Is science the only way to knowledge?

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

[scientism]

YES!!1! ONE DAY SCIENCE WILL DEMONSTRATE EVEN THE ALGORITHMS FOR BEAUTY, GRIEF AND GOOD MUSIC!!!!ONE!!

[/scientism]

Actually, algorithm for beauty, grief, and good music is in principle within the purview of science, even if those of us who foolishly regarded our innermost selves as above complete penetration by mere science would, and richly deservedly, be insulted by this fact.

Pretty much not this.

[Creed of Heresy]

I was! Most atheists who can put two brain cells pleasure themselves on the science vs religion dichotomy and come to treat science itself as an object of religious affection. The result being, quite naturally, the delusion that science answers all questions.

Yeah, OK, that's either a faulty generalization fallacy, a hasty generalization fallacy, or, given every aspect of your presence here is essentially the equivalent of a five year-old sticking his tongue out at the adults in a desperate, annoying bid for attention (not to mention your entire profile's childishly mocking theme); biased sample fallacy. So we can dismiss this claim quite easily given its faulty premise from the very beginning and maybe.

But because I love kicking you in the intellectual nuts: In fact one of the most respected aspects of science itself is the humble fact that it is a method used in a never-ending quest to learn all that we can about the universe and does not claim to know everything; this is the very reason for the scientific method; to learn about the universe. If we knew everything about the universe, we wouldn't need the scientific method. Nice strawman fallacy; you attack the generalization that atheists typically rely on science to consider something factual or not by instead replacing it with the claim that "most atheists" are deluded into thinking that science currently and presently answers all questions, based on a generalization/bias fallacy.

So, we have generalization and straw-man. It's looking like another dandy day on Atheist Forums.

But to have this position you must (1) be familiar with science and how it works, and (2) be smart enough to distinguish between how religion sees knowledge vs how science sees knowledge.

And how individuals see knowledge. And how groups, organizations, individuals, etc. etc. etc. define knowledge.

I define knowledge as something I consider to be factual through having tested my hypothesis, my idea, my curiosity through testing, observation, and repeating the testing several times to determine consistency.

That which is consistent, I will state that I know it. Otherwise, I "suspect" or "believe" or "assume" something, and place about as much weight on those notions as their flimsy reputations suggest. They are little more than opinions, untested hypotheses, and I do not claim knowledge of them; interestingly, should I ever bring them to bear in an actual discussion involving such notions, they will be blasted out of existence extremely quick.

Religious knowledge, however, according to rationalists, is based largely upon the claim that those who are a part of religion or belief do not do so because they are seeking comfort or reassurance, but because they genuinely believe they are correct, that what they hold is, indeed, knowledge. And that's great, really, if your definition of knowledge is essentially that you believe something because someone wrote a claim in a dusty old book that's been translated about a hundred times, and that your reason for believing it is knowledge is essentially an ad populum fallacy wherein it's "shared knowledge" or just simply solipsistic horse-shit, hey, good on ya, you have fun with that, but don't expect me to ever accuse you of being grounded in reality.

Scientific knowledge is considered that which can be hypothesized, tested, observed, subjected to peer review and tested with reliable results. Scientific knowledge, by the way, is the only reason why we are as advanced as we are today, why we are so long-lived today, why we can do so much today.

Religious "knowledge" has contributed not a fucking thing other than war and personal suffering. After all, if the rationalists are right [as you seem to imply] and religion is NOT about the social and psychological benefits but is instead because they actually DO think the world works that way, then they cannot claim to be of any of those benefits; it's simply all about their chosen deity. But then...

Huh. Seems that they really DON'T believe think the bullshit is just the natural truth of the world, it really IS for the comforts and benefits.

What a fucking shock, it's almost like religion was a primitive coping mechanism that is actually non-essential, and is not reliably demonstrable, and therefore something I can dismiss without any concern.

Another problem is, they all have conflicting knowledge with one another...whereas science is pretty consistent in its demonstrations of knowledge. You'll have to understand why I put more trust in the scientific method to be the one that I can actually consider "knowledge" as opposed to the solipsistic inanity of religious "knowledge." You want to claim your knowledge is equal to mine?

Prove it.

Ironically many people here don't even have enough of an interest in science to agree with the false dichotomy of science vs religion.

Ignorance can be progress, it seems!

False dichotomy indeed. How dare we try to get people to get their heads out of their own asses to show them the world around us so that they might actually apply their senses to something meaningful. Nevermind that these people with their heads in the clouds and full of things they believe to be true for no other reason than that they believe it to be true also have their fingers over Big Red Buttons, or over triggers or detonator packs and they might not like the fact I don't just mindlessly believe they are right simply because they think they are right.

I demand proof of things. You don't ask for proof, you don't test things, you become gullible, and gullible people are idiots, they are saps, they are suckers, and they are easy to exploit, as has been shown endlessly throughout history; starry-eyed morons mindlessly following their own "subjective" truths [which ironically they learned from other people...so much for the weight and gravitas of personal experience with the supernatural, huh?] by following OTHER morons with their own subjective truths who desire to make their subjective truths objective truth, and because none of their ideas are universally compatible and therefore will never spread to every last individual on the earth and therefore do a really damn good job of proving this bullshit about religious "knowledge" is an absolute farce, they switch from the staff to the sword and spread their views by force.

This discussion, while it is interesting to see what everyone's subjective opinions are, has no clear definition. What you think is knowledge I think is delusion. But your own mindset betrays your ignorance; there is no "I don't know" on here. You see everything in black and white. As you demonstrated, you seem to be under the delusion that "most atheists" are deluded into believing that science provides the answers for everything.

I dunno who the fuck you know as far as these "science answers everything" types go, but I am quite well aware that "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer to any given question if you don't fucking know the answer. Better to admit a deficiency in knowledge and therefore display modesty and an interest in learning than to invent some mindless bullshit based on whatever you can pull out of your ass.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

I was! Most atheists who can put two brain cells pleasure themselves on the science vs religion dichotomy and come to treat science itself as an object of religious affection. The result being, quite naturally, the delusion that science answers all questions.

Yeah, OK, that's either a faulty generalization fallacy, a hasty generalization fallacy, or, given every aspect of your presence here is essentially the equivalent of a five year-old sticking his tongue out at the adults in a desperate, annoying bid for attention (not to mention your entire profile's childishly mocking theme); biased sample fallacy. So we can dismiss this claim quite easily given its faulty premise from the very beginning and maybe.

But because I love kicking you in the intellectual nuts: In fact one of the most respected aspects of science itself is the humble fact that it is a method used in a never-ending quest to learn all that we can about the universe and does not claim to know everything; this is the very reason for the scientific method; to learn about the universe. If we knew everything about the universe, we wouldn't need the scientific method. Nice strawman fallacy; you attack the generalization that atheists typically rely on science to consider something factual or not by instead replacing it with the claim that "most atheists" are deluded into thinking that science currently and presently answers all questions, based on a generalization/bias fallacy.

So, we have generalization and straw-man. It's looking like another dandy day on Atheist Forums.

But to have this position you must (1) be familiar with science and how it works, and (2) be smart enough to distinguish between how religion sees knowledge vs how science sees knowledge.

And how individuals see knowledge. And how groups, organizations, individuals, etc. etc. etc. define knowledge.

I define knowledge as something I consider to be factual through having tested my hypothesis, my idea, my curiosity through testing, observation, and repeating the testing several times to determine consistency.

That which is consistent, I will state that I know it. Otherwise, I "suspect" or "believe" or "assume" something, and place about as much weight on those notions as their flimsy reputations suggest. They are little more than opinions, untested hypotheses, and I do not claim knowledge of them; interestingly, should I ever bring them to bear in an actual discussion involving such notions, they will be blasted out of existence extremely quick.

Religious knowledge, however, according to rationalists, is based largely upon the claim that those who are a part of religion or belief do not do so because they are seeking comfort or reassurance, but because they genuinely believe they are correct, that what they hold is, indeed, knowledge. And that's great, really, if your definition of knowledge is essentially that you believe something because someone wrote a claim in a dusty old book that's been translated about a hundred times, and that your reason for believing it is knowledge is essentially an ad populum fallacy wherein it's "shared knowledge" or just simply solipsistic horse-shit, hey, good on ya, you have fun with that, but don't expect me to ever accuse you of being grounded in reality.

Scientific knowledge is considered that which can be hypothesized, tested, observed, subjected to peer review and tested with reliable results. Scientific knowledge, by the way, is the only reason why we are as advanced as we are today, why we are so long-lived today, why we can do so much today.

Religious "knowledge" has contributed not a fucking thing other than war and personal suffering. After all, if the rationalists are right [as you seem to imply] and religion is NOT about the social and psychological benefits but is instead because they actually DO think the world works that way, then they cannot claim to be of any of those benefits; it's simply all about their chosen deity. But then...

Huh. Seems that they really DON'T believe think the bullshit is just the natural truth of the world, it really IS for the comforts and benefits.

What a fucking shock, it's almost like religion was a primitive coping mechanism that is actually non-essential, and is not reliably demonstrable, and therefore something I can dismiss without any concern.

Another problem is, they all have conflicting knowledge with one another...whereas science is pretty consistent in its demonstrations of knowledge. You'll have to understand why I put more trust in the scientific method to be the one that I can actually consider "knowledge" as opposed to the solipsistic inanity of religious "knowledge." You want to claim your knowledge is equal to mine?

Prove it.

Ironically many people here don't even have enough of an interest in science to agree with the false dichotomy of science vs religion.

Ignorance can be progress, it seems!

False dichotomy indeed. How dare we try to get people to get their heads out of their own asses to show them the world around us so that they might actually apply their senses to something meaningful. Nevermind that these people with their heads in the clouds and full of things they believe to be true for no other reason than that they believe it to be true also have their fingers over Big Red Buttons, or over triggers or detonator packs and they might not like the fact I don't just mindlessly believe they are right simply because they think they are right.

I demand proof of things. You don't ask for proof, you don't test things, you become gullible, and gullible people are idiots, they are saps, they are suckers, and they are easy to exploit, as has been shown endlessly throughout history; starry-eyed morons mindlessly following their own "subjective" truths [which ironically they learned from other people...so much for the weight and gravitas of personal experience with the supernatural, huh?] by following OTHER morons with their own subjective truths who desire to make their subjective truths objective truth, and because none of their ideas are universally compatible and therefore will never spread to every last individual on the earth and therefore do a really damn good job of proving this bullshit about religious "knowledge" is an absolute farce, they switch from the staff to the sword and spread their views by force.

This discussion, while it is interesting to see what everyone's subjective opinions are, has no clear definition. What you think is knowledge I think is delusion. But your own mindset betrays your ignorance; there is no "I don't know" on here. You see everything in black and white. As you demonstrated, you seem to be under the delusion that "most atheists" are deluded into believing that science provides the answers for everything.

I dunno who the fuck you know as far as these "science answers everything" types go, but I am quite well aware that "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer to any given question if you don't fucking know the answer. Better to admit a deficiency in knowledge and therefore display modesty and an interest in learning than to invent some mindless bullshit based on whatever you can pull out of your ass.

I know it doesn't look like the case on this forum, but most western atheists see science and reason (the latter sometimes, depending on the day of the week) as the defeater of religious belief.

Naturally then you have Richard Dawkins calling his intellectual ponzi outfit the "Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science". Yeah. You have Dennett and Krauss and the like seeing science as the harbinger of truth. You have atheists (and even theists) who position issues such that it is "Science versus Religion". Or they point to evolution as a defeater of religious belief. Sam Harris even grounds his bogus moral theory on science.

So it's undeniable that science is The Source of Truth™ for most atheists.

The atheistforums.org bubble is not a big enough sample size to give you that impression probably because most people here have an IQ under 60. But don't let that color your view of atheism as a whole, alright?

Don't try for kicking me in the nuts when you don't have a leg to stand on, bambino.

I don't want to even touch your horse-shit on knowledge. It's a laugh how you think you can develop a theory of knowledge that claims to test it's hypotheses when you don't even know what foundationalism is.

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?

Listen, I know I've been a little harsh with you, but you gotta admit you deserve it. Making grandiose claims about religious knowledge when you're a little peon on an internet forum who has read approximately zero books on religious knowledge and knows about as much about what he's talking about.

It's easy to earn my respect, buddy. You don't even have to know what you are talking about. You just have to show a willingness to doubt the proposition that you know enough. Have enough humility to realize that maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than the simplistic garbage that you've been made to believe.

Oh, and also, rationalism doesn't mean what you think it means.

[Bad Writer]

Good thing I'm not here to appease you, oh enlightened one. That's why I stick to the position that you should go blow god out your self-righteous, self-absorbed ass.

[davidMC1982]

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.

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.

[Jackalope]

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.

...and equally applicable to himself. No, shit, we can neither prove nor falsify solipsism? Really? What an intellect you have there, Vinny.

Note to all the readers out there - when someone plays THIS card, you've won - because they just committed intellectual suicide and declared that (with solipsism in play) that they in fact cannot know anything beyond the existence of one's own consciousness. Congratulations - you need not argue further with someone who posits that your argument doesn't account for the possibility of you being a brain-in-a-vat.

Of course, Vinny knows this. He also knows that we disregard solipsism because to not do so leads to epistemological nihilism - where knowledge is impossible.

You can fuck off now, Vinny.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

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.

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.

But I never "claimed the existence of God, which I know to be true because of x, y, and z." If I do believe in some higher power, it's not because I'm certain there is one, but because given the data we have, the best explanation is a creator/designer/agent than any non-creator/non-designer/non-agent hypothesis currently available. Being the believer in science that you are, I hope that comes with properly representing views.

And what about basic beliefs, like p-zombies or brain-in-a-vat beliefs? Are they really vacuous? Or do they tell us that some beliefs are impossible to test, and if a belief is impossible to test, it is impossible to arrive at scientifically? This is not some vacuous argument, it is evidence that science as a whole, including individual principles like testability or falsifiability are incapable of giving us all the facts at our disposal. In other words, "as good as science is, it isn't enough on it's own, as you can see, given that it cannot come up with these truths."

The reason many scientists don't make this argument is because most scientists don't work in epistemology. Epistemology is not a physical science, it is a "logical science", if you will.

Not to mention your response totally misses the boat here, as nobody said, not I in my posts, nor this thread title, that science is not the best at arriving at truth. It might or it might not be. Rather, the question is whether science is the ONLY source of truths about the world. Perhaps further scientific investigation into the OP and some scientific readings and experimentation on the wording of my claims will clear this up for you.

ps- Cthulhu Dreaming: I hold that we are rational to accept that solipsism is false, because I allow for non-scientific, non-testable means to arriving at knowledge, namely via epistemic foundationalism.

I don't think solipsism is true, so don't be an idiot.

[Jackalope]

I'm not the idiot who attempted to use it as a rebuttal, so blow me, you jackass. I could care less whether you actually believe in it - that you invoked it demonstrates the intellectual depravity that you're willing to stoop to.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

I'm not the idiot who attempted to use it as a rebuttal, so blow me, you jackass. I could care less whether you actually believe in it - that you invoked it demonstrates the intellectual depravity that you're willing to stoop to.

6/10 on insults. 1/10 on content. Still top 10 smartest posts on this forum. How do you do it, man?

Seriously though, like I said, the example goes to show that we believe things to be true that are in principle untestable, and therefore we believe in truths inaccessible to the scientific method. Therefore, we cannot rightly say the scientific method is the only source of knowledge.

That's why you are still an idiot, certified with that last post of yours. Thanks for playing.

XOXO

Vinny G.

[Jackalope]

I'm not the idiot who attempted to use it as a rebuttal, so blow me, you jackass. I could care less whether you actually believe in it - that you invoked it demonstrates the intellectual depravity that you're willing to stoop to.

6/10 on insults. 1/10 on content. Still top 10 smartest posts on this forum. How do you do it, man?

Seriously though, like I said, the example goes to show that we believe things to be true that are in principle untestable, and therefore we believe in truths inaccessible to the scientific method. Therefore, we cannot rightly say the scientific method is the only source of knowledge.

That's why you are still an idiot, certified with that last post of yours. Thanks for playing.

XOXO

Vinny G.

Hey, dipshit, I actually agree with you on that question. If you had comprehended my posts in this very thread, you'd know that.

So, please, go pound sand.