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To: tortoise
I can't really know that I saw or experienced what I thought I saw.

Ah...here's the problem. You can't trust your own senses. IOW you have no facility for Reason. If you can't trust your eyes, how can you trust your ears when you hear the answer from the scientist?

Let's say you have cancer. You pray to God and the cancer goes away. The doctors don't know what happened. Let's say I have cancer. I get a new scientific treatment and I pray to God. The cancer goes away. How would "Reason" handle this situation? My guess is that "Reason" would accept the first as a mystery and the second as a result of science because "Reason" has faith in science.

143 posted on 10/27/2002 5:28:57 AM PST by AppyPappy
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To: AppyPappy
You can't trust your own senses. IOW you have no facility for Reason. If you can't trust your eyes, how can you trust your ears when you hear the answer from the scientist?

That sums it up pretty well; scientists are as fallible as the next guy. "Trust but verify". That's why scientists are ignored unless they can give a methodology that allows you to achieve whatever it is they achieved on your own. In science, you don't even begin to believe an assertion by a scientist until a number of other reasonably qualified people have performed the experiment independently and verified the substance of the assertion. This is among the primary reasons that you can't really prove anything in science in a rigorous sense.

However, we do have faculties for reason inasmuch as we have faculties for mathematics. Unlike science, mathematics is observer independent (both inside AND outside our universe, as it happens). Therefore, we can use mathematics to evaluate science and can know the evaluation is correct even if we can't prove the science itself. You end up with the case where mathematics can tell you whether or not a belief is rational and reasonable, but it can't tell you anything as to whether or not a belief is actually true or based in reality. For better or worse, since we can't trust our senses, the only metric we have to evaluate them in a rigorous sense is a determination of rationality. And even that's not fool proof for most people, as it is possible to construct an internally self-rational world view that does not necessarily have any basis in reality, though this actually results from uneven application of rationality analysis. Most people regularly engage in only limited rationality analysis of their own beliefs, and therefore live inside a superficially consistent, but invalid, world view (see: "liberals").

148 posted on 10/27/2002 8:50:13 AM PST by tortoise
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