[MD] Are theists irrational?

[Ian Glendinning]

Get a grip Arlo.

How can you "reduce" my saying science is 1% "faith" (untestable
authoritatively accepted social belief if you prefer) to saying
science is just another "theism" whose whole basis is faith. Monstrous
allegation based on nothing I even remotely suggested.

I did (and do) use the word contingent, but there is an achilles heal
in science, that doesn't recognize contingency everywhere, only at
places where "the method" applies. And then ignores any kind of value
in knowledge where the method cannot be applied.

The massive difference between theism and science (archteypically) is
that the former is blind by choice of tradition, the latter merely has
a blind spot. (To the fact that some decisions are actually between
different patterns of social value, where claiming the
GOF-SOMist-Intellectual high ground is irrelevant.)

Mis-placed (greedy) reductionism is bad news whoever wields it Occam
or Aristotle or Arlo or Platt. Not me.
Ian

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Ian]
> If you are going to include all psuedo-science in there too I'd have to drop
> the % to something like 60% or 70%...
>
> [Arlo]
> Well, you had said that intellectual patterns were morally superior IF they
> truly were intellectual patterns. This I agree with. But this is not the
> same as what you say next.
>
> [Ian]
> ... what I mean is even in the "good science" accepted as such by scientific
> "received wisdom" there is still an important residual element of "faith" in
> the untestable basics.
>
> [Arlo]
> See, this is IMO a quite horrible use of the word "faith". It reduces
> "intellectual patterns" to just another "theism", ....