Cosmologic philosophy: multiverse/string theory (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 03, 2015, 13:45 (3612 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

David: All true, but your analogy about God does not really fit. We know gravity exists, but cannot fully explain it. Fine. For me God cannot be absolutely proven, but from the evidence I've gathered He must exist. Faith must appear.-TONY: Actually, what we know is that objects of mass tend to move towards each other at a very specific rate. We know that size matters, in that particular instance. Gravity is currently just a made up word that we use to explain our observations of the world. We take it on faith that there is a fundamental force that pulls things towards each other, just like we take on faith that there is evolution, or there is a God. We haven't observed evolution any more than we have God or Gravity. We see a bunch of stuff happening that we can not explain without invoking these concepts, and choose to believe in them.-I agree with all of this, though going back to your original question (“If someone can ‘believe' in gravity [...] why not God?”), I suspect the agreement is based on different premises, so I hope you won't mind if I return to epistemology and the nature of knowledge. ALL our words are made up. The question is whether they denote a reality, and on an absolute level, we have no way of knowing if they do. Even direct observation cannot offer objectivity (people used to see for themselves that the sun moved in the sky). And so you are right that we take explanations on faith, but the next step down from the absolute is the relative, and this is where I would draw a distinction between God, evolution, gravity, the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, and the theory that if I run full pelt into a lamppost I will hurt myself.-The latter is testable, falsifiable, and definitely observable, and so subjectively I'd say this is not a theory but can be classed as knowledge. There is almost universal consensus on the theory that the earth revolves around the sun, and again subjectively I would class this as knowledge. It appears that there is no universal consensus nowadays on the theory of gravity, in which case what I assumed was knowledge (i.e. there IS an attractive force which we humans call gravity) is not knowledge after all. I'm not that interested, so I'll leave it open. Evolution is a combination of different theories, none of which can be classed as knowledge, because there is nothing like a universal consensus on any of its aspects, but I am sufficiently impressed by certain arguments to believe in common descent and (my interpretation of) natural selection. This constitutes belief, not knowledge.
 
The God theory is not only divided up literally into thousands of variations (one website actually estimates the number of Hindu gods at 33 million), but it enjoys no consensus. Once again, we are confined to the subjectivity of belief. So I agree with you 100% that we choose to believe or not believe, but in certain instances our beliefs may be upgraded to a relative form of “knowledge” (one step below the absolute, in terms of an almost universal consensus), though this may change with new discoveries. (Might that be the case with gravity?) In my opinion, some beliefs - e.g. God, the multiverse, 11 dimensions, an invisible teapot orbiting the sun - are not open to falsification, experimentation or new discoveries that can raise them to the status of relative “knowledge”. Even BBella's new discoveries still left her with the conclusion that in such cases, “The Truth for us will always be personal.”