I think that fundamentalists and
atheistic scientists have the same problem
The fundamentalists, so we could say the Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. make the proposition that
biblical stories, we'll call them mythological stories, are literal representations of the truth. But, and
That might be true depending on what you mean by literal
But what they mean by literal or what they attempt to make literal mean is that they're in the same category of scientific facts
because they don't have
the idea that
There are different ways of approaching truth, and that truths can serve different purposes. They don't have a sense that
Your definition of truth is actually something like a tool rather than an ontological
Statement about the reality of the world and so that the fundamentalists basically
Make the proposition that the idea that God created the world in six days, five thousand years ago is
literally true
And they get the five thousand year
estimate by the way by
Going through the genealogies in the old testament and adding up the hypothetical ages and figuring out you know how long before moses
Adam lived and some bishop did that back and I think it was in the mid 1800s
I might be wrong about that
but it was somewhere back about that time and
More or less that's being accepted as canonical fact ever since and then the scientists say well. Yeah, those are empirical truths
They're just wrong see then. That's the only difference there is between the fundamentalist and the atheist scientist the fundamentalist say those are fundamental
Scientific truths, and they're right and the scientists say well, they're scientific truths. They just happen to be wrong well I
Think that's a stupid argument personally. I mean for a bunch of reasons one is that
The people who wrote the the ancient stories that we have access to were in no way shape or form
scientists
You know modern people tend to think that you think like a scientist?
And people have always thought that way first of all you do not think like a scientist even scientists hardly even think like scientists
But if you're not scientifically trained you don't think like a scientist at all so one of the things for example
That characterizes your thinking is confirmation bias
And so if you have a theory what you do is wander around in the world looking for reasons
Why it's true and the scientist does exactly the opposite of that in
The Little Tiny narrow domain where he or she is?
Actually capable of being a scientist and what they have is a theory and look for a way to prove it wrong
But believe me you don't run around doing that. I mean you you can train yourself
So now and then you can do that
You know you can learn to listen to people for example on the off chance that you might be wrong
But that is by no means a natural way of thinking and of course
the the the fundamental philosophical
axioms of the scientific method
Weren't developed until descartes and bacon and who else decart bacon
Is one more?
Anyways the name escapes me at the moment, but you can argue about when science emerged, but you you it certainly emerged in its
articulated form within the last thousand years
I think you could say even more specifically that it emerged in the last
Five hundred years now you might argue with that and say well, what about the greeks and other people who were?
Fairly technologically sophisticated or who invented geometry or that kind of thing, but yeah? Yeah?
Bare precursors to the idea of Empirical Observation. Aristotle for example,
When he was writing down his knowledge of the world it never occurred to him to actually go out in the world and look at
It to see if what he assumed about it was true, and it certainly never occurred to aristotle
To get twenty people to go look at the same thing independently
Write down exactly how they went about doing it compare the records and then extract out what was common, I mean that's a
That seems self-evident to us to some degree
But you know it was by no means self-evident to anyone five hundred years ago, and people still don't do it
so
It's not even it's not plausible
If you know anything about the history of ideas, it's not plausible to posit that
Stories about the nature of reality that existed before five hundred years ago were scientific in any but the most cursory of ways
So why we out of that argument continually is somewhat Beyond me
Part of the reason is though that
everyone
fundamentalists included
Really believe in scientific facts even though they hate it
They'll use computers
they'll fly computers won't work wouldn't work unless quantum mechanics were correct like the fact that you use a
High-Tech device
Indicates through your action that you actually accept the theories upon, which it's predicated right same as fly
Same as anything you do in it's complex technological society you're stuck with it
You're reading by the lights do they work yeah, they work well
So it's really hard for people who are trying to hold on to a way of looking at the world
That appears to contradict the scientific
Claims when everything they do is predicated on their acceptance of the validity of the scientific claims
It's really problematic for people. It's problematic in a real way. I think because
One of the problems with the scientific Viewpoint if it doesn't tell you anything about what you should do with your life
It doesn't does it solve the problem of value at all in fact it might make it more difficult because one of the fundamental
Scientific claims Roughly speaking is that every fact is of an equal utility at least from a scientific perspective, right?
There's no hierarchy of fact. It's not exactly it's not exactly true because you can think of one theory is more
True than another but that boils down to saying that it's more useful than another so I don't think that that's a really good exception
Okay, so fine
You've got the scientific atheists on one end
and you got the religious fundamentalists on the other and what they both agree on whether they like it or not is that
There's so much power in the scientific method that it's difficult to dispute the validity of Scientific fact and they seem to exist in
contradiction to
the older
Archaic stories if you also accept them as fast fact-based accounts
So what do we do about that?
Well if you're on the scientific atheist end of things you say well those old stories are just superstitious science second-rate
Barbaric Archaic forms of science you just dispense with them. They're nothing but trouble
The fundamental aside you say well, we'll try to shoehorn science into this framework and really that doesn't work very well
it doesn't work very well with the claims of evolution for example fact it works very badly, and that's a problem because
Evolutionary Theory is like
it's a killer theory that's really it's
it's really really hard and like it's not a complete theory and there's lots of things we don't know about evolution but
you know
you
Trying to hand-wave that away. That's that's not going to work without dispensing with most of biology, so
so that's a big problem, so
Here's another way of thinking about it
You don't just need one way of looking at the world
Maybe you need two ways of looking at the world, and I'm not exactly sure how they should be
Related to one another like which should take precedence under which circumstance, but one problem is what's the world made of?
you know what's the world conceptualize as an objective place made of
another is how should you conduct yourself while you're alive and
There's no reason to assume that those questions can be answered
using the same approach I
mean
Physics has its methods and chemistry has its methods and biology has its methods so a method for obtaining
the truth can be bound to a domain
So why would we necessarily assume that you could use the same set of tools to
Represent the world as a place of objects and to represent it as a place in which a biological creature would act
in any ways I'm suggesting that we
That we don't view it that way that we have two different Viewpoints
Maybe they can be brought together although
It's not obvious how but that it's not a tenable solution to get rid of one in
favor of the other and I think the reason for that is that
You need to know how to conduct yourself in the world you have to have a value system
You can't even look at the damn world without a value system
It's not possible your emotional health is depending on a value system
The way you interact with other people is dependent on a value system. There's no getting away from it and you
Say well
There's no justification for any value system from a scientific perspective
You draw that conclusion that no value system is valid where the hell does that leave you there's no down
There's no up. There's no rationale for moving in any Direction
There's not even really any rationale for living and so people say say things like that
Well, why why the hell should I care what happens in a million years? Who's going to know the difference? It's like yeah
Yeah, true stupid, but true and the reason I think it's stupid is because it's just a game
You know I can take anything of any sort and find a context in which it's irrelevant
It's just a rational games like
Who cares of a hundred children freeze to death in a blizzard whoo?
What difference is going to make a billion years well?
What do you say to someone who says that you say well seems like the wrong frame of reference Bucko?
That's what it looks like to me you know because at some point you question the damn frame of reference
Not what you derive from it, and it certainly seems to me that situations like that
Don't allow you to use that kind of frame of reference
There's something inhumane about it
And that trumps the logic or at least it should and if it doesn't then all hell breaks loose
And that doesn't seem to be a good thing