Jesus discussion

[Narukami]

Guys
please keep up the discussion...

Why can't they find common ground? Because "evidence", "certainty" and "truth" do not have the same meaning. For a believer evidence is superfluous, with truth and certainty beyond the reach of imperfect evidence. For the non-believer, evidence is crucial and it plays a strategic and tactical role in a debate. Of course any good scientist knows that evidence is always imperfect, but this is ammunition for the believer. The argument of science is never a proof or disproof but one of likely-hood. But this is meaningless to the believer, also because to him a likely belief is not very impressive. To him an impressive belief is an un-likely one.

Greetings,

Goffredo, you touch upon the core concept at play here, the distinction between knowledge and certainty.

If you will allow I will refer back to Jacob Bronowski, who spoke much more eloquently on the topic than I ever could. It is a long quote, and one that I would think most members of this site have at least heard or read at one time in their life, and yet it bears repeating, particularly in this day and age...

From "Knowledge or Certainty", an episode from the 1973 BBC series "The Ascent of Man", transcribed by Evan Hunt:

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science--or outside of it--we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses: First, in the engineering sense--science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance.

But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge--all information between human beings--can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance--and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality--this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge or error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."

Narukami