Season 1, Episode 8
There are many issues today that involve science. Are you curious about who to trust and what to trust? Listen in episode 8 of the Conversatio podcast as Dr. Matthew Siebert, Chair of the BAC Philosophy Department, discusses the role of trust in science.
SPEAKERS
Dr. Matthew Seibert, Geoffrey Chiles
Geoffrey Chiles
We welcome you to Conversatio. This podcast focuses on the way of formation and transformation so that each of us reflects God’s image in an ever more palpable and transparent way. Today, we welcome Belmont Abbey College, chair of our philosophy department, Dr. Matthew Siebert. I’m Geoffrey Chiles, and this is Conversatio.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Thank you. Good to be here.
Geoffrey Chiles
And we want to learn a little bit about you and introduce you to our listeners first.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Sure. I’m the chair of the philosophy department here, and I have a master’s from Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. And I’ve been I helped start the program here alongside with the seminary for the Diocese of Charlotte. And I’ve been here almost six years, and we’ve grown massively. We have 30, 40 majors, so doing well.
Geoffrey Chiles
You developed quite a resume, quite an expertize. And now here at Belmont Abbey. And Doctor, our topic today is trust in science. This is an important topic for us today, for us as a society. So many issues today are swirling around science. And then for many of the science that seems to conflict, there seems to be different definitions of science.
Geoffrey Chiles
And then there’s the nonscientific individuals left wondering who can I trust and can I trust the science? And let’s start there. Why is trust important to us?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Well, we trust lots of people in our lives. We trust our parents. Even just to say Saint Augustine said we trust our parents, even just that they are our parents and we trust our friends. We trust teachers. We trust people who have expertize. And our faith is a kind of trust as well. And I would say no one really verifies all of one’s beliefs.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
You depend on trust in a lot of ways. Trust is like a human superpower. In the sense it’s what makes it’s one of the things that makes us very different from other animals that we can all kind of pooled our knowledge and think almost as one big organism. It’s what enables cooperation, including including science. You know, we all we all check each other by talking with each other and in a sense, outsourcing our sanity or outsourcing or our understanding of the world to other people.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Also checking with us and believing what they say when they point out the flaws in our own thinking.
Geoffrey Chiles
Dr. Seibert, you mentioned how it’s important to validate that trust, to verify to that trust. And you talk about parents, education, friendship, but even the atheist doesn’t verify most of his or her beliefs. And like you said, it depends on external factors to verify how we figure out what it means to us. How does that help within society?
Geoffrey Chiles
Having trust and and the reciprocity of giving that trust back?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Well, we come to know who to trust, partly by just who cares for us and which people are truthful. And this is kind of an important first step when we’re developing as children that we have parents who take care of us and enable us to to learn to trust them and then to be guided towards other trustworthy sources.
Geoffrey Chiles
You’ve kind of defined trust in how we determine and learn from trustworthy individuals in our lives, in our lives. And the other side of the spectrum, we have to define science I think to really dig into this, how have we as humans, what have we brought about with science and what are the origins of it? And how does the interplay between trust work there with science?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Okay. So with many things, there is kind of there’s a big divide between the classical idea, the classical ideal of science on the one hand, and the modern idea of what sciences. So there’s a classical ideal of science as giving a full explanation of things demonstration and doing this from unchanging natures of things and doing this with certainty.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
So the paradigm example of a science for someone like Aristotle or Plato is geometry or mathematics. If anyone did geometry in high school, you know, you have all these proofs and they thought you kind of the ideal is to do the same thing in every area in the area of biology and physics and so on. But that this can also include not just math and natural science, but other areas of philosophy like ethics or, and even theology.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
So the classical ideal is, is that we are working towards having this full understanding of things, whereas the modern idea of science has come to be. It started out with almost the same idea, but it has come to be that we’ve lost our faith in being able to fully explain things with certainty. And so we aim to get the best explanation that we can, but without necessarily proving it.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
And there’s been a huge emphasis also on sensory sensory experiments doing experiments. That’s where you get the idea of empirical science that from. Whereas in the classical ideal, the regularity of things showed us that there are nature’s that we are in tune with and that our intellects can grasp that there’s an intelligible aspect to the universe. Modern thinkers have tended to think, Well, all, we have our senses, and let’s let’s not try to jump ahead to thinking that we can have we can know the natures of things.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
And so really all we see are statistical regularities. We see that things happen again and again, but they think we would be jumping to conclusions to assume that we’re onto the natures of things And so, you know, there’s this famous line that many people would have heard that correlation is not causation. And that’s true correlation is not causation, but the moderns have tended to see even our grasp of of the natures of things, of trees, plants, animals, whatever, as just correlation as a result of all of this by.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
By limiting it to sensory world and not thinking that we have this grasp of the intelligibility of the universe. The modern idea of science tends to exclude philosophy and theology and even mathematics as if it’s not quite sure what to do with mathematics.
Geoffrey Chiles
Yeah, primarily because those things are not a palpable tactile. You can’t measure those things. So when we have kind of the dichotomy, we have the empirical, then we have the modern modernist view of things when we look at that modern view, how science is limited to the physical. And we talked you talked about measuring science. And we measure and we are we measure our understanding of the world.
Geoffrey Chiles
What should our expectations of science be? Should we expect it to have all the answers?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Well, definitely, if we’re limiting it to this modern idea of just starting from sensory experience, then obviously know there are all kinds of things that we know about our own minds as a primary example that you can. If the philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out that if you were being experimented on and scientists were poking parts of your brain in and they said you should be feeling happy now you say, No, I’m not feeling happy.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Like, can the scientists really say you’re wrong? Of course not. You you know how you’re feeling, you know what your own mind is. So your own mind, I mean, love mathematics. And we can infer, I think, from the natures of things. We can see that there are things that are caused and infer that there must be causes of these and infer that there must be an ultimate cause of these, rather than just saying throwing up our hands in the air and saying We don’t know what caused the universe or maybe there is no cause, which seems like a very unscientific or unreasonable way to approach it.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
So there’s a lot of talk about what is this scientific, is this not scientific? But I think philosophers who looked at these questions realize that a lot of these questions can’t be decided by just some nice little rule. Really, the question just is what is most reasonable Larry allowed in? For example, philosophers, science says the question is the scientific or is this not scientific?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Is kind of a misleading thing. And we should focus on is this reasonable or is this not reasonable? And if we think about it that way, then we should just ask, is it reasonable to believe in God? Is it reasonable to have faith?
Geoffrey Chiles
Science aims at truth and looks for those reasonable explanations inside and in nature? A particle experiments are an example of that and plan you who talked about relativity, quantum mechanics, those sorts of things. Bar is another name to get you thinking about that. He talked about clarifying, understanding the framework of science, not just taking off one fact after a after another, but those names, when you think about them when you think about the interplay between trust and science, what are other factors we should think about when it comes to trusting what science can explain or give us?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Huh. Okay. Well, you mentioned Stephen Barr. He’s a Catholic physicist who studies Big Bang cosmology and other things like that. And he came to visit here a few years ago. Give a talk. One of his favorite philosophers of science is Michael Bologna, who a famous Catholic chemist and teacher of several Nobel Prize chemists and he and philosopher of science.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
And he points out a lot of different ways in which we in which people in the scientific community have to trust each other and trust others. So I would say that the way I would put it is to reject faith in a way to reject science, because a lot of science depends on a kind of faith. So scientists believe their teachers about things.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
I had a friend who was a physicist who knew a physics student who had been doing his undergraduate for ten years because every time his physics teachers told him something, he would go to the library and try to double check it with other things. So he would never actually trust anyone so he was never going to finish his undergraduate degree in physics.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
You have to trust someone at the beginning in order to become the kind of expert who can understand it and then figure it out for yourself in the end. So when scientists trust their teachers, they trust other people who report experiments, when they coauthor papers. A lot of studies are done with many, many coauthors, for example. Recently, there were studies that found gravitational waves and these studies had about 2000 authors.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
So no one of those authors could confirm every single part of that statement. It was a joint statement by these 2000 people combining all of the different information that they had and trusting each other that they were being truthful and following the accepted social norms of science. They trusting that the other people had been trained well, they were kind of scientists all in a way accredit each other, as Michael Bonnie puts it, by engaging with them in the scientific enterprise and confirming, Oh, that person is doing good science, that person is and or that person is not and should not get a Ph.D. So there are many, many ways in which trust plays a role in science.
Geoffrey Chiles
And you mentioned that some of those processes, scientists are crediting one another one field overlapping in other biology, chemistry, physics and society trust those science scientists to perform the experiments, to come to a conclusion, to give them the truth and we can’t really leave the subject without discussing truth a bit more. You say we trust scientists to pursue the truth and that our love of truth is so important to science’s own worth.
Geoffrey Chiles
How is an individual supposed to feel good about the validity of science when there may be a conflict, and where is the truth and all that?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
So it seems to me that science as a community, I would think I would tend to think of science as community. So I don’t think scientists themselves say things like Follow the science or trust the science or anything like that. Scientists themselves have been trained and have adopted the ideals of the scientific community, which includes questioning things, being willing to be wrong.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Being they, they tend to expect that our current best understanding will be shown to be wrong in in a few years. And there’s a famous philosophical argument based on this called the pessimistic induction that past scientists have always been wrong so probably future scientists will always be wrong, but I don’t think that induction really works. The reason that we think that our scientists have been wrong is because we’ve improved our understanding, even if we haven’t gotten to a final answer on it.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
One. One sign of this, for example, quantum physics the best understanding of quantum physics right now implies that the universe actually is random. It’s it does things within probabilities, but there’s no way to be certain what it will do at the subatomic level. So, for example, a radioactive isotope will decay with a Half-Life over a certain period of time.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
That means that every part of it has a 50% chance of decaying by the time of the Half-Life. But there’s no way to tell which part. There’s there’s just it’s not like there’s some hidden variable that we’re not sure of or that there’s some feature of it that we’re not sure of. It’s just that as a whole, it has this probabilistic feature, and Einstein is a paradigm kind of scientist who seems like a great guy to think this is.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Follow the science, follow Einstein. But he just he didn’t like quantum randomness for this reason, and he had a big dispute with them about that. He’s famously said, God doesn’t play dice with the universe. But I think as a whole, the scientific community has come to adopt the opposite view, that that quantum randomness really is a feature of the way the universe works.
Geoffrey Chiles
When we think about today and all the challenges surrounding science. What would be your advice on how to assess all the inputs that we get that claim to be scientist work?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
One place to start would be to find a scientist that you trust in other ways. Right. If you trust this scientist is a good and truthful person then. And that person has expertize in that scientific area, then ask that person for advice about which sources to trust. That person will have a lot more experience themselves deciding Is this good science?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Is this bad science? Is this journal reliable? Is this journal unreliable? Is this is this institution being biased by some kind of influence or is it not? So I would recommend that you if you if you’re trying to figure out the science that you find, someone that you would feel is reliable in other ways, is as truthful person and also has expertise in that area and has knowledge that you don’t have and would be able to give you some some insight into that.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
I guess that’s my short answer. I could go in-depth in other things.
Geoffrey Chiles
And I think that, again, speaks to you were talking about trust and science and how we learn from others, how those things overlap. And again, the third party source to verify, oh, this person’s character is great, therefore I could trust them as a scientist.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Yeah, that’s the best personal. That’s our personal advantage. There’s no sort of mechanism or or algorithm to trust people. It depends on knowing the person.
Geoffrey Chiles
And Dr. Siebert want to touch on this as well. Now that we have you here today for conversation and lots of science in the news and it’s kind of a tumultuous time about we mentioned trust and how do we believe what we believe. When you think about that today and when you think about evolution, and, you know, you’re you’re a chair of a philosophy department at a Catholic college, and I’m sure you have some interesting viewpoints on this.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Yeah. Well, I’ve thought about it a long time, and I haven’t come to a final sort of decision about whether evolution is is really as a lot of evolutionary biologists say it is. But I still think I still would say that it is the most widely accepted empirical theory for a good reason. And I know that the Catholic Church has taught the popes have said for the last hundred years that it is acceptable to accept evolutionary theory as long as you recognize that it’s not random, it’s not a random process.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
There’s a set up behind it that God has put in place And as long as you recognize that there is an immortal soul in each human that could not have been brought about merely by physical processes, so it’s not as if we think that evolution could bring about the the whole of human nature, but it could bring about something biological that God could infuse with a human soul.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
So there are various reasons that it’s kind of still controversial. As Michael Pyne, you said, it’s it’s a theory of great interest and it would explain a lot. But at the same time, there’s very little direct evidence for it that’s not like we can observe directly the macro evolution of one species changing to another species. We have a fossil record, and from that we can kind of infer things.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
But even the fossil record is there are things in it that are unexplained, like the famous Cambrian explosion when many different phyla of animals seem to have just arisen. Well, all at once, in a manner of speaking, you know, over a few million years and it does seem like if it were just a random process, there’s not really been enough time in the in the four and a half billion years that the Earth has been around or the three and a half billion years that they estimate that life has been around for something as amazingly complex as humans.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
To have arisen. So that’s that’s part of the reason to think also that there must be some kind of guidance or some kind of natural laws at play that we’re not aware of, that it’s not just random.
Geoffrey Chiles
Dr. Siebert, obviously a topic that’s on everyone’s mind today, COVID 19, the vaccine and every issue surrounding that. How would you apply that understanding to trust today?
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Yeah, well, I have said that scientists don’t really say follow the science or science says or there’s this settled science. I think that science under the modern understanding is not really in the business of giving us wisdom. It’s just trying to study specific things. So I would say that there are no real COVID experts in the sense that there are some kind of expert who can tell us exactly what policy we should follow, but rather there are vaccine experts, there are immunology experts, there are health care capacity experts, economic impact experts.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
There are people who know about the Constitution and what’s constitutional and so on. So we have many different people, experts on these different fields. And our leaders, I think, should be trying to take into account all the different tradeoffs and make a prudent decision on that.
Geoffrey Chiles
Well, Dr. Siebert, that’ll do it for us today. And we want to thank you for being on our share of our philosophy department and here at Belmont Abbey College, Dr. Matthew Siebert. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Matthew Seibert
Thanks for having me.
Geoffrey Chiles
And we want to thank you all for joining us for this episode of The Conversation. From Belmont Abbey College and listening. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and share with your friends until next time. God bless.
About the Host
Geoffrey Chiles
Director of Broadcasting
Originally from New York, Geoff studied Screen Arts and Culture at the University of Michigan and completed an MA in Broadcast Journalism from Syracuse University. Chiles has a deep history with broadcasting that ranges from high school football games to more than seven college sports on radio and streaming at an NCAA D-II university. In addition to his talents with broadcast journalism, Chiles also has experience in journalism, video production, social media, marketing, and voiceover work. Currently Chiles serves as the Director of Broadcasting at Belmont Abbey College.