> If more people would admit their leaps I think the theistic schism would be far more shallow.<p>There’s an important gap here between science as practiced and science communication.<p>Working scientists will absolutely admit their ignorance, shaky foundations, etc. This is especially important in astronomy and cosmology, as the field is relatively young and experiments are impossible, outside of those that nature has already done for us. (Both evolutionary biology and linguistics have similar problems but cosmology has it especially hard.)<p>This, however, is a losing strategy for communication. Most people equate confidence with credibility (and by high school we’ve beat children down enough that they do so as well), so if you do not sound confident people will not listen to you. (I could pontificate on how this is one of the greatest societal ills of our time, science or no science, but I won’t.) Even outside social situations, most people frankly cannot deal with holding a position and simultaneously not being confident in it, and absolutely cannot deal with holding an entire network of mutually-supporting positions and different degrees of confidence in each, while also having multiple alternatives with different degrees of plausibility for some of them. (This is somewhat more advanced than the programmer’s skill of relying on a deep stack of supporting services and debugging tools while keeping in mind that any given subset of them could be lying, which I’m sure you’re aware is also fairly difficult to communicate the experience of.)<p>Then there’s the active (if not always successful) effort towards never ever reasoning backwards from things you would prefer to be true or that would make the world nicer for you. (The “History Plots” section[1] of the biennial <i>Review of Particle Physics</i> is there solely as an admonishment never to go with the herd. And that’s for things that have no implications for anybody’s worldview, morality, or livelihood!) It is very uncomfortable to genuinely not know where you are going and also not be able to aim anywhere in particular. (It might among other things imply that the entirety of your life’s work only serves to seal off a dead end and you might not even live long enough to learn that. And either way you’re consigning yourself to a very lonely sort of life if you veer away from the mainstream.)<p>On the flip side from the vagueness, there’s the experience of doing everything you can to break something and failing, of your forefathers doing the same at their most imaginative and still failing. (The aforementioned <i>RPP</i> has pages and pages of tests for frickin’ <i>energy conservation</i>, without which most of physics and engineering just falls apart. And cosmologists can only dream of doing the same on the scales that are relevant to them, and indeed they do keep things like “modified Newtonian dynamics” around. Note that time invariance [as much as there is such a thing in general relativity] <i>is</i> energy conservation [ditto].) It is a sort of confidence that few others have justifiably had in their lives. (Few other things will infuriate a physicist more than offhand quoting a number with six significant digits. They know—in some cases from direct experience—that this sort of precision takes <i>generations</i>. And a well-established theory needs multiple times the effort.)<p>So when, say, a cosmologist says that cosmic inflation is a bit of a speculative crapshoot but probably true, the Big Bang is likely true, general relativity they’re fairly sure is true but it sure would be nice to find some cracks, the Standard Model is true despite everybody doing their level best to break it because the foundational issues are quite serious, the mass of a free electron is nearly certain, and the inability to surpass the speed of light is pretty much absolute—this is a dynamic range of confidence that none of us can adequately feel. Now take one of those statements in isolation and try to make your listener understand what the apparent equivocation in it really means.<p>(I do not believe the typical theist in a debate is on more than an advanced amateur level in all of this.)<p>Then you get into the cursed philosophical issues, like the (weak) anthropic principle (a class of “why” questions don’t and can’t actually have much of a meaningful answer) or nonexceptionalism in cosmology (it is possible that everything we can or will ever be able to see around us is in fact wildly atypical as a great cosmic joke, but if so we couldn’t ever know enough to join in and any science we do would be completely meaningless, so we might as well proceed on the assumption that it is not, and happily enough it’s been working out thus far.)<p>[1] <a href="https://pdg.lbl.gov/2025/reviews/rpp2025-rev-history-plots.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://pdg.lbl.gov/2025/reviews/rpp2025-rev-history-plots.p...</a>
Thank you for the nice read. I empathize with many of your points, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I refute on the claim around "our greatest societal ills". I think there is a difference between confident communication and being listened to. I have many a times said confidently "I don't know", as I have made decisions on low confident bets but leant into them with all my heart. Sometimes it paid of and sometimes it did not. It has served me well in my career and in life. As a scientist at heart I still agree that too often confidence is given too much weight and the quiet voice in the room should also be heard. However, we should teach everybody to communicate confidently even if they sometimes communicate wrongly. Of course we should not confuse confidence with credibility and accept that we know little for sure and are all just trying our best with the very limited understanding we have of our universe.