[lbo-talk] The Ungodly Delusions

ravi ravi.bulk at gmail.com
Wed Oct 25 08:42:47 PDT 2006


At around 25/10/06 10:24 am, Charles Brown wrote:
>
> my start at atheism was when I finally mustered up enough courage to ask one
> of my teachers why certain laws were so ... why did objects attract each
> other in proportion to their masses and inverse proportion to the distance
> separating them? Why is Xeno's paradox not really a paradox? I had assumed,
> based on the attitude of those peddling such information to me, that I was
> unable to understand these claims because of my own stupidity. Much to my
> surprise, in almost all cases I received no
> answers... at least none that answered the questions presented. I
> realised, after a few such episodes, the danger (and also,
> unfortunately, the need) of (for) blind faith in undefined entities and
> terms!
> ^^^^^^
> Ravi,
>
> I'm not clear on this. Science doesn't have to answer every "why" question ,
> especially since an infinite number of "why" questions can be asked about
> anything ( reminds of Zeno's paradox a little). Doesn't physics just state
> that empirical phenomena conform to these laws, not claiming to explain why
> nature conforms to them ? This doesn't make belief in the laws of gravity
> "blind", if the belief things conforming them in every observed case,no ?
>

There are two parts to the issue: a) the general "intellectual" (or "enlightened" or "educated" or "liberal") population's belief in scientific theories and facts: while some atomic premises in science may be unexplainable, higher order claims are (that after all is what makes science interesting!). But people believe in some claim or other simply because it is "scientific" (as I mentioned elsewhere, some of this due to pragmatic shortcuts). For instance, one can explain the chemical bonding (say ionic) by just stating as "fact" that elements tend towards their closest noble gas (or some such) or explain it further using Pauli's principle, or dig a bit deeper into the reasoning behind the principle... b) your more general question on the basis of scientific laws and facts. I think you are quite right in your characterisation. But then again, anyone can make generalisations from observations. What makes science different, if at all, is (a) either claims to theoretical explanation -- deduction (discussed briefly above) or (b) parsimony. But sometimes that parsimony is a luxury and is at a cost.

Which throws me back into the "science vs the rest" debate. So, let me bring it back to the issue at hand, of faith: what my scientific education taught me (unintentionally) is the treacherous nature of the faith that one nonetheless needs in order to be able to say or do anything at all. In that sense, it converted me to atheism, by which I mean a wariness of absolutes. ;-) (some would call that mere agnosticism, which I am willing to live with).

--ravi



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