And I know this from personal experience. How often have I lied to myself in order to provide some closure to holes in my knowledge. It was not with truth or fact that I closed the gaps, but with conjecture that had absolutely no basis on what really "was". The more I immerse myself in the fascinating world of scientific philosophy, the more I determine that empirical knowledge is still considered a debatable source of truth, and that conjecture is a viable substitute. Some things never change.
Not that all men are to be horribly blamed, I think. After all, we come to conclusions on our own after all the data have been mined, and the experiments are completed. How do we know what data to look at? How do we know what is the "truth" of all that we observe?
I rather like Wernher von Braun's opinion on the matter:
Scientific concepts exist only in the minds of men. Behind these concepts lies the reality which is being revealed to us, but only by the grace of God.
and Michael Faraday's as well:
Man's natural mind is a very unstable thing, and most credulous, and the imagination, often rules it when reason is thought to be there.
posted by Marcian @ 3:44 PM
1 Comments:
Yes, science is certainly not without problems, at least when humans are involved and there's a lack of information. But it's the best we have. There really is no alternative. You can't say religion is an alternative, because how can you interpret (e.g.) the Bible without a scientific method? If you try to interpret it objectively, you're using science, doing the same thing Darwin did, with all the same issues. If you interpret it subjectively, then it just means whatever you want it to mean. Biology, meteorology, theology, ... they're all essentially the study and interpretation of God/creation/revelation, right?
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