10/11/2013 So-Called Objective Reality

by Kyle VanderWerf

     In last week's meeting, Nathan Turowsky presented a controversial idea, which was mostly rejected by the other members of the club. Namely, he proposed that non-scientific epistemologies have some validity. He described the belief system of the Shingō village in Japan, which states of the story in which Jesus travels to Japan after the events of the New Testament and lives there until his death at 106 years old: “The more [the story] was repeated, the truer it became, until the people of the village, frankly, believed it.” Nathan argued that this wasn't any less true or valid than a system of knowledge derived from science.

     This week, I'm going to follow up on that discussion by presenting a more formal defense of this idea. First, I will briefly review last week's discussion and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the latter of which I led a discussion on just over a year ago, to set the groundwork. Then I'll use this groundwork to show that religion and science can happily coexist, while simultaneously proposing a theory of a role that stories and authorities play in societies. I'll show that a lot of the perceived tension between science and religion arises when people misconstrue the former as being tied to an often ridiculous and over-applied concept called “objective reality.” I also aim to show that the Shingō epistemology does not actually necessarily conflict with our own, and in fact all of us make use of that epistemology on a daily basis.