I know similar threads pop up here all of the time (I see some on the first page), but I feel this is different to the point where another thread is warranted (if I’m wrong, however, and there’s a thread dealing with everything I’m asking, just link me and I’ll abandon this one).
I am a strong critic of religion, but my question is, is putting faith in science any different than putting my faith in a religion? Obviously, science is based on observations…empirical evidence indicates certain things. The problem I have is with the senses. It seems like I need to make a leap of faith to believe in science, just as I would have to take a leap of faith to believe in a religion.
The thing is, why should I believe what I believe? For example, I see my desk and am typing on my laptop which rests on top of it, but if an apparition were to appear before me and quickly vanish, I would dismiss this as a hallucination. I’d do this because science tells me a ghost-like figure hovering in mid-air cannot possibly exist.
What, however, is stopping something like this from actually happening: if a ghost were to pop up, cease to vanish, begin to interact with the books on my shelf and so on, completely visible to myself and others. What would this mean for science? “It’ll never happen.” ← WHY not? Why can’t it? What makes you so sure?
Is this related to the problem of induction? How far beyond that problem does this go? It seems, to me, like science rests on an error of sorts. And that error is that we attribute the future replicating the past on mere HABIT and nothing else.
Am I knocking on the door of extreme philosophical skepticism, or can one believe in science without taking a leap of faith?
Science does not say, “It will never happen.” Science takes what does happen and tries to explain why it happens, or at least provide theories that make predictions about what will happen. Science has to adapt to the observational data (that in a nutshell is the difference between science and religion).
If we came to genuinely believe that ghosts were appearing and this fact contradicted currently accepted scientific theory, then theory would have to be revised eventually to accommodate the fact that ghosts were appearing. Religion does not make this methodological commitment.
So you’re a critic of religion…it requires a leap of faith. Now you’re a critic of science…it too requires a leap of faith. Has it dawn on you that maybe we live of lives the way we do, normal human lives, by constant leaps of faith? As Imp said: “leaps of faith all around…”
We walk by faith not by sight. So now the question you have to ask yourself is what will you believe in, and know that believe in something you will…even your self is a leap of faith.
I don’t disagree with you…I was just afraid of this being the case. Afraid because it basically means that all this “knowledge” I have is worth nothing.
What you don’t say is more real than what is said.
Worth nothing? Ask yourself what is it that you want to “purchase”, so to speak. If it is a normal life, then what you believe is worth plenty. But if what you seek is certainty then what you believe is not worth enough to purchase god-like-certainty.
Leaps of faith all round indeed - all thought is ultimately based on unjustified axioms. Confirmation holism is a truism, not a theory. This truth worries some people so much that they try and pretend otherwise: or simply ignore it entirely. Understandable, yes, but an essentially anti-philosophical stance all the same.
A scientist’s faith is in the world of experience. In the relaibility of empirically gathered data and the sense and continuity of the physical universe.
Religous faith is in there being something more than the physical. We are all religous in this sense: even though nowadays this is highly unfashionable.
I have both types of faith; and feel better for it.
There’s no need to get all emo about it. Knowledge has great value. Heck, you couldn’t even bitch about it here if you didn’t know how to operate a computer.
You have to know how to read in order to see where Hume tells us that our knowledge is worthless. And he had to know how to write to tell us.
And so on.
brevel -
Why do the religious relentlessly insist that everyone is religious? Materialists don’t insist that everyone is a materialist.
I simply mean that everybody believes in more than just the physcial. I suppose it is possible that someone somewhere beieves only in physical things, but I don’t think they would get very far. At the end of the day the physical universe will never explain morality or consciouness (even if these things supervene on the physical).
I don’t doubt that many people on reflection question the validity or justification of their beliefs, but I have yet to meet someone that has managed to erode these beliefs entirely: someone who acts as if only the physical universe exists and it possesses no non-physical properties (like things being right or wrong, or human minds being more than just atoms and particles).
I am one of those people. And a purely physical universe certainly can explain those things. It’s not quite so easy as saying “God did it”, but it’s not really all that difficult, either.
Things are neither right nor wrong, and mind is a metaphor.