From: Kalkor (kalkor@kalkor.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 18:17:44 MDT
[Joe]
Figure out how to rate the differing truth-claims of competing religious
or political ideologies from a perspective outside of both of them.
[Kalkor]
Excellent! Now we're getting somewhere!
David's suggestion was self-explanatory, imho, but I have some points I want
to clarify from yours.
1) When you say rate, do you mean in reference to each other? More/less
truthful? More/less valuable? Would you prefer a scale or just a more/less?
For example, giving each memeset a numerical rating on a scale of 1-10, or
saying "X is more truthful than Y"?
2) Would it be wise or foolish, in your opinion, to address each truth-claim
of a particular memeset and, once reaching something that is false, discard
the entire memeset as false? Or would this only be advisable in the cases
where a supporting premise of the memeset is 'this memeset is true'? And
why?
3) How would this be valuable to the church? As a tool to teach rational
thought to neophytes? As a compendium we could publish? As a method to
counter arguments?
My first answer, I suppose, would be a 3 step process.
1) Tear the ideology down to basic premises or hypotheses. Count these
premises (until the volume becomes prohibitive) up to a certain number (10?
100?).
2) Analyze each premise for logical consistency. When you reach one that is
false, or inconsistent, stop.
3) Count how far you got and that's your rating. If the basic premise is a
fallacy, then the memeset recieves a rating of 0.
I suppose you would need to use the popularly published compendium of the
ideology to begin the process. Manifesto? Bible? etc
Using Xtianity as an example, you could go about it two ways:
1) Use "god exists" as the basic hypothesis, or something of that nature.
Since the hypothesis is non-falsifiable, the entire memeset would get a
rating of 0.
2) Start reading the "old testament" from the beginning. "in the beginning,
god created the heavens and earth". The earth was created, but consensus is
that it happened through coalescence of particles ejected from stars, not by
a concious being. That "god" created it is non-falsifiable. But stating that
requires stating "god exists" which brings us back to #1, and the memeset
recieves a score of 0.
Looking forward to the next step in this discussion!
Kalkor
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