What Ever The Cost by Camospam

Not sure if I’m supposed to do this
Here is a thread to discuss Camospam’s “Whatever The Cost”

Here is the link to the first story.
Part 1

Just a minor nitpick that has pretty much no bearing on the story itself, but is just a little bit jarring in RL context

The quote
I didn’t ask you if you believed in God, I wanted to know if you had faith. You believe in science which demands just as much faith as religion. Any experiment must adhere and conform to established standards to attain repeatable results. So, no doubt you employ the scientific method to discover the 5 W’s.”

Is actually a misrepresentation of science. It is an argument frequently used by apologetics to suggest that science and religion are the same thing when in fact they are pretty much polar opposites.
At its core the argument uses an equivocation of belief in the religious sense (as in faith) and colloquial sense (as in being convinced).
Faith is a unwavering convection without evidence (and is often defined by religious text as a belief in rejection of evidence). Science does not need this nor does it allow this. The purpose of the scientific method is to provide testable and consistent evidence and explanations (or at least predictions) for reality. This process excludes faith or belief in the religous sense of the word as that would require acceptance of a conclusion without testable and repeatable evidence to back it up. Scientist do not need to belief things on faith either as everything that is know can be backed up by years, decades or centuries of corroborating evidence. For modern theories this is stretches not only to the subject of study but to a vast web of adjacent fields of study where experimental results are all consistent with that the theories predict.

This of course only applies to physics, and the adjacent fields of study of chemistry and biology, in the most strictest application. Psychology is not in this sense a hard science, mainly because experiments cannot be set up to eliminate independent variables, and because experiments will very quickly descend into being unethical. As such psychology will have a lot less certainty in its experimentation as well as its theories. It is much closer in undestanding of reality to alchemy than it is to chemistry, if yo will.

Still, a clinical psychologist might reasonably be expected to realise the equivocation in the argument.
On the other hand it does not distract from the story as it is likely that the person in the story making this argument would have heard it before and would repeat what he beliefs to be a valid argument.

As I said, it is a minor nitpick that does not actually affect the story. It just is a small irritation that this falacious reasoning is so hard to be shown as incorrect so that it keeps getting repeated. It would not be so bad really if the persons who initially created this 'argument' were not malicious in their intent. They definitely knew better but in defense of their belief system set out to create an argument that on the surface sounded reasonable and was hard to refute by people without a rounded training in the scientific method and logically sound reasoning.


I will now step off this soap box that mysteriously appeared underneath me and ritually burn the thing.

Hello Marian
Thank you for the well expressed comment.
It showed that the subject sparked your mind, that is a wonderful compliment to a writer.
When researching this story, I found an interesting explanation of faith: “Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, though not beheld.”
Religion doesn’t hold a monopoly on faith, science has faith that an experiment will achieve the same repeatable results because we’re assured things will happen just as they did before.
A religious person has faith from knowing how their god acted before, and carry that forward to what is expected in the future.
In the story I tried to provide a workable solution to a conflict, Show how differing sides could reason and be respectful. Certainly a touchy subject, it wasn’t meant to offend, nor was there an intent to point toward one side or the other. I wanted the issue to be realistic and poignant, make people be engaged.
I am so glad you stood up.
Thank you, Camo

Camospam wrote:

Hello Marian
Thank you for the well expressed comment.
It showed that the subject sparked your mind, that is a wonderful compliment to a writer.
When researching this story, I found an interesting explanation of faith: “Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, though not beheld.”
Religion doesn’t hold a monopoly on faith, science has faith that an experiment will achieve the same repeatable results because we’re assured things will happen just as they did before.
A religious person has faith from knowing how their god acted before, and carry that forward to what is expected in the future.
In the story I tried to provide a workable solution to a conflict, Show how differing sides could reason and be respectful. Certainly a touchy subject, it wasn’t meant to offend, nor was there an intent to point toward one side or the other. I wanted the issue to be realistic and poignant, make people be engaged.
I am so glad you stood up.
Thank you, Camo

First of all, I was not in the slightest offended. I tried to stress that while technically incorrect, the argument being used in the story is very common and also perfectly in character to the main character, so it fit the story perfectly well.

I disagree though that science has faith that an experiment will achieve the same result. Repeatability is a key aspect of the scientific method. If an experiment is not repeatable it is not considered evidence for a hypothesis, and may even end up being evidence that discredits the hypothesis (or even the theory).
Things get messy because there is no good universally accepted definition for the word faith, and it becomes a bit of a jargon word depending on which field you are using it in. Religious faith is not really the same thing as colloquial faith, and both have quite a variety of meanings within their own group as well. At the most extreme end of 'religous faith' we have a conviction without, even in spite of, evidence. At the extreme colloguial end faith is treated as synonymous with being confident. You can have faith that the old testament is historically accurate, but you can also have faith that your plane will land in time. The word is the same but the meaning really is not.
There is a lot of room for arguments and discussion on that scale, and in all fairness most people treat faith as whatever fits with the discussion which honestly is perfectly reasonable. But some people use the fact that the word exists on such a spectrum of meanings to actively deceive and discredit those who oppose their opinion, and that is something to be aware of. Which is how I ended up on this particular saop box.

In the context of this story though, there is no problem as far as I am concerned