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It's not just about consistency. The post mentioned 5 different standards of "truth". In reality the method we use to judge something to be true or false is not uniform : there are lots of variations, even within single sciences. My point is that for all the methods the parent poster pointed out, science does not actually fare better than (Christian) faith, barring a few exceptions. He cherry-picks little pieces of specific theories that satisfy a high standard of truth, I merely point out that, first that does not mean science as a whole satisfies that standard, second you can do the same for the bible. And, when it comes to historical opinions that were held up using less-than-gentle means, science also has loads of black spots. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism, so again that is not a valid criticism of faith, or at least isn't black and white. As an alternative I defend utilitarianism : scientific theories are not true or false, or better or worse than the bible, but they are more useful in some cases. Nobody will design a cell phone using the bible. Nobody should base their moral decisions on biology. The big problem here seems to be that Christianity uses internally the same standards of truth to some extent, and so it can be attacked on those points. It's actually pretty consistent so I think the attacks against it are less than convincing, because there is no better alternative, there is just a completely unjustified faith in science that makes no sense whatsoever : logic, the branch that actually analyses whether science could be wrong and how and why trust in science should exist, has a simple conclusion since the 1950s or so : science fails it's own standards. Somehow this part is always missing from these arguments : there is nothing to back them. |