Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Religion, Science & Philosophy

In science, something is tested by trying to disprove it. You take some theory, and you run it through every stress test you can to see if it breaks. You try to break it to find the truth. Every idea is put through the ringer to see if it survives. Science is essentially Darwinian and it is no surprise that the methods of science eventually led to the theory of natural selection.

But science cannot subject every idea to this kind of scrutiny. Not every truth can be found this way. Science must be founded upon the philosophy of science. There are some theories, ideas, etc, that cannot be tested in this way. They are just not amenable to this kind of methodology. Take the idea that induction itself is a rational endeavor. One cannot put this "theory" to the test for testing of the kind science undertakes presupposes the rationality of inductive reasoning. You cannot undertake the testing without assuming it, and so any attempt to disprove the proposition would be circular.

The idea that the laws of nature are uniform across the universe or across time are similarly presupposed by the very act of testing. Even the objective reality of the external world must be presupposed by the activity of testing-for-truth. So science gets us to truth, and the way it gets us to truth is by attempting-to-disprove. However, not all truth can be attained this way, there must be at least some truths that we can be confident of without this kind of method.

Science also abstracts from the first-person perspective. Science is irreducibly a third-person endeavor. Science takes particular phenomenon and abstracts from our particular phenomenal encounter with them. It removes the experiencer from the equation, as much as possible. It looks for a perspective outside of the subjective encounter. This has some consequences for what things science can actually study. For instance, science will probably never give us an unaided picture of phenomenal consciousness, for you cannot study something you are abstracting from. You cannot eliminate the first-person perspective from the picture while studying it. You cannot remove what you are studying from the equation.

Religion has its own methodologies. While in some ways an inversion of the scientific process, it still can reasonably make claims to truth. Whereas in science an idea is tested by trying to disprove it, in religion an idea is tested by giving oneself over to it. Religion cannot be abstracted from life itself. The first person perspective is not abandoned, it is leaped into with reckless abandon. Ritual isolates particular experiences and allows them to be taken out of their original context. They can be relived by later generations, who can also add to them their own experiences. The phenomenal is first in religion, while it is abandoned in science. Science studies the world with the human element de-accentuated. Religion studies the world with the human element at its center. You live out an experience and push it as far as it can go, and see what you see from within it. Religion cannot be fully understood from the outside, it must be entered into to be really known.

This process makes revision slow, and progress slow, but it does not make them impossible. Ideas are tried and lived, and those that don't work are ideally left by the wayside. Religion is suited to understanding the full significance of phenomenal consciousness, and meaning in a way science is not. For any meaning remains the meaning of MY life, as my own. It can only be understood from within my own first-person perspective. It cannot be understood abstracted from that perspective. And phenomenal consciousness must be explored to be understood. It will never be understood by abstracting from it.

Philosophy works out implications. It looks for rational consistency and teases out the cash value of any and all ideas. Philosophy does not tell you what to believe, it provides no experiential 'stuff' out of which understanding can come. It rather undergirds understanding, and makes it possible. Philosophy turns data and experience into genuine knowledge. It cannot tell you what to believe, but it can work out the full implications of what you do believe, so that you can see whether you really believe that.

Philosophy, science, and religion need each other. Or, rather, we need all of them. Science and religion both give us data from two different perspectives: the objective and the subjective. Both the external and internal are real, the question becomes how we reconcile those ways of knowing since there seems to be conflict between them. Philosophy is the glue that holds a worldview together. It is what makes reconciliation possible. With the full breadth of life in view, we can start to get some view of overarching truth, of the reality that binds both worlds together. Religion without science is blind to what is true beyond the human encounter with the world. Science without religion is blind to what is true WITHIN that encounter. Both without philosophy lack the status of genuine knowing and believing. They remain brute facts and raw experiences.

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