1213 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:45 am
TRANSPONDER wrote: ↑Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:10 am
...For that, only scientific investigation can be relied on to avoid human misperception.
Thus the God instinct is better understood as something that helps humans to survive as individuals, tribes and a species....
....So, no. I do not buy the God instinct as a reason to think that a god exists and, as usual, that still doesn't tell us Which god. ...
Interesting answer, thank you.
I would just like to know, why do you think scientific investigation is without human misperception? If it is done by humans, it can easily have human misperception.
But, you accept the idea that people have this "God instinct"? You just think it is wrong and people should not trust their instinct?
Thank you. A good question if not a new one. This is the argument about Epistemology or 'How do we know what we know?'. which is one of the three supports of Fundamentalist Theism (Faith, Flag and science -scepticism) because Theist argument will often try to scrape a draw by asserting that we can't know anything and science is mere (flawed) human opinion, and thus faith -claims are as valid as any other.
This is of course irrational because it is Faith based. The logic would mean that no particular belief counted more than any other which is why appeal to unknowns is a fallacy. It only works with
a priori godfaith which saves the faith but makes no case. So it is useless in debate.
However your question queries the validity of science. Well, it works
like we say, we all rely on it every day. You have faith that your car will start and not decide to blow up in your face. You trust science to work. Science had to refine its' data, sure, but the established still works. Compasses don't suddenly decide to point east, 2 and 2 do not suddenly = 6, we do not find that Jupiter and Saturn have changed orbits, nor do we find that our mobile phone has suddenly gone fissionable and is emitting deadly radiation.
So we don't dig down to Jurassic strata and find Miocene fossils, we do not look in Hittite strata and find willow pattern sherds. And we do not read accounts of Caesar's Gallic war and read that Vercingetorix sent in a doze Mark 5 Panzer tanks to turn Caesar's flank (though it would be unutterably cool if he did). We can rely on what we know we can rely on
I won'r go into the endless attempts to find fault with strata, radiometric dating or lightspeed -based dating of the universe. But science does have a very good track record of explaining and validating Data, while religion has a very good track record of making claims and those being disproved.
There was no global flood
Tyre was rebuilt,
There was no Passover release custom
To which I'd add 'what we can 'know' There was no Bethlehem birth.
Daniel was not written in Babylon 5 BC
The sun did not stand still to let a battle finish.
That is what (thanks to science) we can know.
Science has earned a bit of credit and in fact, the alternative Isms, while flipping science off, still try to pretend to be scientifically valid, and long for the same credibility, Kudos and clout that science has earned by working reliably.
."
