bigchiefbc wrote:Derelict78 wrote:devnulljp wrote:D.o.S. wrote:Science is a religion.
Its principle tenant happens to be Empiricism.
Rubbish.
Is that kind of superficial bumper sticker supposed to pass for deep insight?
(and the word you're looking for is 'tenet' BTW)
its kind of true
Sciences' principle tenet is Empiricism. Thats not bad though.
How do you define religion then? I have a hard time coming up with a definition for religion that makes Science one. Science isn't a belief system, it's a process for figuring out how things work.
Isn't science based on a naturalist worldview, that everything has a natural cause (which I feel was showed very adequately to neither be a logical necessity nor empirically observable by David Hume - there is no "necessary connection")? Religion is belief in some supernatural phenomenon, right?
Regarding the tricorder thing, I haven't watched Star Trek but the principle is the same as the human eye if i follow (hey,, here's another metaphor):
The human eye is assumed to be taking "pictures" of objective reality in some sense (light -> neural impulses -> visual cortex etc). This is based on looking at the anatomy of the human eye and brain.
If you have a camera and want to know if it's taking accurate pictures, can you decide that by looking solely at the pictures, even if they're pictures of the inside of another camera just like it? Even if it could take a picture of itself, you can't use the pictures alone to determine if the pictures are an accurate representation of reality, because that assumes that they are which is the point in question. You have to compare the pictures to what they're supposed to resemble.
All we have directly available to us is our own minds and our perceptions; sound, image, touch etc (the picture). What it's like to US. We can't look outside our subjective experiences to see what's outside (seeing is subjective experience). We can't compare the picture to what it alledgedly represents.
There is no logical reasoning that will let us infer from a picture alone that the picture is a representation of something else outside it.