Common Ground

[2PhiloVoid]

Christianity does not claim that the deed is annulled, but that Jews have momentarily disqualified themselves from the race. The times have changed, they have been humbled among the nations, and their heart is ready to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah if it can be shown to them that indeed what Christianity states about His resurrection is credible.

For now though, they see Christianity overrun by gentiles that refuse to repent when His Word falls against them, and for this reason God is not glorified in them and all their works are as deceptions. Thus they do not see that Christianity represents any of the qualities that belong to a holy God.

Actually, I was inferring the contentions in Palestine/Israel that are presently between Jews and Muslims.

 

[ose mcgroat]

Tolerance means the willingness to allow the existence of views or practices one disagrees with. It does not mean acceptance of those practices.

That pretty much summarises my message. Thank you very much!

Medicine is not Science, but an Art.

Cor.

Thanks for your interest in my parable, of which I am rather proud. This is way off-topic, but I can't let it pass.

Of course Medicine today is (as far as possible) Science. It does have a major handicap, in that humans may differ in undetectable ways, so that if you apply an identical intervention to two apparently identical individuals you may get completely different results. Unlike upgrading a car engine, where you may invest millions on the basis of results from just two prototypes, you need lots of people to give you any meaningful information.

A guy has symptoms, you take cultures and isolate a bug. You do this with enough people, with and without symptoms, to establish a likely connection between the symptoms and the bug, and you stop sticking leeches on people and start studying ways of sorting out the bug in your laboratory. This is science in action.

And I may be wrong, but I wonder if you are sharing a common misapprehension about science, that it proves facts. It doesn't. The second law of thermodynamics isn't proven, it's just an incredibly robust hypothesis to which no-one has ever found a counter-example. Science is a method with discrete stages:

1. Observation. Coo, look at that. Oo, it did it again (slightly differently)
2. Curiosity. What could the rules be for that activity?
3. Hypothesis. I wonder if it's the inverse square of the distance.
4. Experiment. As many different ways as possible to test your hypothesis. After a million successes, you're feeling good. But you haven't proved it. One counter-example is all it takes.

Medicine, perforce, a little bit different:

1. Observation. Cor these kids are having a rough time with this illness.
2. Curiosity. I wonder what's going wrong inside?
3. Hypothesis. Could overaction of the grutfamblian system be involved in some cases?
4. Experiment. Give grutfamble transferase inhibitors to some kids, not to others. See what happens.
Results probably less clearcut for reasons given above, but if they seem encouraging, there are calculations you can do that will tell you how likely it is that what you found would have happened anyway. If that likelihood is low, you'll probably want to tell others about it and maybe even practice will be modified, but you won't have proved anything. The medical textbooks are constantly being rewritten.

As far as my paediatricians are concerned, there are limits to which an analogy can be taken. Sure they could embark on a program of trials and meta analysis but the religious types wouldn't get past the first RCT - nobody would agree on outcomes.

 

[ose mcgroat]

I gladly learn about other beliefs, for from it comes a balanced world view, understanding and respect.

I'm very glad to hear that. Maybe I've been too hard on you, and misunderstood what you are trying to say.

The human race is currently displaying an unprecedented capacity for self-harm. There are homicidal lunatics out there who are attempting to recruit the whole of Islam to their cause. They won't succeed of course, but they are greatly helped by the widespread hostility expressed towards Muslims in the Western world, hostility which is in very large measure due to ignorance of Islam among the general population, not to mention some of our politicians. My video was an attempt to respond to this, and encourage people to learn about religions other than their own, as a start to understanding each other. Your responses seemed designed to undermine the very substance of that message.

Your suggestion that trying to find common ground could be destructive I found extraordinary. You seemed to be endorsing the aforesaid ignorance. Perhaps your choice of words was unfortunate - if I misunderstood I'm very glad.

The kind of narrow religious education you seem to be prescribing for children (unless I have misunderstood that too) can only perpetuate that ignorance. The words of St Paul that you quote are not terribly contentious nor do they require any great specialist expertise to impart to a child. But we really do have to make the effort to ensure that our children have some understanding also of the alternative religions they will encounter in others. I just don't want them to make the same mistakes as we are.

If you were to ask a Christian or a Muslim, what after all is this great difference between Christianity and Islam, you would probably be met with a medium-sized explosion. (Don't try this at home.) But when you consider the concept, agreed by all, of a life-form that has always been there, always will be there, never requiring repair or replacement, I'm not sure that people who aren't fairly heavily into science quite appreciate just how amazing that is. It is completely at variance with everything we know about the universe. And the idea, again agreed, that life continues after death, with justice meted out by a higher authority - stupendous. Multiply amazing by stupendous, and after that, to any reasonably impartial observer, whether this Guy is the Son of God, or just His spokesman, or perhaps even an imposter, becomes a detail. An important detail maybe, but dwarfed by the amazing stupendificence of the stuff already agreed. And goodness, how many people over the centuries have died over that detail?

All I'm saying is, find out and celebrate what you have in common. Understand and tolerate what you don't. Find out.

I think we have now each expressed our point of view pretty clearly, and I thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Also other contributors to my thread which I hope has stimulated a little. And for your welcome to this lovely forum.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

That pretty much summarises my message. Thank you very much!



Cor.

Thanks for your interest in my parable, of which I am rather proud. This is way off-topic, but I can't let it pass.

Of course Medicine today is (as far as possible) Science. It does have a major handicap, in that humans may differ in undetectable ways, so that if you apply an identical intervention to two apparently identical individuals you may get completely different results. Unlike upgrading a car engine, where you may invest millions on the basis of results from just two prototypes, you need lots of people to give you any meaningful information.

A guy has symptoms, you take cultures and isolate a bug. You do this with enough people, with and without symptoms, to establish a likely connection between the symptoms and the bug, and you stop sticking leeches on people and start studying ways of sorting out the bug in your laboratory. This is science in action.

And I may be wrong, but I wonder if you are sharing a common misapprehension about science, that it proves facts. It doesn't. The second law of thermodynamics isn't proven, it's just an incredibly robust hypothesis to which no-one has ever found a counter-example. Science is a method with discrete stages:

1. Observation. Coo, look at that. Oo, it did it again (slightly differently)
2. Curiosity. What could the rules be for that activity?
3. Hypothesis. I wonder if it's the inverse square of the distance.
4. Experiment. As many different ways as possible to test your hypothesis. After a million successes, you're feeling good. But you haven't proved it. One counter-example is all it takes.

Medicine, perforce, a little bit different:

1. Observation. Cor these kids are having a rough time with this illness.
2. Curiosity. I wonder what's going wrong inside?
3. Hypothesis. Could overaction of the grutfamblian system be involved in some cases?
4. Experiment. Give grutfamble transferase inhibitors to some kids, not to others. See what happens.
Results probably less clearcut for reasons given above, but if they seem encouraging, there are calculations you can do that will tell you how likely it is that what you found would have happened anyway. If that likelihood is low, you'll probably want to tell others about it and maybe even practice will be modified, but you won't have proved anything. The medical textbooks are constantly being rewritten.

As far as my paediatricians are concerned, there are limits to which an analogy can be taken. Sure they could embark on a program of trials and meta analysis but the religious types wouldn't get past the first RCT - nobody would agree on outcomes.

Sir, this is a pet peeve of mine.

Science functions by Hypothesis, testing and then repeat. It does not prove, only seeks to disprove, I agree. Now Hypothesis is derived by inductive reasoning from previous knowledge. This hypothesis needs to be falsifiable or else Science cannot be applied to it. It is then tested against its falsifiable points and if found wanting, discarded. If not, then the testing is repeated to make sure that all factors are accounted for and the failure to disprove it was valid, and then this then acts as a further point from which to derive new hypotheses.

Medicine functions by EBM. EBM first collects data, then deductively makes a conclusion based thereon. This conclusion can not be falsified, for it is inherently derived from the collected data. If it was not harmful, the data can be re-collected, but this does not disprove the first conclusion, but acts as a separate conclusion. These two conclusions are then placed in a statistical set and we then determine which is to be given more weight, is more likely to be correct - this is the Confidence Interval on the question.
EBM is designed to exclude human bias as much as possible, so if a question needs to be answered, it does not start with an hypothesis of what is occurring, but a real world attempt to collect empiric data. Studies are set up to answer concrete questions of practice, such as do colloids or crystalloids have better outcomes. If a study was framed to answer an hypothesis, an inductively derived theory of the framer, Ethics panels would discard it as it would have implicit bias.

So Modern Medicine has neither an hypothesis in the correct use of the term, nor are its results falsifiable, nor are all its studies repeatable, so it fails every single point of the Scientific Method. If you read Medical studies, you would see they never use the terminology 'Science' or 'Scientific', but use Evidence-Based, Best Practice or some such jargon.
There are related fields called Medical Sciences, like anatomy or neurobiology, that skirt this by animal studies or non-treatment based experiments, but this is not Medicine. Although related to that which is practiced by doctors the world over, they are not the same thing. This is what you attempted to refer to by what you consider 'Medicine', but such a study would never pass muster in humans and extrapolations of any such data would be employed for EBM data collection via deductive means, not via hypothesis-testing.

I am a doctor, and we are taught this in Medical School, where we are told "Medicine is an Art, not a Science". I am not a scientist. Very little, if anything, I do is Science; It is Medicine, it is Evidence-Based Practice.

 

[ose mcgroat]

See what you mean by nit-picking. I would hate to be a cause of peeve.

(But I bet people found my post easier to follow than yours!)

God bless and good luck with your studies.

 

[ose mcgroat]

I've been a bit slow. The more I think about these intensely argued posts of yours the more anxious I become. Why are you so desperate to disassociate yourself from Science? Medicine an Art!? It seems a strange thing for a medical school to teach. Is it some kind of evangelical institution? Did they teach you that immunisation is wrong?

Or are you just a compulsive caviler? I do hope so.

Please I beg you, don't be afraid of Science. I promise you, it really is one of the Good Guys.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I've been a bit slow. The more I think about these intensely argued posts of yours the more anxious I become. Why are you so desperate to disassociate yourself from Science? Medicine an Art!? It seems a strange thing for a medical school to teach. Is it some kind of evangelical institution? Did they teach you that immunisation is wrong?

Or are you just a compulsive caviler? I do hope so.

Please I beg you, don't be afraid of Science. I promise you, it really is one of the Good Guys.

I love science. I just happen to know what it is and when something isn't it.
No, I went to a perfectly normal medical school. But it isn't just mine that says so. This is the opinion of Medicine in general, any and all medical schools on earth. I had this debate a while back and found an article from the American Medical Association which debated the difference. I can look it up for you, if you want. It is just difficult to explain it to laymen that aren't familiar with EBM, so often it gets equated to 'science' and over time, even my colleagues sometimes forget this. Just pull up any random medical studies and you'll clearly see the structure I am talking of and the dearth of words like 'science' or 'scientific' therein.
The founders of EBM actually objected when supporters wanted to call it 'Scientific Medicine', for it clearly isn't.

There is another structure called Scientific-Based Medicine, which is more in-line with scientific structures, but this has largely been ignored due to the implicit biases and ethical concerns it entails. EBM reigns supreme.

 

[ose mcgroat]

Well that's a relief. There are some dangerous loonies out there, including some with MD.

I don't think many people will be impressed by your restrictive definition of science. I haven't opened a medical journal for 10 years, but most contain a section entitled "scientific papers"; and academic meetings generally have "scientific sessions" i.e. presentation of new research.

And if you ever meet the guys who found out how to keep very small premature babies alive without damaging their brains and lungs (including myself in a small way), or who after many years of trials practically conquered common childhood leukaemia, unless you're a big beefy guy I wouldn't advise telling them that what they did to achieve that wasn't scientific.

Don't bother with the JAMA article.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Well that's a relief. There are some dangerous loonies out there, including some with MD.

I don't think many people will be impressed by your restrictive definition of science. I haven't opened a medical journal for 10 years, but most contain a section entitled "scientific papers"; and academic meetings generally have "scientific sessions" i.e. presentation of new research.

And if you ever meet the guys who found out how to keep very small premature babies alive without damaging their brains and lungs (including myself in a small way), or who after many years of trials practically conquered common childhood leukaemia, unless you're a big beefy guy I wouldn't advise telling them that what they did to achieve that wasn't scientific.

Don't bother with the JAMA article.

The problem here is that 'Science' has become to have multiple meanings. On the one hand, it means the body of knowledge derived via Scientific Method; on the other, it basically means something akin to ideas people think are proven, or accept on authority, or think likely, or simply 'fact' amongst the more naïve. The latter is a fairly useless characterisation, for it adds nothing by calling something scientific, than it would have if they said it was proven or well supported, etc.; it also robs the concept of its coherence and renders it a facile generalisation.

EBM only came to dominate Medicine in the 90s, so much of our research was undertaken before Medicine's models and epistemology was well articulated. At such times, one could call it 'Science' if you so wish, although it would still be somewhat incongruous to do so, but this is no longer the case today. EBM has greatly improved Medicine and allowed a standard to be applied to treatments, a way to keep abreast of developments and to justify in a evidence-derived manner, what you are doing. I have great respect for the physicians of the past, but the Medicine practiced today, from GP to super-specialty level, is Evidence Based, not 'scientific' in its proper usage.

Quickly looking through my medical journals, I found no section entitled "scientific" anything; not in the Lancet, BMJ, SAMJ, or NEMJ. They have Research or Review sections, even sections devoted solely to discussing vagaries of Evidence-Based practice. Likewise, we never spoke of "scientific sessions", but Research presentations or Academic Sessions. Perhaps this is merely an artefact of what Medicine used to be like before EBM became the accepted paradigm? Some do complain that EBM has a somewhat totalitarian tendency to dominance in the Medical field today.