We are not living in a post-modern environment ideologically, nor were people living in a social darwinist environment in the era previous to that. They were all living in the ideological environment of common discourse in the first place, which is inherently creationist.
@Wayne wrote:
Appealing to a “higher authority” is a highly appealing prospect for humans not only to seek solace & salvation, but also to demystify and explain their world. If that authority is the “highest possible” then it’s easy to attribute everything to him and conclude one’s inquiry - which is pretty much what Thomas Aquinas also did. After all, imagination has no bounds.
Wayne, there is nothing logically wrong, or wrong in any other way, to having a logos, even a dated logical world view… We all have one. The irony is you claim you claim that that since God is infinite, the Christian Logos is indefinite, which is untrue.
While God is infinite in the sense that God is Self existent, God is also definite in that God is Self-defined. God is Who God Is. God is Good, not evil. God is Love, not hate. God is Truth, not deceit. God is Harmony, not chaos. God is Wise, not foolish.
While you claim that belief in God leads an unbound imagination, the belief in the multiverse really does lead to an unbound imagination where everything is possible and even probable.
Belief in an Self created God leads to the realization that humans and the world are not self-created and thus have limits. The absence of a belief in in a Self created God leads to the belief that humans and the universe must be self-created and thus have no limits. Many people who do not believe in science are not conservative Christians, but are pantheist Christian Scientists and New Agers.
Science is based on the fact that our universe is finite, it has a beginning and an end. The Big Bang confirms that view. The multiverse does not. The Big Bang is well established. The multiverse is still strictly speculative, and I do not see how it can be verified, since all universes must be absolutely separate.
If you want to base your logos, your understanding of reality, on an infinite myth then you can base it on the multiverse view. If you want to base your metaphysical logos on science, then the Big Bang is the only available choice and the Self-created God is a reasonable position.
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That only shows that faith & belief arise from culture.
Faith always arises within culture might be a more accurate way to put it.
If there was a culture of worshipping teapots and spaghettis …
But there isn’t. A telling fact, that!
That privilege is reserved for the unknown, for things beyond human knowledge.
It is a “privilege” often reserved for that which we have much good reason to believe is true. And yes, our reasons which we see written on people’s lives and hearts will not impress you since you have already declared for yourself that only scientific empiricism counts. Just realize that your own choice to wear that form of tunnel vision does not mean that everybody else joins in you that kind of voluntary blindness.
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You’re confused between objective information and empirical analysis. They’re not one and the same. Empirical analysis BEGINS with objective information. There can be many objectively obtainable infos pertaining to one phenomenon. All of them may not provide the correct explanation, which is precisely why the empirical method exists. It separates the wheat from the chaff, so to say, as it puts each of those facts to the test, formulates hypotheses, gathers evidence and determines which objective facts provide the best explanation. This is what happened with all the Galileo-era science you brought up. It still happens to this day. Empirical analysis (aka science) is the only source of inquiry that constantly corrects/modifies/updates itself, which is why it is our best method to understand the universe.
Human intuition and judgment are prone to all kinds of biases and errors. As someone said, science prevents us from fooling ourselves.
But who said it’s all about just measurements & calculations? Objective realities are very much about observations and experiences as well. It’s not my narrative, it’s what it is. You guys lug around a lot of misconceptions and confusions, which you should try rectifying if you wish to understand where you’re going wrong.
Not telling at all. I already suggested why. Humans tend to view a power who is greater-than-themselves in every regard as the higher authority worthy of worship. Humans know that they cannot create a universe, nature or life. So whoever did that must be a lot more powerful than them, they conclude. Teapots and Spaghetti won’t make the grade. This is pretty much the reason why your-typical-God is considered an omniscient, omnipotent entity. And not because there’s any real evidence that such an entity exists.
This should not be an emotional decision, it should be an intellectual one.
Just like any human, I’m also sympathetic, empathetic and appreciative of people’s feelings. I’m also emotionally & socially inclined to hold certain beliefs and faith. However, when it comes to questions pertaining to reality, I will shed all the emotional baggage and go with evidence and reason, even if they contradict what I wish to be true. I’ll scrutinize every claim out there, compare it against the evidence and decide which one fits the data the best. This is not voluntary blindness or tunnel vision, but rather an open acceptance of reality the way it is.
I said for anything to be truly objective, it must be something that can be reduced to a mathematical statement or formula. Observations and experiences are always subjective to some degree. You can never really stand outside of your conception of reality to observe reality “objectively” and with complete neutrality, so your observations and the way you experience the world will always be colored to some degree by the perceptions you already have about how the world works and what one should expect. I’m really kind of amazed that this isn’t obvious to you.
Yeah, but telling people to rectify their epistemology isn’t really effective. People know how they know. To communicate and convince, you have to understand where another person is coming from and say something that makes sense to them.
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Your mistake is that you’re still talking in the singular. One person’s experience is subjective. But if every person can experience or observe the same thing, then that’s not subjective because it is independent of what one person perceives as reality.
Ask people to tell you whether a movie is good or bad, for example. If you ask a million people, some may say that it is good and some bad - those are subjective opinions, so you really cannot conclude whether the movie is actually good or bad.
But ask people to tell you where the sun rises - east or west. Even if you ask 1 billion people you’ll get the same answer - it rises in the east. Now that’s an objective fact.
Subjective opinions are highly vulnerable to bias and prejudice, it can change depending on what a given individual’s viewpoint is. In contrast, objective facts are free of that personal bias. This is why science only accepts objective facts as a starting point. Because it allows reproducibility of observations and results - a key step towards understanding reality. The big limitation of philosophy & theology is they don’t employ such a rigorous approach.
I find it so lame that the defenders of the glorious scientific method still do not accept the fact that freedom is real and relevant in the universe.
It seems to me if you aren’t capable to describe a human being acting in a free way, then you rank very low in the level of general knowledge that you have about the way things work.
And it is not just human beings which have the awesome power of making a possibility the present or not, freedom is relevant in the entire universe.
If Coyne at least had skill to describe how things behave in a free way, if he could just handle the logic of it, eventhough he denies it is real. The logic of choosing is certainly not more complex than the rules of tic-tac-toe, yet… Coyne doesn’t understand it.
It has nothing to do with the rigorousness of the approach it has to do with the appropriateness of the approach to the subject at hand. Some things can be measured. Some things can be logically or mathematically deduced from things that can measured. Many, many things, about which we make truth claims are not conducive to mathematical notation or the scientific method.
It is only a “limitation” for those who insist that objective and 100% verifiable truth is the only truth that matters or is worth discussing. I personally find that the most interesting questions in life (from fields like philosophy, theology, ethics, sociology, anthropology) cannot be answered using math or hard science. That doesn’t mean all we can aim for is a subjective free-for-all opinion party. There are still good ideas and bad ideas, preferable hypotheses and unlikely hypotheses, models with genuine explanatory power and models that are mostly conjecture or full of holes and contradictions. Just because a discipline involves subjectivity does not mean you can’t engage it with intellectual rigor.
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You use subjectivity to denigrate subjectivity. I hold these truths to be self-evident, that subjectivity is valid, and objectivity is valid, that subjectivity applies to the spiritual domain, that objectivity applies to the material domain, that the spiritual domain choosese which way the material domain turns out.
Humans know that they cannot create a universe, nature or life.
…or a “God” either. Much to agree about here.
And you speak well of the varied aspects of life in your next paragraph. I would only object that life is not so cleanly divided between all these things and thus tweak your conclusion as follows.
This is not voluntary blindness or tunnel vision, but rather an open acceptance of reality the way it is.
I modify that as follows:
…blindness or tunnel vision, but rather a [selectively] open acceptance of [the empirically accessible parts of] reality the way it is.
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Sorry, Wayne. Gravity is mass bending space, just as God is the Creator of the universe. What evidence do we have that gravity exists other than it exists? The evidence that God exists as a scientific fact is that God exists as the Creator of the universe.
It does seem strange that people like Coyne think that people need to choose between faith and science when trying to solve all our problems. That is like deciding that we need to eat all our food with either a fork or a spoon.
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It’s fallacious to say that all objective realities should be measurable or described mathematically. What about evolution? I spoke about whale evolution above where there was no mathematical deduction or measurable quantity. Yet all evidence listed are objective facts and they lead towards an undeniably strong conclusion.
See, if something is real it must be repeatedly observable. The more times you can observe it and the more the people who can observe it, the higher your confidence that it is indeed real. If an effect or observation can be reproduced many times over by multiple people, then the likelihood of it being true increases exponentially.
The problem with your approach is that one single person’s experience may not be reproducible, therefore one cannot conclude with any degree of confidence that the effect he experienced is real. It may simply be an illusion or delusion in his head.
This is why subjective experiences cannot be given equal weightage as objective facts. Modes of knowledge that do so will be vulnerable to preconceptions, bias and may produce unreasonable conclusions.
And your position can be stated as follows:
Acceptance of a tweaked version of reality to fit your beliefs and what you wish to be true, rather than boldly following the evidence wherever it leads.
…there is no way no how that the statement “the painting is beautiful” is on the same scale of “confidence” as the statement “there are 5 sheep in the meadow”.
Facts use the logic of cause and effect, of being forced. Evidence forces to a conclusion, resulting in a 1 to 1 representation of what is evidenced.
Subjectivity uses a logic of choosing. “The painting is beautiful” is an equally logically valid conclusion to “the painting is ugly”. The rules for opinions are 1. it must be chosen, 2. it must be in reference to the agency of a decision.
The words beautiful and ugly are in reference to the agency of a decision, namely love and hate. The love of the way the painting looks, or the hate of the way it looks, are doing the choosing.
There is a categorical difference between fact and opinion, and no gliding scale of cerititude, where subjectivity is at the low end (OUTRAGEOUS!), and objectivity is at the high end.
My goodness! Do you know that gravity is a measurable force? For e.g., earth’s gravity is 9.8 m/s^2.
I hope I don’t have to tell you that God has never been measured.
Gravity is a measurable force, which means that one can observe what gravity has done. You use the example of the earth’s gravity, but the force of the moon’s gravity and the sun’s gravity are not the same. Thus it is true that gravity is not absolute, but relational.
God per se like gravity per se has not been measured, but we can observe every day the being that God created, which can be measured in many ways.
I think we are still talking past each other. I am not arguing that Joe Schmoe’s subjective experience should be given equal weight as “fact” to an observation that a million people agree on. I am just saying that even that agreed on fact is colored by the subjectivity of the community who agrees on it. Raw observations are always interpreted and assigned meaning and the meaning that is constructed is a product of culture and worldview. You mentioned that everyone agrees the sun rises in the east. True. But exactly what “the sun rises” is interpreted to mean has changed over the centuries.
I think it is an observable phenomenon that institutional racism exists in the U.S. and it actively inhibits the potential achievement of minority youth. I could back this up with various “objective” studies, statistics and facts. But at the end of the day my assertion that institutional racism exists is an interpretation of raw facts colored by my experiences and worldview. Other people could look at the same facts and come up with a different explanation that would also be subjective to some degree.
I am not a Creationist and I am not trying to argue against scientific facts. But I also acknowledge that to a certain degree, what we know scientifically is a product of the questions we have asked and the answers we have looked for, and interpretations of data are never 100% objective because humans are not capable of that.
I don’t see the point in going back and forth further. I only brought it up to point out what I consider to be a false black and white dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity when it comes to truth seeking.