The point of introducing error bars and tolerances isn't to make knowledge objective, (which is most likely impossible); the point of it is to minimise variance in the information we know is subjective.
Doesn't it, in fact, eliminate subjectivity by saying, 'The answer is definitely between these lines, but do not assume where'?
To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: 'When we eliminate the unreliable, whatever remains, however distasteful, must be objective truth'.
Isn't your complaint not that it's subjective, but that it's not perfectly precise? And if we know that, and avoid making subjective statements around the known imprecision, and our results stay in tolerance then what's the problem?
At some point it has to go into our heads, and then, you're, so to speak, screwed.
You keep saying that, and I still have no idea why you think it's a problem. If we use knowledge for its intended purposes and within its tolerances, and it's 100% reliable when used that way, what is the issue? If it's shareable and reliable, it's objective.
Extraordinarily consistent results is a far cry from eternal truths and axioms.
I already expressed my problem with a definition that insists that objective information doesn't change -- the Sydney to Canberra distance
can change in consequence of heat, for instance. Tolerances help take care of that.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks that eternal truths are necessary. It just induces an excluded-middle fallacy: either truths are eternal, or all knowledge is subjective. In practice, we do very well with slowly-changing systems and error-bars, but we do very badly when we don't check what we think we know against the outside world.
Scientific language is great, if you know it. If you don't it is gibberish.
Yes, we have to be competent for the tools to be reliable, as I mentioned upthread.
Have you never considered the fact that the concept God is extraordinarily vague?
I think we're off objective knowledge now, but 'God' is not simply a vague term, but contradictory. It's hard to see what use a contradictory term is, outside of poetry.
We wouldn't be able to recognise omnipotence even if it bit us in the ass, would we?
I'm not even sure that the term 'omnipotent' is meaningful, until we can construct an enumerable domain of tasks over which it applies. But if we had such a domain (let's say the domain of 'constructing pretty things'), we could test for someone's capability in that.
Such tests wouldn't be exhaustive of course, but they'd quickly reveal that somone like me can't draw to save his life, but is reasonable at music. If extensive testing revealed that someone was great at painting and drawing and music and tattooing and flower-arranging and hair-braiding and filling ornamental jars with pickled vegetables, and all the activities that humans normally use to decorate their world -- as assessed by a statistically significant sample of competent human judges -- then that would be pretty compelling. I wouldn't insist on exhaustive testing in this case to accept that one individual is extraordinarily competent in 'prettiness' tasks. It wouldn't be strictly proven, but I wouldn't be uncomfortable in calling them 'pretty-omnipotent', say.
The problem is... we need a domain of well-defined tasks for the term to be meaningful. That domain needs to be enumerable so we can order it and test it. My big problem with religious hyperbole like 'omnipotent' is that they don't define the domain, or the domain is defined implicitly, or it's not enumerable. But if they did, and it was enumerable, I think it would be testable in theory at least.
So what if we can't measure psychic rays? It can still be meaningful, can't it?
In talking about our shared world, I try and avoid words whose meanings I can't link to something tangible.
But not all of our experiences are shared. When I'm not talking about the shared world, I'm happy to make up words all the time. 'Psychic ray' immediately strikes me as a made-up term: two words associated for aesthetic effect, with lots of room for interpretation. Is a 'psychic ray' a beam or a fish? Is it psychic because it thinks, or because it's a product of thought? Such terms are for fun and amusement. I set them aside again though, when it comes to doing shared-world work. That's just good mental hygeine.
Human beings are first and foremost emotional beings. Rationality comes pretty far down the list, right?
It depends on whether you mean the population or the individuals. Rationality goes down the list in populations, but for a small proportion of individuals it can be a very dominant mode of thought.
If scientific language doesn't resonate within a person emotionally it will not be meaningful. Yes, I'm also scientifically trained.
So is my wife, and like you she's very emotional. If I want to explain the plot of
West Wing to her, I need to do it in terms of feelings because the chess-moves are meaningless to her. But when she tries to describe the world to me in terms of emotions I get all
Untouchables on her ass: 'Just the
facts, ma'am'!
What this illustrates is that while some people need emotion to make sense of stuff, to others its toxic. It happens that rationally strong people flock to science. They're the ones who've given it its rigour. But yes, anyone can train in it.
From that perspective, science is not developed for its beauty, but its use. When papers are reviewed the question is not 'Is this gorgeous' but 'Does this
work'? Scientists may also have an opinion about the beauty of a result, but that opinion can vary and it's secondary to use.
The dominant aesthetic in science by the way, is
efficiency. Concise formulae with broad application are normally considered 'more beautiful'. Short proofs are considered 'more elegant' than longer ones. It's not a universal aesthetic, but it's the most common one.
The thing about efficiency though: it can be
measured. So even scientific aesthetic is utilitarian.
I too think it's annoying when people (religious and otherwise) run away with the conclusions and make sweeping claims that are at best dodgy and at worst miss the mark entirely. But I think riling against it using sciency won't do more than confuse, primarily because religious faith isn't defended using sciency.
This has nothing to do with science and a lot to do with pragmatism.
There's no point hunting for evidence for a term like 'God' that is so vague and contradictory. Much more use is to ask for the poetic associations of 'God' instead, and keep the term 'evidence' attached to objective information.
Just good mental hygeine, is all.
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