4x-pvcdLTJg.txt

Speaker 1:          00:01          I think that fundamentalists and atheistic scientists have the same problem, the fundamentalists, so we could say the Christian fundamentalists in the US make the proposition that biblical stories, we'll call them mythological stories, are literal representations of the truth, but, and that might be true depending on what you mean by literal, but what they mean by literal over what they attempt to make literal mean is that they're in the same category of scientific facts because they don't have the idea that there are different ways of approaching truth and the truth can serve different purposes. They don't have a sense that your definition of truth is actually something like a tool rather than an ontological statement about the reality of the world. And so the. The fundamentalists basically make the proposition that the idea that God created the world in six days, 5,000 years ago is literally true and they get the 5,000 year estimate.

Speaker 1:          01:06          By the way, by going through the genealogies in the Old Testament and adding up the hypothetical ages and figuring out. You know how long before Moses Adam lived and some bishop did that back in the. I think it was in the mid 18 hundreds, I might be wrong about that, but it was somewhere back about that time and more or less that's been accepted as canonical fact ever since, and then the scientists say, well, yeah, those are empirical truth. They're just wrong. See, and that's the only difference there is between the fundamentalists and the atheist scientists, the fundamental say those are fundamental scientific truths and they're right and the scientists say, well, their scientific truths, they just happened to be wrong. Well, I think that's a stupid argument personally. I mean for a bunch of reasons. One is that the people who wrote the, the ancient stories that we have access to, we're in no way shape or form scientists, you know, modern people tend to think that you think like a scientist and people have always thought that way.

Speaker 1:          02:04          First of all, you do not think like a scientist. Even scientists hardly even think like scientists, but if you're not scientifically trained, you don't think like a scientist at all. So one of the things, for example, that characterizes your thinking is confirmation bias. And so if you have a theory, what you do is wander around in the world looking for reasons why it's true, and the scientists does exactly the opposite of that in the little tiny, narrow domain where he or she is actually capable of being a scientist and what they have is a theory and looked for a way to prove it wrong. But believe me, you don't run around doing that. I mean you, you can train yourself so now and then you can do that, you know, we can learn to listen to people, for example, on the off chance that you might be wrong, but that is by no means a natural way of thinking.

Speaker 1:          02:48          And of course the, the, the fundamental philosophical axioms of the scientific method weren't developed until descartes and, and who else? Descartes. Bacon is one more. Anyways, the name escapes me at the moment, but you can argue about when science emerged, but you, you, it certainly emerged in it's articulated form within the last thousand years. I think you could say even more specifically that had emerged in the last 500 years. Now you might argue with that and say, well, what about the Greeks and other people who were fairly technologically sophisticated or who invented geometry or that kind of thing, but yeah, yeah, bear precursors to the idea of empirical observation. Aristotle, for example, when he was writing down his knowledge of the world, it never occurred to him to actually go out in the world and look at it to see if what he assumed about it was true and it certainly never occurred to Aristotle to get 20 people to go look at the same thing independently.

Speaker 1:          03:50          Write down exactly how they went about doing it, compare the records, and then extract out what was common and that's a. That seems self evident to us to some degree, but you know, it was by no means self evident to anyone 500 years ago and people still don't do it. So it's not even. It's not plausible. If you know anything about the history of ideas, it's not plausible to pause it. That stories about the nature of reality that existed before 500 years ago were scientific at any but the most cursory of ways. So why we have that argument continually somewhat beyond me. Part of the reason is though that everyone fundamentalists included really believe in scientific facts. Even though they hate it, they'll use computers, they'll fly, computers won't work, wouldn't work unless quantum mechanics were correct, like the fact that you use a high tech device indicates through your action that you actually accept the theories upon which is predicated, right?

Speaker 1:          04:55          Same as flying the same as anything you do in it too. Complex Technological Society, you're stuck with it. You're reading by the lights. Do they work? Yeah, they work well, so it's really hard for people who are trying to hold onto a way of looking at the world that appears to contradict the scientific claims when everything they do is predicated on their acceptance of the validity of the scientific claims. It's really problematic for people and it's problematic in a real way, I think because one of the problems with the scientific viewpoint is it doesn't tell you anything about what you should do with your life. It doesn't. It doesn't solve the problem of value at all. In fact, it might make it more difficult because one of the fundamental scientific claims, roughly speaking, is that every fact is of an equal utility, at least from a scientific perspective.

Speaker 1:          05:44          Right? There is no hierarchy facts. It's not exactly. That's not exactly true because you can think of one theory is more true than another, but that boils down to saying that it's more useful than. So I don't think that that's a really good exception. Okay, so fine. You got the scientific atheist, so on one end, and you got the religious fundamentalists on the other and what they both agree on whether they like it or not, is that there's so much power in the scientific method that it's difficult to dispute the validity of scientific facts and they seem to exist in contradiction to the older archaic stories. If you also accept them as fast fact based account. So what do we do about that? Well, if you're on a scientific atheist end of things, you say, well, those old stories or just superstitious science, second rate, barbaric archaic forms of science, you just dispense with them. They're nothing but trouble and if they're on their fundamentalist side you say, well, we'll try to shoe horn science into this framework. And really that doesn't work very well. It doesn't work very well with the claims of evolution. For example, fact it works very badly and that's a problem because evolutionary theory is like, it's a killer theory and it's re, it's, it's really, really hard and like it's not a complete theory and there's lots of things we don't know about evolution,

Speaker 2:          07:05          you know,

Speaker 1:          07:08          trying to wear hand wave that away. That's, that's not gonna work without dispensing with most of biology. So. So that's a big problem. So here's another way of thinking about it. You don't just need one way of looking at the world. Maybe you need two ways of looking at the world and I'm not exactly sure how they should be related to one another. Like which should take precedence under which circumstances, but one problem is what's the world made of, you know, what's the world conceptualized as an objective place made of. And the other is how should you conduct yourself while you're alive? And there's no reason to assume that those questions can be answered using the same approach.

Speaker 2:          07:55          I mean

Speaker 1:          07:58          physics has its methods and chemistry has its methods and biology has its methods, so a method for obtaining the truth can be bound to a domain. So why would we necessarily assume that you could use the same set of tools to represent the world as a place of objects and to represent it as a place in which a biological creature would act in anyways. I'm suggesting that we, that we don't view it that way, that we have two different viewpoints. Maybe they can be brought together, although it's not obvious how, but that it's not a tenable solution to get rid of one in favor of the other. And I think the reason for that is

Speaker 1:          08:43          you need to know how to conduct yourself in the world. You have to have a value system. You can't even look at the damn world without a value system. It's not possible. Your emotional health is dependent on a value system. The way you interact with other people is dependent on a value system. There's no getting away from it. And you say, well, there's no justification for any value system from a scientific perspective. You're going to draw that conclusion that no value system is valid. Where the hell does that leave you? There is no down, there's no APP, there's no rationale for moving in any direction. There's not even really any rationale for living. And so people say things like that, well why? Why the hell should I care what happens in a million years? Who's going to know the difference? It's like, yeah, yeah, true, stupid but true.

Speaker 1:          09:28          And the reason I think it's stupid is because it's just a game, you know, I can take anything of any sort, can find a context in which it's irrelevant. It's just a rational games like who cares if a hundred children freeze to death in a blizzard, who, what difference is going to make a billion years? Well, what do you say to someone who says that you say, well, seems like the wrong frame of Reference Bucko. That's what it looks like to me. You know, because at some point you question the dam frame of reference, not what you derive from it. And it certainly seems to me that situations like that don't allow you to use that kind of frame of reference. There's something inhumane about it and that trumps the logic, or at least it should. And if it doesn't, then all hell breaks loose. And that doesn't seem to be a good thing.