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dmarchall491 t1_it2li1i wrote

Reply to comment by anarchietzsche in [Peter Harrison] Why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it by BasketCase0024

> And even then, if we take your position, why is science so much more valid than any other form of truth if we know that it's probably wrong?

Because it works. Simple as that. You don't even have to believe in it for it to work. Just look around you, look at the computer you are currently typing on. How do you think that came into existence? I have yet to see any other form of knowledge seeking produce anything even remotely as impressive as that. Heck, even if you take the Bible as literally true, there is nothing in there half as impressive as what science has produced. Having Jesus running around and making some blind people see is pretty unimpressive accomplishment compared to say the discovery of germ theory of disease.

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anarchietzsche t1_it306su wrote

Well, the Christian fanatic would probably say the same. Or the homeopathist. Or the psychopath.

Sorry, I don't necessarily agree with the above. I've just been reading a lot of Kierkegaard lately.

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Fishermans_Worf t1_it370pz wrote

The principle difference is science is inherently self questioning and a fanatical application of it would be fanatically self questioning, not fanatically confident.

Science doesn't expect to provide the truth directly—it provides a mechanism to move closer to the truth by showing previous assumptions are not true. It's a process of elimination. I can't think of any other widespread worldview that operates on similar grounds.

This is a huge generalization, but overall religion and philosophy looks for truth and then tries to prove it with logical arguments—science looks for truth and then tried to disprove it with practical experiments.

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anarchietzsche t1_it381na wrote

But what I'm saying is that there is a fanatical adherence to reason as a methodology. It's unquestionable that reason can be wrong, even though we know that it is going to be proven wrong eventually.

The faith in human reason is the same as the faith in a greater power. It's impossible to justify one without using the system that it is built upon. The Munchausen paradox, in short, and why living rationally is actually based on an irrational idea or begging the question.

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Fishermans_Worf t1_it3kukf wrote

The Munchausen trilemma does neatly show the metaphysical impossibility of knowing anything for certain though it is somewhat self defeating. If all arguments and knowledge are based on unprovable assumptions—so is the Munchausen trilemma. The assumptions it makes are reasonable... but... that's its point. Reason depends on assumptions.

My question is—once you've reached the inevitable metaphysical conclusion that no truth is perfectly confirmable—where do you go from there? You must make assumptions to live. Presumably you assume you exist or that oxygen is necessary for life.

Does the uniform lack of absolute certainty affect the relative merits of arguments for truth? If not, can you say that having faith in something you directly experience and can confirm through repetition is the same as faith in something you've been told but cannot experience or test? You can't say either are True—but can you justifiably lean in a direction? Can you approach the truth? If you can approach the truth, are there methods that appear more likely to lead you in the correct direction?

IMHO—the idea that we cannot know anything for certain merely pushes me further towards worldviews that are inherently self questioning rather than ideological. Reason demands to be abandoned if it can be shown to be unsound.

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anarchietzsche t1_it4y87r wrote

Well, that's Kierkegaard's position - when you're presented with the choice between selfish hedonism, reason, and the spiritual life, we're given a contextless question with no way of building context or understanding why we have to make a choice without relying on one of the above categories to build context.

Instead of viewing the spiritual life as ideological, we might see it as submissive in the face of overwhelming knowledge - we are finite and in the face of the infinite, so we can't possibly begin to create justification within our finite spheres of understanding. See the contrast between Kierkegaard's treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac and Kant's - if we side with Kant (the ethical/reasonable thinker), we basically deform the infinite into a greater (but imperfect) version of ourselves.

So, although ideology definitely plays a part, I see the spiritual thinker as someone who admits they don't understand and can't understand something because they are limited by their finite nature. You might also think about Lovecraft here - on being confronted with otherworldly horrors or four-sided triangles, how can we begin to create explanations for something that lies outside of our abilities to reason about?

Although it sounds like crackpot nonsense at first, the bigger question really comes down to whether the limits of our language and understanding as the limits of our world are the limits of the world. If we're not careful, we're at risk of claiming beyond what we can.

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