🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov10.182833.1@stsci.edu| zellner@stsci.edu writes:
|Tim Dodd, cegtitd@prism.gatech.edu, writes:
|
||  How do we decide if a statement is true?  We devise an empirical test 
||  and let reality tell us if the statement is accurate.
|
|Sure, if you can.  When did you last try the Eotvos experiment?  Or did 
|you (heavens forbid!) take the results of that experiment "on faith"?  And
|do you have a good experiment to test superstring theory?

You're missing the point.  If it is not possible in principle to devise
a test of a proposition, then that proposition describes things which have
nothing to do with reality.  Note the "in principle"!  This is a crucial
distinction.

||  Religious thought is typified by "mystical mode".  In this mode of 
||  thought, it is recognized that there exists a level of "truth" or 
||  "reality" to which mere rational thought does not have access.  
|
|There certainly might be levels of reality to which neither experience nor 
|experiment have access.  That isn't the same thing as the limits of ration-

Then how are you justified in referring to these "levels" as real?

|ality.  If a proposition isn't falsifiable, it isn't science.  But that 
|doesn't say whether it's true or false, or even rational.  According to the 
|Gospel of John, Jesus said "Before Abraham existed, I already was."  Science 
|cannot touch that one, but it's a simple statement of fact, either true or 

How has this been established as a fact?

|false, with nothing "mystical" about it. 
|
||  These two modes of thought are mutually exclusive.  Neither can encompass
||  the other:  they cannot be mixed.  You can think mystically or rationally,
||  but you cannot do both at the same time.  
|
|I don't see that much difference.  I can read one of St. Paul's letters with 
|the exactly the same thought-modes that I read a physics book or a computer 
|manual:  with every attention to detail, and with the DEFAULT assumption that 
|the writer knows much more about it than I do (yet).  What is this saying?  
|
|Where's the "mysticism" in all that?
|
|Ben

If you read physics books the same way you read the Bible, then I would
have to say you don't read physics very well.  What do you do when a
statement is made in a physics book which pertains to something of which
you have no direct experience?  You can decide if the statement is
accurate by reading about experiments that have been done to test it,
tracing through the mathematics, etc.  If you have the necessary tools,
you can even test it yourself.  Why don't you demand the same sort of
justification from religious writings?  In reference to the quote from
John above, what reason do you have for accepting this statement as true?
Any possible "reasons" will necessarily be of a fundamentally different
character from the reasons which are acceptable to rational thought.

Tim
-- 
Tim Dodd, Research Scientist, Georgia Tech:  cegtitd@prism.gatech.edu