Platt: >> What did you mean by "I place great faith in Beauty." > > [Platt] > That Beauty is a meter of Truth, Rightness and Goodness.
Steve: I'm not sure what you mean by "faith" here. >> Steve: >> But all belief is by definition a matter of intellectual quality. > [Platt] > > I disagree with your belief that "all belief is by definition a > matter of > intellectual quality." Many beliefs are held in common and thus > qualify as > social level phenomena. Steve: I see this as a huge misunderstanding of the intellectual level and types of patterns of value in general. When a pattern of thought becomes prevalent, it doesn't morph into a social pattern. It's still a pattern of thought. Steve and Platt, I ran across this thread on a science forum, I think it addresses the Topic rather well.The following is by physbrain at http://forums.seds.org/archive/index.php/t-386.html Now, on its surface, a comment like "I have faith in science (and/or the scientific method)" would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Faith is typically reserved for describing one's beliefs in things, concepts, or ideals that cannot be objectively experienced or proven. However, from an epistmological perspective, both religion and science are belief systems. The only significant difference is how we have come to obtain the knowledge in each. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the two are not mutually exclusive, and when viewed with the proper perspective, they are actually complimentary. Religious faith is typically placed in some underlying assumptions about our own existence, meaning and purpose. Scientific faith is based in the belief, or assumption, that given enough time and careful consideration of the right questions, there is no (physical) phenomenon in the universe that cannot be understood. Disagreement usually occurs over things in which the two overlap, or one or the other tries to make predictions or judgements about things that they should probably not be offering opinions. That being said, scientists are quite dependent upon the scientific method as a means of acquiring new knowledge. We implicitly accept the fundamental requirement that theories should be experimentally verifiable and experimental results should be reproducable. This is the primary criteria which we use to judge the value of newly proposed ideas. It helps us to distinguish good science from bad and sound theoretical advances from crackpot theories. So, when I say "... I have alot of faith in the way the scientific community arrives at a widely accepted theoretical hypothesis.", I mean that I will accept certain theories as more or less true, or at the very least the most accurate articulation of those ideas to date. Despite not having any direct experience with the observations or derivations used to arrive at their conclusions, I will accept them because believe that there are people out there who will validate the work of their peers before endorsing their theories and widely publicizing them. This is the way it must be. Scientists have always "stood on the shoulders of giants". They accept the current theories about the universe as essentially true so that they can go on and discover new things. The only time one really need to question, and perhaps experimentally verify, those presumptions are when one encounters something that cannot be completely explained with the existing models. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
