Posted on 04/06/2005 11:36:46 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
Freepers began a most engaging dialogue at the end of another thread! It is not only a fascinating subject - it also presents us with an opportunity to clarify ourselves and hopefully help us appreciate our differences and thus relieve some of the contention on various threads (most especially science and philosophy threads).
The subject is knowledge - which, as it turns out, means different things to different people. Moreover, we each have our own style of classifying “knowledge” – and valuing the certainty of that “knowledge”. Those differences account for much of the differences in our views on all kinds of topics – and the contentiousness which may derive from them.
Below are examples. First is PatrickHenry’s offering of his classification and valuation followed by mine – so that the correspondents here can see the difference. Below mine is js1138’s offering.
Please review these and let us know how you classify and value “knowledge”! We’d appreciate very much your following the same format so it’ll be easier for us to make comparisons and understand differences.
PatrickHenry’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties:
1. Revelation: Spiritual understanding divinely communicated.
Alamo-Girl’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties:
js1138’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties
2. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week.
3. Conclusion from evidence: I conclude from the verifiable evidence that ...
4. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet.
5. Acceptance of another's opinion: I provisionally accept the opinion of X (an individual or group) as knowledge because (a) I haven't worked it out for myself; and (b) I have what I regard as good reason for confidence in X.
6. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning.
7. Internal emotional state: I feel I'm happy, or I have empathy, compassion or sympathy for you.
Separate List for theological knowledge:
2. Faith: Belief in a revelation experienced by another.
2. Theological knowledge, indirect revelation: I believe in a revelation experienced by another, i.e. Scripture is confirmed to me by the indwelling Spirit.
4. Evidence/Historical fact, uninterpreted: I have verifiable evidence Reagan was once President.
5. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet.
6. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning.
7. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week.
8. Trust in a Mentor: I trust this particular person to always tell me the truth, therefore I know …
9. Internal emotional state: I feel I'm happy, or I have empathy, compassion or sympathy for you.
10. Evidence/Historical fact, interpreted: I conclude from the fossil evidence in the geologic record that …
11. Determined facts: I accept this as fact because of a consensus or veto determination by others, i.e. I trust that these experts or fact finders know what they are talking about.
12. Imaginings: I imagine how things ought to have been in the Schiavo case.
2. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet. I am aware that this has limitations, but what choices do I have? I learn the limitations and live with them.
3. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning. Same limitations apply, except that they are more frequent and serious.
4. Logical conclusion: I can prove the Pythagorean theorem is valid and true. The trueness may be unassailable, but the conclusions of axiomatic reasoning are only as true as the axioms, which may be arbitrary. Outside of pure logic and pure mathematics, axiomatic reasoning drops quickly in my estimation of usefulness. People who argue politics and religion from a "rational" perspective are low on my list of useful sources.
5. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week. I am not aware of any scientific theory that I understand which has failed in a major way. Some theories, of course, make sharper predictions than others. Eclipses are pretty certain.
6. Conclusion from evidence: I conclude from the verifiable evidence that ... Oddly enough, "facts" are less certain in my view than theories.
7. Acceptance of another's opinion: I provisionally accept the opinion of X (an individual or group) as knowledge because (a) I haven't worked it out for myself; and (b) I have what I regard as good reason for confidence in X.
It does speak well of Christianity, however, that it coexists with a science-oriented society. There are certainly tensions, as the evolution threads will demonstrate, but it's a whole lot better environment for science than Islam.
Agree. Science is Aristotle. The unique contribution of the Christian church is that the church was open enough to thought and debate to produce thinkers who liked Aristotle, assimilated him, and went on. This says more about the CONFIDENCE LEVEL of the church than anything else, as opposed to, say, Islam. And this confidence level rises and falls along with her closeness to Jesus, who eschewed all coercion in the certainty He was living the truth and that truth, lived, will conquer all hostile thought.
The caricature of the entire church as a closed society, squashing all dissension, is largely a modern fiction.
This is not to defend the Galileo moments, of course. As the church's SPIRITUAL VITALITY diminishes she becomes INTELLECTUALLY oppressive, much like a short man bullies.
So science is Aristotle's brain, flourishing in the freedom that the Gospel engenders.
That they are moving at all means that relativistic effects are present.
That they exist at all means that quantum mechanical effects are present.
Just because the effects are vanishingly small to your limited perception, and are small enough to be irrelevant to the outcome, doesn't mean they're not there.
I would appreciate seeing your list of knowledge and how you value their certainty.
Quantum mechanics and relativity do describe what happens at the intersection of Ford and Buick. The reason we don't use them to explain the collision is because they provide far more detail than is necessary for a sufficiently approximate explaination; Newtonian physics is enough.
Kinda like asking "what did you do today": I'm content with an answer of "got up, went to work, wrote some documentation", a detailed "first I opened my eyelids, then rolled right, then lifted the blanket, then ..." does indeed answer the question but goes far beyond what we find useful, and answering "the following sequence of neuro-chemical reactions caused my eyelid to open..." takes the answer into a whole different realm of understanding, totally obfuscating the answer originally sought.
Physics, via quantum mechanics and relativity, is attempting to somehow determine the ultimate answer to "what happened and how", pushing toward the supposed Grand Unified Theory - which will be fascinating and (presumably) correct, but using it to explain the Ford and Buick collision is unnecessarily detailed ... but that doesn't mean that the rediculously detailed explaination isn't true.
Simply magnificent, chronic_loser! Thank you so much for this beautiful essay/post. And thanks, Alamo-Girl, for bringing it to my attention.
If anything, "(1) and (2) [faith and revelation]" were obstacles to real learning for millennia (just as they continue to be in the Muslim world to this day). Furthermore, faith and evelation" led primarily not to "confidence" in the reliability of "the first 7"This is yet another reason to segregate the different categories of knowledge. To me, they speak of different matters, and thus there should be no conflicts. It's because they're too often mixed together that conflicts result.
A few miles north of here, there's a squalid place called the Sinbad Motel. It's always been a favorite landmark of mine.
LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!
Dear Ich, you demonstrate to all of us why it is truly said that the last "respectable" form of bigotry in anti-Christian bigotry. Personally, I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
To the contrary, I assert that Spiritual understanding overarches everything to believers and thus trumps all other forms of knowledge.
However, as betty boop says, God is author of both revelations: Scriptures and Nature - and therefore, we believers expect them to agree. I have personally never been disappointed.
Nevertheless, when a believer is unable to reconcile between the revelations he must conclude that either he does not yet understand Scripture or he does not yet understand Nature (or perhaps both). But, in the end, a believer will always defer to God. After all, there is no scientific argument against the notion that God created "all that there is" five minutes ago.
In sum, my worldview as a sample Christian is that "all that there is" is God's will and is unknowable in its fulness, that the physical realm is a manifestation of that reality. Hence, I am also Platonist concerning math and physics - that universals, including mathematical structures, exist 'beyond' space/time. For me, it is elegant and peaceful that all other "types" of "knowledge" fit neatly within that context.
And, btw, the radical Platonist theory (Level IV) of Max Tegmark's is the only closed cosmology known to me.
I don't disagree.
Here's the problem.
My original comment was on Einsteinian Relativity and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in that wreck.
Now, as to Einsteinian Relativity in a second, as to whether it REALLY has any effect on the crash, or whether we are so far down the curve towards the asymptote of zero that it doesn't, really, and only does mathematically. Certainly mathematically there is an effect, but math is a model. Just because the math curve doesn't hit zero doesn't mean that the real world effect isn't zero. This question is one for empirical science to try and determine.
So long as the mathematical effect is so small that it's orders of magnitude below anything we can detect empirically, it's speculative. Rational, logical, but speculative.
The problem with the Quantum Physics bit is that I wasn't commenting on Quantum Physics as a whole. I referred only to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is a special subset of the whole grand edifice.
My point was not that quantum physics have no effect. I didn't comment there at all. My point was to keep the effects of things bounded by what they apply to. When two cars come into an intersection at constant bearing, decreasing range, they are going to collide with each other. Quantum mechanics may indeed give us some level of detail down at the asymptotes which may (or may not) be meaningful, but grosso modo, Heisenbergian uncertainty has no more to do with the outcome of that collision than nuclear fusion on the Sun does.
That was really my point: that our spheres of knowledge are bounded, and we can get into pretty interesting and pretty wrong beliefs when we start looking at graphs of outcomes that show asymptotes, and then extrapolate from the fact that it doesn't quite reach zero that "everything is possible". Empirically, everything is NOT possible. That our math doesn't quite get to zero does not mean that the observed world is wrong and the math is right. It means that the math is a model, and when you get way out on the fringes of things, the model starts to talk about things that the eyes don't see, and won't see.
Somehow this got turned into a discussion of quantum physics, by a grand conflation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Mechnics as a whole discipline.
But I wasn't the one who did that.
Really my point was much more precise, limited, and intended to be humorous.
Your mitocondria provide the fuel you use to keep pumping along, and they have their own independent DNA. Is it you taking your mitocondria out for dinner, or the other way around?
The problem with science and the Greeks and Romans is that they didn't like to get their hands dirty and their idea, expressed to varying degrees, that matter was itself somehow tainted. Both the Greeks and the Romans had significant technological innovations which remained basically stillborn until about 1000AD. It took the Judeo/Christian view that both matter and physical labor were good because God had made the world and had pronounced the results "good" together with the monastic tradition of physical labor and intellectual pursuits to provide the context within which modern science and technology truly took off. The next big impetus came with the Reformation. Northern Europe was freed further from the Roman and Greek attitudes toward work and physical labor entrenched in the Catholic church/Roman society and had a significantly greater track record of both scientific and technological development.
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