God Does Not Play Dice - The Danger of Unquestioned Belief - Extra Credits

[Music] so how was your New Year's ours was good we had a few topics picked out and ready to go for our first week back but then well our last episode triggered a massive response and we love seeing an episode spark discussion and we usually try to stay out of that discussion because I feel like our presence biases them I would much rather lurk on our forums or patv comments section and on Facebook and watch the Fantastic discussion that goes on even when most of it is just telling us how wrong we are but the reaction to that last episode was well disappointing we decided it deserved a full response and we had extra credits like us some science if our occasional deviation from gaming topics for a science episode didn't already give that away so if science ever needs defending we will be among the first to jump to that defense but science doesn't really need to be defended against the concept of Faith only some of its misuses it saddened us that so many people on the boards had such hatred of religion and such

veneration for science that they couldn't even look at the places where they might gain from one another the best thing we can do for the things we venerate is question I had hopes that the episode would spawn a rational discussion of how we can use faith without being blinded by it but instead I saw the very kneer hostility that we had mentioned in the episode I saw people not differentiating between religion and Faith when we had just spent two episodes talking about how faith is an important element of religion but not all of it and certainly not exclusive to it that faith is universal and applies to everyone's life in some way or another but the most bother some thing I saw in the reactions to the episode was an utter rejection of exploration ostensibly in defense of science now our team holds a pretty wide range of World Views our writer James is an agnostic the way he tells it he spent his life searching but he's never found but without a doubt the search like all searches has been worth it in and of itself when asked at a panel once what he thought was the most important Discovery in human history his immediate answer was the scientific method so he's been pretty sad to see those who say they're on the side of science offer unquestioned absolutes in the same way that one sees creationists do elsewhere it seemed like most of the comments were

making two arguments first that science is about observation and second that it relies on logic so let's dig into those two statements and see if they mean that science is devoid of Faith first let's take science as based on observation to that argument I say I agree 100% but that very statement necessitates the inclusion of faith in science I mean to base anything on observation requires a great deal of Faith you must trust that your observations are true observations and you have all the standard examples how do you know you're not in the Matrix how do you know you're not dreaming are your observations more valid than that of a person who's colorblind I mean if they can have observations that aren't true why can't you deart who I consider one of the fathers of the scientific method goes into the question of what can truly be known with certainty a great deal in his meditations it was for him one of the foremost questions of the coming scientific age we are all the time proving that how we previously observed the universe was false and this doesn't make it the wrong way to go about things in fact I'd say it's a very good indicator that it's a fantastic way to go about things but it does mean that our Reliance on observation is an Act of Faith but let's go step further let's

look at how observation and logic interact all logical systems are based on a series of postulates things we take as true because without doing so we'd have nothing to build our logic off of we have to take these postulates or axioms on faith so long as we're working within that system because if you reject them your whole system falls apart perhaps the most famous axiomatic system is uid geometry ukl begins his great work the elements by listing a group of postulates and many of these things are pretty straightforward things like a straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points pretty hard to argue with that but then he gets to the fifth postulate if two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough this is often known as the parallel postulate because it's how most of us Define parallel lines it's where we get the idea that parallel lines never meet but uclid was a smart guy he knew this postulate was a little more questionable in the first section of the elements he actually elucidates every single mathematical proof possible without relying on this fifth postulate before he ever brings it in though he mentions that he's doing so but that

doesn't get us very far so he needs this fifth postulate to create the rest of what we now think of as geometry this ukian geometry was then what we based most of the rest of our math on when we were first tackling algebra in the west we proved it as valid through using geometric proofs which is why square numbers are called square numbers even if you look at calculus as Newton presents it it starts by giving us strictly ukian proofs this meant that all of our early physics were delivered through a ukian lens the math we did for it was ukian math but space or rather space time doesn't follow UK Ian rules math as we understood it didn't line up with reality even though we believed that our math gave us insights into some real truth about it you see that postulate 5 the parallel postulate only works in a flat plane if you're working in a curved space the surfaces of a sphere for example you get a different result relativity the major advance in physics in the early 20th century required that we abandon the axiomatic system we'd previously had faith in that we' previously seen as reality Kant even says that ukian math is one of the few a priori truths we had to develop not only a new understanding of how to observe

but also choose a new group of postulates a new systemic starting point to work from but for us to build anything from these starting points we had to take on faith that they're true at least within that system and we'll do this over and over find new ways to observe that puts the lie to the old ways we believed in find flaws in our old systems that show that the axioms that we made up that we believed had something to do with the real world were just mental Stepping Stones devoid of reality and that's okay that right there is the power of science we have to start with faith a belief that we can know a in our observations a belief in our root logical systems but it's just that a starting point we can move away from that Faith often with great pain and great effort but we can do it science allows us to move to New starting points new faiths it allows our faiths to shift and grow and change because it takes Faith as a means rather than an end this is its power but when you drill all the way down you'll always find something you're just going to have to Simply believe the funny thing is we are never going to achieve that absolutely perfect system in 1931 a man named Kurt Goodell proved very rigorously and very

logically that in any mathematical system there will always be statements that are true but unprovable his work was lauded by the likes of Turing Von Newman and Einstein his actual proof is incredibly complex not something James would have ever gotten through if he hadn't been kicked through it in college but there are many books out there that break it down to its fundamental meaning which are worth looking at if you're interested in this sort of thing looking into it helps James realize that mathematics and science don't lose anything because they aren't some absolutist objectivist truth math is no less valid or useful or beneficial to humanity science is no the beacon which will direct us toward a better future just because they'll never reach a total truth because they ask us to put forth belief in certain fundamentals no scientist I know has a problem with believing absolutely in the empirical results they're testing and accepting unquestionably that those results might someday be overturned without that Faith there is no science oh and uh while we're here we should probably talk about that Einstein bit too although James would argue that Einstein did actually believe in a spian deterministic god Einstein's religion wasn't what we were talking about James actually does this a lot he likes to play word games within

our episodes from time to time where he'll say exactly what he means and see if it sort of kicks people's Consciousness into thinking about it like way back when we attributed LA Noir to Rockstar rather than team Bondi that was an intentional statement suggesting that Rockstar played a more significant part in making that game shippable than most people realize calling them team Bondi the entire time was less intentional that was just me being an idiot James usually throws those word games in there to actually get people to dig in and question and usually we get a handful of people who catch it and really do but here we saw something different happen we saw a defensiveness that made me kind of sad I don't care about Einstein's religion I care about his one great faith what was the one thing Einstein took to his grave what did he deny for most of his adult life what was the one thing that he would not could not question that God does not play dice with the universe Einstein could never accept the uncertainty principle that underlies quantum mechanics he believed he had such total faith in the power of science he couldn't accept that a scientist couldn't know everything his Blind Faith in science caused him to act unscientifically to spend many good

years of that prodigious intellect of his cooking away at how he could debunk quantum mechanics he denied quantum mechanics right up until his death in 1955 long after the world scientific Community had accepted it as useful and experimentally valid knowing we might get some angry or defensive responses to that episode we'd hoped that this would drive some people to reflect to think about the consequences of an absolute belief in science a belief that can't admit the possibility that science itself is a work starting from Faith with the admission that our faith May in the end be incorrect to me this is just as dangerous as people who say that religion has no place for reason within it and it's just as untrue anyway I have set our bit thanks for indulging me next week we'll get back to game stuff as always thank you for watching we'll see you guys next week [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]