Page created 13 Oct 2003 by dex
URL: http://www.nsf.gov/
Science is so weird and cool and spooky. This entree would be a good place to discuss what you find cool, weird, or spooky, or what you hear that's cool, weird or spooky.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17434-2003Oct12.htmlHere's the text of the article. This is really bizarre, and really really interesting. I miss working with scientific subjects.
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Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants
By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A01
Scientists in North Carolina have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object.
The technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others today do with their hands. It might even allow some paralyzed people to move their own arms or legs again, by transmitting the brain's directions not to a machine but directly to the muscles in those latent limbs.
The brain implants could also allow scientists or soldiers to control, hands-free, small robots that could perform tasks in inhospitable environments or in war zones.
In the new experiments, monkeys with wires running from their brains to a robotic arm were able to use their thoughts to make the arm perform tasks. But before long, the scientists said, they will upgrade the implants so the monkeys can transmit their mental commands to machines wirelessly.
"It's a major advance," University of Washington neuroscientist Eberhard E. Fetz said of the monkey studies. "This bodes well for the success of brain-machine interfaces."
The experiments, led by Miguel A.L. Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, N.C., and published today in the journal PLoS Biology, are the latest in a progression of increasingly science fiction-like studies in which animals -- and in a few cases people -- have learned to use the brain's subtle electrical signals to operate simple devices.
Until now, those achievements have been limited to "virtual" actions, such as making a cursor move across a computer screen, or to small two-dimensional actions such as flipping a little lever that is wired to the brain.
The new work is the first in which any animal has learned to use its brain to move a robotic device in all directions in space and to perform a mixture of interrelated movements -- such as reaching toward an object, grasping it and adjusting the grip strength depending on how heavy the object is.
"This is where you want to be," said Karen A. Moxon, a professor of biomedical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It's one thing to be able to communicate with a video screen. But to move something in the physical world is a real technological feat. And Nicolelis has taken this work to a new level by quantifying the neuroscience behind it."
The device relies on tiny electrodes, each one resembling a wire thinner than a human hair. After removing patches of skull from two monkeys to expose the outer surface of their brains, Nicolelis and his colleagues stuck 96 of those tiny wires about a millimeter deep in one monkey's brain and 320 of them in the other animal's brain.
The surgeries were painstaking, taking about 10 hours, and ended with the pouring of a substance like dental cement over the area to substitute for the missing bits of skull.
The monkeys were unaffected by the surgery, Nicolelis said. But now they had tufts of wires protruding from their heads, which could be hooked up to other wires that ran through a computer and on to a large mechanical arm.
Then came the training, with the monkeys first learning to move the robot arm with a joystick. The arm was kept in a separate room -- "If you put a 50-kilogram robot in front of them, they get very nervous," Nicolelis said -- but the monkeys could track their progress by watching a schematic representation of the arm and its motions on a video screen.
The monkeys quickly learned how to use the joystick to make the arm reach and grasp for objects, and how to adjust their grip on the joystick to vary the robotic hand's grip strength. They could see on the monitor when they missed their target or dropped it for having too light a grip, and they were rewarded with sips of juice when they performed their tasks successfully.
While the monkeys trained, a computer tracked the patterns of bioelectrical activity in the animals' brains. The computer figured out that certain patterns amounted to a command to "reach." Others, it became clear, meant "grasp." Gradually, the computer learned to "read" the monkeys' minds.
Then the researchers did something radical: They unplugged the joystick so the robotic arm's movements depended completely on a monkey's brain activity. In effect, the computer that had been studying the animal's neural firing patterns was now serving as an interpreter, decoding the brain signals according to what it had learned from the joystick games and then sending the appropriate instructions to the mechanical arm.
At first, Nicolelis said, the monkey kept moving the joystick, not realizing that her own brain was now solely in charge of the arm's movements. Then, he said, an amazing thing happened.
"We're looking, and she stops moving her arm," he said, "but the cursor keeps playing the game and the robot arm is moving around."
The animal was controlling the robot with its thoughts.
"We couldn't speak. It was dead silence," Nicolelis said. "No one wanted to verbalize what was happening. And she continued to do that for almost an hour."
At first, the animals' performance declined compared to the sessions on the joystick. But after just a day or so, the control was so smooth it seemed the animals had accepted the mechanical arm as their own.
"It's quite plausible that the perception is you're extended into the robot arm, or the arm is an extension of you," agreed the University of Washington's Fetz, a pioneer in the field of brain-controlled devices.
John P. Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown University developing a similar system, said paralyzed patients would be the first to benefit by gaining an ability to type and communicate on the Web, but the list of potential applications is endless, he said. The devices may even allow quadriplegics to move their own limbs again by sending signals from the brain to various muscles, leaping over the severed nerves that caused their paralysis.
"Once you have an output signal out of the brain that you can interpret, the possibilities of what you can do with those signals are immense," said Donoghue, who recently co-founded a company, Cyberkinetics Inc. of Foxboro, Mass., to capitalize on the technology.
Both he and Nicolelis hope to get permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin experiments in people next year. Nicolelis also is developing a system that would transmit signals from each of the hundreds of brain electrodes to a portable receiver, so his monkeys -- or human subjects -- could be free of external wires and move around while they turn their thoughts into mechanical actions.
"It's like multiple cellular phone lines," Nicolelis said. "As my mother said, 'You can dial your brain now.' "
Significant challenges remain if the technology is to find widespread application in people. Although earlier experiments suggest the electrodes are safe and able to continue functioning for three years or more, longer-term safety studies are needed, and implants with far more electrodes may be required to accomplish anything more than the simplest tasks.
"For something basic like grasping a cup of coffee or brushing your teeth, apparently you could do almost all of this with this kind of prosthesis," said Idan Segev, director of the center for neurocomputation at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "If you were a pianist and had a spinal cord injury and you wanted to play Chopin again, then 500 neurons is not enough."
Still, Segev expressed astonishment at how much the monkeys were able to do with signals from only a few hundred of the brain's 100 billion or so nerve cells -- evidence, he said, that "the brain uses a lot of backup and a lot of redundancy."
That may explain one of the more interesting findings of the Duke experiments, he and others said: that neurons not usually involved in body movements, including those usually involved in sensory input rather than motor output, were easily recruited to help operate the robotic arm when electrodes were implanted there.
Asked if the monkeys seemed to mind the experiments, Nicolelis answered with an emphatic "No."
"If anything, they're enjoying themselves playing these games. It enriches their lives," he said. "You don't have to do anything to get these guys into their chair. They go right there. That's play time."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
that's incredible. and kind of scary.
And finally found they can do it, I have seen controls for computers that work off of different connections, kind of like a polygraph machine, and let you do certain controls just by thinking about them. I think it's a brilliant step toward robotic prostetics.
I, for one, welcome our cybernetic monkey masters.
thank you, Kent Brockman.
Did Rainier Wolfcastle have anything to say after winning the governorship?
"BRAIN" IN A DISH ACTS AS AUTOPILOT, LIVING COMPUTER
A University of Florida scientist has grown a living .brain. that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.The .brain. -- a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat.s brain and cultured inside a glass dish -- gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene.
As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments.
wow
How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon
So it was quite a shock when Boris Smeds, a graying, Swedish, 26-year ESA veteran [see photo, "Unsung Hero"], who normally specializes in solving problems related to the agency's network of ground stations, discovered in early 2000 that Cassini's receiver was in danger of scrambling Huygens's data beyond recognition.Making that discovery would lead Smeds from his desk in Darmstadt, Germany, to an antenna farm deep in California's Mojave Desert, after he and his allies battled bureaucracy and disbelief to push through a test program tough enough to reveal the existence of Cassini-Huygens's communications problem. In doing so, Smeds continued a glorious engineering tradition of rescuing deep-space missions from doom with sheer persistence, insight, and lots of improvisation.
hooray for the swedes!
wow! that was rad!
http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#Utterly fascinating. Article entitled "Can This Black Box See Into The Future"
FEoTD!
Someone mentioned intelligent design in political cabbage soup, and so I thought that I'd bring it up and try to clarify something. Intelligent Design, as I understand it, is not the same as Creationism. True Creationism is the belief that one diety (God) created the world in 7 days less than 10000 years ago (or some crazy small number like that). Intelligent Design holds that the universe has been in a state of change/evolution for billions of years, but that there must be some higher power involved because the vast, complex universe is unbelievable delicate and statistically impossible.
My brother, who is a biologist, has recently become a strict creationist and scoffs at my impeding residence in hell whenever I try to argue evolution with intelligent design (I believe that God made it, but that it took a long time and critters have changed within the limitations of "the plan").
first of all, there is no One True Creationism. there are many creationisms, each one being a story told by some religious sect or another. creationism stories all have the same basic structure, that there is some sentient force or being or deity which created everything. the nature of the sentience and the nature of "everything" are the only things that vary between different creation stories, and the details of how the post-creation universe is arranged and how it functions are a whole different matter. intelligent design is a generic creationist story invented and told by american politico-theologists in order to try to circumvent the de facto prohibition of teaching religion in public schools. the fact that intelligent design fits the mold of a creation story perfectly is what makes it creationism. it doesn't matter that intelligent design is not the creation story told by any organized religion.current theories of intelligent design are not science for one very simple reason, which is that they rely on the dogmatic assertion of the two things that make it a creation story, that 1) a higher power, 2) created the universe. science, as a practice and method for turning conjecture and hypothesis into accepted theory by way of testing and demonstration, systematically shuns dogmatic assertions.
our current scientific understanding of the universe does not rule out that some form of creationism actually occurred when our universe began. the notion of a creationist beginning is not inherently incompatible with any of many things that scientists can empirically demonstrate. the reason why creationism is not explicitly included as a scientific notion is that no one has ever empirically demonstrated the two central features of a creationist beginning to our universe, or anything even remotely close. as far as science is concerned, creationism is one of the many untested possibilities. some would say that it is not only untested, but untestable.
any creation story that does not conflict with our tested, empirically demonstrable, and scientific understanding of the universe is still tenable as a dogmatic, asserted, and religious understanding of the universe. intelligent design is one such creation story, but that does not make it science.
creationism is no more a theory that evolution, there is no "law" of evolution. So why should we teach evolution and not anything else?
this is the science entree. if you're going to start using words like "theory" and "law" you'd better start using them correctly.
law n 1: legal document setting forth rules governing a particular kind of activity; "there is a law against kidnapping" 2: the collection of rules imposed by authority; "civilization presupposes respect for the law"; "the great problem for jurisprudence to allow freedom while enforcing order" [syn: {jurisprudence}] 3: a generalization that describes recurring facts or events in nature; "the laws of thermodynamics" [syn: {law of nature}] 4: a rule or body of rules of conduct inherent in human nature and essential to or binding upon human society [syn: {natural law}] 5: the learned profession that is mastered by graduate study in a law school and that is responsible for the judicial system; "he studied law at Yale" [syn: {practice of law}] 6: the force of policemen and officers; "the law came looking for him" [syn: {police}, {police force}, {constabulary}] 7: the branch of philosophy concerned with the law and the principles that lead courts to make the decisions they do [syn: {jurisprudence}, {legal philosophy}]theory n 1: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory" 2: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices" [syn: {hypothesis}, {possibility}] 3: a belief that can guide behavior; "the architect has a theory that more is less"; "they killed him on the theory that dead men tell no tales"
hypothesis n 1: a proposal intended to explain certain facts or observations 2: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices" [syn: {possibility}, {theory}] 3: a message expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence [syn: {guess}, {conjecture}, {supposition}, {surmise}, {surmisal}, {speculation}]
these three terms, when used as scientific terms, are all used in the first sense. scientists who use the term "law" to label anything outside the field of jurisprudence are doing it out of either convention or ignorance. e.g. a lot of theories of physics are commonly called "laws" even though that's technically incorrect. the real shame isn't that we are or aren't teaching evolution or intelligent design in our schools, but that we aren't teaching these basic definitions.
biological evolution is a theory about how species change over many generations via sexual reproduction and exposure to their natural environment. the basic principles of the theory are extremely well-substantiated by enormous bodies of evidence about thousands of species, and experiments in breeding, biochemistry, and genetics. the scientific debates that are ongoing about evolution are about the fringe details, not about the principles. evolution should absolutely be taught in public schools, specifically because it is a well-substantiated hypothesis (therefore, a theory).
creationism, in any form, is a hypothesis about the way the universe began. there are no well-substantiated hypotheses of a creationist beginning to our universe, and therefore no scientific theories of a creationist beginning. that doesn't mean it's not possible, just that it's untested. personally, i don't really care whether intelligent design is taught in schools or not. but if it is, it had better come branded with the disclaimer that it is a hypothesis, and not a theory.
you're such a nice guy
the question I would ask your brother is how he can believe in a God who would purposely deceive him. If he's a young-earth creationist who believes the universe is only 8,000 some years old then he has twisted his mind into a logical pretzel to have it make any sense. You either assume that the laws of physics are dead wrong or that the unvierse was created with the impression of age. The light from distant stars that has taken millions of years to reach us is really created already in transit. If God set up the universe with this false information ask your brother why God couldn't have just created the universe last tuesday, it's really just as plausible.
Good thoughts, and thank you. But, I have no intention of trying to convert my brother back to the world of the sane at this point. In recent years, we've seen less eye to eye on matters of life and theology than I would have thought possible, and meaningful communication regarding these differences has grown harder and harder to accomplish peacably... Yes, I think that his ideas are ludicrous, but I don't plan to argue with him because, ultimately, I don't think it matters what he believes about creation/evolution. In the grand scheme of things, to me it seems like an insignificant question; I just don't think there's going to be an essay-section on the entrance exam to heaven...
Everyone knows that the entrance exam to heaven is a scantron, I mean come on it's ther perfect form of testing after all. 25 multiple choice questions and 10 true/false, I think you can find a copy of it on the internet if you search hard enough.
some guy in germany has some thing going on where he thinks he's going to detect gravitational waves...a buddy told me about it a few days ago, but i didn't think anything of it till i read the article on the bbc, but still, who knows.
gravimitational waves
Kansas Board Approves Challenges to Evolution
Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.Awesome! So next time some chem student's lab experiment goes wrong she can blame unnatural forces of darkness. aaargh
I'm stunned. Science is no longer limited to natural explanations? Then what the hell is it?!? It's not science, and it's not religion, it's totally useless! Don't get me wrong evolution isn't fool-proof, but neither is creationism, as long as it's stressed as a theory of how life changes over time and how modern life can come from single celled organisms it's pretty solid. And the gaps in the fossil record they talk about are decreasing every year, the entirety of the planet can't all be excavated at once.i mean come on, that's like saying the planets aren't really moving because the big bang theory can't be taken to the exact moment of origin, that doesn't mean the planets aren't moving now, it just means the whole something from nothing part is a little tricky to explain. It's that point where you can bring in creation by god, but not in a public school because of the seperation of church and state, there I've ranted enough.
There was a Kansas student on NPR this morning stating how embarassing it was to be a part of this whole mess. The best part was that she was on right after some pro-I.D. guy was on saying that this change would be exciting for students.Maybe someday this time in history will be known as the second dark ages.
but...i think what needs to happen is for everyone agree to disagree. I mean, sure - Intelligent Design is not really 'Science'. is' more metaphysics. more suited for a philosophy class (which they should teach to high school students, btw).
Creationists don't have the right to shove it down people's throats. but the Theory of Intelligent Design (yeah. i said theory. and i believe it applies. i will respond to that more later.) is not one that should be ignored, either. certainly not on Church/State separation grounds.
however, saying that Science is not 'explicitly limited to natural explanations' is disingenuous. Why can't we just say that there are certain things that, as an extension of Humanity's best efforts to explain our surroundings, Science is not capable of explaining everything. why can't we just admit that it's possible that our best efforts at rationalizing and testing and observing just can't answer every last question about our universe?
RE Theory of Creationism.
It is well accepted that God created the universe. not by any means Universally accepted, but many many people believe this.
according to the definition above
"theory n 1: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"
well-substantiated - the biblical account of the creation of the universe is explained in pretty easy enough terms regarding God's part in the whole thing universe. the bible is also widely accepted as a very accurate historical document by scholars all over the spiritual/religious roadmap. i would say there is ample substantiation to the document as a whole, historically and scientifcally speaking. the creation story is rather organized, and systematically lays out the creation of the universe and everything contained therein. it's explanation applies in relation to anything you can find that exists in this universe to explain it's specific phenomenal existence.
i believe that, by these grounds, the idea that God created this universe is a Theory, not just a hypothesis. you may not accept it, and it may not be proveable with the known tools of humanity, but that doesn't make 'merely a theory'.
just my 2 cents.
i read the bible once. it was the holy bible, not that it matters. the idea that it is an accurate historical record is a very slippery one. i think we can all agree that it is a historical artifact. but does it accurately record historical events? i think that depends entirely on what's meant by "accurate." from the perspective of the people who wrote it, it is perfectly accurate. an eyewitness to a hypothetical historical flood thousands of years ago that stretches from horizon to horizon might truly believe that the entire world is flooded. an eyewitness to a hypothetical infestation of locusts thousands of years ago might, for lack of a better explanation, think that he did something to bring it upon himself. from the perspective of someone armed with the intervening millenia of discovery and explanation, some of the stories told in the bible begin to look less like historical record, and more like hyperbole, fable, and superstition.take for example the story of sodom and gamorrah. no one now knows whether these two cities ever actually existed and if they did, what happened to them.
what we do know is that in this century several ancient and dead cities have been discovered in the rift valley of the dead sea and that two in particular appear to have been thriving metropolises right up until something deposited a layer of ash over the whole of them, after which there is no evidence of human activity at the sites.
we do know that the rift valley of the dead sea is a very tectonically active area. it is a part of the rift valley system that streches from turkey down into the heart of africa. one of the main features of the activity in this huge fault complex is that large blocks of the earth are thrust vertically from time to time, sometimes in very large increments.
and finally, it is well known that there are a lot of sulphur deposits in the dead sea area and that in some places there are sulphur hot springs.
it is very plausible that the large sulphur deposits and occassionally very violent tectonic activity in the area could hypothetically combine to cause an eruption of molten suphur which shoots up into the sky and falls back down to the ground. it is plausible that that is what happened at these two sites which have been found near the dead sea. some might say that all of this evidence taken together is proof that the two sites are sodom and gamorrah, and that they were destroyed by brimstone raining down from the sky, but it isn't proof. we don't know if there are other sites like these two, and if there are, how do we tell which of them, if any, are sodom and/or gamorrah? we can't say which of them are the two mentioned in the bible, because we don't have enough evidence to definitively say that any of them are sodom or gamorrah.
so what is proof? if someone were to find some scrolls (unlikely, because the layer of ash indicates that there was probably some kind of fire and scrolls probably would have been consumed) or some stone tablets or something which indicated that the name of the place was sodom or gamorrah, then that would be incredibly strong evidence, probably approaching some standard of "proof." if someone were to find a stone tablet in damascus which contained directions to sodom and/or gamorrah, and those directions led to one or both of these sites, that would be also be incredibly strong evidence. but we would have to consider that ancient navigation isn't is accurate as modern navigation, ancient roads may have washed away in mudslides or floods and then been relocated, earthquakes may have destroyed the ancient geological landmarks that are the key to the directions, and due any one of these circumstances, we may arrive at these two sites by the dead sea by mistake, when the real sodom and gamorrah are somewhere else. one of the hallmarks of proving something is that all other possibilities are ruled out. one thing that we can be sure of is that if there are directions to sodom and gamorrah to be discovered in damascus, then that means they at least existed.
let's say for sake of discussion that these two sites are sodom and gamorrah, and they were destroyed by molten sulphur (by the way, the archaic name for sulphur is brimstone) falling from the sky after a violent earthquake caused an eruption of the stuff into the sky.
did god cause that eruption or did pressure and movement in the earth's mantle cause it? let's say it was pressure and movement in the earth's mantle that caused the earthquake and then ask whether it was god that caused that pressure and movement or huge amounts of thermal and magnetic energy in the earth's core? let's say it was huge amounts of energy in the earth's core and ask.... was that put there by god?
the idea here is that we can collect evidence about these two sites until we are absolutely sure about what they are and how they were destroyed, and maybe they are sodom and gamorrah after all. we can make observations about natural phenomena and study the data and make conjectures about it and validate those conjectures by using them to make predictions about the data and about ongoing phenomena to the point where they are no longer conjecture but theory.
but we cannot ever prove that god destroyed sodom and gamorrah, either directly or through some chain of events. we especially cannot prove that it was done as punishment for things that the sodomites and gammorans were doing. we cannot know those things through science, only through faith.
which brings me to my point.... we may be able to find that sodom and gamorrah actually existed and that they are these two sites by the dead sea, but the bible says that god destroyed them as punishment. is that an accurate historical record of the destruction of those cities or is it the belief, by force of faith, of the person who wrote the text?
i only present this huge rant on the subject of sodom and gamorrah because i happen to know a little bit about these two sites near the dead sea. for what it's worth, there's an episode of history's mysteries about it on the history channel that i've seen at least twice. however, there are lots of stories in the bible and lots of archeological study taking place in israel and jordan. i think it's quite likely that we'll find out within the next century that some of the stories in the bible actually happened and by doing so, i think that we will find out that the bible doesn't accurately record those events. i think that we will find this out about the bible because the many authors of the bible's stories have interlaced whatever historical record is actually contained in their writing with statements and conclusions based on faith, and not history, and because many of the stories in the bible are not recorded for posterity but instead as a lesson to learn from.
what about direct revelation? what about when you have a reliable record of historical facts written by an author who also claims that God spoke to him? do we disregard this? because we cannot prove that there is a God, so we cannot take as accurate that God would have spoken to this author, and therefore we cannot take as accurate anything this author has written? or do we work it the other way? where the author has proven himself reliable w/r/t historical accounts as far as we can tell, and therefore it is plausible that God spoke to this author?also, your conjecture and hypotheses regarding the accuracy of Sodom and Gomorrah leads you to believe that the only way to know the truth of God's hand, or lack thereof, is by faith, and not scientific evidence. but i ask, what amount of faith do we have in the scientific process? why do we have this faith? is it because after a certain period of time and number of trials, certain things become consistently reliable? then i ask you, can we not assume the same about God, when certain assumptions and revelations of God continue to hold after many trials and over a vast period of time?
basically, you have to have faith in something. some have faith that Science and only Science can explain what goes on in this universe. and if science can't reach a conclusion, then that conclusion is not reachable. I hold that Science can only explain and illustrate the way the natural world works. I believe in the Living God who is faithful to those He loves, and works in mysterious ways, and in ways that He has revealed to us and we can count on. I think there may be a compromise between the two, but politics and sin and the hardened hearts of many people have a major role in undermining this view.
it is also very late and i may not be explaining myself very clearly.
when you ask how much faith a person can have in science and the process by which it produces explanations, i understand exactly where you are coming from. there is no really good answer to that.what i do know is that scientific study basically amounts to the application of skepticism. the most accomplished scientists in history were the most skeptical ones. einstein developed his theories because he was skeptical of newton's theories, which couldn't explain some phenomena in spite of the fact that they explained a lot of other things. newton in turn developed his theories because he was skeptical of the theories that came before him. aristarchus was skeptical of the idea that the sun revolved around the earth, but people dismissed his ideas. by the time copernicus, kepler, and galileo revisited aristarchus's work, a whole convoluted system of astronomy had been constructed around the idea of geocentrism. the renaisance astronomers were able to construct a much simpler explanation for the things we see in the sky based on the old dismissed idea of heliocentrism, and the parsimony of that explanation is what ultimately caused heliocentrism to prevail over geocentrism in the war of ideas. skepticism is clearly useful in making new discoveries.
but if all we ever did was doubt the results of science -- all science -- then what use would science be? how could we apply newton's theories and the theories of others to produce things like the automobile or the airplane if we couldn't believe that those theories are at least mostly true? the answer is that newton's theories were extremely reliable predictors of the basic interactions of objects. they are not a perfect explanation, but they are reliable enough for us to apply them and get useful results. for someone who is simply trying to apply the results of science to achieve some technical goal, some of those results are sound enough to have faith in.
the right balance of skepticism and faith depends entirely on your goals.
as far as direct divine revelation is concerned, think about what it would take to rule out the other possibilities. when someone claims to have spoken directly with god, is the claim true? if it's not true, is it hyperbole or metaphor or an outright lie? if the claimant believes that it's true, why? is the claimant delusional or gullible or confused? or is the claimant right? there are many things that might cause someone to claim to have received a direct revelation from god, and only one of those things is that the person actually received a direct divine revelation. how do you rule out the other possible causes? if you choose to believe the person, it is a choice based on faith, not on evidence. that's perfectly fine, but your faith is not evidence of anything other than itself.
whoops, aristarchus got the heliocentrism idea from aristotle. the idea was dismissed by the contemporaries of both men.
good post.i don't reject a faith in science. i just think people tend to elevate it higher than Faith. if i didn't have faith in science, i wouldn't be able to drive my car, play my guitar, type on this computer, cook my dinner, etc.
Otters and Bears