hi so uh we are going to be talking quite a bit about video games and board games throughout the semester but i'm also going to be kind of alongside of that doing some lectures on some of the science kinds of things uh so that hopefully you get to gain some proficiency in that that you can then apply as i talked about in the main quest towards your poster at the end so in order to do some of that we're going to start by just talking about science and kind of what it is and how it works and what's really going on with all of this so i'm going to do a little bit this week just kind of on how science works and hopefully this will begin to give you a sense of why the social aspect of this is also a kind of important part of it so before we do any kind of discussion of that that we have to do a little bit of philosophy and many of you are probably not all that interested in philosophy or not philosophy majors but as it turns out philosophy is a really important discipline regardless right so as soon as you start asking the question well who cares about philosophy i thought i thought i could get out of philosophy why why does this even matter well it turns out it matters because it basically forms the foundation for pretty much all the disciplines right so you can talk about science if you're an artist or a musician or business or any other kind of discipline you could just fill in the blank there of i don't know why does your discipline matter and as soon as you start trying to answer that question you're basically doing philosophy so whether or not you know it you do philosophy quite regularly kind of all the time you do it well you can do it poorly but you're still doing philosophy right and so it's important to get a little bit of a background a little bit of foundation philosophical foundation so we know what's going on with with science what are some of the assumptions we make what are some of the philosophical conclusions that we are talking about so this is an interesting kind of web comic in the sciences a lot of times they talk about like which is the best science or the purest or i don't know whatever the case may be with the mathematicians kind of laying laying claim to some of that however in in reality right all this stuff all the sciences in every discipline is kind of upheld as it were on the back of or the shoulder of it's hard to tell with the stick figure of epistemological philosophers and epistemological is just another way of saying kind of how we know epistemology is the study of knowing and so how we know so how do we know anything um right and so this philosophers and you make philosophical assumptions in order to do uh anything in these disciplines right so as christians we can ask this question um in a different way as well right so why can we do science why can we learn anything about science a lot of it has to do with it's the way god has created the world and he upholds it and his promise right he has created a world that is rational it's understandable at the opening of john 1 if the word became flesh right that's that's rational speech and language are rational and therefore understandable to humans and so god has kind of condescended uh to us in a way that he's made us so that we can understand we are rational beings um i know usually we use the word condescend it's like he was condescending and it's kind of derogatory but i don't that's not what i mean here in this this term of god's condescension to us he really kind of steps down to us because he has to he needs to right because he's god and he's the creator and we are not god we are we are similar to him in some ways because he's made us in his image but we are not anywhere near his level and so for for anything to happen anything kind of relation there he has to condescend he has to come down descend as it were so he's also made a world that's reliable we talk about repeated experiments uh we can trust that the sun is going to rise the same way day to day um because these are the patterns that are that god has instituted right genesis 8 22 after the flood uh god makes a promise that there are these these cycles these patterns that are going to stay in place because he's he's making them do that i already mentioned the image of god right but because we are created in the image of of god we can do things as kind of a as a sub level god calls us in genesis 1 different to and apart from all the other creatures he calls us to rule over the rule of the world basically and a lot of times that has bad connotations right to take dominion or to rule we a lot of times think of oppression but that's not what's necessarily meant here right god rules over us but he rules as a good and perfect father um and so he calls us to rule over his world to take care of it and part of in order to take care of something in order to take care of anything you have to know it you have to understand it right and so the study of the world science is part of our calling of part of our being made in the image of god and what god has what has god has called us to do right which leads right into this god's called us to this act um of care so the western world for the last couple hundred years or so has been following this pattern of something called the scientific method which is a series of steps and this is the kind of thing you'll find at the beginning of almost every science textbook right where we ask questions we make observations we propose explanations and then you design some sort of experiment you go out do it and then you uh you and you collect your data you predict your results you analyze it and you interpret it and then all that should lead us to some answers right well scientism and the enlightenment has sort of bled into this belief that somehow by following this process we can achieve truth uh objective objective truth always and this is this is the pattern this is the cookbook this is the recipe this is the step-by-step basis where if you follow these steps right you will get it you will get it right so part of what i want to do in this little lecture is kind of dive into that aspect of it this idea of right are we can we really achieve objective truth so there's a variety of things out there that basically say we've got problems in science so this is a paper that was published in a really well-known science magazine uh it's a little 15 years old but there's a there's additional things that i could have used but this one is just the most straightforward but you can see the section that i've highlighted down here at the bottom right um for most study designs and settings it's more likely for a research claim to be false than true that's so encouraging moreover for many current scientific fields claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measurements of the prevailing bias in this essay i discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research right not not such a great picture um and a lot of scientists think that there are significant issues in terms of reproducibility and whether or not published research is actually giving us real truth right uh and so there's a lot of examples i could give but in the interest of time i'm i'm not going to do that i will spare you what i'm more interested in is the question of why why given the series of steps that i mentioned in the scientific method why does this kind of thing happen in a process that's supposed to be objective right everybody follows the same steps everybody should be able to arrive at the same answers why is this not happening it turns out there's a lot of reasons uh the the plos paper talks about prevailing bias right so existing beliefs can affect uh every step of the scientific method if you believe something about the world that will affect the way you look at it will affect the kinds of questions that you ask that comes in here under kind of the religious belief category money not everybody is motivated purely for good practically speaking many jobs people's livelihood depend on their ability to generate research and to publish and if you are if a company is paying you to do research you are motivated to kind of find the results that they're looking for um now whether or not you would admit to that or people admit to that is beyond the point right but money is a significant motivator these days several 300 400 years ago p most of the people who did science did it as a side hobby kind of it wasn't their main thing and so they weren't as dependent on it social positions so obviously livelihood religious belief social position um your standing amongst your peers in sciences can be very important in uh politics we see see this more and more and more the fda the federal drug administration so they're the ones who are responsible for if there's a drug that's going to come to market they have to approve it before it does right and so they do some testing on it and that kind of thing in a a private survey of fda employees 20 percent of them were pressured to exclude or alter their findings that's awful uh how many of them actually did we don't we don't know there was a government bill that i was not actually passed i believe called the first act which was going to limit the amount of funding directed toward research in the social sciences and empower the federal government to make political decisions about what constitutes the most worthwhile research right so that's that's um when the government decides to take more and more control you know that's always a good thing right no uh when the government decides what's worthwhile uh you're you're headed down you're headed down not so great track and i'll i'll come back to that in a second here right but um when you end up with not much diversity of thought uh you can end up with problems where you just kind of get this you the the frame the phrase echo chamber has become more more prevalent where basically um you you say something and then everybody just kind of bounces it right back at you and affirms you with that there's not there's not really any challenging there's not really any diversity of thought and so this is becoming a pretty big problem not only in research institutions but also in higher education as a whole 40 percent of top tier liberal arts institutions have no republicans on faculty which you know it's pretty easy in that case to only hear one side of things and it's hard to be balanced um another more practical example closer to home right um we had to do with the early days of covid and the reporting of case numbers for given areas so in allegheny county you know houghton shutdown sent everybody home and so most people weren't really paying attention to it but in the early days of test day early days of covid it was really hard to test um testing was not widely available it wasn't very fast there were limited amounts of doing things and so a lot of the testing they wanted to reserve for people who are in really poor shape so here in allegheny county where there just wasn't much testing they basically told people like just stay home if you're sick just stay home unless uh unless you're really really sick and you have to go to a hospital and then once you go to a hospital they would test you so what that means is that there are probably a lot more people with covid in the early days here in allegheny county but they just never got tested for it because there wasn't testing available so this was not like a sinister plot there was not malicious you know guys or plan to mess up the data it was just we just didn't have the tests available to do widespread testing so it made our case numbers look really really low even though in fact that might not have been the case so this is an example of how the numbers may not actually tell the whole story the data may not tell you everything that's going on you just we just didn't have access to all the information we need in this case i don't think that was anybody's fault i don't think so anybody was trying to do anything as i said devious but it's just the reality of the situation so i mentioned governmental control right so a lot of time when governments get involved or people who are trying to make decisions right you can end up with this language well we're going to do this we're going to fund this we're going to say this for the greater good you don't necessarily hear that language but that's ultimately what's kind of happening and a lot of times we'll go along with this as long as it aligns with our particular morals but what happens when the government tells us well we're making this decision for the greater good and this is in conflict with what we believe right when the government says well hey we know better than the individual and this is a significant point of tension that you could talk about in your government classes right but you know 50 60 years ago for sterilization was a thing where the government basically said for the benefit of future generations we are going to sterilize certain people against their will because we think this will benefit society and now we look at that and go that that's horrible that's horrific we shouldn't do that right um but that's that's one of the things the us government did um in china you have the one child policy that was in existence for a long time where parents there's there's so many people there's so much overpopulation that they they restricted the number of kids that people could have and it's led to huge issues in china now they've backed off of this policy um but there are it's done significant damage basically as a result of the government saying well we know what's best kind of thing we are moving closer to the point where certain kinds of christian belief may be designated as hate speech so there's actually a trial in norway poland i don't remember and one of the scandinavian countries about someone who essentially uh quoted quoted scripture and is on is on trial for for kind of hate speech and fortunately the uh at least the initial findings were in favor of the christian in this case but the very fact that that kind of thing could go to trial is disconcerting to say the least so we can easily run into problems here along those kinds of things so i mentioned money as as a motivating factor when we read the news we tend to think i and then we shouldn't be pollyanna's about this i guess but i also don't want to be um totally negative either but so we want to believe that people when they present the news are trying to inform us but not necessarily the case when new york times wall street journal cnn fox all these places they're they're companies they're they're trying to make money and so um they were facebook instagram all this stuff right their goal is not necessarily your welfare their goal is to make money now if they can make money off of your welfare then they probably do that right um and so a lot of times they will publish things or try to get you to click on things or read things because when you click on an article or when you read something that generates site traffic and then they can charge more for advertisers because they know basically all right if i have thousands of people who are going to see this page then you can charge more for advertising space on that page than if you only had 10 people who came to that page right and so getting people to click is really really important because then you can charge you can charge ad companies more um so you run into these problems where shoddy shoddy journalism occasionally so the rolling stones uh they lost a defamation lawsuit this was a fairly famous spec back in the day they published in their journal an article about a rape that had happened on a college campus and the individuals who were named in the in this article you know gotten all kinds of trouble they were smeared blah blah blah turns out that in this case the the person who had come two rolling stones had made this thing up and rolling stones really had not checked the story very well and so because of that they lost a lot of money basically because the store is completely false completely fraudulent totally made up and yet they published it so and this is not just really so not just this kind of thing this is now quite a bit like click bait again the idea right is we want you to click this because when you click this then it draws ad revenue right and so man tries to hug wildlife you won't believe what happens next why don't you just tell me why can't you just put it in the headline nothing happened right well then you won't click on it if if the headline reveals what the story is about then you're less likely to click on it can you solve this ancient riddle 90 people gave the wrong answer they just want you to click fear mongering is your boyfriend cheating on you uh he is if he does these five things why don't you just list list them these are my favorite right list with the payoff nine things no one knew about princess leia number seven will blow your mind you see this kind of link you'll notice that it's never number one it's never the first thing right they want you to click through all the way through to that number seven spot um so unfortunately this thing kind of happens obviously in the news and online and part of what i'm going to try and help try and help with you with this semester is to be more discerning about these kinds of things but this happens in science too and it's really hard to see where headlines grab attractions this is a really interesting comic so here this guy is basically trying to take take normal conversational things but then summarize it as if it were a headline right maybe rob shouldn't host the party his cats and some of us are allergic very normal sentence right but if you were to try and make that into a headline it becomes wow major snub for widely touted top spot it's lavish gala bit mixed right you can see how that's much more dramatic but it's making something big out of something that's really not that big a deal and it goes on so this is a problem in in science and this this becomes a problem because this is great i love this this is so accurate right so it starts with some really simple research uh a is correlated with b a very low correlation given c with a bunch of other conditions right um so the university is very excited about this because they want people to come to the university and so they promote this and so then a newswire organization picks this up and if it's big enough they'll say well we want people to know this news to click on it and read the article uh and then the internet picks it up and it goes to news and by the end of it you've just it's just kind of blown out of proportion because each each thing is trying to get more and more clicks and kind of uh [Music] dramatize it more and more uh and it kind of get it kind of can go totally totally haywire so where does this leave us right i haven't i'm not trying to totally destroy your faith in in anything that you read ever or hear from me even all right so as christians though i think this leaves us in a really good spot right because we believe in god who made the world and holds it together we believe that he has created objective truth and that it does exist and that objective truth is founded and revealed in god i jesus says i am the way the truth and the life no one comes to me uh no one comes to the father except through me right and so this is revealed the truth is revealed to us in scripture perfectly uh inherently and infallibly however we are humans we are not god so we can know truth god has revealed truth to us but we cannot know exhaustively so we both have confidence in the sense that truth is attainable but we also should be humble about about it as well you partly has to do with the fact that our reasoning is twisted by the fall but can be redeemed in in christ so we can approach scientific disciplines we can approach anything with confidence and humility both so the same with science it can reveal truth but not all truth science has got limits science merely describes it can't act it can tell us kind of the way things are but not the way they ought to be so here's a simple example the law of gravitation describes falling phenomena and you can do all sorts of calculations but it doesn't describe why the law exists in the first place or why the law has certain parameters right you need god for that so here it is right there are laws that govern speed of falling objects including the unit of constants of gravitation and so we can predict and calculate speeds and fall times and all those other kinds of stuff and it helps helps us get rockets to the moon but why are these values why are these constants this way who set them basically or where did they come from and why aren't they changing right so you can see here i'm not gonna we won't do any hardcore math you can kind of ignore some of this but velocity has to do with time and the gravitational constant g there so why is g that constant why is it a constant in the first place and not changing constantly so this kind of uniformity this idea that the world holds together and there are constants in the world is absolutely necessary for science uh and it is god who basically as christians we believe it's god who sets those constants in the first place right and so this is a somewhat humorous thing right philosophy's dead scientific induction tells us all all i know yeah all right so prove why you can believe in the uniformity of nature right science is dependent on this uniformity so why does this uniformity exist right uh and without god you you really aren't left with much in the way of answers so all right so that's that's quite a bit there i'm going to pause here on this kind of this philosophical side on on the sciences and then we'll approach some of the more practical thing um in the next bit here