The Bible; Divinely Inspired?

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And without experience by way of our natural senses we would not know a single physical law. Nothing exists in the mind prior to sensory input. Physics is rooted in experience. We can get beyond our personal experience, but first we have to have personal experience of the world. That is where science starts. If we had no senses we would have no science.

ruveyn

I agree.

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Biblical Inspiration: IRRELEVANT?

Last edited by Clarifier on 23 Jan 2009, 8:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Philosophy shall follow science and not the other way around. If something is measurable and it contradicts philosophy, than the philosophy is wrong ("ill-founded"), never the other way around.

There is no hind that anger is something more than a complex interaction of neutrons in our brain, those neurons follow the same physical law like any other mater in the universe, therefore it is the same thing.



Everything which exists is measurable, otherwise we could not gain any knowledge about such a think. Therefore nothing can exist outside the material world and therefore it also can not have "truths".

science is a man-made construct designed to explain phenomena around us. the phenomena is not fallible, the explanation is fallible. The error always lies in the interpretation (or occasionally the experimentation) and not in the facts.

Humans are fallible, humans designed science, science is fallible.

You need to have a very concrete understanding of exactly what science is in order to understand that.

science is not what we are trying to explain. Science is not the phenomena, science is not the universe, and science is not the facts.

Science is the experiments, the interpretation, the extrapolation, the explanation, the inference.

And religion is baseless hypothesis.

That's the point: Regardless of all weaknesses of the scientific method, it is the only method we have to gain knowledge.

I wasn't talking about religion. It was an odd comment. Like you have a hard time accepting the fallibility of science so you have to lash out at some other belief so you feel more justified in believing what you do. I could be wrong about that, it is just an odd pattern of human behavior... you could have a completely different reason for the comment you made.

I have no problem with science, I like it, I study it, I almost majored in it. I still will major in it. I don't even have a problem with science being fallible. Everything humanity know is fallible. Even math. I just don't like the assumption that science is infallible. Or the confusion between human perception and interpretation and facts. I find that it leads science down a problematic path (dogmatic) and I like science too much to see is become dogmatic.

One, no, philosophy shall not follow science, they answer different questions, so either statement is completely absurd. Second, we haven't brought up a single philosophical contradiction with science, a distinction between phenomenal anger and biological process has nothing to do with science, but rather is an ontological problem owing to the nature of experience, experience being something that is only known first-person and thus immeasurable by science.


Well, we do not feel complex interactions of neutrons in anything else, but we know anger from a first-person perspective. That shows that it must be something more than just neurons and neutrons, but it does not say what exactly it is. The following of physical laws does not prevent a statement that there is a category of mental facts.


Logic isn't measurable, we do not have units of logic. The best we can do is provide a binary measure of logical validity or perhaps some in-depth criticism, but logic still has some level of existence despite the fact that it does not appear to be material. I mean, do you have a materialist theory of logic, that shows it both to be both valid and only material? After all, it really seems that when we refer to logic, we are referring to something human-independent, abstract(can be read as non-material), but also valid.

Which is why of course, math uses the scientific method. And of course, you know that the scientific method is the only method to gain knowledge because you used the scientific method to discover itself. And of course, the proper actions of scientific methodology are never questioned by philosophers of science.

Your statement seems false, and at worst could be taken as self-refuting.

But physical laws are not.

Convergence achieved.

Physical laws are man-made descriptions of the world. The world is independent of us. The laws we posit to describe the world are artifacts.

The chances of us ever getting to Rock Bottom Reality are virtually nil. With out best machines we are 15 orders of magnitude removed from Planck Length. Which means at best we have a foggy incomplete notion of how the world really works.

Science is empirically supported guesswork. Our best theories are NEVER proven. They are only tested and some have been falsified.

ruveyn

Convergence lost.

Never mind...

No: A lot of the philosophy is based on the reaction to scientific knowledge. The epistemology of Immanuel Kant, as a very strong example, is a direct reaction to Newton's physic.

Sir Frances Bacon correctly stated "there are Idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies" (Novum Organum, XLIV). He further says, also correctly, that those "idols" "all of which must be renounced and put away with a fixed and solemn determination, and the understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed; the entrance into the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences" (dito, LXVIII).



To declare such a "distinction between phenomenal anger and biological process" declare that some exist outside the biological process. If this statement is made, the next question must be, how this could be measured? How this could be qualified and quantified? A first hand experience of anger is also just a process of our neuron activity? So what shall be so special on this?



The instrument of measuring anger first-hand are our neurons, when other parts of the brains are recognizing that something is going on. There no need to introduce something outside the material world to explain this.



The success of logic is measurable. If a e.g. the constructor of bridge made a wrong logic reason the result is well measurable, it even give a headline in the newspaper.



The logic of our brain has an clear material basis, like the logic of a computer chip - the brain is just more complex. Our logic is based on the rules of physics. when our brain says that a issue could be either true or false it based on material structure of our brains that one protein can connect to an other - or even not.

Kant's -Critique of Pure Reason- was a reaction to the skepticism of David Hume. The only way Kant could dodge Hume was to invent the bogus notion of the synthetic a priori judgment guaranteed to be true. There is no such thing. All sure fire true things are analytic tautologies. Any statement with real world meaning is not guaranteed to be true. Synthetic judgments are provisional and subject to revision.

Kant's assertion that the laws (or axioms) of Newtonian physics are synthetic a priori judgments is just plain wrong. Similarly Kant's assertion that the axioms of Euclidean Geometry are true a prior synthetic judgments is also wrong. We know this since there are consistent non-Euclidean geometries.

In a word, Kant's approach has been thoroughly falsified.

ruveyn

Of course science is not infallible, in this instance science is being held up as infallible in a religious debate as if that disproves scientific thoughts on religion. Unlike the god hypothesis which never holds itself to account, science must continually strive to disprove itself to attain the truth