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Richard Dawkins

  
  

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eib
05:51 / 06.12.06
Have "we" discussed his new foundation yet? http://richarddawkins.net/foundation,ourMission

It's basically an admirable attempt at addressing the dangerous trend in Western Society for such crack pot movements such as Intelligent Design and belief in Creationism.

It's just not possible to be "religious" and "intelligent and rational" is it? I consider anyone who actually believes that God created the universe as a cretin. We all agree, right?

Quote "A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened, by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book – Genesis – which, by another series of historical accidents, has been translated and disseminated to almost every home in the land plus – infuriatingly – every hotel room. Even before science told us the true story of the origin of the world and the evolution of life, there was no reason to believe the Jewish origin myth any more than the origin myths of the Yoruba or the Kikuyu, the Yanomamo or the Maori, the Dogon or the Cherokee. Now, in the 21st century as we approach Darwin’s bicentenary, the fact that half of Americans take Genesis literally is nothing less than an educational scandal."
 
 
diz
07:07 / 06.12.06
It's just not possible to be "religious" and "intelligent and rational" is it? I consider anyone who actually believes that God created the universe as a cretin. We all agree, right?

Oh, boy, this is going to be fun to watch.
 
 
Supaglue
08:16 / 06.12.06
A Youtube link to the Foundation's introduction video

"The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition."
 
 
illmatic
08:43 / 06.12.06
It's just not possible to be "religious" and "intelligent and rational" is it? I consider anyone who actually believes that God created the universe as a cretin. We all agree, right?


I'm sorry I can't write a longer response than what follows. I'm at work etc. but in brief: oh, fuck off.
 
 
Evil Scientist
08:55 / 06.12.06
It's just not possible to be "religious" and "intelligent and rational" is it? I consider anyone who actually believes that God created the universe as a cretin. We all agree, right?

My brother seems to manage it and he's a pretty smart cookie.

The paragraph above is the kind of elitist crap that doesn't help the situation one bit. There are many people working in the scientific fields who, in actual fact, hold religious beliefs about the origin of the universe. There are many intelligent and rational people who hold religious beliefs.

To suggest that everyone who believes in a religion is a cretin is as bad as someone of a particular religion suggesting all non-believers are cretins.
 
 
Spaniel
09:08 / 06.12.06
I think Eid may be making some rather wrongheaded assumptions about this community.

There are atheists amongst us, me included, but there are plenty of smart believers too, and with posts like that you're not gonna make friends and influence any of 'em.
 
 
Ex
09:29 / 06.12.06
Eib, we have a great spectrum of belief on this board.

But I think what's more important than that is that we have a respectful manner of addressing issues. I think that dismissing much of the world's population as cretins may fall short of that ideal.

I'm an atheist, but I'm aware that I also need an informed and inquisitive approach to other people's belief systems - just to interract with other people and be a decent human being. I don't think that is best served by chucking out simplistic insults. You can't pathologise and dismiss huge psychological trends - just in terms of understanding how societies function, you need better analyses.

I also think that it's ironic that a major part of the criticism that faith receives from atheists is that God-related belief is a sheep-like and intellectually underdeveloped way of dealing with the world. However, pressed for details, many of the atheists who espouse this have nothing further to add except explaining that theists are wankers, nutters or cretins. This rather undermines the argument that 'we' are all thinking, rational and enqwuiring types while 'they' use their rote beliefs to avoid hard cognitive work.

I'd love to discuss Richard Dawkins, Faith Schools and City Academies in the UK, and indeed ID and creationism. However, I'm not sure where we can go from your opening assumptions. Bravo for starting a thread, but maybe we can shift gear a bit.
 
 
Supaglue
09:37 / 06.12.06
So, with polemics aside, where do the concessions between science and religion have to be made?

It seems that somewhere down the line, the two are incompatible, particularly with reference to the creation of the universe. How does someone of faith reconcile their beliefs with science and at what point does science theory get overidden by that faith?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:58 / 06.12.06
Dudes, come on. Grammar.

I consider anyone who actually believes that God created the universe as a cretin.

What you're responding to is:

I consider anyone who actually believes that God created the universe to be a cretin.

Two very different things.

Back on topic. In the thread summary, eib says:

Religion is still being studied in schools - not only in the U.s but in supposedly enlightened countries, such as ours. Why the hell isnt State and Religion more seperated in a supposedly socialist UK? Faith schools should be banned

Now, there are a number of odd things about this statement, before we go into the Dawkins. One, the idea that the UK is supposed to be an enlightened country. The US has a constitution drawn up during and based on the principles of the Enlightenment. The UK does not. Second up, the idea that the UK is socialist. Third up, the idea that it follows that State and Religion (his caps) should be more separated in the UK. The United Kingdom has an established religion - the Church of England - which is intimately connected to the state. Bishops of the Church of England sit in the House of Lords. The Queen is the head of state and the Defender of the Faith.

And finally, that faith schools should be banned. The way this is laid out seems to presuppose that to do so would be a successful separation of church and state. However, an independent school would presumably then be able to teach whatever it liked - including creationism. It would only be schools supported by the state - state schools - that would be constrained by the theory of evolution. So, the contention would instead be that government funding of faith schools should be banned. Which is fair enough as a proposition, but I don't know if that's the proposition that is being advanced.

If it is, then the proposition is incompatible with the idea of the established church - after all, how can the state ban all religious expression in schools when it has its own religion. Solutions? Well, the obvious one is to disestablish the church - secular assemblies all round! However, that is another thing that must be done. Alternatively, we could decide that the faith schools business is a red herring - that it doesn't really matter what faith a school represents itself as, as long as it cleaves to a syllabus which seeks to give its students necessary skills for operating in and contributing value to society, say. In which case, the next issue is whether creationism needs to be excluded from that syllabus.

Speaking purely personally, I wouldn't really mind if people believed that the Earth was created last Wednesday, as long as they also believed in women's right to control their own bodies, the free availability of contraceptive technology, legal equality for gay men and lesbians, transgender rights and so on. As it happens, the theory of evolution is a wedge issue for people who would also like to prevent the teaching of some or all of those things.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
10:24 / 06.12.06
as long as they also believed in women's right to control their own bodies, the free availability of contraceptive technology, legal equality for gay men and lesbians, transgender rights and so on. As it happens, the theory of evolution is a wedge issue for people who would also like to prevent the teaching of some or all of those things.

Yes, although, to confuse matters, "evolutionary psychology" and various forms of anatomy-is-destiny biological determinism which derive from particular readings of Darwinian principles are also used to prevent the teaching of and/or attempt to delegitimise some of those things...

On the other hand, i'm not sure i agree with you that it doesn't matter if people believed the earth was created last Wednesday, as it would seem to me that believing the earth was created last Wednesday, or even 10,000 years ago, would preclude believing in or understanding quite a lot of very important things about (e.g.) ecology, agriculture, human and pre-human history, genetics, the rise and fall of civilisations due to natural resource exploitation, etc, which are pretty fucking important to the survival of the human race right now (there's a very close relationship between creationism and denial of climate change, the need for ecological sustainability, etc, as well as the already mentioned other things)...

Also, anyone who thinks the UK is anything remotely near "socialist" is very, very sadly mistaken (i know because i believed that the UK was going to become socialist for maybe a couple of weeks in 1997, and the realisation that it was actually becoming, if anything, even further to the right economically and even closer to the USA politically than ever before was one of the most disappointing realisations of my life, and cured me for life of ever again believing in a parliamentary route to socialism).

Probably more later...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:35 / 06.12.06
Yes, although, to confuse matters, "evolutionary psychology" and various forms of anatomy-is-destiny biological determinism which derive from particular readings of Darwinian principles are also used to prevent the teaching of and/or attempt to delegitimise some of those things...

Oh, indeed - I would probably put evolutionary psychology in their with creationism as a faith-based position that tends to lead to ghastly attitudes. Which is the next question - wose science are we legitimating and advancing?

On the other hand, i'm not sure i agree with you that it doesn't matter if people believed the earth was created last Wednesday, as it would seem to me that believing the earth was created last Wednesday, or even 10,000 years ago, would preclude believing in or understanding quite a lot of very important things about (e.g.) ecology, agriculture, human and pre-human history, genetics, the rise and fall of civilisations due to natural resource exploitation, etc, which are pretty fucking important to the survival of the human race right now (there's a very close relationship between creationism and denial of climate change, the need for ecological sustainability, etc, as well as the already mentioned other things)...

Hmm. Yes and no. Actually, there is a movement in evangelical Christianity that argues for climate change control on the grounds that it is a mistreatment of the Earth given by convenant to man.

However. Let's say that I believe that God created the Earth two hundred years ago. On the first day, he cycled the universe, incredibly quickly, through the processes that science tell us took billions of years to take place, from the Big Bang, the formation of the planets, the dinosaurs, and so on. The second day was January 1, 1800. That's certainly a very eccentric viewpoint, but it isn't one with necessary implications for my views on climate change. One form of creationism, at least, posits something like that - that the Earth was created, fossil record and all, at a specific point in history, and has been continuing since then, behaving as if the events depicted in the fossil record had actually occurred - so, fossils, oil, comme ca. A more dangerous religious idea in those terms would seem to me to be the idea of post-physical life, or indeed the rapture.
 
 
Supaglue
11:18 / 06.12.06
Oh, indeed - I would probably put evolutionary psychology in their with creationism as a faith-based position that tends to lead to ghastly attitudes. Which is the next question - wose science are we legitimating and advancing?

That might be slightly unfair. EP, however right or wrong as theory and however misapplied and misused, has (or should) still undergo the same rigourous process of scientific inquiry - it is still open to peer review and requires empiricism (the lack of, being one of the criticisms of the theory) before acceptance. There are very few faiths that run along empirical lines or can be tested in the same way.


"One form of creationism, at least, posits something like that - that the Earth was created, fossil record and all, at a specific point in history, and has been continuing since then, behaving as if the events depicted in the fossil record had actually occurred - so, fossils, oil, comme ca."

Surely this is where the argument stops? The argument is perfectly valid (and avoiding the problem of occams razor of how a simplistic universe evolved into a complex one after it was created by a complex being such as god - and of course how he came about), but there is no evidence and becomes pure faith. I don't think scienctific theories can be categorised as such.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:36 / 06.12.06
And? My question is, in practical terms, what changes between somebody who thinks that the world has a chronological age of 200 years and somebody who thinks that the world has a chronological age of about 4.5 billion years, if their attitude to what goes on in that world is the same. If the argument is that schools should teach as fact what is currently most generally accepted by science in science lessons, then I certainly agree - but for the same reason that I think science lessons should have the best laboratory equipment available - however, the age of the bunsen burners in my science lessons has not significantly, to my knowledge, changed how I interact with the world in areas not involving heating things with a gas flame in a laboratory.
 
 
Supaglue
11:59 / 06.12.06
Well practically speaking, I agree, but then does that science class impinge upon it's already constrained teaching time by explaining creationism/ID when they are not based in science?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:39 / 06.12.06
I would agree entirely that a science class should not be wasting its time talking about things that are not scientific - creationism as a theory belongs in comparative religion class - although eib may be opposed to such things existing, or may mean by religion is still being studied in schools that religion is still informing the curriculum in schools. However, that, again, is not really about the separation of state and religion, or about whether faith schools should be banned, but about whether unscientific content should be placed in the middle of scientific learning.
 
 
Saturn's nod
12:39 / 06.12.06
It could be argued it's a good opportunity to introduce the essential thinking skills about how we know or claim to know stuff.

A friend of mine's got an idea for a science lesson for kids based on the phlogiston explanation for stars (See the section 'Concept' in this Wikipedia entry). It seems similar to me: why not make space for the question of what distinguishes different explanations? The crystal spheres idea is a fabulous story and consideration of its relationship to the appearance of telescopes, spectroscopes, equations, and the other tools of astronomy introduces all those good questions about how various accounts can be distinguished with instrumentation and consultation and perplexity.

(Shameless plug: ) In Latour's vocabulary I find this kind of question very easy to frame - it could be asked which accounts are richly 'vasculated', and which have 'robust chains of translation' 'taking into account nonhumans' as well as different groups of humans?
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
11:42 / 08.12.06
If anyone has a log-in for New Scientist Online there's an article in the current issue from a geophysical modeller who is also a creationist. He's recognised as doing important work in the field but at the same time the data he finds in his work contradicts what he believes is the literal truth of the Bible.
 
 
multitude.tv
16:07 / 08.12.06
You've (John Baumgardner) said that your primary goal as a scientist is "defense of God's word".

Though I haven't read the whole piece, Dr. Baumgardner says here: "I would say my primary goal in my scientific career is a defense of God's Word, plain and simple."

If that's accurate, it's he's not doing science but engaging in apologetics. Which is, I would think, is what most other Scientist would say. He has, it seems, a rather celebrity status amongst apologists, who generally place anyone who "believes" and has "credentials" on high; that is, he is a "safe Scientist".
 
 
Ticker
17:59 / 08.12.06
So, with polemics aside, where do the concessions between science and religion have to be made?

It seems that somewhere down the line, the two are incompatible, particularly with reference to the creation of the universe. How does someone of faith reconcile their beliefs with science and at what point does science theory get overidden by that faith?

you know folks, there are a lot of religions and not all of them have an either/or relationship with all current scientific theories. Why do so many people think Science and Religion are incompatible? Not all religions require static cause effect mythology to be held as untouchable by provable results.

Nor do I *believe* that Science should be treated as some giant all encompassing philosophy or replacement for religion. Sorry...I mean Religion.

The Scientific Method does not automatically disprove all possible religious beliefs, it may disprove some specific ones but there are an awful lot out there. In time Science may discover and explain mechanisms that have been described via analogy in religious beliefs.

I find the attitiude of Science vs. Religion to be some what unproductive. Rather we should have critical progressive thinking over hidebound dogmatic adherence but those are likely to happen in either the big 'S' or big 'R' camps.
 
 
multitude.tv
18:20 / 08.12.06
In time Science may discover and explain mechanisms that have been described via analogy in religious beliefs.

Do you mean something like this?
 
 
Ticker
18:53 / 08.12.06
Er, not so much with the random fiddling but more with the diamond hard testing.

If religious experiences are a simple matter of tweaking the right brain bits the right way, eventually couldn't even Dawkins experience it in a lab designed for that purpose?
 
 
multitude.tv
19:13 / 08.12.06
I think he did try it out, from the previous link:
"Persinger’s chamber — one of whose visitors was the British arch-atheist Professor Richard Dawkins (he experienced nothing)"

and from another article,
"Prof Richard Dawkins. He agreed to try his techniques on Dawkins to see if he could give him a moment of religious feeling. During a session that lasted 40 minutes, Dawkins found that the magnetic fields around his temporal lobes affected his breathing and his limbs. He did not find god."

Here is another article (at the time the machine was used on 900+ people, seems about 80% have some sort of "religious experience" with the helmet).

Finally, from Dawkins own site about the machine.

And here is another article on The God Helmet, with Susan Blackmore's experience:
"Psychologist Susan Blackmore, writing in New Scientist, said she felt something "get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall... Totally out of the blue, but intensely and vividly, I suddenly felt anger... Later, it was replaced by an equally sudden attack of fear."
 
 
multitude.tv
19:19 / 08.12.06
Also, it seems a version of the machine is available for sale, if anyone is interested in trying it out.
 
 
illmatic
11:19 / 09.12.06
That reminds me a little bit of the experiement done with (I think) mescaline in the 60s, where it was given to a prominent church person (who had a strong anti-drugs bias), to see if it would make him "see God" or find something comparable to his religious experience. Unsurprisingly, this didn't happen. I'm not thatsurprised that Dawkins didn't find God.

If religious experiences are a simple matter of tweaking the right brain bits the right way, eventually couldn't even Dawkins experience it in a lab designed for that purpose?

Bit of a big "if" though isn't it? Although it's an interesting area of experiementation, I don't think all religious feelings and sentiment can be reduced down to crossed wires in a malfunctioning brain. There's a lot more erm, "existential" meanings in "religious" thinking, which "science" doesn't really address. Scare quotes there because I concede completely that the two subjects shoudn't be opposed against each other in this way.

Dawkins thread from Conversation
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
15:24 / 09.12.06
I know that Joan Roughgarden is a scientist that doesn't believe religion and science are incompatable, I don't know whether she believes the Bible is literal truth or who wins in her mind in a fight between God and science.

The 8th December New Scientist podcast has a brief interview with Baumgardner.
 
 
el d.
13:38 / 11.12.06
The Scientific Method does not automatically disprove all possible religious beliefs

I do rather think that all Religion is per se unprovable. Religions are closed belief systems (like mathematics), with the exception that mathematics can evolve, proving or disproving it´s own hypothesis. Religions, regardless of race, nation or cultural background, simply state stuff which cannot be proven. The underlying idea is that something can be something else ideally than it is materially.
( Hey you christians out there: You´re eating the true flesh of your saviour in form of a true and mostly stale cooky)
What remains to be said is that the basis for all religion has always been the same: Stuff we don´t understand. This is mostly everything, in our chaotic universe we can´t even predict the weather with some degree of viability.

Rather we should have critical progressive thinking over hidebound dogmatic adherence but those are likely to happen in either the big 'S' or big 'R' camps.

I agree with you there, but disagree on the point that the scientific community hasn´t got a better approach on dealing with the unknown. If you´ve got a mass of data, the scientist will try to find some strucure in it, rules, hypothesis which then can be proven ( or at least have the possibility to be disproven. )
The priest, the prophet and the common believer will simply see it as the will of \\your god-like entity of choice\\. If their presumtions about the will of whatever don´t work out, well, then it´s just the fault of those guys who didn´t believe enough, or the candles which were arranged in the wrong way or simply: "God´s ways are mysterious." Point is, they don´t get the idea that maybe their presumtion was wrong.

I definitely think that in confronting the unknown without presuming it to have the will of a giant bearded man / elephant / six-armed godess, or any other presumtion which cannot be disproven ( and basically doesn´t work either) is not a viable state of thought for a rational being.

This is mostly Sir Karl Popper, with a bit of reasoning done on my side as well. Please disprove me if you can.

please pardon my off-topic side-rambling here for a moment: I´m not a native speaker, so if you notice any faults in vocabulary, style or grammar, please don´t hesitate to PM me if you find time. Thanks.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:23 / 11.12.06
( Hey you christians out there: You´re eating the true flesh of your saviour in form of a true and mostly stale cooky)

This is a true and mostly stale argument, evade. What this is is a mystery. The whole point is that it doesn't make sense.

A secular example. You have a friend who is dating a young man. This young man, she states entirely honestly, is the most wonderful man in the world. However, this young man also borrows money from her and never pays it back, has a hairy back and belches venomously. You ask a mutual friend how she can possibly see in him the most wonderful man in the world. The friend replies that it is a mystery. So, in scientific terms, the wafer in a transubstationist mass is indeed a wafer, and remains so. It's a common and mistaken belief that anyone thinks that the wafer becomes a gobbet of flesh somewhere around the epiglottis. Cut somebody who has just taken mass open and you will find not flesh but wafer in their digestive system. However, while not altering its atomic structure, it also became in the Eucharistic mystery the flesh of the saviour. One for the Mystery Machine, possibly, but by no means an example of faith defying science, only of faith and science operating in parallel.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
15:35 / 11.12.06
Haus,

Calling an arguement 'stale' in this context is really unfair. Doubly unfair, because you then raise the spectre of a 'mystery' which is equally and perhaps even more 'unfair', being both older and more bizarre than the varieties of rationalist argument produced before.

Frankly I'm beginning to admire Richard Dawkins more and more, anyone who can cause this much intellectual havoc whilst being so reasonable and pleasant etc etc deserves some admiration.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
15:41 / 11.12.06
XK,

I was interested in the claim that not all religions are incompatible with modern science. Could you expand on this statement - i would be interested in how modern experimental science (proofs, probabilities, falsifications) can be understood as compatible with any existing religion....
 
 
nighthawk
17:05 / 11.12.06
i would be interested in how modern experimental science (proofs, probabilities, falsifications) can be understood as compatible with any existing religion....

Well, in so far as the religion doesn't make claims that conflict with the science? There's a difference between 'being compatible with' and 'being justified by', and religion is hardly unique in making claims that cannot be justified by science (in the sense that they could not be justified by science, rather than cannot be justified because we lack knowledge). This doesn't rule out the possibility that some strains of religion make claims that are incompatible with science; but then that was never xk's claim.

I have to say, even though I'm a complete atheist, I find Dawkins' pretence to an ideologically-innocent Rationalism incredibly frustrating, especially when he hints that anyone who doesn't approximate his position or approach is irrational and anti-science.
 
 
nighthawk
17:21 / 11.12.06
I mean, I like to think that my belief that Blue Mountain Peaberry is a superb coffee is compatible with modern science, but its not justified by it. Likewise my belief that Gogol is an excellent novelist, that reality is wholly physical, that the existence of a working class expresses the possiblity of a movement beyond Capital, that I ought not to drink my housemate's last beer from the fridge before she gets home. All compatible with science, none justified by it.

Some religions do make some claims that conflict with modern science, but the idea that one has to choose between Religion (in any of its forms) and Science, simply because the former cannot be justified by the latter, is ridiculous.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
18:23 / 11.12.06
Nighthawk,

I don't think it's for science or for that matter philosophy to justify claims made by any religion. Rather it should be the task of theology and religion to prove it's own case preferably with an evidence based argument rather than a faith based one. Hence the use of 'compatible' for clearly a postmodern theologian, can make god sufficiently distant to not obstruct the changes made by political, philosophical and scientific worldviews (discourses). The problem is often a religious discourse makes claims that can never be part of an acceptable scientific discourse.

So then I think you can see we more or less agree, except, and this is the crux of the issue. That religious discourses cannot claim any longer that the crucial concept of 'Truth' is their's to define. For 'Truth' requires supporting evidence, provability and crucially the thought that it might be disproved. Nor can religion be said to be able to function as the "jurist-priest... and ...legislator" (deleuze)and not just because the underlying myths are appalling but because as one of the poles of the state it simply doesn't work, and has been supplanted.
 
 
nighthawk
18:30 / 11.12.06
So then I think you can see we more or less agree, except, and this is the crux of the issue. That religious discourses cannot claim any longer that the crucial concept of 'Truth' is their's to define.

Oh yeah, I agree with all of that, but I'm not sure anyone claimed any different in this thread; and it does not undermine xk's claim above, which is what I thought you were suggesting.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
18:42 / 11.12.06
Calling an arguement 'stale' in this context is really unfair. Doubly unfair, because you then raise the spectre of a 'mystery' which is equally and perhaps even more 'unfair', being both older and more bizarre than the varieties of rationalist argument produced before.


Stale was used in the post above mine - I was quoting. A little more attention, please, SDV, and I'm sure we'll be rattling along the road to relevance in no time.
 
 
Jack Fear
18:53 / 11.12.06
...it should be the task of theology and religion to prove it's own case preferably with an evidence based argument rather than a faith based one. ... religious discourses cannot claim any longer that the crucial concept of 'Truth' is their's to define. For 'Truth' requires supporting evidence, provability and crucially the thought that it might be disproved.

Interesting. Tell me: Is there room in your worldview for only one kind of truth?

Do you find "truth" in, say, the works of Shakespeare? Can the truths one finds in Shakespeare be scientifically proven? And if not, does that make them any less true?

Democracy proceeds from the assertion that all persons are endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The framers of the US constitution called those assertions truths: moreover, they called them self-evident truths. Must those truths also be scientifically provable? How would one go about testing such truths? Is there such a thing as a self-evident truth? Must all truth exist within the framework of the scientific method? If so, where does that leave morality and ethics?
 
  

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