The thought that killed a "source of knowledge"
Posted by m082844 11 years, 2 months ago to Philosophy
Here is one of the most damning thought experiments regarding religion as a means to knowledge. If you were to start over today; take many infants and raise several different isolated colonies starting from complete ignorance. After several hundred generations in isolation and growth you'll have a unique religion per colony -- not one will be the same -- yet all the science and math they discover must be the same.
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Societies repeatedly get it wrong when it comes to science. This is because our thoughts and ideas are often not linked to the laws of nature...EVEN in the halls of science. I hope I'm making sense. As I said before: In short, we repeatedly get it wrong when it comes to science. Just look at our recent history. We aren't as smart as we think. This doesn't mean we should stop trying - quite the opposite.
And, I agree that the laws of nature are not in flux. I based my income and my profession on that.
Notations are not essential -- they can be different -- to scientific discovery. A colony only able to count to three shares that much in common with all colonies able to count to higher numbers. Regarding blood types, different colonies share ideas in common to the degree of their discovery.
I'm not saying they'd all colonies would use the same language/notation or discover at the same rate or in the same categories of science or that they are impervious to error -- which are all likely to be false and most importantly they are all inessential to the thought experiment. The essential is that the mathematical/scientific concepts they do discover that are true are necessarily the same and could be demonstrated in reality; I'm surprised that any rational person would deny this much -- then again I am assuming you're bing rational.
To clarify whether or not you're rational, do you mind answering a few questions? Do you think reality is objective in the sense Objectivism means? Do you think we can form concepts that are consistent with reality? If yes to all the above, then why do you think it is possible to have two different ideas that are contradictory be true?
One tribe thinks the world is flat while the next thinks the earth is round. Since they don't communicate with each other, they will continue to believe that. The reason we can advance science today is the fact that we all try to communicate new discoveries.
I'll give you an example of science being counterproductive because of vested interests in the outcome. Global warming, now called climate change, where scientists can show the proof or lack of proof of data to support their position. No one can doubt that climate changes constantly, but scientists felt it necessary to alter the data in the famous hockey stick chart of global warming data and email back and forth that it is better to change the data to ensure their position would be accepted as fact.
As to gravity, its effects are suspended when magnetism enters into the equation, such as plasma or antimatter magnetically held in mid-air so it won't touch anything. If gravity always works the same way, the universe wouldn't be expanding and accelerating away from other planetary bodies.
Things are not always black and white but varying shades of grey, both in science and religion.
Objectivism holds that the laws of nature are not in flux so if our ideas are true then neither will they be in flux.
And the fact that 2 + 2 will always equal 4, or that gravity is always a force that affects mass and energy et al.
Greetings!
According to your thought experiment, atheism would not naturally develop in any of the colonies; only religion would. If so, it suggests that religion is both natural and necessary to human society, and that therefore, they are, at root, not so very different from one another (since people's psychological needs are determined by the kind of consciousness they have). Religious *practices* would vary a great deal, but the root religious experience involving a Creator might very well be similar.
>yet all the science and math they discover must be the same.
Not sure what you mean by that. Obviously, notation systems would differ, as would basic assumptions about the universe. There's nothing in your model disallowing one colony from thinking up the idea of "zero" and developing a system of scientific notation similar to our own, and another colony having a counting system comprising "one, two, three, many" and ending there.
There's nothing in your model preventing one colony from assuming that there are two kinds of blood, arterial and venous, while another colony figures out that there's only kind of blood which at one moment is oxygenated and at another not.
>Here is one of the most damning thought experiments regarding religion as a means to knowledge.
You could just as easily damn philosophy as a means to knowledge, since each colony would be just as likely to think up its own unique system.
Instead of being a religion-hater for its own sake, why not be a lover of intellectual history for its own sake, and realize that there's no such thing as a big, homogeneous fund of something called "knowledge" to which only science has access, but rather that knowledge is heterogeneous — there are different kinds of knowledge and different methods of access: religion gives religious knowledge; science gives scientific knowledge.