs - Jesus died and rose from the dead, etc.

I confess I was clutching at straws somewhat. Perhaps I missed Vael's point.

Obviously, when Crane says that we should accurately understand what it is we are criticizing when we talk about religion, he is making a normative statement. However, it seems to me that the central thesis of his post is a descriptive claim about the nature of religious belief.

What I was trying to say (which is really just a minor stupid point) is that you can't distinguish between normative and descriptive statements about religion by asking religious people if they are true. But I think we were just talking about different things. You are focusing on the claim that there are central and peripheral religious beliefs (which seems undeniable to me) in religion, while I was focusing on his claim that religious beliefs are not like scientific hypotheses.

Welcome to my life...


Not a shot at you OP that happens to me with everyone's posts.

Existential claims can be proved but not disproved, so by their nature they're not open to scientific scrutiny because they're not falsifiable.

My take is that he is rejecting Christianity on the factual basis of a central tenet like the Resurrection not happening, not on the scientific basis of whether or not someone can rise from the dead. Kind of like how one might reject a claim of mind reading because there's not enough evidence of a factual basis that it happened, not on the scientific basis that telepathy is not possible by the laws of physics.

Yes. You lose sight of what you're talking about.

I agree with the second sentence. The actual results do not change. But under what you have accepted above by "doing poker" taking different forms at different times means that mathematics is not mathematics. He's attempting to create a sub-class of mathematics that is time-independent, which is precisely contrary to the time-dependent nature of our understanding of what the thing actually is.

In order for you to draw a seamless picture of doing poker yesterday, today, and tomorrow that is somehow universal in nature, you've got to limit that which you consider to be poker. There was once a time that there was no such thing as "limit" poker. At that time, such a game would probably not even be considered to be poker, even though it is now. So is it poker? If poker is poker (timeless), then no (because there was a time when it wasn't). But if poker is a time-dependent concept, then yes.

The time-independent sense of mathematics holds appeal because it's neat and pretty, but as I've repeatedly stated as a fundamental point in my position, it's not really all that accurate as a description of what is actually happening.

I think you should take a more careful approach here by separating out "motivation" from "influence." The quote you gave didn't really do a good job of this, and neither have you.

Motivation speaks much more to the original cause of the enterprise. Influence is an ongoing effect of guiding the direction of the enterprise. Motivation gets the ball rolling, influence guides where it rolls.

You can say that the motivation for pursuing a particular notion is independent of the result. But it's not possible to say that the result is independent of the things that influenced it.

To take the quotes explicitly:

This points to the originating ideas which started the enterprise of Indian mathematics. But these have no impact on the results.

This points to the fact that the pursuit of specific types of ends led the mathematicians to reach certain types of conclusions. It doesn't matter *WHY* these things were the things that they wanted to accomplish, but these were *THE THINGS* they wanted to accomplish. And therefore, the mathematics that was developed focused on *THESE THINGS*.

To phrase it in a more leadership-oriented context: Two people can work together to accomplish the same goal even if they have different motivations. But it's much more difficult for two people two work together to accomplish completely goals. It will always be possible to find *SOME* commonality in their pursuits that allows them to work in tandem.

Neither of which matters to the fact that once the conclusion is established, we don't need to know why Newton wanted to invent calculus or why Columbus was so determined to sail West. Other than chick-flick human interest material.

Is it that hard to see how time-dependent your notions are? Was it "not math" while he was in the process of working on it?

I wouldn't go that far. If someone accepts an existential claim of a biblical miracle, they're not being hypocritical by disregarding a claim about UFO abductions, IMO. With the former he's just weighing the evidence in one case and accepting the claim, and with the latter he's either not aware of enough evidence or deems the evidence weak and disregarding the claim.

Nor would I find it hypocritical if someone accepts the existential claim of God creating man and rejects a scientific hypothesis for abiogenisis, even if science could demonstrate that life can arise on it's own, simply because could have and did are not synonymous. Also, I don't think it's hypocritical to accept a scientific explanation for one thing and reject a scientific claim with another. For example, one could accept evolution but reject abiogenisis.

it's not time-dependent it's holistically dependent.
Any single action in the process is not automatically "doing math" or "doing science". There are so many examples... hmmmm...
Cut out each step of a scientific experiment.
shake them up in a hat.
Pin them in random order on the wall.
Carrying them out in order would very rarely be "doing science".
Yet, as part of an overall correct-order scientific procedure they are.

The reason so much "crappy science" isn't considered having been done scientifically is not because every step was not-science or science on it's own. Sometimes 90% of the same steps in another experiment will be add up to science.

I'm not going to explain this further, you already know this. cheeeez.

Holistically dependent? What does that even mean?

Your attempt to hold this narrow definition seems tortured to me. I don't think either of us are going to convince the other of the errors being committed.