Science Is Faith-Based

As a person to whom supernatural faith is anathema, and for whom science is both a comfort and a shield against faith-based dogma, I am not happy to admit that the title of this post is in fact true. But in order to remain consistent with my own proselytizing of reason and logic, I am forced to do so. Here’s why:

Science is based on our observation of the Universe; observation relies on the senses. The veracity of the senses cannot be tested without invoking the senses (a logical fallacy); thus, even empirical data is inherently suspect.

Suppose I see a UFO flying overhead: how can I confirm that it is real? I observed it with my eyes, but how can I be sure that they are trustworthy? I can ask someone else if they see the UFO, and they can agree that it is real, but that doesn’t prove anything because the trustworthiness of their eyes has not been confirmed. My eyes cannot be invoked to corroborate theirs, because the trustworthiness of mine remains in question. We can get a third person to corroborate the second, and so on, but we will eventually run out of people, having proven nothing about the reality of the UFO.

Thus, acceptance of empirical data, and the science that depends on it, requires a leap of faith that what is observed is real — not just according to the senses, but irrespective of them — which cannot be proven conclusively.

The Parental Paradox

It is a precept of American governance that parents shall be afforded the right to raise their children according to their own values. It is also a precept of American governance that society as a whole has a vested interest in preventing parents from raising their children in a manner contrary to the consensus view of what is proper. These two precepts can be contradictory.

In practice, the consensus view takes precedence, at least in cases where the violation of consensus is considered extreme. In those cases, parents whose values do not conform to the consensus view often find their right to raise their children according to their own values infringed. In order to reclaim that right, they must conform to the consensus view, in which case they become, in effect, unpaid surrogate parents of society’s children.

Indeed, all parents who conform to the consensus view, willingly or not, are providing a free service to society by raising society’s children in accordance with society’s values. Most parents are only too happy to raise the children they’ve produced, but should society be taking free advantage of that eagerness? Should parents be paid a stipend for the service they provide? If so, then it would follow that they should be licensed and monitored to ensure that they continue to conform to consensus opinion on child rearing, or else forfeit their stipend and their parenting privileges.

This is not a personally-held belief for me, it just popped into my head suddenly. My inclination is to find it extreme and even repugnant, but it’s not exactly trivial to get around, logically, so I may be forced to accept the idea. I’ll have to think on it some more….

Can There Be Only One?

While reading something-or-other on logic, I came across this oft-used syllogism:

Major Premise: All men are mortal.
Minor Premise: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

It suddenly occurred to me that most Christians do not believe in the truth of the major premise: they believe that Jesus of Nazareth was non-mortal. I won’t say “immortal,” since they do believe that he gave up his Earthly body in the end. The Gospels, however, claim that he rose from the dead before ascending to Heaven — not in spirit form initially, but his Earthly body actually came back to life, if only temporarily. This is clearly something other than mortal, although not quite immortal; hence: “non-mortal.”

Of course, most Christians also believe that Jesus was something more than a man as well. Still, they would likely concede that he was born of a human mother, that he was flesh and blood, that he consumed food, water and air and presumably required them to survive while in his humanoid form, and that he was vulnerable to harm. This would place him squarely in the “man camp,” for all practical purposes, at least while he was here on Earth. As such, it is fair to call Jesus a man, albeit a non-mortal one, according to Christian doctrine.

If Jesus was a non-mortal man then the major premise of the example argument would not be true. In that case, it would be reasonable to presume that there are non-mortals living among us even today, and that there always have been. If we presume a worldwide population of about one million, circa 10,000 BCE, with even just one non-mortal among them, then simple arithmetic tells us that Jesus may have been, at best, only one of a couple-hundred non-mortals. This most conservative estimate suggests that there could be upwards of 6,000 of them alive today!

I would like to meet one of these non-mortals. I would also like to devise a test for non-mortality, to determine whether or not I am able to rise from the dead. Such knowledge would allow for a far more adventurous lifestyle!