Comment by markhahn
5 hours ago
I still don't know why the author brought religion/faith/god into the discussion; he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.
5 hours ago
I still don't know why the author brought religion/faith/god into the discussion; he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.
Beeeecause this was a lecture delivered at a Catholic philosophy/theology conference?
> he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.
That's because he is. Take a look at the articles listed on his website.
I think the reason is because he was trying illustrate that you can say an awful lot (in analogical language) about things that are not empirically observable.
> scientific epistemology
Science can't tell us so far what really exists. It can only predict experiments. To put it in more common terms, "is the wave function real or not?", or "do quantum fields really exist, or are just elegant mathematical abstractions for explaining experiments?"
Or as others say "shut up and calculate".
> It can only predict experiments.
Your "only" here makes it seem like predicting experiments is a narrow thing. It's not. All of the modern technologies we have--including the computers we're all using to post here--are based on science "predicting experiments"--but the "experiments" are things like building computers, or the Internet, or the GPS system. The fact that all those things work exactly as our science predicts makes it very hard to view that science as "only predicting experiments". It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.
Not only that - one could argue that all observed phenomena are experiments, and the way we behave in the world is based on predicting them.
A religious person - if not honest enough to simply say "existence of God is an axiom and cannot be derived from reason alone" - uses the very predictions of experiments to reason God into existence: everything that exists has a cause; universe exists; therefore universe has a cause.
7 replies →
> It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.
That's the popular definition of the word "real".
But this article is about the philosophical meaning of the word "real". And from that viewpoint science hasn't delivered yet, science doesn't know yet what "really exists out there", it can only predict how that thing behaves in experiments.
5 replies →
>Science can't tell us so far what really exists.
Only inasmuch as nothing can tell us what "really" exists. By any practical definitions of any of the words in that sentence science is the best way of determining what exists.
... which is still far more than religion can provably do.