Replies

Where science is used to promote a political, religious, or moneyed agenda I would have to agree, but it has always been that way. Many people would rather die than change their opinion.

It is certainly true (based on my observation) that "many people would rather die than change their opinion." Somehow I believe that you do not fit that category. I do have reason to believe that you care about Truth. Call it basic intuition....

LeGrande, what of the case when "many people" are attempting to use science as a means either of (1) supposedly disproving the existence of God; or (2), in grudging acknowledgement that that is an exercise in futility, then settling for "second-best": supposedly proving that God is entirely irrelevant to anything pertaining to the natural world?

Boiling it all down, where do we humans get the universal idea of Truth from in the first place, if there is no universal standard by which it can be (1) identified (perceived); (2) known; and (3) relied on? [Check out the seeming paradox implicit in that statement.]

There is nothing in the natural world that is "universal enuf" to serve as a ground for Truth, to provide an ultimate criterion on which logic could be constructed. So to speak. Everything "here" — i.e., within the range of direct human experience — is finite; i.e., "in time." Yet universality has the essential quality or property of timelessness. The quality of universality is what makes a law of Nature a LAW....

I do believe that is the very insight at the heart of Descartes' observation that the idea of God is the necessary foundation of every other idea we have or could ever have, including the idea of the personal self, or (as he put it) the ego.

Jeepers, contemporary science's apparent monomania on this issue appears to me to utterly "queer the deal" when it comes to the quest, the search for Truth.

JMHO (resting on many great ones), FWIW.

LeGrande, what of the case when "many people" are attempting to use science as a means either of (1) supposedly disproving the existence of God; or (2), in grudging acknowledgement that that is an exercise in futility, then settling for "second-best": supposedly proving that God is entirely irrelevant to anything pertaining to the natural world?

Not to belabor the point, but science can't prove anything. Science is based on falsification, and what isn't falsified isn't proven, it remains a theory.

There may not be a 'Universal Truth' we have no guarantees that our quest is achievable.

I do believe that is the very insight at the heart of Descartes' observation that the idea of God is the necessary foundation of every other idea we have or could ever have, including the idea of the personal self, or (as he put it) the ego.

How so? I see the idea of God as a red herring. Also the idea of a God based ego, is another false path.

I believe there is a universal truth. I believe that truth is the quest for truth. It is like life, a process, not an end result.

And yes I know that is circular logic : ) Life is just a feedback loop too.

“Boiling it all down, where do we humans get the universal idea of Truth from in the first place...”

What do you mean by truth?

Just curious because you seem to use it to mean something other than an attribute pertaining to statements. Where do we humans get the universal idea of heat. Isn’t it simply the attribute of all hot things? Isn’t truth simply the attribute of all true statements?

Hank