Download or read book The Way of Science written by Dennis R. Trumble and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How science can convey a profound sense of wonder, connectedness, and optimism about the human condition. This book makes a compelling case that now more than ever the public at large needs to appreciate the critical-thinking tools that science has to offer and be educated in basic science literacy. The author emphasizes that the methods and facts of science are accessible to everyone, and that, contrary to popular belief, understanding science does not require extraordinary intelligence. He also notes that scientific rationality and critical thinking are not only good for our physical well-being but also are fully in sync with our highest moral codes. He illustrates the many ways in which the scientific worldview offers a profound sense of wonder, connectedness, and optimism about the human condition, an inspiring perspective that satisfies age-old spiritual aspirations. At a time of daunting environmental challenges and rampant misinformation, this book provides a welcome corrective and reason to hope for the future.
Download or read book Does Science Present the Truth written by Jesuis Laplume and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of scientists who do not know what they are talking about are still espousing the supposed fact that Science proves that there is no God and no thought or emotion outside of the brain. This is nonsense and a blatant misuse of Traditional Science. This book "Does Science Present The Truth?" discusses the basis of Traditional Science and the assumptions upon which it is based. It explains the fields in which that sort of Science can still provide useful results and the many areas at the leading edges of many fields of Science where the assumptions are violated and recent Science has had to adapt, on an incident-by-incident basis, the new assumptions needed to explain the results observed by many researchers who are working in a large number of fields. Unfortunately the older scientists who head up scientific societies have refused to admit that revision of the founding assumptions is badly needed and the system is in chaos - actually chaos is one of the concepts that had to be developed outside of Traditional Science. In reality they are asking that these founding assumptions should be considered Dogma and cannot even be discussed, but rather must be taken On Faith. What sort of Science is that when Dogma and dogmatic belief are involved? There was a historical justification for those who started Traditional Science to ignore thought, emotion, prayer and other forms of pure information as no one knew how to measure them. Many believed that measurements confined to the mass and energy arena would be possible without taking those sorts of things into account. Interestingly-enough, we still do not know how to measure those pure information processes even now, although we can infer some by how they affect the brain, the body and some of our experiments in mass and energy flows. This book goes into some detail in identifying both the weaknesses and some of the many strengths in Traditional Science. It also tries to show why making conclusions about things that you do not include, using a useful Science in other areas, is just plain foolish. If I were to ask the question "How much credence would you give to a study that assumed that it was not necessary to include certain things and then used that study to show that they did not exist?" You would be unlikely to give it any. This is the quandary that we live with in Science and spirituality. The cross-over should never have come up because the tools in our Traditional Science do not include any reasonable aspect of the components of spirituality. It is long past time for those who head the elite of Traditional Science to start a discussion of just where existing Science can be used with confidence and where it should not be used at all. Perhaps it is the time to even revisit all of the founding assumptions and revise them as necessary, given several hundred years of evidence building up to support the need for that revision process. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has written a number of books in this field, with his latest a call for such a review. That book, called "Science Set Free" in the US and "The Science Delusion" in the UK, is very much worth reading. "Does Science Present The Truth?" also includes a list of some of the myriad of books used in developing this author's book. Readers are also invited to visit the Author's website at http: //www.jesuislaplume.com for more references and a better idea of just who this author is and what they are trying to say.
Download or read book Reproducibility and Replicability in Science written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-10-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the pathways by which the scientific community confirms the validity of a new scientific discovery is by repeating the research that produced it. When a scientific effort fails to independently confirm the computations or results of a previous study, some fear that it may be a symptom of a lack of rigor in science, while others argue that such an observed inconsistency can be an important precursor to new discovery. Concerns about reproducibility and replicability have been expressed in both scientific and popular media. As these concerns came to light, Congress requested that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine conduct a study to assess the extent of issues related to reproducibility and replicability and to offer recommendations for improving rigor and transparency in scientific research. Reproducibility and Replicability in Science defines reproducibility and replicability and examines the factors that may lead to non-reproducibility and non-replicability in research. Unlike the typical expectation of reproducibility between two computations, expectations about replicability are more nuanced, and in some cases a lack of replicability can aid the process of scientific discovery. This report provides recommendations to researchers, academic institutions, journals, and funders on steps they can take to improve reproducibility and replicability in science.
Download or read book Science and Partial Truth written by Newton C. A. da Costa and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2003 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the consequences of adopting a 'pragmatic' notion of truth in the philosophy of science. This framework describes issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate, as well as the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development.
Download or read book Why Trust Science written by Naomi Oreskes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the social character of scientific knowledge makes it trustworthy Are doctors right when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when so many of our political leaders don't? Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength—and the greatest reason we can trust it. Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, this timely and provocative book features a new preface by Oreskes and critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo.
Download or read book The Knowledge Machine How Irrationality Created Modern Science written by Michael Strevens and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.
Download or read book Four Views on Creation Evolution and Intelligent Design written by Zondervan, and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution--or the broader topic of origins--has enormous relevance to how we understand the Christian faith and how we interpret Scripture. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design presents the current "state of the conversation" about origins among evangelicals representing four key positions: Young Earth Creationism - Ken Ham (Answers in Genesis) Old Earth (Progressive) Creationism - Hugh Ross (Reasons to Believe) Evolutionary Creation - Deborah B. Haarsma (BioLogos) Intelligent Design - Stephen C. Meyer (The Discovery Institute) The contributors offer their best defense of their position addressing questions such as: What is your position on origins - understood broadly to include the physical universe, life, and human beings in particular? What do you take to be the most persuasive arguments in defense of your position? How do you demarcate and correlate evidence about origins from current science and from divine revelation? What hinges on answering these questions correctly? This book allows each contributor to not only present the case for his or her view, but also to critique and respond to the critiques of the other contributors, allowing you to compare their beliefs in an open forum setting to see where they overlap and where they differ.
Download or read book Physics Pearson New International Edition written by Art Hobson and published by Pearson. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for the non-science major, this text emphasizes modern physics and the scientific process-and engages students by drawing connections between physics and everyday experience. Hobson takes a conceptual approach, with an appropriate focus on quantitative skills. The Fifth Edition increases coverage of key environmental topics such as global warming and energy, and adds new topics such as momentum. Hobson's text remains the least expensive textbook available for students taking nonmajors physics.
Download or read book Science Truth And Meaning From Wonder To Understanding written by Benjamin L J Webb and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science, Truth, and Meaning presents a scientific and philosophical examination of our place in the world. It also celebrates how diverse, scientific knowledge is interconnected and reducible to common foundations.The book focuses on aspects of scientific truth that relate to our understanding of reality, and confronts whether truth is absolute or relative to what we are. Hence, it assesses the meaning of the scientific deductions we have made and how they have profoundly influenced our conception of life and existence.The subtitle is 'From Wonder to Understanding', which is a paraphrased quote from Einstein, who said that the search for scientific truth is ' ... a continual flight from wonder to understanding'.In addressing the goal of advancing our understanding of our place in the world, this book also reveals the development and details of diverse sciences, their connections and achievements, and that while perhaps the same fundamental questions exist, they are seen in the light of an ever-refined scientific perspective on reality.Why the book is needed: many popular science books have been written, aimed at different levels of subject expertise, and nearly all treat their specific subject in isolation. Few attempt to link different sciences to their common foundations, and those that do are written by physicists. Since human knowledge is derived by, and relates to, the biological organism that human beings are, then such a book written from a biological perspective represents a novel perspective on the integration of science, and addresses new questions. This is such a book.Impressive aspects: the depth, breadth, consistency, and clarity of the work.
Download or read book Tracking Truth written by Sherrilyn Roush and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracking Truth presents a unified treatment of knowledge, evidence, and epistemological realism and anti-realism about scientific theories. A wide range of knowledge-related phenomena, especially but not only in science, strongly favour the idea of tracking as the key to what makes something knowledge. A subject who tracks the truth - an idea first formulated by Robert Nozick - has the ability to follow the truth through time and changing circumstances. Epistemologistsrightly concluded that Nozick's theory was not viable, but a simple revision of that view is not only viable but superior to other current views. In this new tracking account of knowledge, in contrast to the old view, knowledge has the property of closure under known implication, and troublesome counterfactualsare replaced with well-defined conditional probability statements. Of particular interest are the new view's treatment of skepticism, reflective knowledge, lottery propositions, knowledge of logical truth, and the question why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense.Ideally, evidence indicates a hypothesis and discriminates it from other possible hypotheses. This is the idea behind a tracking view of evidence, and Sherrilyn Roush provides a defence of a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. The accounts of knowledge and evidence she offers provide a deep and seamless explanation of why having better evidence makes one more likely to have knowledge. Roush approaches the question of epistemological realism about scientific theories through thequestion what is required for evidence, and rejects both traditional realist and traditional anti-realist positions in favour of a new position which evaluates realist claims in a piecemeal fashion according to a general standard of evidence. The results show that while anti-realists were immodest indeclaring a priori what science could not do, realists were excessively sanguine about how far our actual evidence has so far taken us.
Download or read book The Misinformation Age written by Cailin O'Connor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Empowering and thoroughly researched, this book offers useful contemporary analysis and possible solutions to one of the greatest threats to democracy.” —Kirkus Reviews Editors’ choice, The New York Times Book Review Recommended reading, Scientific American Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. “[The authors] deftly apply sociological models to examine how misinformation spreads among people and how scientific results get misrepresented in the public sphere.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American “A notable new volume . . . The Misinformation Age explains systematically how facts are determined and changed—whether it is concerning the effects of vaccination on children or the Russian attack on the integrity of the electoral process.” —Roger I. Abrams, New York Journal of Books
Download or read book Faith Versus Fact written by Jerry A. Coyne and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A superbly argued book.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion The New York Times bestselling author of Why Evolution is True explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail In this provocative book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Coyne is responding to a national climate in which more than half of Americans don’t believe in evolution, members of Congress deny global warming, and long-conquered childhood diseases are reappearing because of religious objections to inoculation, and he warns that religious prejudices in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable “truth” by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science. Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm—to individuals and to our planet—in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in. Praise for Faith Versus Fact: “A profound and lovely book . . . showing that the honest doubts of science are better . . . than the false certainties of religion.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith
Download or read book Questions of Truth written by John Polkinghorne and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2009-01-19 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the universe begin? Can God's existence be proven? Do humans matter more than animals? For many years people have sent the scientist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne these and other questions about science and belief. In question-and-answer format, Polkinghorne and his collaborator Nicholas Beale offer their highly informed opinions about some of the most frequently asked of these questions. Readers can follow their own paths through the book, selecting questions that interest them and looking at the additional material if they choose. This unique book will help Christians clarify their beliefs regarding difficult issues and better face challenges--from within and from others--to their faith.
Download or read book The Limitations of Scientific Truth written by Nigel Brush and published by . This book was released on 2005-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brush examines the inherent limitations of scientific truth and reveals why biblical truth offers the only authority that can be completely trusted on issues of eternal consequence.
Download or read book Evolution Vs Creationism written by Eugenie C. Scott and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-08-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the scientific evidence for evolution and reasons why it should be taught in schools, provides various religious points of view, and offers insight to the evolution-creationism controversy.
Download or read book The Language of God written by Francis Collins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?
Download or read book Science and Religion in Quest of Truth written by John Polkinghorne and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the vantage point of eighty years, a highly regarded scientist and theologian surveys the full spectrum of critical issues between science and theologyJohn Polkinghorne, an international figure known both for his contributions to the field of theoretical elementary particle physics and for his work as a theologian, has over the years filled a bookshelf with writings devoted to specific topics in science and religion. In this new book, he undertakes for the first time a survey of all the major issues at the intersection of science and religion, concentrating on what he considers the essential insights for each. Clearly and without assuming prior knowledge, he addresses causality, cosmology, evolution, consciousness, natural theology, divine providence, revelation, and scripture. Each chapter also provides references to his other books in which more detailed treatments of specific issues can be found.For those who are new to what Polkinghorne calls "one of the most significant interdisciplinary interactions of our time," this volume serves as an excellent introduction. For readers already familiar with John Polkinghorne's books, this latest is a welcome reminder of the breadth of his thought and the subtlety of his approach in the quest for truthful understanding.
