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Old April 8th, 2019 #1
Jerry Abbott
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Default Once more: the nature of truth, the nature of man, and the worth of science & religion

The ideology of modernity might be partially correct. In one respect, it is the baby in the bathwater of globalism. Modernity holds that science is the best way by which the truth might become known.

The idea that truth is like the rain carving many channels in the mud, such that there's "my truth" and "your truth" and "their truth" is wrong. There is only the truth, and any opinion in conflict with it is simply false. Truth is discovered, not decided. It does not matter how many people hold a false opinion, nor what their cultural norms are: it remains a false opinion.

The most important question in this regard is:

How do you know when you are using a method for seeking the truth that actually does succeed in finding it?

To which the correct answer is:

You know that your method for seeking truth really works when it has a historical track record of giving to people powers that they did not have before.

Valid methods for seeking truth do that because useful truths are a subset of all truths, and it is a subset in which humans have a particular interest and to which they devote a considerable amount of their time. Any method for seeking truth that really works will discover useful truths often.

Science does that.

Religion does not do that.

If you were to try to prove the validity of logic with logic, then you would be using the well-understood fallacy of circular reasoning. Accordingly, the efficacy of logic (and, by extension, of science) manifests in a different way. An inferential way. We ask ourselves what the hallmarks of a successful truth-finding method of thought might be: how it would affect us. We predict that useful truths would occur among all of the truths that the method would discover, and that, as a result, mankind would grow in power, would become able to do things that were never possible in earlier times. And by that metric, science has emerged the champion with no close rivals.

Science has a historical track record for discovering ways to make a light spring forth and banish darkness, of healing the sick, of knowing what would otherwise have gone unnoticed because of distance or because of smallness (or for some other reason), of enabling people to communicate rapidly across thousands of miles, of empowering men to fly when men had never flown before, of sending probes to other planets in order to see what had never been seen before.

Religion has no similar record. It only makes claims that it never proves and spins engaging fantasies that comfort some people in the face of death.

But whereas science is infinitely superior to religion in finding truth, religion does have a place among men nevertheless. Why? Because our species, Homo sapiens, is, despite its Latin binomial, not entirely sapient. Rather, it straddles the boundary of what we are pleased to call humanity, with some of its members above the line, and some below.

Where is that line drawn? It certainly exists, such that our species can be sorted into human and sub-human categories, but where it is exactly is a judgment call. The definition for that line that I prefer is the ability to understand the exponential function. But I've heard alternatives, such as the ability of the individual to appreciate the wisdom of moral circumspection even when the fear of God/hellfire does not influence his judgment.

As long as we believe that we must carry along the sub-human part of our species, we must have some means by which to keep them out of trouble, and we must have a way to prevent them from making too much trouble. Religion is what usually plays that role; hence, religion has value.

The globalists are right when they aver that truth is universal, independent of the observer or of the observer's culture. But that does not mean that the globalists are also correct about what the truth is, specifically. It is possible, and perhaps commonplace, for an ideologue to state the universality of truth, and be right as far as that goes, but afterward proceed to lie about what the universal truth is. And that is why globalism is a vile ideology, deserving to be eliminated from this world.

Last edited by Jerry Abbott; April 9th, 2019 at 06:03 AM.
 
Old April 8th, 2019 #2
jaekel
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And it appears to be reality, bc it uses science to back it up.
But it is junk science made of lies that they
claim is truth.
 
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