Surely the answer to the thread title is no, science is not the only way to knowledge. However, its track record for furthering our understanding of how the universe works is unsurpassed. There is not a single other human endeavour that even comes close.
Religious beliefs had tens to hundreds of thousands of years to further our knowledge. Modern science has had a few hundred years. Science has had an order of magnitude shorter amount of time to produce an order of magnitude greater body of knowledge.
Can anybody name a single fact revealed by religion that could not have been revealed by science? How many facts revealed by science can you name that could not have been revealed by religion?
Religious people often say "science keeps being proven wrong, how can you trust it"? Firstly, they neglect to realise that it is science that proves itself wrong, not religion that proves it wrong. Secondly, name the last time science was flat-out plain wrong. What tends to happen is that disproven theories continue to be applicable but for a narrower set of conditions. Newtons laws vs General Relativity for instance.
That's a vacuous argument with no utility. If you were to claim the existence of God, which you know to be true because of x, y and z, I could just as easily turn around and say "seriously, how do you test the hypothesis that you're not a brain in a vat". Arguments of this kind seem to be unique to the religious and philosophers. For some reason, science never has to resort to such arguments. You'll notice that philosophy has been practiced for the last few thousand years and our progress was pretty slow then too.
In summary, things that are true are generally easily shown to be true and science has proven itself to be our best method of establishing truth.
Religious beliefs had tens to hundreds of thousands of years to further our knowledge. Modern science has had a few hundred years. Science has had an order of magnitude shorter amount of time to produce an order of magnitude greater body of knowledge.
Can anybody name a single fact revealed by religion that could not have been revealed by science? How many facts revealed by science can you name that could not have been revealed by religion?
Religious people often say "science keeps being proven wrong, how can you trust it"? Firstly, they neglect to realise that it is science that proves itself wrong, not religion that proves it wrong. Secondly, name the last time science was flat-out plain wrong. What tends to happen is that disproven theories continue to be applicable but for a narrower set of conditions. Newtons laws vs General Relativity for instance.
vinny Wrote:Seriously, how do you test the hypothesis that you're not a brain in a vat? That your cognitive faculties are working properly? That everyone around you are actual people instead of p-zombies?
That's a vacuous argument with no utility. If you were to claim the existence of God, which you know to be true because of x, y and z, I could just as easily turn around and say "seriously, how do you test the hypothesis that you're not a brain in a vat". Arguments of this kind seem to be unique to the religious and philosophers. For some reason, science never has to resort to such arguments. You'll notice that philosophy has been practiced for the last few thousand years and our progress was pretty slow then too.
In summary, things that are true are generally easily shown to be true and science has proven itself to be our best method of establishing truth.
