No. our approaches to knowledge and evidence are diametrically opposed. Mine is systematic, and relies on critical, logical analysis of tangible, objective facts. The faithful.... I don't know. Childhood installed ROM? Gut feeling? Clearly, it's not "extensive evidence" they're relying on. They seem to have a whole different concept of what evidence is, and falsifiability is not a necessary feature.
My point was not that you don't have a different approach, but that they are as equally certain of their understanding of reality being the truth with their approach as you are with yours. They see the evidences that fit the criteria of their approach to seeing reality, as you see evidences that fit the criteria of your approach.
To you, they are wrong and are crazy to see the world the way they do. To them, you are wrong and are crazy to see the world the way you do. Both are seeing the world the same way in that case, myopically, that theirs is the right way, and the other wrong. As I said, it's doing the exact same thing. This was and is my point.
Again, no. Our epistemology is not pursued for utilitarian purposes, and certainly not for psychic succor.
That's not true. Your system of understanding the world is to create a functional map of the terrain in order for you to navigate it, interact with it, utilize is, and translate it into something you can use. Why else bother to try to use the tools of understanding to understand it at all? Boredom?
And as far as for succor goes, that too, yes. In times of distress, you lean to your understanding of the world to find some comfort, solace, direction, hope, or anything else to help you deal with it. How you interpret the world is for the explicitly purpose of helping you cope with it, interact with it, manipulate it, utilize it, and so forth.
Our reality is not magical, it's mechanical; an observable, testable universe of chemical and physical interactions. Myths and magic are of no epistemic use in assessing or testing reality.
They are of no use in
doing science, that is certainly true. But they certainly do have proven use in helping translate reality into a functional system that humans can build entire civilizations upon. They are not just useless beliefs at all.
So how are we to perceive, test and understand reality?
Many different ways. It depends what it is you are hoping to learn or discover. Sometimes, science is not the right tool. If you're looking to understand purpose and meaning, perhaps you might try meditation instead.
Faith in comforting mythology and gut feelings has been used for thousands of years, with no consistent picture or useful knowledge emerging.
You don't consider the great empires and civilizations that gave us the foundations of the modern age to not be "useful knowledge"?
Science yields universally consistent and accepted results.
Within a limited range of human experience it does. But it's not the end-all-be-all tool for all available human knowledge. Sometimes, you don't need a screwdriver. Sometimes you need no efforts at all in order to understand.
Faith is a flawed epistemic modality, though it might be a useful sociological or psychological anodyne.
Please do not equate faith with mythic and magic systems of belief. Faith is found in all systems, including modernity, science, atheism, and so forth. It has nothing to do with magical thinking itself. That is a sloppy, highly biased, irrational misunderstanding of it.
And this is a misunderstanding on his part. Atheism is an acknowledgement of ontological ignorance, and science, of degrees of probability. Assertions of unassailable truth are the bailiwick of Religion.
And yet isn't this what you are doing in claiming that only your way of approaching the truth is valid? Now you really DO have the truth, or the right way to understand reality? I don't really see a difference. "I have found the one true way," is a religious assertion indeed.
Because it's so well-evidenced and tested that its reliability is extremely high, so high that doubt would be unfounded and obtuse.
Again, exactly what someone who is part of a mythic system would say of their own system. In both their case and your's it is a matter of faith speaking. "We 'physicalists' try to avoid faith," yet unwittingly are demonstrating it in statements such as "to doubt this is crazy!"
Again, the science is one thing. Concluding that therefore materialism as a belief system must be true, is a matter of faith. I can see and accept the exact same science as you do, yet find my worldview supported better by it than yours. It's a matter of
interpretation, and that is a matter of philosophies and worldviews,
not science.
Even so, science, unlike many religions, is always ready to modify its beliefs if new information comes to light.
Healthy religions can do this as well. But don't kid yourself, science has those traditionalist strains as well that always resist new ideas as they come to light. There's as much of that in science as you will find in religions, because..... humans are humans.
I'd call it an epistemic advantage. We have both different goals and methodologies.
It's not an advantage at all. It's like trying to grip a tight hold on the wind with your fist. It's a square peg in a round hole. More often than not, you have to simply let go and go with the flow. Trying to seize upon a concrete understanding of life with the mind will only lead stress and anxiety and clumsiness when the world is too complex to be reduced down to our crude mental understandings.
We've always been OK with uncertainty. Unlike religion, we feel no need to fill in the gaps with myths or unevidenced facts. We may seek a firm handle on reality, but we don't make things up and cease searching if we don't achieve this.
This is a contradiction. If you are seeking a firm handle on reality, you're doing so because you're not OK with uncertainty. You feel a need to fill the gaps with certainty. That's why you reject poetry, or myth, and favor hard evidential facts in their stead.
You've got everything backwards, you're projecting religious features onto a modality that's rejected them.
I'm not projecting it. I'm observing it. If you step back from your own vantage point as reality, you can see the exact same thing being done, just with different systems. You don't recognize your own as a system of thought. You see it as reality. But it is every bit as much a lens, or filter, or mental construct as the mythic systems are. Instead of gods and magic, you have atoms and quarks.
It's still layering a language of understanding upon it. Science may be more sophisticated of a language and far more detailed and useful, but it's still doing the same thing. At some point, even the language of science will fail, just as the language of myth does.
No. You seek succor, we seek ontological truth -- whether it comforts us or not.
I don't seek succor. I seek finding peace with Uncertainty. You must have me confused with someone else. But you just admitted you seek firm handles on reality in preference to uncertainty. And if that isn't seeking succor, maybe I don't understand the meaning of that word? It certainly is seeking a sense of security though.
No, science and faith are completely different: different goals, different methodology.
I completely agree. Science and materialism are completely different and use a different methodology. Believing that the world can be reduced down to only matter, is doing faith.
It doesn't matter if you feel science supports you best. Every religious denomination feels they are supported by the same Bible the best too, yet they each have a different conclusion about what it is saying. Don't they? It's all a matter of faith.
The parallels you cite are simply wrong, It's an erroneous conflation.
No they aren't. Perhaps this post better explains them. You may still not be able to see them, but that would be because you don't see the set of eyes you are looking through. As with anything, when we are too close to something, we can't see it objectively. But others can.
So what is Reality? By what methodology are we to research it?
Reality is many things. Reality is Openness. All the rest is perception.
What method to use to research it depends totally upon what it is about it you wish to research.
We've been using religion for thousands of years, with little progress and no consensus.
Not sure what you are referring to here. No progress in what? And no consensus about what?
We've been using science for a couple hundred years, and we've learned more than in all the rest of history.
About how the systems of natural world works? Of course. About understanding human nature and learning how to transcend it, I'm not sure what contributions to that you think science has offered? Pills?
Moreover, our knowledge is universally accepted -- because of the methodology. So how has this system failed?
First of all, I didn't say science has failed. I've said Materialism is hardly the salvation of mankind. It doesn't begin to address questions of meaning, purpose, fulfillment in life, peace, connection, hope, relationships, social betterment, etc. All it does is says, "It's just the brain", and the rest falls flat.
You say it failed -- at your goals, but It never had the goals you attribute to it.
And that is why it fails. It fails to address the totality of humankind. It says love is nothing more than a chemical. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that response here in discussions with Materialists.
It is not just a variation of religion.
Yes it is. It's just Christianity without God.
It was born out of it, and is still trying to do the same thing.
We're not trying to navigate the world.
Absolutely you are. Science creates maps and models. What on earth do you think we do with maps and models? We use them to understand and navigate the world with. This is kind of a no-brainer.
We're trying to understand it. Mythology and magic never achieved much in this respect.
Yes it did. It created functional models that allowed humans to utilize a common language, a map, to translate their experiences of reality in order to come together and build societies, cultures, and civilizations.
I think you're looking at the is whole thing completely wrong. The goal was not "doing science". The goals was a common framework in order for people to come together in a shared community. That's what it's all about.
