The Epistemology of Microphysics
25 points - last Wednesday at 1:46 PM
SourceI still don't know why the author brought religion/faith/god into the discussion; he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.
mysterymath
today at 6:53 PM
Beeeecause this was a lecture delivered at a Catholic philosophy/theology conference?
> he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.
That's because he is. Take a look at the articles listed on his website.
I think the reason is because he was trying illustrate that you can say an awful lot (in analogical language) about things that are not empirically observable.
dist-epoch
today at 7:07 PM
> scientific epistemology
Science can't tell us so far what really exists. It can only predict experiments. To put it in more common terms, "is the wave function real or not?", or "do quantum fields really exist, or are just elegant mathematical abstractions for explaining experiments?"
Or as others say "shut up and calculate".
> It can only predict experiments.
Your "only" here makes it seem like predicting experiments is a narrow thing. It's not. All of the modern technologies we have--including the computers we're all using to post here--are based on science "predicting experiments"--but the "experiments" are things like building computers, or the Internet, or the GPS system. The fact that all those things work exactly as our science predicts makes it very hard to view that science as "only predicting experiments". It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.
bheadmaster
today at 7:26 PM
Not only that - one could argue that all observed phenomena are experiments, and the way we behave in the world is based on predicting them.
A religious person - if not honest enough to simply say "existence of God is an axiom and cannot be derived from reason alone" - uses the very predictions of experiments to reason God into existence: everything that exists has a cause; universe exists; therefore universe has a cause.
lo_zamoyski
today at 8:12 PM
Epistemically speaking, the existence of God is not axiomatic. Your second claims is more accurate, though not entirely. Knowledge of God's existence is derived from observed features of reality. However, these features are very general and not scientific per se; rather, they are presupposed by empirical science. Examples include the reality of change, causality (especially per se vs. what science is generally concerned with, per accidens), or the existence of things. The denial of these general features would undermine not just the possibility of science, but the very intelligibility of the world. You would hang yourself by your own skepticism.
These are also not axiomatically accepted features either (except perhaps in the sense that they are in relation to the empirical sciences, as science presupposes their existence).
bheadmaster
today at 8:16 PM
> Knowledge of God's existence is derived from observed features of reality.
If it were so, God's existence would be just another scientific fact.
lo_zamoyski
today at 8:26 PM
Did you read my entire post? I already explained to you why this isn't the case. We known that, for example, change is real through general observation, but it is not something belonging to any empirical science per se. Rather, it is presupposed by each of those sciences.
Of course, the classical definition of "science" is more expansive, including what would be the most general science - metaphysics - so in that sense, yes, you can say the existence of God is a "scientific fact". (God here is self-subsisting being, not some ridiculous "sky fairy" straw man of New Atheist imagination.)
dist-epoch
today at 8:24 PM
> It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.
That's the popular definition of the word "real".
But this article is about the philosophical meaning of the word "real". And from that viewpoint science hasn't delivered yet, science doesn't know yet what "really exists out there", it can only predict how that thing behaves in experiments.
>Science can't tell us so far what really exists.
Only inasmuch as nothing can tell us what "really" exists. By any practical definitions of any of the words in that sentence science is the best way of determining what exists.
... which is still far more than religion can provably do.
> Microphysics is the branch of physics that studies molecules, atoms, and elementary particles.
So not quite chemistry, but particle physics?
I don't think it's that narrow. The article mentions the kinetic theory of gases, which explains the observed properties of gases in terms of statistics of the motions of the atoms or molecules that make up the gas. Chemistry also explains observed properties of chemical elements and compounds based on the properties of atoms and molecules. I think those are included in "microphysics" as the article is using the term.
The article does focus on particle physics, I think because that's the most fundamental level of physics we have--everything else is built on it.