RE: Christianity is heading for a full allegorization
January 16, 2022 at 8:52 pm
(This post was last modified: January 16, 2022 at 9:08 pm by GrandizerII.)
(January 16, 2022 at 11:51 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:GrandizerII Wrote:People, namely scientists, conduct science. Science does not conduct itself.
Scientists, being people, can sometimes fail at using logic properly to evaluate results. They can also end up doing very shoddy research.
Sure, scientist can make a mistake and be biased in his research, but that is where many other scientists come in and test his claims and make scientific consensus, so that in the end science is objective.
Yeah, that's a bit of a fantasy, though. This may be your hope or expectation of science, but science isn't necessarily self-correcting or objective, and it certainly isn't omniscient (as I've heard some people like to say).
Like I said earlier, there are known limitations to science. See Thomas Kuhn and his notion of paradigm shift. Simplistically speaking, there is a specific framework in which scientists operate that makes it very difficult for new radical ideas to be readily embraced (even if they end up being true). There's often quite some resistance to these ideas (at least at the start). As such, it is more reasonable to say that scientists, collectively speaking, do not automatically opt to correcting errors made by any one individual scientist or erroneous positions held by the consensus. Certain circumstances need to occur first because these radical (but true) ideas become accepted within the scientific community.
There are also gaps in our knowledge that we may never be able to fill through science. For example, the hard problem of consciousness. To this point, despite many attempts, it has been very difficult to find a proper starting point to solving this problem scientifically. See also the gap between relativity and quantum. Additionally, see the many interpretations of quantum mechanics taken seriously within the scientific community (Copenhagen vs MWI for example), hard to see any consensus there in the foreseeable future.
More relevantly, putting aside whether science is truly self-correcting or objective or even omniscient (as some people elsewhere have said!), the statements that you (and others) have made about science do reflect an ideology. One that is often politically-driven and unshakable. How many times have atheists (for example) used science as a weapon to combat opposing philosophies and claims made by religious people? Do you see yourselves eventually thinking that evidence is more than just physical evidence, that maybe you should start taking the idea of revelation seriously? That maybe this world doesn't necessarily behave in a natural way (as in the laws of nature do not operate in a consistent manner)?
I certainly don't take revelation seriously and set a high bar for what constitutes evidence. And I don't mind saying that I hold to an ideology when it comes to my views of the world and the way it generally operates (including that science is the best way to attain conclusive knowledge about selective aspects of the world, despite its limitations). We shouldn't be so averse to the term, and we needn't feel so insecure if our views are compared to those of religious folks and called ideological views just like theirs.