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Originally Posted by tml09
Originally Posted by DT43
You're right, you know it all already.
What's the point of even opening up discussion, when our society has geniuses like lobotomybeats to break it down for us?
So science is your God, then.. truescientists know that there are crucial questions that the field ofscience can never answer. But for some reason, the devoted acolytes ofthe Church of Empirical Science seem convinced that science willeventually explain everything (not talking about you in particular,just the particular faction of people who assert with certainty thatempirical science is the end all be all.. the Richard Dawkins-types).At a certain point you have to admit that you are putting blind faithin something as well.
"God" in what sense?
Iknow that there are certain things that are a mystery to us, but to saywholeheartedly that there are questions that science cannot answer isfoolhardy. Maybe not now, but eventually. I cannot predict the future,but there will eventually be a point where we understand this universebecause we will have accumulated the knowledge to do so. How soon willthat be? Definitely not during this century. Our knowledge of theuniverse has increased exponentially within the past few thousand yearsand I think it's safe to say that the mysteries will slowly unravelover time, as long as we're smart enough not to kill everyone on earth.
"Blind faith" - we're all entitled to opinions. I believe thatmy logic is well thought out and reasonable. So does a religousperson. Indifferent third party analysis is required here
If you believe science is falsifiable without a doubt, andthat science can hold all the answers... it's no different frombelieving that God is falsifiable without a doubt and that God holdsall the answers.
I don't think it is foolhardy to admit there are questions sciencecannot answer. For example, look at the creation of the universe. Forone, there's the obvious problem that none of us were there, nor isthere any way to test our theories on what occured. Secondly, there'sthe lesser recognized problem that since space and time are propertiesof the universe, so it follows that whatever was here prior to thespace-time continuum was not contingent on space and time and thereforecan never be quantified or understood scientifically. Something washere (not something in the sense of an object or matter or space, but something in the philosophical sense).. but it's not something that science as we know it can ever understand.
Another question that has baffled science is the problem ofconsciousness. Consciousness is something that we all accept.. we knoweach person is aware of themselves, and we know our sensory perceptionis a result of our body's response to neural stimuli. But how canscience ever actually quantify conscious experience? For example, youand I can both look at a blue sheet of paper, but how "blue" does thepaper appear to you? How "blue" does it appear to me? How can we putinto numbers the "blueness" of what each person experiences?
Look up Thomas Kuhn, he was a scientist who made a lot of contributionsto the scientific method. One thing he said was that science does notprogress in a linear (not even in an exponential, as you put it)fashion. There's actually nothing continuous about the progression ofscience. Science is done within a certain accepted paradigm, and oncescientists reach a "crisis point" in which they can no longer deal withthe anomalies of their paradigm, it undergoes a paradigm shift. When aparadigm shift occurs, scientists begin to adopt things they neverwould have considered valid before. A good example of this is Newton'stheories of motion. When Newton first published his writings, the ideathat there was some invisible unseen force pulling things around wasabsurd when compared to the current accepted paradigm. The paradigmshift occurred when people realized that Newton's theories wereeffective in explaining a lot of things. When Coulomb later came outwith his theory of electromagnetic force, it was a lot easier toaccept. Something else that arose from Kuhn's writings is theobservation thatsince paradigm shifts must have social consensus, many scientificparadigms are influenced by socio-political factors and not necessarily their verifiability.
There's no reason to believe that science will ever have the answers..all history has shown us is that the more things we learn, the morepuzzles arise. Einstein's quantum mechanics solved a lot of anomalies,but also opened up a world of complexity that we still don't understand. Furthermore, there are some things that we know exist,but we also know that they can never be quantified by science(consciousness and emotion are just a few examples). A lot ofscientists are so obsessed with dominating nature that they forget weare all parts of nature ourselves. True science is about humility, notthe bravado and aggressive certainty of some proponents modern science.I feel like in the humility of science, we have to admit that there arereal elements of the human experience outside of the realm of empirical science. Note that I am NOT saying we should just say "since we don't understand, let's just say it's God and call it a day".. I think that through science we should make every effort to quantify that which is quantifiable. But imo, allowing science to lord over your life completely neglects the non-scientific realities of your existence.
