Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> I'm not asserting that photographs aren't easily faked.  I've
> made some pretty convincing fakes myself, and I'm not even that skilled
> with Photoshop.  But yes, photographs are nevertheless generally
> reliable, as a statistical thing.  Not many people modify photos with
> the intent to defraud, and fewer of them do so convincingly, and
> besides, there'd be little reason to fake the eruption of a volcano.
> And so on.  Plus you have a preponderance of people who've seen the
> evidence firsthand, not just a select few who wrote about it and
> passed nothing but their words down to later generations.
Agreed on all points.

> > The point is that deciding what does and does not count as reliable
> > evidence is a subjective and non-scientific process. Science itself has a
> > particular set of epistemological criteria, as do religions (each religion
> > has their own), as does law, etc. You can apply the criteria of one realm
> > to another realm, but the results are generally meaningless.
>
> Thank you.  The fact that there are different criteria being applied is all
> that I was trying to say.  That is the distinction between what constitutes
> "religious" teaching and what doesn't.
Exactly. Things conforming to one set of criteria are scientific, and
others are not. Stating that the Bible is a religious and not a
scientific document should not be controversial. It does not necessarily
follow that only scientific ideas should be taught in schools, but this
fact is an illustration of the "hegemony of the scientific viewpoint" that
I mentioned earlier.

> > The absolute hegemony of the scientific viewpoint makes this somewhat
> > difficult, though, since religious people often wind up mistakenly
> > applying scientific principles where they have no relevance.
>
> Well, Creationism is precisely a case of folks trying to apply
> religious principles to science.  So I'd say fair's fair. :)
I'd say that it's an example of scientific principles applied to religion:
asserting that empirical provability is the only standard of truth, and
then attempting to empirically (dis)prove a religious text. But asking
whether God scientifically created the earth in 6 days makes as much sense
as asking the latitude and longitude of the Tao. Of course it *does* go
both ways, as people judge scientific discoveries by how they correspond
to received religious ideas.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"