Nature of Belief
The nice thing about this being my blog is I can write whatever I want on it . . . So here is my response to a thread of commentary between me, springy, and Luna about the nature of belief and science. (below)
okay - i get your point, i think, springy. there is more than a little bit of an element of "belief" in involved in science, especially biology bc it's really complicated. i guess rejecting supernatural intervention outright (like good materialists) is sort of a belief (although i maintain it as a different cetegory of belief from belief in interfering deities) . . . in that if something seems supernatural, we wrinkle our brows and keep doing experiments or thinking up new models until we can explain it.
okay - i get your point, i think, springy. there is more than a little bit of an element of "belief" in involved in science, especially biology bc it's really complicated. i guess rejecting supernatural intervention outright (like good materialists) is sort of a belief (although i maintain it as a different cetegory of belief from belief in interfering deities) . . . in that if something seems supernatural, we wrinkle our brows and keep doing experiments or thinking up new models until we can explain it.
posted by Joolya at
2:25 PM
1 Comments:
Well yes, but then we're back where we started. Science is empiricist - or, as you put it anti-"supernatural" - and formulates theories which reject non-empiricist explanations for things. But this requires a belief, which is different from the dogma of faith. What I asked originally is whether we should think like this outside of science. Why do scientists privilege conventional senses - sight, sound, touch - over spirituality? Probably because everyone agrees we have these. Should we base our beliefs about other things (whether there is a god, for example) on empiricism in the same way? I believe we should.
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