Yes; by paying attention to the evidence of it’s success for science, and by ignoring the lack of evidence AND it’s wild contradictions for religion. Both of which are blatently obvious. It really isn’t the complicated problem you are trying to make it.
It later occurs to me: and of course, an important qualitative difference is that your ordinary liberal arts-focused Joe may expect to be fully capable of travelling to Rome to confirm that there is such a place if he wants to–if not now, then at some point in his life. But unless he undergoes a massive career change and several years of intensive study, he won’t be able to confirm with firsthand evidence that the universe is expanding–and even then, he wouldn’t be able to later switch gears and confirm firsthand the details of the human genome. As you pointed out earlier, even for scientists it’s just not possible to know it all firsthand.
I admire your faith. 
:rolleyes: Ah, and now we see the standard attempt to defend religion by defining atheism or science or whatever the bugaboo of the moment is as being faith just like what the believers indulge in. And faith isn’t something to be admired anyway.
It’s not faith that I’m communicating by typing into a machine and a system invented by scientists and that works according to scientific principles. Science doesn’t need faith because it actually works. Religion DOES need faith, because all it ever does is fail and lie.
Would getting a rise out of us prove something, in your eyes?
He might go to Rome, but then he has Berlin, Cairo, and Athens to worry about. And then the smaller cities. He will never have first hand knowledge of every city he reads about either.
In my theory of knowledge class there were a couple of people, trolls really, who spent the whole term saying “do we really know that?” We don’t know anything in the mathematical sense, but we can know that the probability of something being true is getting vanishingly close to 1. Keynes had a book on that, and it appears to be not original with him. But, getting back to authority, do you know something even if the authority tells you? He can be wrong, or you might have misheard him.
So, the question is, do you think we “know” about cities we haven’t visited based on authority or second hand evidence?
But people “knew” that Newton’s laws were absolutely true, and there was a ton of experimental evidence for them. You are trivializing the problem of knowledge; though even if I were a theist I wouldn’t sentence you to sit through the ToK class I sat through.
And his laws WERE true - within their limits. That’s why they are still used within those limits. The fact is, trusting Newton’s laws will to this day get you farther than trusting religious proclamations. Scientifically derived knowledge isn’t perfect, it isn’t 100% certain - but it has a far larger chance of being true and far more evidence for it than a religious claim, and religious claims are what the OP mentioned.
My method of dealing with that is not so much thinking in terms of TRUE and FALSE as thinking in terms of probability.
Einstein’s relativity I put at around 90%. The Big Bang I only put at 65%
A airliner less than 200 tons destroying a building over 400,000 tons in less than 2 hours I put at less than 5%.
Science is about UNDERSTANDING THINGS FOR YOURSELF not taking ANYBODIES word. But no one has the time to test EVERYTHING so some judgment of probability may have to be made. But don’t consider it true or false unless you really understand it for yourself.
And on the reincarnation thing:
BELIEVE means to accept something as true without sufficient evidence. Therefore belief is STUPID by definition.
psik
(To Voyager and others) See, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. This guy assesses the “probability” of the World Trade Center being brought down by an airliner (<5%) in the same way he assesses the “probability” of the Big Bang (65%). Perhaps on the basis of “gut instinct”, “common sense” and of course what he considers the “believability” of the sources. But do you think he’s qualified to make his own assessments (reviewing the science papers on the one hand and the Homeland Security reports on the other) to make any kind of valid independent judgment?
This is likely the kind of guy who joins Sarah Palin in sneering at “fruit fly research in Paris, France”. And then votes for her.
And you don’t think this is a problem worth discussing here?
Um, ok. Why? Why 90%, and not 91%? How did you get these numbers?
Oh, they were produced rectally.
No, science is drawing conclusions and making predictions based on repeated observation of phenomenon. You don’t need to test everything, that would put us back to before the written word in terms of advancement. I trust science because of it’s track record. It’s been right a whole lot, and when it’s wrong it admits it and corrects itself. I seriously doubt you understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. Or airplanes & buildings.
And now you demonstrate that you don’t understand reincarnation. Stevenson’s work has been almost universally criticized for method and conclusion. He didn’t prove anything.
Sarah Palin is a joke. I decided I was an agnostic when I was 12 years old and stopped going to church when I graduated from grade school. And I let my Mensa membership expire in the 80s.
You see airliners hitting skyscrapers is Newtonian physics is pretty damn simple. But then the EXPERTS don’t even tell us the quantity of steel in the impact zone. In fact they don’t even tell us the south tower moved only 14 inches on impact. You have to check the NCSTAR1 report to find it moved 12 inches at 70th floor and extrapolate.
Now what evidence do you have that you have done more research on the Big Bang than I have on the WTC.
Like I said, what matters is what you UNDERSTAND FOR YOURSELF. I am not sufficiently interested in the Big Bang to study it.
So many people who pretend they know science don’t understand squat but just paraphrase the experts they have chosen to BELIEVE.
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/ESQ0207GREETINGS
psik
You know that part where your opponent says, “OMG! I never thought of it that way! I do have faith!”?
That only happens in Chic tracts.
http://dotsub.com/view/3e1982ce-fd37-4c22-a98f-2916c796b6af/viewTranscript/eng
I know Dan Dennet was talking about democracy but his TED talk was also referring to science.
The previous encounter with **psikeyhackr **demonstrated that he is not very well informed or has not investigated properly all the evidence. What is important is that an engineering and scientific consensus has been reached for a long time by the people that investigated the collapse of the WTC.
The towers collapsed thanks to the combination of the plane crash and the subsequent fires.
PDF document:
Would you mind cutting it out about religion - since Kanicbird’s only post, I think everyone in this thread is an atheist.
Newton’s laws even at slow speed aren’t right - they are only right within measurement error. In any case they are not derived from taking lots of measurements, and fitting a curve. They come from first principles. They make a very critical assumption, that time is immutable, which turned out to be incorrect. Knowing that they were true implied knowing that time is immutable, which is knowing something which is incorrect. Science isn’t about knowing, it is about making the very best approximation to truth we can, backed up by evidence.
I don’t think you understand probability very well. The probability of the Big Bang theory being true would be very hard to measure, and it certainly has nothing to do with how much research you or anyone else has done on it.
Ahh I see. What your asking for is a way to test for Perfect Truth that anyone can do without even having to try hard, not so much about if someone can verify scientific theories for themselves. Is this correct?
The OP used examples from religion. It looked to me to be another attempt to equate science and religion; this is a fairly common argument for that.
But I went on to mention the “law of attraction”, karma (which isn’t necessarily a religious doctrine per se), fad diets, the anti-vac crowd and now WTC conspiracy theory.
The problem I think you’re having is you want people to have access Perfect Truths, but the thing of it is there’s no way to get Perfect Truth because all your data comes filtered in through your senses which can be fooled, and more importantly don’t gather all the data. When you look at a book you see text, color, maybe texture, shininess. You can feel the book and get weight and texture. You can drop the book and hear a thud. It might have a smell if it’s wet, really new or really old. You could lick it or eat some of it to get a taste. Learning anything beyond that, such as what it’s really made out of, where it came from, how to read it, etc. requires outside knowledge which requires research and education. Your senses would never tell if it was printed Denver unless the book was marked as such nor would they tell how much recycled paper is in it. Short of visible mold you’d never know what microbes live on the book or if it’s UV transparent. The pigments in the ink would be an utter mystery. Even the existence and the reality of the book can be called in to question. That’s the biases of solipsism.
That’s why Perfect Truth is elusive, you can never be completely sure there isn’t something relevant you’re not aware of. It’s always a judgment call based on perceived reliability and believability of the information. The Scientific method and Occam’s razor are tools to sort the wheat from the chafe, but they can’t deliver Perfect Truth that’s self apparent to all. Nothing can. As a result you’ll have a market place of ideas. Education is the currency, and if you want to buy the best ideas in a field then you need to work and get all the currency you can so afford them. You can’t be spoon fed discount Quantum Mechanics, only dumbed down knock-offs.
Now people of limited means might buy silly ideas like jet liners didn’t take down the WTC, due to not having the means to buy better ones, but short of thought police there’s nothing much to do about that.
psikeyhackr’s belief seems to be based on incomplete data/not enough idea currency. It wasn’t damage from the initial impact that took the towers out, as his viewpoint seems to be based on. It was the resulting intense heat of burning jet fuel weakening the steel support beams till the building collapsed under it’s own weight.