Do We Approach Knowledge with Science?
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So any questions, comments, concerns before we break for lunch regarding these ideas of truth and tolerance? Yes.
I’ve had someone tell me that they’re trying to explain moral relativism.
Yes.
And they said that like, that light might be blue to me, but you see it as yellow. So how is that… Like it’s true for me and it’s true for you, but what about they do actually see different colors. How do you like-
Yeah.
Okay. Good question. So we might say that this bookcase looks blue to somebody, but it looks green to somebody else. Well isn’t this kind of a relativistic because what if they’re colorblind? Well, the fact of the matter is that the color of that bookcase, whatever it might be, is reflecting light, that’s bouncing off this and radiating light at a certain wavelength. That wavelength is a certain wavelength that is determined, irrespective of how you perceive that wavelength to be.
So if you’re colorblind and your anatomy has problems with it that don’t allow you to perceive the accuracy of that wavelength, well, that’s not relativism. That’s just, you have mistaken data. So if I have a barometer and it’s not measuring the… What is it, the air pressure? I shouldn’t used such a complex term.
What does barometer’s measure? Air pressure?
Yeah.
Yeah. Air pressure. That’s right. I should be confident in my own thoughts here. Okay. If I have a barometer and it’s giving the wrong answer as to the air pressure, well then that just means that the barometer’s mistaken now that the air pressure isn’t, whatever it actually is. And the same way with the color of this. This is still radiating, reflecting a certain wavelength of color and that color is fixed. It isn’t change based on what you or a colorblind person determines it is. Okay?
So even though they’re misperceiving it, that just shows that their detection tools are broken or mistaken. Not that the wavelength all of a sudden changes simply because they perceive it to be green when it’s actually blue. Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So our inability to perceive something or figure out what it is, is not proof that relativism is true. It just means that we might not know. You know? And that’s why I said initially when we were doing the test on objective and subject of truth, even if we can’t know the answer to a question, like maybe we’re going to ask the question, “Well, how should we move forward with regards to cloning?” Is cloning a moral thing? And maybe we can’t figure it out. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a right answer as to the morality of cloning, just because we can’t figure it out.
It just means we can’t figure it out. That’s all it means. It’s not justification for relativism. It’s a great question though. Thank you. Good. Other questions, comments, concerns that you want to bring up now as opposed to porch chat time? Yes.
Why has this idea of relativism taken off in our culture? Like what is the main reason?
Why is relativism taken off in our culture? Well, yeah, that’s a hard question to answer because there’s probably lots of factors. Let me just tell you one factor. I don’t know if it’s the predominant one. But I think we have grown skeptical of knowledge in areas other than the hard sciences. And so there’s this new, not a new idea, but there’s this idea called scientism and scientism is the idea that the only thing that we can know to be true is what we can determine by scientific experiments.
And usually those things are limited only to the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry. So if you pick up a piece, if you have some water, you can use the hard sciences to figure out, well, what is water made up of? It’s made up of H2O, right? Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, right?
You never have people say, “Well, that might be true for you, but for me, water’s made up of H2O.” You never have that because in our culture, we’ve adopted this idea that scientism is sort of the way we approach knowledge. Okay? Well, the thing is, is that science cannot be applied to say the arts or to religion or to morality. And so since science can only determine truth based on a certain number of disciplines like the hard sciences, the rest of the science, the rest of the things like the arts, the sciences, I’m sorry, the arts, morality, religious belief become relative. Hey, we can’t know with certainty the truth about these things, so it’s just relative.
And so I think this elevation of science as a way of knowing things has predominated in our culture, even though science is just one tool, amongst many tools by which we can gain knowledge. So this is really the study of what’s called epistemology. So if you study philosophy. Epistemology is simply how we come to know things. Science, yes, can tell a certain things about certain aspects, but science is not our only tool of gaining knowledge about reality.
For example, a testimony is another way of gaining knowledge. If I wanted to know, for example, what the weather like is in Chicago right now, I could call up my relatives and ask him, “What’s the weather like?” And he’ll say, “It’s sunny and really, really humid.” Now that testimony is fairly trustworthy, reliable. It’s instant. In fact, it’s much quicker, oftentimes in scientific tests because scientific tests take a lot of time. So testimony is one way we can also gain knowledge.
Here’s another one, introspection. If you want to know what’s your thinking right now, if you want to know the images that are in your mind and the thoughts you have in your mind, all you have to do is introspect. And when you introspect, you’ll have the immediate access to what is occurring in your soul. By the way, no scientific experiment today or in principle will ever be able to tell you what is happening in your soul. Only through introspection, which is another method of gaining knowledge about reality, can you determine what’s in your soul.
So you have, yes, science can tell you certain things about external reality, the natural world. You have testimony, you have introspection. Also, logical old deduction is another way. If I say, “Do you have an older brother? Do you have an older sibling?”
No.
Do you have… Okay. You have an older father? Okay. Your father’s probably taller than you, right?
Barely.
Okay. Barely. All right. Well, if your father is taller than you and a guy named John is taller than your father, then is that guy John taller than you? Yes. And we know that by logical deduction. So logical deduction is another tool that we can use to determine truth about reality.
So notice there are all these different methods of gaining knowledge about reality. Some can figure out some things, others can figure out things about other things, but science isn’t the one tool that can figure out about everything. Science can’t tell us about introspective things and it can’t tell us about logic. But science has been elevated to this point in which it’s now the God of everything. And since it only can detect stuff about the natural world and in the hard sciences, everything else, all the other disciplines are left to just simply, hey, whatever you believe is fine.
And I think that’s one of the contributions to why our world has adopted relativism. Our culture has adopted relativism because the elevation of science to a point where it doesn’t belong. It’s important, we need it, but it’s just one tool amongst many that helps us figure out truth about reality. Great question. All right. We are done. I’ll be there for porch chat, open forum to answer questions about all this stuff. So thank you very much. We’ll see you then.
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