https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UFWWY1dwNfE
I think that fundamentalists and atheistic scientists have the same problem the fundamentalists, so we could say the Christian fundamentalists in the US make the proposition that biblical stories, we’ll call them mythological stories are literal representations of the truth and that might be true depending on what you mean by literal but what they mean by literal, or what they attempt to make literal mean is that they’re in the same category as scientific facts because they don’t have the idea that there are different ways of approaching truth and that truths can serve different purposes they don’t have a sense that your definition of truth is actually something like a tool rather than an ontological statement about the reality of the world and so the fundamentalists basically make the proposition that the idea that God created the world in six days, 5,000 years ago is literally true, and they get the 5,000 year estimate by the way by going through the genealogies in the Old Testament and adding up the hypothetical ages and figuring out how long before Moses, Adam lived some bishop did that back in the, I think it was in the mid 1800s I might be wrong about that, but it was somewhere back about that time and more or less that’s been accepted as canonical fact ever since and then the scientists say, well yeah, those are empirical truths, they’re just wrong and that’s the only difference there is between the fundamentalists and the atheist scientists the fundamentalists say, those are fundamental scientific truths and they’re right and the scientists say, well they’re scientific truths, they just happen to be wrong well, I think that’s a stupid argument, personally I mean, for a bunch of reasons, one is that the people who wrote the ancient stories that we have access to were in no way, shape or form scientists you know, modern people tend to think that you think like a scientist and people have always thought that way, first of all, you do not think like a scientist even scientists hardly even think like scientists, but if you’re not scientifically trained you don’t think like a scientist at all so one of the things, for example, that characterizes your thinking is confirmation bias and so if you have a theory, what you do is wander around in the world looking for reasons why it’s true and a scientist does exactly the opposite of that in the little tiny narrow domain where he or she is actually capable of being a scientist and what they have is a theory and look for a way to prove it wrong but believe me, you don’t run around doing that I mean, you can train yourself, so now and then you can do that you know, you can learn to listen to people, for example, on the off chance that you might be wrong but that is by no means a natural way of thinking and of course, the fundamental philosophical axioms of the scientific method weren’t developed until Descartes and Bacon, and who else? Descartes, Bacon there’s one more anyways, the name escapes me at the moment, but you can argue about when science emerged, but it certainly emerged in its articulated form within the last thousand years I think you could say even more specifically that it emerged in the last 500 years now, you might argue with that and say, well, what about the Greeks and other people who were fairly technologically sophisticated, or who invented geometry, or that kind of thing, but yeah, yeah bare precursors to the idea of empirical observation Aristotle, for example when he was writing down his knowledge of the world, it never occurred to him to actually go out in the world and look at it to see if what he assumed about it was true and it certainly never occurred to Aristotle to get 20 people to go look at the same thing independently write down exactly how they went about doing it compare the records, and then extract out what was common and that’s a that seems self-evident to us to some degree, but it was by no means self-evident to anyone 500 years ago, and people still don’t do it so it’s not even, it’s not plausible if you know anything about the history of ideas, it’s not plausible to posit that stories about the nature of reality that existed before 500 years ago were scientific in any but the most cursory of ways so why we have that argument continually is somewhat beyond me part of the reason is though that everyone, fundamentalists included really believe in scientific facts even though they hate it they’ll use computers, they’ll fly computers won’t work, wouldn’t work unless quantum mechanics were correct like the fact that you use a high tech device indicates through your action that you actually accept the theories upon which it’s predicated right, the same as flying same as anything you do in a complex technological society you’re stuck with it, you’re reading by the lights, do they work? yeah, they work, well so it’s really hard for people who are trying to hold on to a way of looking at the world that appears to contradict the scientific claims when everything they do is predicated on their acceptance of the validity of the scientific claims it’s really problematic for people it’s problematic in a real way, I think, because one of the problems with the scientific viewpoint is it doesn’t tell you anything about what you should do with your life it doesn’t solve the problem of value at all in fact it might make it more difficult because one of the fundamental scientific claims, roughly speaking, is that every fact is of equal utility at least from a scientific perspective, right there’s no hierarchy of facts, it’s not exactly true, because you can think of one theory as more true than another but that boils down to saying that it’s more useful than another so I don’t think that that’s a really good exception okay, so fine you got the scientific atheists on one end and you got the religious fundamentalists on the other and what they both agree on, whether they like it or not, is that there’s so much power in the scientific method that it’s difficult to dispute the validity of scientific facts and they seem to exist in contradiction to the older archaic stories if you also accept them as fast fact-based accounts so what do we do about that? well, if you’re on the scientific atheist end of things you say, well, those old stories are just superstitious science, second-rate barbaric, archaic forms of science, you just dispense with them, they’re nothing but trouble and if you’re on the fundamentalist side, you say, well, we’ll try to shoehorn science into this framework and really that doesn’t work very well, it doesn’t work very well with the claims of evolution, for example in fact it works very badly and that’s a problem, because evolutionary theory is like, it’s a killer theory and it’s really, really hard and like, it’s not a complete theory, and there’s lots of things we don’t know about evolution, but you know trying to hand-wave that away, that’s not going to work, without dispensing with most of biology so, that’s a big problem so, here’s another way of thinking about it you don’t just need one way of looking at the world maybe you need two ways of looking at the world, and I’m not exactly sure how they should be related to one another, like which should take precedence under which circumstance but one problem is, what’s the world made of? you know, what’s the world conceptualized as an objective place, made of? another is, how should you conduct yourself while you’re alive? and there’s no reason to assume that those questions can be answered using the same approach I mean, physics has its methods, and chemistry has its methods, and biology has its methods so, a method for obtaining the truth can be bound to a domain so why would we necessarily assume that you could use the same set of tools to represent the world as a place of objects, and to represent it as a place in which a biological creature would act I mean, anyways, I’m suggesting that we don’t view it that way that we have two different viewpoints maybe they can be brought together, although it’s not obvious how but that it’s not a tenable solution to get rid of one in favor of the other and I think the reason for that is that you need to know how to conduct yourself in the world you have to have a value system you can’t even look at the damn world without a value system it’s not possible your emotional health is dependent on a value system the way you interact with other people is dependent on a value system there’s no getting away from it and you say, well, there’s no justification for any value system from a scientific perspective you’re going to draw that conclusion that no value system is valid where the hell does that leave you? there’s no down, there’s no up there’s no rationale for moving in any direction there’s not even really any rationale for living and so people say things like that, well why the hell should I care what happens in a million years who’s going to know the difference it’s like, yeah, yeah, true, stupid, but true and the reason I think it’s stupid is because it’s just a game you know, I can take anything of any sort and find a context in which it’s irrelevant it’s just a rational game, it’s like who cares if a hundred children freeze to death in a blizzard what difference is going to make a billion years well, what do you say to someone who says that you say, well, seems like the wrong frame of reference, bucko that’s what it looks like to me you know, because at some point you question the damn frame of reference it’s not what you derive from it and it certainly seems to me that situations like that don’t allow you to use that kind of frame of reference there’s something inhumane about it and that trumps the logic, or at least it should and if it doesn’t, then all hell breaks loose and that doesn’t seem to be a good thing