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RE: Surviving A Post Truth World - Fighting A War Between Reason And Superstition
I prefer to think that 21st century society is post-trust, rather than post-truth.
As any philosopher will tell you, truth is a fraught concept. But for the average non-philosopher, trust is a pretty good tool to determine truth. For example, I can’t personally test every single claim put forward by physicists, so I trust that the community of physicists does their due diligence during the peer review process.
In other words, our perception of the truth of a statement that we cannot directly verify boils down to our perception of the trustworthiness of the person or institution making the statement.
Exactly so when children are taught in school that everything they see in the world can be explained by the big bang and evolution, they trust they are being told the truth when in fact they are not because nobody can possibly 'know'. Darwinism has had the effect of stopping people from even exploring other possibilities becuause they are taught the big bang and darwinian evolution as fact.
If you wanted to go down a rabbit hole you could say the same about other things that are taught in schools such as the events that occurred in Germany between 1939-45. Things are being taught as fact so that people won't even think about questioning it and this is very damaging to society in my opinion.
Incorrect, we do know, 100% that the theory of evolution is fact, seriously, just reading Darwin's book will show you that.
With any theory we say is correct, obviously we leave room for modification, so a great example is Newton's theory of gravity, being amended to Einsteins theory of relativity, and that will one day be amended to fit the quantum mechanics model into it.
However the theory of gravity is right; sure you can point to the discrepancies between macro gravity and quantum gravity, but what you can't do is say we will find that gravity has nothing to do with relativity or any of Newton's findings.
@kouba01 says that:
In other words, our perception of the truth of a statement that we cannot directly verify boils down to our perception of the trustworthiness of the person or institution making the statement.
However I disagree with this statement; sure, you can't test most quantum principles without a degree in physics and a powerful computer, you can though test lots of theories yourself with little or no equipment.
Lest we not forget that the whole point of a theory is that it will make predictions, and so we can test these predictions.
So when somebody says to you that oxygen is needed for fire to burn, you don't have to take their word for it. You can put a candle under a jar where no oxygen can get in, you can then watch it go out. Afterwards you can determine more experiments to make sure that your candle didn't go out for another reason.
This is why we invented the scientific process, to make sure that we are not fooling ourselves. At some point in our history, people thought that dancing, or killing animals or even humans would make it rain and their crops go.
It's easy now to laugh and say they were ignorant, but we could be having this conversation in that time; and you could be trying to convince me that there was no way to know that the dance didn't do anything, and I would be saying well lets put that theory to the test using the scientific process.
So yes, trust must exist, however we only need to trust the process, and even then, we can test the process ourselves without the need for trust.
Cg