JustAsking
Sexy Member
Yes, this post is full of good observations. It gets to the basic problem of unsufficient epistemal (is that a word?) humility. On one side you have religious people who are 100% certain about their particular brand of received universal truth. And on the other side you have the logical positivist fundamentalists who think reason, logic and empirical facts lead to universal truth.
It is mistake to brand all religious people as in the first camp, and all atheists and agnostics in the second. But I think you can say that most religious fundamentalists who think they are the most certain about their received knowledge are conservative and most logical positivist fundamentalists are liberal and probably atheist, since their view of the world is empirically based.
There is a huge group in the middle, though. About 90% of the world's Christians belong to denominations whose doctrine completely embrace science, for example. And they don't insist that the Bible should be interepreted literally nor do they apply it to anything outside of faith and salvation (not science, for example).
Science draws its limitations in scope from the fact that it has to be mute on anything for which verifiable and falsifiable statements cannot be made. So much of the human condition will be outside of the scope of science for a very long time. As a corollary of that, science is also mute and blind to any subject matter that is not about purely natural processes.
On the other hand, the same discipline that limits the subject matter of science happens to enable scientific truths to be held with far more certainty than any other forms of truth. Scientific truths come with their own instructions on how to falsify them, so when they survive hundreds of years of rigorous scrutiny and successful application, you have to admit that they are "on to something".
And back on the first hand, that same kind of discipline eventually causes a scientific theory to be modified or replaced when the predictive powers of the theory start to run into trouble in the face of some new findings. Because of that most real scientists know that scientific theories are always models or approximations of what they are attempting to explain. Since the replacement theories are ususally vastly different than the ones they replaced, there is a strong awareness that this will always be so.
In short, we are extremely certain about scientific truths, yet we are certain that those truths do not represent universal cosmic truth.
That group of denominations that represent 90% of Christianity, hold simultaneously, the dual notions that God is the author of all things, but also that the findings of modern science trumps scripture in any given situation about the natural world. They would call their position on evolution, "theistic evolution".
You can say what you want about religous people in general, but this position does have a lot of epistemal humility. It takes their received religious truths out of conflict with their acceptance of scientific truths, even knowing that the scientific truths are not necessarily cosmic truth either.
In summary, conservative religous people error on the side of religious fundamentalism, which is simply wrong. Liberals and athiests error on the side of logical positivitist fundamentalism, which is also simply wrong.
It reminds me of an old wisdom saying. "Seek out those who seek understanding. Avoid those who claim that they have found it."
Of this I am certain!
