An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[FlatAssembler]

hypotheses that are tested need to be reasonable, they need not to appear to contradict our experience.

I think there's another layer to this. What science tells us very often ends up contradicting our experience. 

My experience of the stars is that they are tiny twinkling points of light. This is what my senses tell me. 

It's not my experience which tells me that the stars are a zillion miles away, huge hot spheres. It is the reporting of researchers who create hypotheses, collect data with instruments that differ a lot from what my eyes tell me, test the hypotheses against the data, etc. There is a lot of thinking that goes into this, far more than just experience. 

Then to tell us the truth about the stars (i.e. not just what our eyes tell us) scientists present quantified data. How far away, how big, how hot, the percentages of various elements, math formulae to tell us how the nuclear fission goes on. In science, the guy who knows most about the stars is the one who is most familiar with these quantifications and formulae. 

But numbers aren't something we experience. Numbers are idea -- abstracted from the reality of the star. The star still looks like a point of light, but the numbers on the computer screen -- which look nothing like anything -- tell us the truth. 

So paradoxically, scientific knowledge is abstracted, taken from real objects into theory and abstraction. The scientist who knows most is the one who has the greatest grasp of abstractions. 

All of that, though, doesn't fill in the picture of what a star is like. What is it like to be that big? That hot? That long-lived? To get this stuff, you just need a vivid imagination. You need to close your eyes and picture what stars are like. Even the sun looks like a bright disc about the size of the moon. It takes imagination to get beyond that. The numbers point toward what we should imagine, but numbers are not real. 

So I would say that complete knowledge requires extreme and detailed capacity to imagine stuff. And for this you need poets, artists, etc.

Those things don't actually contradict our experience, you'd need to be an idiot to think they actually do.