by maksym 2 Replies latest jw friends
Just wanted to know if could something exist and be true without empiricism or science. So the question is like love. Can we empiricanly define love or morals or ethics without empiricism.
Can Love be defined without empiricsm? Can science define love on a petri dish?
No. Then again, love is a very subjective concept and broad word. Love is ultimately the greatest unselfishness that can be displayed, in benefit of another than one's self. You can't judge art empirically. It is something scientifically unmeasureable, because it depends on the people, time, culture, etc.
Human abstractions belong to the realm of the humanities, where as reality belongs to the sciences.
However, I am guessing this is an extension of your other conversation where you said atheism was the result of spiritual abuse, and that christianity is beyond empiricism. This is B.S.
The problem with religion is that it is a humanity that insists on being taken as a science. If it were actually about love, and empathy, and oneness or some such, then it could go off and do it's own thing. But insists on making fact based assessments of the universe and itself...until somebody tries to bring facts and logic in to counter it's absurdist claims, then it retreats to the "humanities" way of thinking until the conversation is over...then it starts making fact based claims again.
It's like an art critic admiring van gogh's "The Starry night" and then insisting that we all go to the stars when we die, and that is literally what happens, stars are just the souls of dead people, we die then fly up and become a star. Until somebody brings up how nonsensical that is, then the art critic responds with a curt "well, you just don't understand art. Go get a color wheel, study some impressionism, and come back when you're ready to have a real conversation." That is religion.
If the big monotheistic religions didn't base their dogmas on a wizard making the universe, specifically creating this planet just for us, then guiding biological evolution to produce humans (or worse yet, poofing humans into existence), and then all of the miraculous nonsense that is picked and chosen after that, then it could rest happily unmolested as a branch of philosophy. But it doesn't, it insists on continually demanding that empiricism bow before it's bronze age mythologies in order to get to the philosophy aspect of it.
So yes, there are things that science is not qualified to talk about, namely the subjective areas of human thought covered by philosophy, art, music and literature. Unfortunately religion is not content to live in that realm, and until it is, science will continue to kick its ass.
