just saw a jared diamond lecture (video) on religion. He lists five reasons for religion:
1. explanation
2. politics
3. morals
4. warfare
5. beauty
the talk was fine but it’s a ropey list. (1) covers, at least (2), (3) and (4) as well. beauty and “truth” are left, which is nice.
of course religion is a hypothesis. it made sense, once, to attribute certain phenomena to deities, what other explanations were available? polytheism morphed into monotheism, a necessary prerequisite for science. god could sit in the background, the why answered, while the hows were tackled. what’s happening now is that the hows appear to require no outside agency. why is increasingly seen as either an irrelevant or soluble question.
i always tell the kids that we are just hypothesis generating machines. all thoughts are hypotheses. there are no truths, simply hypotheses that have been tested well. (i know, poor kids.)
i rather follow c.s. peirce in this respect. although i truly came to his ideas through karl popper, rather like first hearing a cover version of a classic. but peirce is far richer.
i’ve banged on about peirce before and won’t do so again now, except in the context of truth. for peirce there is no platonic truth. he introduced the idea of community and time into the concept. i come to this as a historian. every historian should understand that there are no truths. we would say that our knowledge of any historic period increases over time. partly because we gain more evidence, partly because we gain more commentators that build on previous work or introduce new ideas. i.e. our hypotheses change. the same is true of that well-known branch of history, science.
key to this is community. we measure this in everyday life, and all of us know what the competing explanations are for a bunch of things, together with what is in favour and what isn’t. perhaps we could even measure this, calculate truth. stephen wolfram thinks we can and has built something to do it.
I see a new field of knowledge-based computing. Imagine a spread sheet that can pull in knowledge about the entries.
whether this is going to work well enough we’ll discover in time (launch next month). but whatever it yields will be improved upon. we’re getting better at analysing data. we’re also getting better, and smarter, at creating it. something else that’s launching soon, fluidDB.
