By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
I have to take issue with your earlier reader’s comment:
"Unlike in (most) religion, there are no scientific hypothesis (beliefs) that could not be changed if the evidence so indicated."
The problem with this formulation is that the nature of scientific hypotheses and religious beliefs are so very different. Scientific hypotheses in and of themselves have no moral content, whereas religious beliefs are of course primarily concerned with morality. Or as the (somewhat crude) saying goes, science deals with the "how," religion with the "why." A scientific hypothesis has no value for the scientist as human being when she is confronted with a moral dilemma.
Neuroscientists today use investor-trustee games and brain imaging technology to watch the moral decision-making process in real time—something never before possible and yet even in this arena the hypotheses are limited to the "how." Science cannot tell her what should or should not be done, but can only make predictions based on previous experimental or observational data about what might or might not happen if she takes one course of action. The moral judgment is up to the scientist. Take an example in which there is MORE than overwhelming evidence: that smoking can cause cancer. Is the scientist (or anyone else) who refuses a cigarette based on that evidence making a moral judgment? Yes! The scientific data say nothing about whether cancer or death are BAD and things to be avoided, only that they are likely to happen.
I think Ward’s point and perhaps James’s as well is that all of us, scientists or not, are living, breathing human beings of a certain time and place and as such we will never have enough information to deal with every single problem or potential problem using an evidence-based decision making process. We must therefore by default adopt some beliefs for which there is "less than overwhelming evidence" to guide us through life. This says nothing about whether you can change those beliefs over the course of your life, only that you will have to commit to some before there is ample data.
While I will agree that scientific hypotheses are certainly more malleable than religious beliefs, I think it’s fairly obvious from history that religious beliefs can and do change as well, just mostly on a much longer timescale and rarely within an individual’s lifetime.
Another adds:
I haven’t read the Ward, but both the reader replying to him and Ward himself (based on the reader’s quotation from Ward) omit a crucial part of James’ claim, which is that the case must also be one that can’t be settled on "intellectual grounds" (i.e., by reasoning either apriori or aposteriori). So cases for which sufficient evidence could be presented one way or the toher were not among those about which James thought we had a right to believe despite a lack of evidence.
I’m not endorsing James here, just noting in his defense that, if he was wrong, he wasn’t *that obviously* wrong.
The Dish 