The Scientific Method 2

(If you know who I'm talking about, the timing's a strange, unfortunate coincidence...I wrote this weeks ago)

Two years ago, I was told that atheists (read: non-Christians/Jews) can’t be moral because (Christian/Jewish) God gave people morals, so if you don’t believe in (Christian/Jewish) God, you can’t possibly have them. I’m going to use this statement to illustrate how the scientific method is useful in non-science applications and well as support my claim that beliefs are proposed hypotheses (either because they can’t be supported for lack of information*, haven’t yet been supported, or have been found to be unsupported but are accepted anyway). This is not meant to be a value assessment of beliefs—everyone has them and they can serve important purposes, especially in areas that can’t be supported or refuted—just a clarification of what beliefs are, as well as a demonstration of the value of a scientific-minded perspective.

(*”information” as I'm using it here refers to physical world data that can be gathered or discovered by or shown to any and all relevant parties. I may need to come back to this idea about what is information later.)

The Scientific Method:

Initial Observations and Question/Problem

Hypothesis         ß----------------------------------

Experiment                                                      |

Results/Analysis                                             |

Conclusion: Accept or Reject Hypothesis ___|

Share Findings

Observations and Question:

A philosophical/ethical question with real world implications: The Bible says morality comes from God; what does this mean for Christians and non Christians?

(Whether or not is it true that the Bible says this doesn’t really matter. This is the understanding of the person who began the following thought, and I will accept it since this is not intended to be a Theology discussion. As I hope I’ll show, the outcome should be the same whether this information is correct or not because it’s not what is being evaluated.)

Using logic, a good idea, especially in philosophy where things often can’t be tested: If morals came from God, and a person doesn’t believe in God, then can they believe in the things or be influenced by things that come from God?

Hypothesis:

These are what the Scientific Method is evaluating, and all alternatives or testable possibilities should be clear:

H1: No, they cannot (implicit: Only Christians can have morals).  (This is as far as the initiator of this thought got, it is her belief)

H2: Yes they can (implicit: Anyone can have the same morals).

Experiment:

Do research: Read various philosophy/ethics texts from different points of view, go back to see what more the Bible has to say, survey/talk to people about their morality/views, observe how people behave/treat each other.

Results/Analysis:

Ethics has been an important concern in all cultures, not just Christian ones, for as far back as we have texts to read, and many have had similarities in their moral codes, even if they believe in a different god.

Bible talks about the “good Samaritan”

Most people care about being good to each other, but be careful with phasing of questions, and be sure you’ve interacted with a random sample of people (ie: you aren’t focusing on people clearly on the fringe or only belonging to one group)

Most people act reasonably nice to each other (be careful with using news sources for observation, they tend to focus only on the negative)

Conclusion:

Non-Christians show evidence of being ethical (note that this says nothing about why that is): H1 rejected, H2 accepted. We often call this a “belief” for lack of a better word, but an accepted hypothesis is fundamentally different from a proposed hypothesis because it is a conclusion reached using all relevant and available information. It is not set in stone, but it can come close if there is little to no known information refuting it. (“Available” meaning accessible within reason: it is not reasonable for an average person to travel all over the world interviewing people for something like this, but it is reasonable to talk to friends or go to the library)

Share Findings:

Now you may use this information when interacting with people, sharing opinions, philosophizing, or talking about your views.

Where the person who made the initial claim went wrong: She treated her reasoning (Observation) as the Experiment/Results and her Hypothesis (H1) as the Conclusion, and so when she shared her perspective, it came out insulting and ignorant because she was lacking information about non-Jews/Christians’ behaviors and ideas. Reasoning is an important part of the Results/Analysis step, but people need to incorporate all available information and can’t skip over steps or leave out obvious sources of information. Observing people’s behavior and interacting with them is easily done, a part of daily life, really (assuming you’re not antisocial) and requires no special skills, so there is no reason not to use that form of information gathering. Even if her thought process had followed a Scientific Method-style of thinking based solely on her initial understanding and nothing else, further observations should have conflicted with her only hypothesis (H1), prompting her to reject it and go back to the beginning and start over, incorporating any new information from the initial Experiment step. You can’t stop and ignore all new information once you reach a conclusion because you can’t know everything; the Scientific Method is unending. And, fortunately, none of this should threaten her religious views because it does not deny that God gave people morality – It doesn’t address where morality comes from at all. Her exact interpretation of what that means for *other* people may need to change, but she herself does not need to, except to be a little more open minded and nicer to others.

Of course, no one I hope actually goes step by step like this outside of science, where every part of the process must be clearly spelled out for others to follow and hopefully find acceptable as well. It would be entirely too tedious to do this for everyday interactions and understandings; we’re not attempting to contribute to the general knowledge of the world in our daily interpersonal reactions - we don’t need that level of rigor. Instead, my purpose here is to demonstrate the importance of recognizing where your understanding of something falls in relation to available information, when you need and can easily find more information, the limitations of your own knowledge, and present a systematic way to do that. A good understanding of the Scientific Method can allow a person to incorporate it into his/her way of accessing and interacting with the world.