sawfoot _:
Jen Pearly:
As a long-time science editor, I took certain courses in detecting mathematical and other errors in epidemiological research. One of the teachers of one of these courses pointed to an estimate that 80% of peer-reviewed published medical literature is based on bad study design, statistically speaking, and that as consumers of this literature we ought to be extremely skeptical of all of it.
Here is an article explaining common sources of error and their prevalance.
Jen, what are you responding to here? Epidemiological research has flaws....so....fairies are real?
Jen Pearly:
Something, some kind of super subtle energetics must survive death(s) if what we are doing and experiencing as a result of so doing makes any sense at all.
So either everything we know about physics, chemistry and biology is completely wrong and misguided, or some stuff that some dudes in a bronze-age civilisation made up doesn't quite make sense....gee, it is a tricky one to choose between....
Hi, Sawfoot,
I don't know how much sense it makes, ultimately, for me to make a statement of belief or disbelief regarding "fairies." I will go ahead and bite and say that, to date, I haven't believed and don't believe in the existence of fairies; however, this belief/disbelief has nothing to do with the kinds of questions the scientific method can ask and (provisionally) answer. It has to do with my not having experienced fairies directly myself, immediately. And it has a lot to do with not even knowing of anyone seriously claiming the existence of such things.
My point in bringing up the seriously flawed state of scientific literature, besides backing up what Daniel said way up the thread about the same topic, is that when you point to modern "science" as some kind of foundationally valid and reliable arbiter of what deserves to be culturally privileged in terms of "truth-value," you are pointing to peer-reviewed journals, which are seriously flawed on those very terms. If you aren't going to "believe" in anything, or even remain agnostically open-minded, until it is published by scientific concensus, then you are going to have a very narrow range of "reality" within which to think, imagine, experience, and play.
Very, very narrow. And you (or someone similarly minded) might take Lipitor or hormone replacement therapy and suffer harm because of insufficient sketicism toward there being any "truth" that is reliably foundational. Worse--you may see little "point" in reading Shelley's poetry or attending a Medicine Buddha Puja.
Moreover, science is defined by its method, the scientific method. Science
is this method, not any specific conclusion drawn by means of employing it, conclusions which are always provisional and frequently reversed anyway. This method, the scientific method, is based on axioms--axioms that operate elegantly and fairly consistently as a closed system of inquiry, but axioms nonethess, which is to say
beliefs.
I'm married to someone just like you with regard to this debate, so I'll continue to think fondly of you even if I've just wasted my digital breath.
With regard to your second quotation of my words, I was saying that what we are doing in trying to get enlightened doesn't make much sense if this life is "all there is." It doesn't make logical sense, unless one thinks that there are just immediate benefits of meditation and these outweight all the trouble it costs. But, more important, perhaps is that biology, physics, and chemistry have not proven anything at all, for science doesn't "prove" things; in fact, you can tell a scientific expert from a novice by his or her propensity to use the word "prove" at all: No pro will ever use that word in a scientic paper. The data "suggest," never "prove"--so at least professional science is honest, which is wholly admirable. But even if such a thing as energetic phenomena or afterlife could be disproven, science hasn't done so or even attempted to. Science doesn't undertake questions beyond accessible material sense data; it doesn't even ask the existence of such things as a research question. It can't and still be "science."
Jenny