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Stabilizer comments on Rebutting radical scientific skepticism - Less Wrong
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This is a very interesting game. At a meta-level though, my belief in a lot of science is grounded in its usefulness. If people who believe in Newtonian physics can make me float in the air in a gigantic metal tube hurtling at 500 miles/hr while I sip my Coke, I suspect their belief is well-justified.
Yes, and many a medieval could have reasoned thusly:
To be fair to the medieval, their theories about how one can build large, beautiful buildings were pretty sound.
Similarly, modern theories about how to discover the habits of God in governing Creation (the Laws of Nature) are pretty sound as well. Or so theists say.
A better example than Amiens Cathedral would be the Placebo Effect. For most of human history, people with access to lots of data (but no notion of the Placebo Effect) had every reason to believe that e.g. witch doctors, faith healing, etc. was all correct.
Warning: Rampant speculation about a theory of low probability: Consider the corresponding theory about science. Maybe there is a Placebo Effect going on with the laws of nature and even engineering, whereby things work partly because we think they will work. How could this be? Well, we don't understand how the placebo effect could be either. God is a decent explanation--maybe airplanes are his way of rewarding us for spending so much time thinking rationally about the principles of flight. Maybe if we spent enough time thinking rationally about the principles of faster-than-light travel, he would change things behind the scenes so that it became possible.
I think you underestimate how much we know about how placebo effects operate.
I didn't mean to imply that the placebo effect is a complete mystery. As you say, perhaps it is pretty well understood. But that doesn't touch my overall point which is that before modern medicine (and modern explanations for the placebo effect) people would have had plenty of evidence that e.g. faith healing worked, and that therefore spirits/gods/etc. existed.
Yes, but they would have been dead wrong about everything they thought about the supernatural, not just the placebo effect. Thus if anyone were to suggest
The example of the placebo effect would work against this theory: "people were completely and totally wrong about beliefs affecting reality before and it turned out to be some artifacts of selection bias / regression to the mean / relaxation / evolutionarily-based allocation of bodily resources, and so I disbelieve in your suggestion even more than I would just on its merits because clearly people are not good at this sort of thinking".
No, the analogy I had in mind was this:
What People Saw: Acupuncture* being correlated with health, and [building things according to theories developed using the scientific method] being correlated with [having things that work very well]
What People Thought Happened: Acupuncture causing health and [building things according to theories developed using the scientific method] causing [having things that work very well]
What Actually Happened: Placebo effect and Placebo effect (in the former case, involving whatever mechanisms we think cause the placebo effect these days; in the latter case, involving e.g. God.)
Filtering out all the selection bias etc., the relaxation and evolutionarily-based allocation of bodily resources seem to work fine for my purposes. They are analogous to theism-based allocation of technological power.
Point taken: useful beliefs are not necessarily true beliefs.
That being said, in this particular case, belief in Jesus Christ wasn't necessary for the cathedral to be built. If you, as a medieval, saw that the Muslims and Hindus too were building magnificent things, then you should conclude that belief in a particular god in inessential (you're still allowed to conclude to that it is well-justified to believe in a god).
With airplanes, the belief in Newtonian physics is essential.
Sure, but in order conclude so you'd have to go beyond the people who believe x can make fancy technology y, so I suspect x is a well-justified belief heuristic.
My understanding of history is that this is not the case. Not too long before some bicycle mechanics were building the first airplane, prominent Newtonian physicists were saying things like "heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
Specifically, "I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of." (Wikiquote seems to imply the "heavier than air" quotation is a misquotation.) And Kelvin wrote that in 1896, when the Wright brothers were building bicycles rather than flying machines; they didn't start on the latter until 1899.
(I upvoted the parent comment because its basic point is sound, but I don't want to look like I'm upvoting the debatable history.)
In case anyone was wondering, I had changed the wording of the part satt quoted before he or she posted this comment, because I thought it sounded kind of misleading (which apparently I was right about). Good catch on the possible misquote, that was from memory.
I need to learn to Google more quickly!