What My Students Said About Religion and Science

 
Iqbal

Iqbal

Meet Allama Iqbal: British knight, national poet of Pakistan, author of poetry in two languages (Persian and Urdu), author of philosophy in two languages (Persian and English), and the only major philosopher I know of who has an airport named after him.

Iqbal is an empiricist. Like William James (one of the visible influences on his thought), he strives for a thorough and consistent empiricism. This effort leads him to a neat little analysis of both religious and scientific knowledge. Before moving on, let that point sink in for a moment: Here’s a major philosopher who thinks a proper understanding of experience justifies both religious and scientific … knowledge.

Sound weird? Well, it does go against a host of popular assumptions. But it’s not that weird – nor is the reality of both scientific and religious knowledge a very unusual idea among careful and consistent thinkers.

Iqbal gives us this idea in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a very good book in which he attempts to integrate the insights of two intellectual traditions: modern science and religious mysticism — especially Sufism.

And Now It’s Time for a Story

The story will be told from my own fallible memories.  But it’s a fairly accurate account of what happened.

So there I am in E-121 somewhere between 9 and 10 AM. I’ve just finished giving my students the gist of Iqbal’s argument for the legitimacy of both religious and scientific knowledge. I’d better review the argument for you. Knowledge, Iqbal says, is born of reflection based on experience. Two of the major varieties of knowledge are born of two major varieties of experience: scientific knowledge (born of reflection on sensory experience) and religious knowledge (born of reflection on religious experience). He says on these matters:

The facts of religious experience are facts among other facts of human experience and, in the capacity of yielding knowledge by interpretation, one fact is as good as another.

You can put this into an argument from the reality of scientific knowledge to the possibility of religious knowledge:

1. Science is a source of knowledge.

2. Science derives its warrant entirely from a combination of experience and reflection on experience.

3. So experience and reflection on experience is a source of knowledge.

4. There is such a thing as religious experience that can be reflected on.

5. So religious experience and reflection can also be a source of knowledge.

And Now, My Students Object!

Now my students begin to question Iqbal. Here are a few of the objections and replies (not word-for-word, but in words meant to capture the heart of the matter). My replies are, more or less, given on behalf of Iqbal because, today at least, I work for Iqbal – as on another day I work for Aquinas, Confucius, or Nietzsche.

Objection: But scientific knowledge can be subjected to tests, and religious beliefs can’t!

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Says who? I don’t think Iqbal says that. What makes you think there is no such thing as a religious hypothesis that can be tested? For example, you might be able to confirm someone else’s religious experience by having your own religious experience.

Objection: But religion is based on subjective experiences, and science isn’t!

Iqbal International

Iqbal International

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Science relies on the experiences of various individuals. Those experiences are relayed from an individual scientist to everyone else by testimony. In this respect religion is exactly the same as science.

Objection: But religious thought is much harder to verify than scientific theories!

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Maybe so. But so what? Iqbal’s analysis doesn’t depend on the ease of verification, or even the method of verification. Maybe it is harder to test a religious belief. Maybe not. (And maybe it varies by religion, and varies from belief to belief in both religion and science.) Maybe religious belief is less reliable than scientific belief, but that doesn’t affect Iqbal’s analysis either way.

Objection: But science is about matter, and religion and ethics are not. So they aren’t about anything real.

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Are you sure about that? Remember what I told you about Plato and Pythagoras! Since triangles are composed of perfectly straight line segments without width, they can’t be made of matter, and you can’t see them. But you’re pretty sure you know what they are, and since you don’t know what doesn’t exist triangles must exist, and they must be non-physical realities known through the mind rather than through sensory experience.  So maybe non-physical reality is just as real as physical.

Objection: But scientific thought is concrete, and religion is abstract, and concrete reality is so much easier to know.

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Consider the X beliefs. Science depends on knowledge of them. But try explaining how we know them without being abstract. If you’re going to object to abstract knowledge, you’re probably going to have to object to science if you want to be consistent!

Objection: But what about the conflicts between the evidence of religious experience and the scientific evidence?

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: What about the conflicts between scientific evidence and scientific evidence?  These conflicts come up all the time, and scientists manage them on a case-by-case basis, choosing one theory over another based on what evidence is more solid or what interpretation of the evidence is better. There are also conflicts between religious experience and religious experience, and religious believers have to deal with them in the same way. Well, it’s the same with conflicts between religious and sensory experience: If a scientific theory clashes with a religious view, you have to evaluate the experiences and the interpretation of them. In such a conflict, the best combination of solid evidence and good interpretation of the evidence wins! So, you see, this objection counts against science no less than against religion; rather, it counts against neither.

Objection: But moral beliefs are relative because in different cultures people have thought different things about morality.

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Your unstated premise is that whatever different cultures think differently about is not objectively true. Different cultures have thought different things about astronomy. Does that mean that there is no objective truth about whether the earth orbits the sun? If this is a criterion for truth, science is condemned as relative along with religion!

Objection: But scientific knowledge is so much more systematic than morality!

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Not necessarily. You may think this is necessarily so, but you are mistaken. It’s a good thing you’re taking this class, because later we’ll talk about Kant and Aristotle and Mill! Their analysis of morality is more systematic than science!

(By the way, I may have been mistaken in that last point.  Is science, as a whole, less systematic than Aristotle and Mill? Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s definitely less systematic than Kant. Everything is less systematic than Kant.)

I suspect many of my students were all along motivated largely by the tension between evolution and traditional monotheisms — perhaps thinking incorrectly that evolution is a test for rationality. And now, with very little time left before class dismisses at 9:50, one of my students finally asks about evolution directly.

Objection: But what about evolution?????

Reply on behalf of Iqbal: In a clash between scientific and religious beliefs, you evaluate the evidence on which the beliefs are based, and you evaluate the interpretation of the evidence. In this particular case, Iqbal thinks the view that God created the earth in a manner inconsistent with evolution is based on a poor interpretation of the evidence from the Quran, which he happens to read non-literally in this case. So Iqbal is a theistic evolutionist.

And my final remarks, as time in class is running out, are something like this: I’m not saying that religious and scientific knowledge are entirely alike in degree of certainty or in method of verification. I’m not saying they are exactly the same kind or same quality of knowledge. And I’m not saying there aren’t good objections to Iqbal’s view of religious knowledge. But let’s be sure to offer good objections that don’t undermine science while we’re trying to promote it!

James

James

The End of This Essay At Last

Many of these objections were old territory for me, for I long ago put them into the mouth of the Grey Robot.

I do concur with Iqbal in this particular argument – though not necessarily in all the material related to the argument in his very good book.

But my goal was not to convince my students to agree with Iqbal. My main goals were to get them thinking, challenge a presupposition richly deserving to be challenged, and introduce them to a neat philosopher.

This was Intro to Philosophy; I’m sure my upper-level students would have given some better objections if they’d tried. For that matter, some of the lines of thinking in the Intro course, had they pressed on with them, might have led to a serious concern with Iqbal. (And I might well have not had any answers.)

Still, it’s amazing how often poor objections and double standards are used against the rationality or knowability of religious beliefs. Well spoken were those words of William James:

Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

Now, I am gradually working towards devoting all of my Ricochet posts for an extended period of time to the topics of a couple of book projects I’ve been working on. I hope this is one of the very last before I get around to that.  But here it is, whether or not it be one of the last.

And I plan to give you a sequel later, in which I’ll look at one aspect of this matter a bit more systematically.  Specifically: How is religious belief to be verified or falsified?

Author’s notes:

  • Edited since initial posting.  See comment 32 and comment 66, below.
  • The conversation below eventually led to an overview of the philosophy of science and a new presentation of the major issues I discussed with one of my primary interlocutors.  See comment 229, below.
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  1. Ross C Inactive
    Ross C
    @RossC

    Interesting arguments that are appealing because I am a religious believer (confirmation bias).  I do not spend much time trying to reconcile religious belief and scientific knowledge so these are interesting thoughts to consider.

    • #31
  2. Augustine Member
    Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Ball Diamond Ball:

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.:BDB, the key point he’s making is that religion may be a legitimate source of knowledge. Try going with the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief” and see if Iqbal’s argument works better for you. Bet it will.

    Interestingly, I tried substituting “astrological rigor”, “Phlogiston theory”, and “homeopathically sound” with no trouble. My guess is you could substitute “corned beef” without damaging the argument.

    So the proposed counterexample, if I err not, is:

    1. Science is a source of corned beef.

    2. Science depends on experience.

    3. So experience is a source of corned beef.

    4. There is such a thing as religious experience.

    5. So religious experience can also be a source of corned beef.

    Interesting.  I think this sort of counterexample does succeed in exposing (as Claire B. says) the presence of at least one unstated premise in Iqbal’s argument.  (Probably an unstated premise closely related to Tom Meyer’s “After all, all experiences can be sources of knowledge, yes?”)

    Let me try to rework Iqbal’s argument a little more formally.  This might be it:

    1. Science is a source of knowledge.

    2. Science derives its warrant from a combination of experience and reflection on experience.

    3. So experience and reflection on experience is a source of knowledge.

    4. There is such a thing as religious experience that can be reflected on.

    5. So religious experience and reflection can also be a source of knowledge.

    • #32
  3. Augustine Member
    Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Aaron Miller:Generally agreed, but “religion” or “religious knowledge” might not be the best categorization as a counterpart to science. Where would one order the arts and history?

    Important questions.  I’m not going to even try to answer them.  Or some of the other important questions in your comment!  Sorry: I just don’t have much time, and my brain is pretty full already.

    Augustine seems here to equate religion with non-empirical knowledge.

    No.  That seems to be the opposite of Iqbal’s conclusion.

    • #33
  4. Augustine Member
    Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Claire Berlinski does a good job reworking Iqbal’s argument.  It calls attention to the importance of some factor in addition to experience in the definition of knowledge–a factor left unmentioned, as it was in the earlier version of the opening post (and perhaps also in Tom M’s comment 18).

    I’m adding my reworking of the argument from # 32 to the opening post.  I think it’s a better representation of Iqbal’s own thought than Claire’s reworking.  (And it’s a safe working assumption that I botched Iqbal rather than that Iqbal botched his own argument.)

    Thanks to Claire and the critics, including BDB in number 17!

    • #34
  5. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Augustine:

    Larry3435:Auggie, I’ve refuted your argument ad nauseum on other threads, so there is no point in doing so again.

    In fact you have not. (The reader may examine these threads for himself or herself, of course.)

    Now did you mean to say “arguments?” I’ve certainly never given Iqbal’s argument before on any thread.

    I don’t know what Iqbal’s argument may be.  I’ve only read your defense of what you say that argument is.  And that defense as presented in this post is the same thing you have said on many other threads.  Basically, you deny the distinction between (1) objective and verifiable assertions, and (2) subjective assertions.  Then you deny that you are denying that distinction.  Then you deny the distinction again.

    Sometimes, arguments by analogy are slippery.  Sometimes, they are just facially wrong.  Your analogy between the “experience” of conducting empirical, replicable, and verifiable scientific experiments, and the “experience” of religious beliefs, falls in the latter category, sharing nothing in common but your use of the word “experience.”

    • #35
  6. Ball Diamond Ball Member
    Ball Diamond Ball
    @BallDiamondBall

    Y’all have fun with this. I could keep going, but no.

    • #36
  7. Ball Diamond Ball Member
    Ball Diamond Ball
    @BallDiamondBall

    Larry @35 this has been my experience as well. I knew why you said “argument”. It’s the same thing over and over.
    Okay, unfollowing.

    • #37
  8. Augustine Member
    Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Larry3435:

    Augustine:

    Larry3435:Auggie, I’ve refuted your argument ad nauseum on other threads, so there is no point in doing so again.

    In fact you have not. (The reader may examine these threads for himself or herself, of course.)

    Now did you mean to say “arguments?” I’ve certainly never given Iqbal’s argument before on any thread.

    I don’t know what Iqbal’s argument may be. I’ve only read your defense of what you say that argument is. And that defense as presented in this post is the same thing you have said on many other threads.  Basically, you deny the distinction between (1) objective and verifiable assertions, and (2) subjective assertions. Then you deny that you are denying that distinction. Then you deny the distinction again.

    Where on earth you get these misreadings of me continues to be a mystery to me.

    Your analogy between the “experience” of conducting empirical, replicable, and verifiable scientific experiments, and the “experience” of religious beliefs, falls in the latter category, sharing nothing in common but your use of the word “experience.”

    This is simply a failure to notice that there are three aspects of the things compared in Iqbal’s argument: experience, reflection, and knowledge.

    • #38
  9. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Augustine:

    Larry3435:

    Augustine:

    Larry3435:Auggie, I’ve refuted your argument ad nauseum on other threads, so there is no point in doing so again.

    In fact you have not. (The reader may examine these threads for himself or herself, of course.)

    Now did you mean to say “arguments?” I’ve certainly never given Iqbal’s argument before on any thread.

    I don’t know what Iqbal’s argument may be. I’ve only read your defense of what you say that argument is. And that defense as presented in this post is the same thing you have said on many other threads. Basically, you deny the distinction between (1) objective and verifiable assertions, and (2) subjective assertions. Then you deny that you are denying that distinction. Then you deny the distinction again.

    Where on earth you get these misreadings of me continues to be a mystery to me.

    I get them by applying the plain meaning of English words to the things you write.

    • #39
  10. Augustine Member
    Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Larry3435:

    Augustine:

    Larry3435:

    Augustine:

    Larry3435:Auggie, I’ve refuted your argument ad nauseum on other threads, so there is no point in doing so again.

    In fact you have not. (The reader may examine these threads for himself or herself, of course.)

    Now did you mean to say “arguments?” I’ve certainly never given Iqbal’s argument before on any thread.

    I don’t know what Iqbal’s argument may be. I’ve only read your defense of what you say that argument is. And that defense as presented in this post is the same thing you have said on many other threads. Basically, you deny the distinction between (1) objective and verifiable assertions, and (2) subjective assertions. Then you deny that you are denying that distinction. Then you deny the distinction again.

    Where on earth you get these misreadings of me continues to be a mystery to me.

    I get them by applying the plain meaning of English words to the things you write.

    The bolded material above entails that somewhere in the opening post I deny that there is a distinction between assertions which are objective and verifiable and those which are subjective.

    What remarks in the opening post make that denial?

    • #40
  11. Sabrdance Member
    Sabrdance
    @Sabrdance

    Consider Galileo’s experiment of the balls.  He took two balls of the same size, but of different masses, placed them on polished ramps of increasing steepness, and with a mechanical device he released them.  They arrived at the bottom of the ramps at the same time.

    Why?

    Perhaps there was something special about Pisa -would the experiment achieve the same result at sea or in London?

    Perhaps there was something special about the device.  Maybe the polish acted as an accelerator.  Maybe Galileo subtly rigged the device to get the answer he wanted -even unconsciously.  Perhaps over a longer distance or slower speed the outpacing of the lighter ball by the heavier one would be obvious, but over a short distance Galileo’s eye couldn’t see it, and he perceived what he wanted to see.

    But the experiment was well designed, there’s nothing obviously different about the setting of the experiment, or reason to believe the measurements are off.  Additionally, the thought experiment of tying the balls together also indicates that the finding is what it should be.

    We have experience, plus reflection, with gives warrant to the belief -knowledge.  The experiment itself does not prove anything without the theory and the argument.

    Now, why cannot the same analysis be done for, say, a conversion experience, or a ecstatic prayer?  Or a running at a Pentecostal church.  Or something even more basic -consciousness itself?

    • #41
  12. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.:BDB, the key point he’s making is that religion may be a legitimate source of knowledge. Try going with the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief” and see if Iqbal’s argument works better for you. Bet it will.

    I was just going to refer to Plantinga myself, but naturally, you beat me to it.

    I’d also point out (again) the successful (!) formalization of Gödel’s ontological proof of God’s existence. You may not find the proof as a positive result compelling. Neel Krishnaswami doesn’t, and neither do I:

    Overall, the proof system needed for the proof is a fully impredicative second-order classical S5 — a constructivist may find this a harder lift than the existence of God! (Can God create a consistent axiomatic system so powerful She cannot believe it?)

    It’s funny because it’s true. — Homer Simpson

    I’m a Lutheran classical-finitist constructivist, so I find Krishnaswami’s comment hilarious.

    What I think is compelling about the proof is the negative result: it falsifies the claim that belief in God is necessarily irrational, if you accept “irrational” to mean “logically inconsistent.” It’s proven not to be. That doesn’t mean there is no irrational motivation for belief in God, only that rational motivation does, provably, exist.

    • #42
  13. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Merina Smith:Love your conversation. I enjoyed reading James’ Varieties of Religious Experience back in the day and have always thought that science is a less certain field than people think and religion more certain than people think.

    If a “religion” is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. — John Barrow

    • #43
  14. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Larry3435:So I’ll just say this: I experience your argument as false, and since experience is a source of knowledge, I therefore know that your argument is false.

    This is the best demonstration of failing to understand the argument one could hope for.

    • #44
  15. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Ross C:I do not spend much time trying to reconcile religious belief and scientific knowledge so these are interesting thoughts to consider.

    I do, obsessively (I’m the computer scientist/physicist grandson of a Lutheran pastor; it can’t be helped), so feel free to toss any questions my way.

    • #45
  16. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    In case my example of a mother’s love is unclear, my point is that knowledge doesn’t have to be scientifically verifiable or exactly measured in order to be noted with a reasonable degree of objectivity and certainty.

    Even if your mom is the best person in the world, some would probably claim she is unloving. Reasonably certain and objective identification of truth (right knowledge) does not require unanimous agreement. Case in point: hippies abound.

    • #46
  17. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Great Ghost of Gödel:

    Larry3435:So I’ll just say this: I experience your argument as false, and since experience is a source of knowledge, I therefore know that your argument is false.

    This is the best demonstration of failing to understand the argument one could hope for.

    I doubt it.  I’ve always enjoyed the skits of the Firesign Theater.  In one, a character says, “My time machine worked!  I’ve been to ancient Greece.  I’ve brought back proof.  Here, look at this grape!”

    The point is that not all testimonial evidence is equivalent just because it shares the property of being testimonial evidence.  Someone who describes hell to you is not doing the same thing, and is not entitled to the same credence, as someone who describes Detroit to you; even if you have never been to either place, and even if you share my personal prediliction for believing that the differences between the two places are not all that significant.

    • #47
  18. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Aaron Miller:my point is that knowledge doesn’t have to be scientifically verifiable or exactly measured in order to be noted with a reasonable degree of objectivity and certainty.

    What fries my gourd about this whole discussion is the idea that even mathematical or scientific reasoning is consistently verifiable, exactly measured, or deductive. It isn’t. The so-called “hard” sciences strive for reproducibility and exact measurement, but that’s a gold standard that even in the hardest science, physics, is unattainable in practice, witness the controversies in cosmology over inflation theory, holographic universe theory, and even, to some extent, Big Bang criticism, as well as the various and numerous controversies in quantum mechanics, and ultimately, of course, the mutual inconsistency of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the two most successful physical theories in history. Physics is no refuge of the exact and objective—quite the contrary.

    Mathematics is no help either, from the Pythagorean school drowning the discoverer that the square root of 2 is irrational; to Kronecker observing of Cantor’s set theory “Das ist nicht Mathematik; das ist Theologie,” which scarcely needs translation; to Hilbert’s “Taking the Principle of the Excluded Middle from the mathematician … is the same as … prohibiting the boxer the use of his fists” to Bishop’s constructive analysis to smooth infinitesimal analysis to homotopy type theory; mathematics is rife with controversy, politics, and personality cults, right to the foundations.

    People who say scientific knowledge is uniquely privileged don’t understand science.

    • #48
  19. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Larry3435:

    The point is that not all testimonial evidence is equivalent just because it shares the property of being testimonial evidence.

    Augustine explicitly disclaimed this.

    Someone who describes hell to you is not doing the same thing, and is not entitled to the same credence, as someone who describes Detroit to you; even if you have never been to either place, and even if you share my personal prediliction for believing that the differences between the two places are not all that significant.

    No one is claiming otherwise. Hence my claim you haven’t understood the argument, as exemplified by your sentence that I quoted before. Your claim is tantamount to claiming Augustine is claiming religious experience is identical to knowledge, as opposed to a source of knowledge. That is, quite simply, mistaken.

    • #49
  20. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Great Ghost of Gödel:

    Larry3435:

    The point is that not all testimonial evidence is equivalent just because it shares the property of being testimonial evidence.

    Augustine explicitly disclaimed this.

    Someone who describes hell to you is not doing the same thing, and is not entitled to the same credence, as someone who describes Detroit to you; even if you have never been to either place, and even if you share my personal prediliction for believing that the differences between the two places are not all that significant.

    No one is claiming otherwise. Hence my claim you haven’t understood the argument, as exemplified by your sentence that I quoted before. Your claim is tantamount to claiming Augustine is claiming religious experience is identical to knowledge, as opposed to a source of knowledge. That is, quite simply, mistaken.

    Explain it to me then.  What is the claim?  If they are not “identical,” then do they have some common property?  If so, what is that property?  Auggie is drawing some equivalence, some parallel, some analogy between “knowledge” based on empirical experience and “knowledge” based on religious experience.  What is it?

    I say they are fundamentally different.  The type of “experience” that science relies on is based on perception and objective measurement.  The type of “experience” that religion relies on is personal and subjective.  These two forms of “experience” are not even in the same ballpark.  They have nothing in common except the word “experience” being used to describe them.

    • #50
  21. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Auggie makes the following argument to his (possibly Socratic and hypothetical) student:

    Objection: But religion is based on subjective experiences, and science isn’t!

    Reply on behalf of Iqbal: Science relies on the experiences of various individuals. Those experiences are relayed from an individual scientist to everyone else by testimony. In this respect religion is exactly the same as science.

    I say again, not all testimonial evidence is equal.  My example involving hell and Detroit is a precise objection to this statement.  Maybe he’s not saying they’re exactly equal, although it sure sounds that way to me.  But if he’s not, then I ask again:  What similarity is he claiming?

    • #51
  22. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Larry3435:

    The type of “experience” that science relies on is based on perception…

    Yes.

    …and objective measurement.

    No.

    The type of “experience” that religion relies on is personal and subjective.

    No more than whatever the perception science relies on is.

    These two forms of “experience” are not even in the same ballpark. They have nothing in common except the word “experience” being used to describe them.

    False.

    In both cases there is perception, followed by an attempt to systematize the perception by relating it to other perceptions and inferences. The great myth about the hard sciences and mathematics is they’re deductive. They are, like all human knowledge, ultimately inductive. With enough evidence for an inductive conclusion, we adopt a shorthand and call something a “law.” But these “laws” remain, in analytic philosophical parlance, “defeasible,” open to being “overturned” by later experience, as Newton’s mechanics famously was, by special and general relativity, which in turn were “overturned” by quantum mechanics. And again, there’s a lot of overstating of understanding of how this kind of knowledge actually works, up to and including denial induction is even possible, cf. Hume and Popper.

    All Augustine is saying is religious perception induces an inductive reasoning process just as sense perception does, and this inductive reasoning process, while possibly more challenging and leading to more tentative defeasible conclusions than scientific induction, is no different than scientific induction. This is almost trivially true—is trivially true, given an accurate apprehension of scientific reasoning.

    • #52
  23. Jordan Wiegand Inactive
    Jordan Wiegand
    @Jordan

    Larry3435: I say again, not all testimonial evidence is equal.  My example involving hell and Detroit is a precise objection to this statement.  Maybe he’s not saying they’re exactly equal, although it sure sounds that way to me.  But if he’s not, then I ask again:  What similarity is he claiming?

    I’m not sure that’s the issue.

    I think the claim is actually weaker than we might suspect: adjectives modify nouns.  So, for example, the red car and blue car are equally cars, and one car doesn’t have more car-ness than another.

    All evidence is equally evidence, and all knowledge is equally knowledge.  The mechanism by which it is gathered is interesting, but doesn’t make it true or false, or less or more reliable than other forms.

    It just makes it different, and the way in which they differ is really a philosophical and metaphysical conversation.

    Augustine, Philosopher status, confirmed.

    • #53
  24. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Gödel and Jordan,

    With all due respect, poppycock.  If I say that “this table is 32 inches long,” I am saying something qualitatively different than if I say “this table is pretty.”  Gödel, you can say that with more precise tools I might discern that the table is 32.01 inches long, and empirical measurement is less than perfect, but that does not affect the qualitative difference between objective fact and subjective opinion.  Just because neither is perfect does not make them “alike.”

    And Jordan, if you believe that all evidence is equally credible just because it all goes by the name of “evidence,” then I urge you not to set foot in a courtroom in any capacity.

    • #54
  25. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    And by the way, Gödel, if science is not based on objective measurement then someone has wasted a lot of money on a lot of lab equipment, the purpose of which is to perform objective measurements.

    • #55
  26. Jordan Wiegand Inactive
    Jordan Wiegand
    @Jordan

    Larry3435: And Jordan, if you believe that all evidence is equally credible just because it all goes by the name of “evidence,” then I urge you not to set foot in a courtroom in any capacity.

    Not what I said.

    There’s also no need to be rude.

    To follow your example, both are descriptions of the table.  So with respect to both being descriptions of the table, one is a quantitative description, and one is a qualitative description.  They are both equally descriptions.

    The way they relate to one another; that’s philosophy.

    • #56
  27. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Jordan Wiegand:

    Larry3435: And Jordan, if you believe that all evidence is equally credible just because it all goes by the name of “evidence,” then I urge you not to set foot in a courtroom in any capacity.

    Not what I said.

    You said “All evidence is equally evidence, and all knowledge is equally knowledge.  The mechanism by which it is gathered is interesting, but doesn’t make it true or false, or less or more reliable than other forms.”  So I think my description of what you said is accurate.  “Equally credible” is another way of saying “no less or more reliable.”  If there is a meaningful distinction there, you would have to explain it to me.

    As for me, I stand by my position that some evidence is more reliable than other evidence.  Even if we limit ourselves to sensory perception as evidence, my perception that there is a car approaching the intersection is more reliable than someone else’s perception that there is a pink elephant dancing on the ceiling.  You don’t have to believe that, but I’m betting that if you are being honest you will admit that you do.

    • #57
  28. Front Seat Cat Member
    Front Seat Cat
    @FrontSeatCat

    My scientific knowledge doesn’t go much further than when the pot of water is boiling, put in the noodles and they’ll cook…but a born skeptic, has made me curious.  I had a book about an atheist scientist, after decades of study, realized the incredible order the the universe had to have a creator.

    He used the stinkbug as an example – it has something like 24,000 parts and it’s ability to “cause a stink” was profoundly unlikely (not kidding)! He also said the same of the human eye – the thousands of “randomly evolved parts” to just create the ability to see were so astronomically unlikely, it was nearly impossible – and that’s just a small part of a human being.

    Then just when scientists thought the atom was the smallest living thing in the universe, along comes quantum physics and sub-atomic particles – they kept peeling back the onion til nothing was left, or so they thought…what was left was an energy pattern with order – there’s that darn word again.

    NASA is constantly posting stories where they see things in the universe that elicit “that’s impossible! – that’s backwards!” God has a great sense of humor!

    http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/12/05/the-illusion-of-matter-our-physical-material-world-isnt-really-physical-at-all/

    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/dark-matter-core.html

    This is an interesting story:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsbj7EN1Uzs

    Life’s a journey!

    • #58
  29. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Larry3435:With all due respect, poppycock. If I say that “this table is 32 inches long,” I am saying something qualitatively different than if I say “this table is pretty.”

    Again, no one has even hinted otherwise.

    Gödel, you can say that with more precise tools I might discern that the table is 32.01 inches long, and empirical measurement is less than perfect, but that does not affect the qualitative difference between objective fact and subjective opinion. Just because neither is perfect does not make them “alike.”

    You’re being obtuse, deliberately or otherwise. The technical point is that humanity has to come to some form of consensus on how to measure things, units, and even how to interpret the results. Your example of measuring a table is naïve, because it makes a pile of unstated assumptions, e.g. being in a Euclidean space, the measurer and table sharing a frame of reference, etc. In actual science, vs. bad armchair philosophy, measurement is one of the most contentious problems there is!

    So the fact remains that perception is perception; induction is induction; and different inductive reasoning processes are the same qua process, but pose different challenges and levels of warrant for their conclusions—precisely as Augustine said.

    • #59
  30. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Great Ghost of Gödel:

    Your example of measuring a table is naïve, because it makes a pile of unstated assumptions, e.g. being in a Euclidean space, the measurer and table sharing a frame of reference, etc.

    Putting this slightly differently: “measuring the table” is itself an inductive process that benefits from the 2,300 years since Euclid laid out plane geometry and is based on defeasible assumptions about the table; the space the table is in; the relative motion of the table, room, and measurer…

    Like many (most?) defeasible inferences, these are usually sound. But not always.

    • #60
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