Tag Archives: Epistemology

How We Gain Knowledge

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Popper and KuhnBefore I disappeared from blogging, I had finished up reposting my Wheat and Tares posts on epistemology (i.e. theory of how we gain knowledge. Good summary of my posts found here. Full series found here, in reverse order of course.) But the truth is that throughout my series, I never really had a single post that attempted to explain what epistemology really is.

Conjecture and Refutation

To summarize how epistemology works, the basic idea is that scientific progress is made through a process of conjecture, criticism, and then refutation. Essentially we see something in the world that we wish to have explained or (even more likely) a problem that we can solve if we can explain it. Continue reading →

Kuhn’s Insight – John Polkinghorne and The Value of Value

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In my last post, I declared victory for Scientific Realism over Positivism on the grounds that even if Positivism is right, it’s first “prediction” must always be that we ignore it as “truth” – at least to some degree – and be committed to our theories a “the truth” or else we can’t make scientific progress.

I therefore declared that on the point that Kuhn and Popper disagree, that Popper wins by default.

However, Kuhn had many insights that Popper missed or downplayed that help fill in the explanation gaps in Popper’s own theories. One of these is the fact that “refutation” really only happens between two (or more) competing theories. While Popper does not deny this, he really didn’t make it as clear as Kuhn either. We will eventually see that this insight is a key point in understanding the value of Theology.

Another explanation gap that Kuhn fills for Popper is explained in this quote:

Fortunately, there is also another sort of consideration that can lead scientists to reject an old paradigm in favor of a new. These are the arguments, rarely made entirely explicit, that appeal to the individual’s sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic – the new theory is staid to be “neater,” “more suitable,” or “simpler” than the old. (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 155) Continue reading →

What is Morality? The Relationship Between Morality and God

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Note: This post takes several of my threads (i.e. What is morality?, What is atheism?, What is theism?, What is religion?, One Moral Will, and the concept of meaning-memes) and shows that they are all deeply inter-related.

This was the final conclusion I was able to draw from my last post on Supernatural Morality:

Theists can rationally justify (though they do not prove) their belief in objective morality via their additional premises (i.e. the existence of an afterlife, with perfect knowledge, and inescapable consequences). Atheists cannot justify their belief in objective morality and are merely being rationally incoherent when they believe in (or act as if there is) objective morality despite all the evidence against it.

Now, of course, this is probably a hollow victory if there is in fact no God. If there is no God, does it really matter that morality is a delusion? This is a thought for a future post. But the question does point out one thing: there is some sort of link or connection between belief in God and belief in Morality. At a minimum, that connection is the rational coherence of morality as stated in the quote above. (Making here some possible allowances for an “atheist” that receive answers to prayers or believe in heaven.)

I now want to explore the relationship between belief in God and belief in Morality further, for there is clearly some sort of link there that few speak enough of. Continue reading →

A Review of Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision

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When M* was asked if we were interested in reviewing any of a list of books from Greg Kofford books, one book in particular jumped out at me called Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision. I knew that was the one I wanted to review.

The book was much of what I was hoping for. Let me just say that unlike my esteemed colleague at M*, Ivan Wolfe, who also reviewed the book, I am a huge fan of speculative theology, especially speculative ways to work out the points of conflict between our current best scientific theories and our current best theological theories. Or, at least I’m a big fan if it’s not being presented as doctrinal fact, which this book never does. Continue reading →

Our Epistemology So Far

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EinsteinThis is a reprint of the summary of my Wheat and Tares posts on epistemology. Just reprinting it here to make it easier to link to locally here and to add to the overall discussion. Personally, I feel this is my best posts.

Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground in past posts. The problem with this ‘Reason as a Guide to Reality’ series of posts is that they build on concepts from past posts. It’s easy to get lost in all the concepts. So let’s do a quick review of past ideas and build up the principles of finding truth/knowledge (i.e. Epistemology) that we’ve determined so far.

First, everything we thought we knew about science turned out to be false. Namely, science is not specifically about prediction, nor reductionism, nor holism, nor observation, nor falsification. All of those ideas are important to science, but they do not delineate a boundary for science.

 

Second, science is not justified by inductive thinking. The past does not determine the future. Instead, science (and all knowledge actually) is justified based on being our best explanations so far. No other justification is necessary and no other justification is possible. Continue reading →