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Pradeep Samant

Truth and Understanding

Traditional Philosophies, Principle and PracticesReligious Philosophies and Concepts

Truth and Understanding

People sometimes say that science deals with facts but that religion simply trades in opinions. In other words, science’s concern is with truth, understood as correspondence with reality, but the best that can be said of religion is that it might be ‘true’ for an individual, but only in the weak sense that it was helpful for that particular person to look at life in that particular way, without necessarily implying anything about the way reality actually is. Two bad mistakes lie behind this claim.

The first is a mistake about science. There are no scientifically interesting facts that are not already interpreted facts. No doubt all could agree what the reading was on the dial of some piece of measuring apparatus, but for that reading to have meaning one would need to know what the instrument is actually capable of measuring. For that one needs a theoretical understanding of the nature and operation of the apparatus. In science, experimental ‘fact’ and theoretical ‘opinion’ intertwine in a subtle circularity, as experiment seeks to confirm or disconfirm theory and theory seeks to interpret experiment.

The second mistake is about religion. The question of truth is as central to its concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary exercise in comforting fantasy. Both science and religion are part of the great human quest for truthful understanding. Before we explore what this might imply for their mutual relationship, we must pay further attention to the individual characters of these two truth seeking endeavours. The claim will be that both are seeking truth through the attainment of well- motivated beliefs.

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