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KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH 8/17/2006 10:21:35 PM
What is reality, what is truth? Mapping Reality is about knowledge and faith; and how all knowledge is based on faith.
There is a huge amount of knowledge, facts, truths, information, et cetera, available in the world. At present it is easier to access this treasure trove than ever before in our history. What is tougher, however, is how to distinguish between what is useful, accurate, and relevant, and what is not. What is theory, what is fact, what is truth, and of course, what is plain nonsense.
We certainly have plenty of knowledge about the world and its varied features. Yet, as we reflect upon what is presumably known, we begin to discover that commonly accepted convictions (scientific ‘facts’ and religious ‘truths’) are less secure than originally assumed and that many of our firmest beliefs are dubious or possibly even chimerical. Such doubts and hesitations are caused by anomalous features of the world that most people notice but tend to minimize or ignore. Epistemologists notice these things too, but, in wondering about them, they come to realise that they provide profound challenges to the knowledge claims that most individuals casually and without any reflection accept as absolute and unconditional truth.
We are presented daily with roughly three kinds of knowledge systems, namely:
• Religion and the ‘paranormal’ (parapsychological or PSI phenomenon) – things that we believe without any ‘rational’ proof.
• Science (scientific artefacts) or the ‘normal’ – so-called ‘rational, proven knowledge’ that we believe in particular because it is ‘proven’.
• General artefacts – knowledge that we have created to manage our daily lives, e.g. law, accountancy, language, mathematics, even history. This knowledge has nothing in common with religion, the paranormal, or science. We know this and do not need to believe it – it is facts based on human conventions and rules and not on universal truths! History is a bit of an odd-one-out though because it can be applied to any of the three varieties of knowledge.
Without being a sceptic – but being critical nevertheless – what can we reasonably (or at least safely), believe then?
On the one hand, we have so-called ‘irrational’ beliefs in telepathy, time travel, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, ghosts, UFOs, mermaids, and fairies. On the other we have ‘rational’ beliefs in the speed limitation of light, warped space (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), pions, gravitons, quarks (subatomic particle theory), life from nothing (abiogenesis), and humans that are said to have evolved from fish (neo-Darwinism)! We have the so-called wave-particle duality and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics and according to physicists themselves, Quantum Mechanics is extremely ‘weird’.
Think for a moment about these scientific ‘facts’ like Einstein’s Relativity Theory, Quantum Theory, Cosmology (e.g. Black Holes, ‘M’ theory, and the Big Bang), neo-Darwinism, abiogenesis, et cetera. These are truly very nebulous theories, but they are daily presented to us as if they were indisputable ‘scientific fact’ nevertheless. However, these theories are not ‘scientifically proven fact’, but at best, are only working assumptions, hypotheses, mathematical manipulations of wacky mathematical equations, or plain flights of fancy.
Thomas S Kuhn, for example, writes: “Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles (typically mathematical equations), and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.”
For our purposes, we need a very simple schema to distinguish between different thinking systems. With some trepidation, I suggest the following, but please remember this is only a very simple approach to help us think clearer – to minimise all the wool around our thinking process. My suggested representation is as follows, namely:
Theory and practice (incl. experimentation) can also be called dogma and ritual.
This schema shows us that science in effect carries more baggage than any other thinking system, but the upside is that science has a built-in self-rectifying mechanism when used correctly. Nevertheless, all thinking systems are based on faith. As I see it, mysticism is based on faith with the ultimate aim, to achieve union with God; and science strives for rationality and a study of Nature (the physical universe), not truth or reality! Mathematics is pure rationality and logic and also has no bearing on life and truth outside the realm of mathematics.
Faith is an acquired taste! No, even worse, faith is an infection and we all have it since a very young age. There is no human being that is not infected, by one or another strain, of ‘the faith infection’ – some strains are admittedly worse than others are, but we are all infected nevertheless. It is just about impossible to change your basic faith infection too – most people will never dare to question their own faith – the fact that they are infected with a reality dimming disease never occurs to them at all.
The problem with all types of faith is that it distorts our view of reality and makes our maps of reality disjointed with the area mapped. I am talking about all faiths, like religion, science (‘the Greek disease’), philosophy, et cetera, et cetera.
