Is the Left Hostile to Religion?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Is the Left Hostile to Religion?

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

since it hasn't been posted in full, here's the marx quote:

quote:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

exactly what to make of this in terms of hostility depends on who you ask. marx and engels have some sympathy for religion, lenin hates it, marxists like bloch think communism and christianity are striving toward the same thing and are completely compatible.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 14:24

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 01:52

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

CommieGIR posted:

Are we assuming that everyone is following strict marxism? I think most, at least US, leftists do not.

no, but the "opiate of the people" bit came up so I thought I'd post the whole thing for context.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 14:52

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

I don't really have anything substantial to contribute to the discussion cause y'all talking past each other and misusing words, but I want to just point out that anybody who cites the solar eclipse 1919 and the Eddington expedition as an example for the scientific (hypothetico-deductive) method has very obviously never really looked into how that worked out in practice. That evidence was tenuous as poo poo and they threw out half the plates. The confirmation of general relativity is actually a really good example for the social nature of consensus building in science as opposed to the impact of cold, hard facts.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 14:08

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

CommieGIR posted:

Well, the Expedition was more to CONFIRM for the scientific world that the hypothesis held up. They didn't need a lot of plates to confirm, just 2-3 for the lensing to be visible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimentum_crucis

Yeah, and one of the plates they decided on using showed way too much deviation, one showed way too little and one was blurry. And several others who showed values in line with non-relativistic space time were ignored because they didn't fit the expectations. Seriously, the Eddington excursion was a prime example of scientists knowing what conclusion to look for and then creatively interpreting the available data until they supported that conclusion. They happened to be right of course and that's great, but people always hold the eclipse up as a paragon of the scientific method.

(For the record, my point is not that this wasn't good science because it contained human impulses and sociological factors. My point is that good science contains all those things and is generally a lot messier than people like to believe.)

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 14:25

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

CommieGIR posted:

I'm gonna have to disagree, because the plates were viewed by others as well who came to the same conclusions as Eddington.

That is certainly not true at the time, where considerable skepticism was the general answer by the commissions who Dyson presented the results to.

quote:

And the plates were comparisons of night shots of the stars versus the stars during the eclipse, it was well viewable that the position of the observed stars was dramatically different than during the ecplise, confirming the bending.

No, they confirmed a bending, the problem was that Newtonian mechanics of course predicted a bending. The question was whether Einstein's or Newton's values were right.

quote:

Measurements and photographs were also taken from Brazil that also confirmed the findings during the same eclipse. There was no 'fluke' in being right, the observations played out the claims.

That's the Sobral expedition, yes. They used the Sobral 4inch values because those were the ones that most closely gave the right sort of values, even if the Sobral values were considerably larger than what Einstein had predicted.

quote:

There was no creative interpretation of the results. That's a claim you need to prove. Even Dyson, who was a skeptic of Einstein's theory, said the resulting plates showed the bend.

I am talking about Dyson's interpretations here. He was the principal decision maker.

Cingulate posted:

I've read Dyson, Eddington & Davidson 1920 (even re-ran the stats myself), I've read The Golem, I've not read Earman & Glymour 1980, I've read a bunch of other papers on the topic, and I think Eddington's and Popper's respective interpretations are entirely defensible.

I've read those, including the 1980 paper which I assume is Relativity and Eclipses? Pretty sure that's online somewhere. First of all, the numbers you ran were the numbers extracted from the plates that Dyson accepted into evidence, not the far larger number of plates that were judged to show wrong numbers due to consistent errors like the sun heating the plates or movement of the telescope mounts. So rerunning the numbers begs the question.

To reiterate what actually happened: Two groups went to Principe and Sobral to take pictures with different experimental setups. They produced, in total, 43 plates. Only 5 of the 16 Principe plates were usable, while one Sobral plate was unusable. From the usable plates, divergence values were calculated. The same group of people looked at 7 plates taken in Sobral by the telescope and came to a value that was significantly higher than Einstein's predicted value, and then looked at 18 astrographic plates and calculated almost exactly the Newtonian prediction. All you can unequivocally conclude here is that gravity bends light, but we knew that. Which brings me to my actual point:

I also think their interpretations are defensible, especially in the light of later, better experiments that confirm GRT. They were absolutely right. But that doesn't mean that they didn't interpret, and it doesn't mean that you could not equally have looked at the astrographic plates, which had a higher resolution but were blurrier, and discard the telescopic images. Or you could have looked at the Principe images, which gave a third, equally unexpected value. Dyson &co made a conscious decision about which data to publish and which data to hold back, and that's how we arrived at the confirmation of GRT by experiment. That's how science works. This happens all the time. What I'm saying is not that this somehow disqualifies the Eddington expeditions, but that science tends to me messy. The fact that we're making progress anyway is great and should give us the confidence to admit that experiments very seldomly force us to accept or reject a theory, that we as human beings and scientists are always involved in that process, and that's okay!

quote:

That is true I guess, although in the best Kuhnian sense - science is an effectively progressive enterprises even if it is a social, historical phenomenon.

Agreed.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 15:41

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 01:52

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

CommieGIR posted:

Go read that paper. They said, regardless of any possible bias Eddington might have had, Dyson and Eddington reached the same conclusions that the later re-review of the results of the 1919 Eclipse came to. Its not a fluke, and its generally accepted that enough evidence was gathered to support Einstein's claims. Sorry.

Einstein's theories were still very much up in the air in the general science fields at the time, the proof Eddington and Dyson provided helped solidify backing of Einsteins claims. You don't get to argue that it was just Eddingtons bias playing out when re-review of the evidence says "No, they read it correctly and came to the correct conclusions". That's not chance.

That paper says "The 1919 measurements were not sufficient, by themselves, to overthrow Newton", which is the point I've been making. I've also explicitly said that they ended up being right and later reevaluations show that. But Eddison & Dyson didn't know about those later reevaluations. The data they had at hand was in need of interpretation, they did their best and discarded the right set of plates. That's great! It also demonstrates that this sort of interpretation and these kinds of judgment calls are part and parcel of science.

edit:

Cingulate posted:

Let me try to write something we can all agree on.

1. Eddington took measurements of a phenomenon which is, as far as we can say today, well explained by General Relativity, and better explained by it than by Newtonian mechanics.
2. At some stages in the analysis of the data, Eddington had to make a decision. The answer was not obviously, perfectly clear - not with mathematical certainty. He had to judge.
3. Eddington was a seemingly honest researcher, and did not intentionally falsify anything, and in the abovementioned judgement, he made a defensible call. As with any judgement, it was made by a human with his own convictions and motivations, which by necessity influence what we do. But this case does not look like fraud or lying.
4. It is possible other decisions would have been justifiable, and that had things been slightly different, he might have made another choice; these decisions could have led to more complicated, indecisive, perhaps even contradictory results.
5. That in this situation they did not is a matter of history - of specific instances of human action that may as well have happened otherwise, not of a universal law that scientists never err or whatever.

I agree with all of this.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 15:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Is the Left Hostile to Religion?