(January 27, 2011 at 3:24 pm)Watson Wrote: Yes, our amount of scientific information has increased a thousandfold since the times of the Bible and its stories, I will agree with you there. Have we gained any real knowledge, though?
Depends how you define knowledge which is somewhat more dificult than it seems. Sticking with the usually sufficient definition of a true justified belief absolutely we have real knowledge, we have determined the truth or falsity of tens of thousands of propositions using a methodology that is more than sufficient for epistemic justification.
Quote: Ever heard the old phrase 'the more I see the less I know'? Because there is a lot of truth to that.
For what reason? It seems completely bunk to me, it's either a bad comparison as science is not a method that lets any proposition contrubute to the overall picture of reality, it takes great effort not to take in everything that we can suppose to be true. It's also a bunk statement for another reason, that being the ammount of knowledge we accumulate by definition increases the amount of knowledge we have - that should be painfully obvious. We might in the process realise we knew less about the universe than beforehand, but the amount of confirmed propositions we have is still higer than it was before.
Quote: And it basically sums up what I'm saying about science. Just because we've beheld the processes of life and the universe does not mean we know what they are or why. We don't know that they will always work the way they do, or even why it is that they work the way they work. The more about the universe we uncover, the more questions we will have.
And you have nothing better, so either you follow the methodology that is by far the most effective and pramatic way we have of determining the truth of claims about reality or you don't - Just because we have limited understanding of the phenomenon in question at this point in time does not mean either 1) We will not know at some point in time, or 2) You are raitonal for believing completely unjustified claims in the mean time.
Quote:Contrarily, I would definitely agree that our amount of understanding of this world has increased since then. We understand the way things work and how. We understand the place of certain phenomena in the scheme of things, and the relation of that place to other phenomena in our world. Science has pushed us to look at relationships between natural occurrences, and to seek answers as to how those occurrences actually, well...occur!
Which is more than your religion ever achieved - It's kept us basking in ignorance for a few thousand years and wasted hundreds of generations of great thinkers on the waste of time that is theology, especially in the early days of the church that explicitly promoted theology as a better use of one's time than science of philosophy, and even though it didn't explicitly condemn the two in priniciple, it cut them down whenever conclusions were reached that were contrary to the silly doctrines.
Quote:In short? The world itself. All of it is revealed to us in 'private revelation' because we are merely subjective entities.
This is a stark contradiction to your posts in the other thread that dismissed subjective value and humor in favor of objective experience and now you're going wholy subjectivist on us when it's conventient for covering up the fact that your 'experiences' demand you keep them in the subjective realm.
Quote: Only by acknowledging the objective world around us as truly objective, and recognizing our place within it, do we draw closer to God and the way in which he works. We see his creation and we understand what part of it that we are.
Flip-flopping again?
No, you project your fantasies on reality and call it objective.
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