I thought this was interesting too: Einstein believed that science put forward concepts for elucidating reality.21 Scientists search for ways to identify, define, analyze, clarify, and understand the world. Religion, art, and philosophy also seek to produce languages and models to make the universe comprehensible.22 Each of these pursuits—science, spirituality, religion, art, and philosophy—may be conceptualized as ways of coming up with names and categories for what is considered to be real. Spirituality may name as real what is known by faith; some philosophies may name as real what is known through reason. Science differs from these two endeavors in terms of what and how it goes about naming phenomena as real, but, like spirituality and philosophy, science can be thought of as a type of naming system connecting what we think of as mind and world.23 To illustrate this point, we can look to the writings of Phillip Converse. Converse was president of the APSA in the early 1980s. According to Converse, science uses names to point to what it sees as truth. That is, science tells us that its names truly correspond to reality. However, science by its very nature is a process of continuously renaming and improving on older naming schema. Science is therefore premised on the understanding that truth, at any particular time, is incompletely named (and incompletely known). Religion, according to Converse, is premised on an understanding that there is a truth outside that which is capable of being named by science, even by a science so rigorous as to overcome its own errors of naming. Converse’s discussion is valuable in highlighting the similarities of science and religion (both are naming systems), as well as their dissimilarities (they name different phenomena as real, and they rest on different understandings of the nature of truth).24 (Grigsby 18-19) Grigsby, Ellen. Cengage Advantage Books: Analyzing Politics, 5th Edition. Cengage Learning, 01/2011. VitalBook file.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 23:13:14 +0000