I agree with all of you that there are more than two ways of knowing.I
further agree that thinking this way is a trap that we too easily fall into
when we dialogue with athiests who want to set up a religious " blind faith"
straw man to contrast with the rational atheist.
Ater all , one knows another person in a a quite different way than one
knows God or geology.
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Jonathan Clarke
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 5:54 PM
To: Loren Haarsma
Cc: _American Sci Affil
Subject: Re: Science and religion: two ways of knowing
If we are going to talk about different ways of knowing we must not ignore
the
aesthetic or the relational. Neither of these are scientific, but all are
important.
Jon
Loren Haarsma wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Keith B Miller wrote:
>
> > I think that Shuan's summary of the nature of science is expressed well.
> > It is very close to how I present the issue. One possible way that this
> > "two ways of knowing" approach can be misunderstood, is that they can be
> > seen as being Hermetically sealed off from each other. This can end up
as
> > Gould's "Non-overlapping Magisteria" idea. But just because science and
> > theology (I prefer the term theology to religion) have distinct ways of
> > knowing does not mean that they cannot or do not influence each other.
>
> I also liked Shuan's summary and Keith's addition.
>
> I think the following point is worth adding:
>
> Scientific knowledge and religious knowledge are just two kinds of
> knowledge amongst many kinds of knowledge.
>
> For example:
> --There are historical methods for obtaining reliable knowledge about
> historical events.
> --There is personal knowledge you can gain (e.g. about another person's
> character) through personal experiences.
> --There is "social knowledge", that is, reliable knowledge based upon not
> your own personal experiences, but the experiences of people whose
> testimony you trust. (Journalism at its best gives us this sort of
> knowledge.)
>
> And so forth.
> There are similarities amongst these various ways of obtaining knowledge,
> and also appropriate differences amongst these methods.
>
> I make this point because, in my experience, if you only talk about just
> two kinds of knowledge (scientific and religious), people will start to
> play an either/or sort of game. They will focus on the differences rather
> than the similarities between them, and some will be tempted to see one
> form of knowledge as always better, always more reliable than the other.
>
> Loren Haarsma
> Calvin College
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