CaliforniaKid wrote:Cogs,
How would you respond to this?
Hey Kevin,
While the rules of logic and the scientific method are part of what I'm talking about, I'm also talking about things like publication, peer review, and academic consensus. The academic community gives kudos to anyone who can deconstruct a scientist's argument. So while a scientist may arrogantly think he's doing objective, pure science, the community acts as a control, thereby sifting out distortions caused by his biases. It's definitely not a perfect system, as Kuhn demonstrated, but like Kuhn I think that in the long run it works.
As far as logic is concerned, it was the opinion (if I'm not mistaken) of Isaac Watts that logic is more a descriptive than a prescriptive discipline. It is our way of systematizing something that we already know and do instinctively. All our reasoning, really, is done in syllogisms. One needn't know what a syllogism is in order to employ it. It's true that a Cartesian skeptic might ask why we should accept this instinctive syllogistic way of knowing. I think the only answer we can give is that it seems to work, and we couldn't escape it even if it didn't. Like I said, it's instinct.
In my opinion, our syllogistic way of reasoning evolved over time-- just like consciousness and opposable thumbs-- precisely because it works. It allowed human beings to interact with and make sense of their world and, thereby, to increase its favorability for survival. Arguably, the scientific community has "evolved" for much the same reason. The emergence of academic rules and structures and ways of knowing in Europe gave the Europeans a technological advantage that enhanced their survival. The academic way of knowing has been adopted by most other cultures because they need to be able to compete. The academy is simply nature's latest innovation. So while I admit that it's hardly perfect, I think that the fact that it seems to work (broadly speaking) is reason enough not to plunge into the postmodern depths.
The religious way of knowing is a much more complicated situation. Because while a certain degree of spirituality and/or need to find meaning does appear to be instinctive (though hardly as ingrained as the syllogism), there really isn't a single religious way of knowing. No religious way of knowing has particularly gained ascendancy over the others, because no religious way of knowing allows us to make sense of the world in the kinds of survival-enhancing ways that the academic community does. Aspects of certain belief systems may ultimately enhance survival-- like for example the Catholics' rule against birth control and the Muslims' willingness to use violence-- but even if one religion were eventually to gain ascendancy I don't think that would demonstrate its superiority as a way of knowing in the same way that the academic community's has. The academic community has produced consistent, repeatable, useful results. The products of the various religious ways of knowing are a mixed bag, to say the least. They have been inconsistent and often even contradictory, and their validity is much more difficult to evaluate than in the case of science. I can boot up my computer and watch a movie in order to see the validity of science in action. But how do I test the validity of original sin or monotheism?
I hope that helps put words to why I think the logical and scientific ways of knowing are generally better and more reliable than religious ones. Best,
-Chris
Well, quite interesting. I think the evolutionary speculations are facile and quite strained, however, and add nothing to the argument for the reason that, to me, this is a textbook example of the extension of Darwinian concepts from the mechanics of phylogenetic development into areas in which evolutionary theory begins making great bounding leaps into regions where its explanatory power evaporates and is taken over by a scientisitic exercise in pseudo teleology, or, the attempt to use evolutionary theory to explain what existence
means, as opposed to being content in explaining its presence, in a strictly cause and effect, mechanical sense.
The explanation regarding the purpose or function of religious knowing really isn't relevant to a Gospel understanding of reality because revelation and spiritual perception and knowledge are relative to the perfection and development of the human species in a spiritual, moral, and intellectual sense, not about his survival. Indeed, our biological survival is irrelevant to our spiritual development. Hence, ancient faithful Christians were terrified of the pains they would suffer being thrown to the Lions, but had no fear of the death that would result, as that has no bearing on our ultimate spiritual development.
This would also be true of non-LDS and certain non-Christian religions as well, to the degree they have truth or have, through various techniques, transcended some aspects of normative waking consciousness or experience. Biology is a given fact. It is the
evolution of consciousness that is the question for religion, not the survival value of religious belief. The inherent circularity and empirical nebulousness of evolutionary theory when it extends itself into this kind of explanatory exercise virtually guarantees that some reductionistic model of the biological necessity of religion and its evolutionary trajectory will be found.
Evolutionary theory
explains everything, which is why Popper questioned whether evolutionary theory was really a scientific theory at all (though he did not call into question its basic explanatory power within the realm in which it actually has that power), and is one of its primary weaknesses as a theory, at least when it gets out of its collar and runs amok.
That which explains everything, explains, of course, nothing.
