On 10/16/2018 1:00 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Monday, October 15, 2018 at 8:50:57 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
The "separation" of science from religion was the invention of
science as a way of knowing what was fact and what was
superstition. Science was testing beliefs and holding them only
provisionally.
Brent
They had myths. We have models.
"As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of
science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the
light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported
into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition
in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable,
epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my
part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in
Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe
otherwise. *But in point of epistemological footing the physical
objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts
of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.* The myth of
physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has
proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a
manageable structure into the flux of experience."
-- Willard Van Orman Quine
"It's models almost all the way up and all the way down."
-- Ronald Giere
That misses the point. Of course religions and science have models.
The difference is that science test the models. Science isn't a body of
beliefs, it's an attitude.
Brent
Science has questions that may never be answered. Religion has answers
that may never be questioned.
--- Bob Zanelli
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