And what other methods have you discovered for determining what is demonstrably true about reality besides science? I found astrology to be pretty useless, as was religion, reading tea leaves, visiting psychics, etc., but none of them generated a single idea that I could use.
Science is the ultimate program in pragmatism. It's all about learning how to control experience to maximize desirable outcomes and minimize undesirable ones.
Do you like electric lighting at night? That's a pretty pragmatic product of science.
How about motors and engines to do much of the heavy lifting and transporting, and assorted mechanisms to do the tedious tasks needed in daily life? Is that pragmatic enough?
Do you find near instantaneous global communication capability a practical function? Science didn't subjugate it. Science created it.
You're incorrect in your assumptions about philosophy. Secular humanists are typically much more educated in and comfortable with logic and reason that their faith-based counterparts. Look how badly the creationists perform at that.
What truth can art embody that is not equally well or better expressed in language. hat art adds is beauty, and of course, this is just another of the religionist's straw man depictions of a class of people he really doesn't understand. Art plays a large role in my life. My wife and I had about ten years experience playing live music in restaurants and coffee houses, have a house full of
art, and recently had this mural painted on our garage door, some Grateful Dead iconography (as is my avatar).
So where is the truth there? I see beauty. I see joy. I see two terrapins caught up in the rhapsody of making music. But not truth. Art's value to me is to inspire the moment in which it is being appreciated.
And, as I've already mentioned to you elsewhere, religion is not useful to the person who feels complete and satisfied without it. Where religion departs from secular methods, pronouncements, and values, it offers nothing of value to the content secular humanist.
How about a term woo-wooism, where we postulate all manner of truths and paths to them, none offering anything that can be used to make a complete life better? Sure, there are people with unmet needs who might find solace in religion, but they are not in an enviable position relative to the person who has met those needs without it.
Yesterday, a friend came by, who had recently traveled to South America, and who is now all a-titter about yerba mate as a health aid. Before that, it was Buddhism and incense, but that didn't work out when he and his local spiritual guru had a falling out.
Like so many unanchored souls, he's looking for magic to rescue him from some unmet need, for which he has visited any number of woo-woo sources in search of a solution. I say that he should have looked to himself and worked through these issues through self-reflection as a much younger man, and avoided this world of implied or promised magical solutions, which deflect his thoughts from searching within himself for answers to any number of impotent chants, amulets, and supplements.
You're contiinualy speaking for us and getting it wrong. Perhaps you should ask us rather than tell us what we think, and this time, write it down and refer to it the next time you want to report what it is atheists told you they believe rather that this script that you're stuck on.
Atheists have no gods. We'll leave that to those who can find a use for them.
And of course, you're wrong here again. I wrote the following to you personally a few days ago, directly contradicting your depiction of us as empty, dimensionless vessels with no appreciation of art, beauty, :
PureX : "the idea that the scientific process somehow frees humanity from it's ignorance and bias and shows us 'true reality' is foolishness. All it shows us is what works relative to our expectations, and what doesn't. What that has to do with 'true reality' is anyone's guess, ... and everyone's opinion, of course."
IANS replied : "Nothing else really matters apart from the fact that we have desires and beliefs that inform our actions, and that if belief B reliably informs action A such that desired result D is the outcome more consistently than other competing beliefs, then belief B can be called whatever you call useful ideas - true, correct, factual, knowledge - whatever. Concerns about absolute or objective truth are metaphysical time wasters. What difference does it make what's "really" out there if we can manipulate our experience of it to conform to our preferences? Hologram? Brain-in-a-vat? Last Thursdayism? Descartes' demon? A matrix? [It doesn't matter] The information is neither available to us nor necessary to have. We are irreversibly locked into the theater of our consciousness, experience nothing else directly, and therefore can assign primacy to the subjective conscious content over what we imagine underlies it."
Did you read that? If so, is it not evidence that you should revise your assessment, or is the "objectivity is their god" meme pretty much here to stay in your ongoing assault on atheists and atheism?
Science only needs you to recognize its usefulness. Absolute authority isn't all it's cracked up to be, and science knows that.
How can one be excessively confident in science? Doesn't that imply that one would have had better outcomes if one had relied less on science and more on some other method? Has one made an error trusting science instead of some other way of knowing - perhaps horoscopes, or lost biblical transcripts? Who has been harmed expecting science to come through?
And exactly how is this knowledge manifest? What reason is there to consider it knowledge rather than just ideas that cannot be put to use?
Then I'm sure that you can demonstrate that what you are referring to is actually useful. Why should others follow in your footsteps? What benefit should they expect to find?
Correct. Physicians are not scientists, except perhaps those doing medical research. Mostly, physicians apply the science developed by others the way that engineers might. Physicians are educated in sciences such as anatomy, physiology, cytology, embryology, biochemistry, immunology, genetics, microbiology, and pharmacology.
As a scientist, he uses the scientific method, not science. We're all using science even now as we send and receive digital data from one another.
