Davian made a pretty interesting paraphrase of Churchill by saying, "science is the worst way to investigate reality, but all the others have been tried."
I would say that science is the tightest, most reliable way of getting to the truth; however this technically can't be the case because science involves falsification, which means you can only get at varying degrees of certainty and never certainty that you have the truth. Yes, even with evolution, which it would be worth betting the life of yourself and your entire family is true.
Science being the most reliable way doesn't at all imply that it's the only way. I think you can structure the ways of ascertaining knowledge as a hierarchy that's a reverse pyramid, with the most fundamental ways of getting to truth being the least reliable and the more you move up the bigger the sections get but the less fundamental they are.
Starting with intuition at the bottom, which is the basis of everything else on top of it. Without intuition we couldn't even know other people exist, much less science, which works from the assumption that "other things" exist. Intuition is the basis of all the other sections that sit on top of it. However, it's also the least reliable, because people previously intuited that the world was flat, you know.
The next section (bigger but higher up on the reverse pyramid) is experience. Experience is intuitively validated; we trust our experience as valid not on the basis of any reasoning, but because we "know without reasoning," we intuit. However, unlike naked intuition, experience is dressed up in a plethora of sensory pathways that activates it.
The next section (fattest yet but also least fundamental) is reason, which we can specifically understand as the process of connecting premises to conclusions. Where does science fit into this? Because science -- let's not forget -- is first and foremost a philosophy (the most useful one in history), it can be seen as a tiny compartment in this pyramidal section of reason. Why here and not with experience, since experience is considered synonymous with empiricism, and science is a structured type of empiricism? Because science is a philosophy, and as such it's restricted by reason: it has philosophical presuppositions and its constituent parts can be articulated. Now, it's important that -- as much as we talk about God being difficult to talk about -- there's a more clandestine debate constantly going on about what science actually is. So science is far from free of philosophical problems, not unlike theism. The only difference is everyone loves science so much that they don't really question her like theism, which not all people like that much (and not always for bad reasons).
What does the pyramid ultimately mean? That we need all the sections when it comes to determining what is true, that each section has a varying degree of fundamental relation to ourselves, and that they each have varying degrees of reliability -- we can trust them in varying degrees.
So apropos the restatement of Churchill: science isn't the only way of investigating reality. It's the most useful, most reliable, but far from the only compartment, and far from being free of philosophical problems.
I would say that science is the tightest, most reliable way of getting to the truth; however this technically can't be the case because science involves falsification, which means you can only get at varying degrees of certainty and never certainty that you have the truth. Yes, even with evolution, which it would be worth betting the life of yourself and your entire family is true.
Science being the most reliable way doesn't at all imply that it's the only way. I think you can structure the ways of ascertaining knowledge as a hierarchy that's a reverse pyramid, with the most fundamental ways of getting to truth being the least reliable and the more you move up the bigger the sections get but the less fundamental they are.
Starting with intuition at the bottom, which is the basis of everything else on top of it. Without intuition we couldn't even know other people exist, much less science, which works from the assumption that "other things" exist. Intuition is the basis of all the other sections that sit on top of it. However, it's also the least reliable, because people previously intuited that the world was flat, you know.
The next section (bigger but higher up on the reverse pyramid) is experience. Experience is intuitively validated; we trust our experience as valid not on the basis of any reasoning, but because we "know without reasoning," we intuit. However, unlike naked intuition, experience is dressed up in a plethora of sensory pathways that activates it.
The next section (fattest yet but also least fundamental) is reason, which we can specifically understand as the process of connecting premises to conclusions. Where does science fit into this? Because science -- let's not forget -- is first and foremost a philosophy (the most useful one in history), it can be seen as a tiny compartment in this pyramidal section of reason. Why here and not with experience, since experience is considered synonymous with empiricism, and science is a structured type of empiricism? Because science is a philosophy, and as such it's restricted by reason: it has philosophical presuppositions and its constituent parts can be articulated. Now, it's important that -- as much as we talk about God being difficult to talk about -- there's a more clandestine debate constantly going on about what science actually is. So science is far from free of philosophical problems, not unlike theism. The only difference is everyone loves science so much that they don't really question her like theism, which not all people like that much (and not always for bad reasons).
What does the pyramid ultimately mean? That we need all the sections when it comes to determining what is true, that each section has a varying degree of fundamental relation to ourselves, and that they each have varying degrees of reliability -- we can trust them in varying degrees.
So apropos the restatement of Churchill: science isn't the only way of investigating reality. It's the most useful, most reliable, but far from the only compartment, and far from being free of philosophical problems.
