JDHURF made a comment to the post below saying, in part, that "Truth is ultimate and all truth is ultimate truth…..when one diferenciates between scientific truth and ultimate truth they obviously have a religious agenda and do not know what they are talking about."
To clarify my thinking I had to respond and I think it would do well to put my response as a new post in itself.
I responded:
No, I think you may have misunderstood me. I do believe there is an ultimate truth out there. I also believe that scientific knowledge can be the same as this ultimate truth but we really have no way of ever finding that out absolutely conclusively.
Science's truth can be understood in the Poppernian way as being the best understanding given the current facts. No theory can be proven correct, though it is necessary for an idea to be called scientific that it must be capable of being proven wrong, i.e. that it is falsifiable.
Science's understanding is the most rational understanding of the universe, but it may not be the most correct one. Indeed, it probably is not.
As a skeptic I happen to greatly appreciate rationalism, but in being a skeptic I also understand its limitations.
I don't suppose you view my reasoning as religiously motivated, do you?
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3 comments:
I think I agree with you. Science doesn't really have "truths" as such. Assuming there is an ultimate truth, any "truth" we have will necessarily fall short, since any idea we can hold is limited by our perceptive and imaginative limitations. At best, our little truths may be considered "correct" if they approximate a subset of the ultimate truth instead of being completely unrelated, sort of like Newtonian physics approximating relativistic physics for the subset of problems which don't approach c.
The quote of mine that you highlighted was not in response to your commentary or your views and I hope you didn’t take them as such. I was going on a tangent based on something that you said in response to another individual speaking of (T)ruth, I never thought that you, yourself, believed in or espoused such (T)ruth. The confusion is my fault for not being as clear as I should have been.
“Science's understanding is the most rational understanding of the universe, but it may not be the most correct one. Indeed, it probably is not.
As a skeptic I happen to greatly appreciate rationalism, but in being a skeptic I also understand its limitations.
I don't suppose you view my reasoning as religiously motivated, do you?” – orthoprax
No, I totally agree with you. Great post. I didn’t mean for my statements to seem as though they were in response to anything that you said.
“I don't think you understand how science operates. Science is not in the business of telling you absolute Truth (with a capital T) or how to live your life or what politics to follow.” - orthoprax
That is a quote of you telling someone else this, correct? If so then I was merely affirming what you said while going into a tangent.
“You mentioned truth (with a capitol T) and I know that you are, in no way, promoting such an idea of truth I just want to say something about that. Anytime an individual begins to talk about truth (Truth) or the “ultimate truth” I am immediately aware of their religious motivation and influence. There is no “Truth” or “ultimate truth” there is only truth, truth is an absolute.” - me
I didn’t mean that you had mentioned truth (with a capitol T) as something that you believed in but rather that you had mentioned it as something that is believed and espoused. I was merely going into a tangent about “ultimate truth” I was not going into this under the notion that you believed in or espouse (T)ruth, it was simply a tangent and I was not clear enough.
As far as I see it scientific laws and physical laws are human descriptions, based upon human observation, and are therefore subject to future revision – or even outright rebuttal. Scientific law and theory, as you say, may coincide with the universal truth but is, in fact, not absolute truth. I agree with that and I did not mean for my comments to come off as disagreement with anything you said. I guess that is one downside of posting after three in the morning……that being said there are scientific truths such as gravity, gravity is a truth that has been observed. Here is where I really agree with you: some believe that the laws of physics cause the behavior of the universe “the Law of gravity” is not the reason why objects are attracted to earth, it is simply the name and description that we have assigned the observed phenomenon. The true underlying reason why all objects in the universe attract each other, is to this day, not fully understood.
To conclude I agree with you and have agreed with you, if you took my comments as disagreement it is my fault for not being clear enough. Though I am glad that you decided to create a thread upon the subject, it allowed me to go into this subject further and more effeciently, though I probably still did a poor job. Sorry for the confusion.
JDHURF,
No worries. Twas just a little miscommunication. Though I think it was a good idea to put this point in a post by itself in any case.
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