DangerousTalk

Fundamentalist religious believers love to ignore and attack science. Some will claim that there are other sources of knowledge. It is not unusual to hear some religious believer talk about spiritual knowledge or to claim that they can know God through faith. I maintain that without science there is no knowledge.

I guess I am stealing the wording here from the famous (and false) view that without God there is no morality, but I rather like my rewording better. For one thing, it is much more accurate. Science is how we know things. It is the only way we can know things with any accurate level of certainty.

Is this dogmatic? Maybe, but the difference here is that science can support its claims with actual evidence and more importantly with results. Don’t believe me? How are you even reading what I am saying on a computer screen? People built your computer based on knowledge obtained through the scientific method. Your house was built using knowledge obtained through the scientific method. You didn’t pray your home into existence, did you?

In the summer, one doesn’t use spiritual knowledge to stay cool. One uses a scientifically engineered air conditioner. In winter, praying in a group may warm you up a little, but not nearly as much as science can through the use of a heater.

The fact is that when something matters, science is what you rely on and everything else is just amounts to mere assertion. Assertion isn’t knowledge. Any real knowledge can only be understood through the scientific process. We can’t claim to know something unless we can evaluate that knowledge through objective standard.

Religion can only claim assertions. I could claim that I knowledge that there is an invisible pink unicorn in your pocket, but that would just be an assertion unless I could back it up with actual evidence. If I even tried to defend that assertion with evidence, I would be attempting (either successfully or unsuccessfully) to use the scientific method (in this case unsuccessfully). So yes, science does have the monopoly on knowledge.

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Filed under: Alternative Worldview, anti-intellectualism, science