Do believers and non-believers have different concepts of "truth"?
A snippet from this article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/12/bill_maher_terrifies_bill_oreilly_an_atheist_has_the_fox_news_host_running_scared/
"Beneath this unstated premise lies another more insidious notion: that there are two kinds of truth – religious and otherwise. That, say, the assertion that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh might not be literally true, but it merits respect as “religious truth” (or, as Reza Aslan puts it, “sacred history”), as a metaphor for some ethereal verity, one so transcendental that boneheaded rationalists obsessed with superfluities like evidence cannot grasp it."
It seems to me, for non-believers, "truth" is digital. Either, or.
For believers, "truth" is analog, a sliding scale.
To them "truth" isn't an absolute, isn't an "atomic" part of perception/reality. For them, "truth" is a super-position of several notions. That's how they are able to believe in several conflicting things at the same time: Instead of looking for a singular, pure fragment of reality, they assemble various incomplete fragments of reality into a new fragment. They believe in the Big Bang and at the same time they believe that God caused it, even though both explanations have no overlaps.
It seems to me, non-believers are looking for absolutes, for the tiny, unchanging building-blocks that make up reality.
It seems to me, believers are looking for the big picture of reality, not caring about what exactly the big picture is made of, as long as the accuracy of the big picture is good enough.
And that's how you get hundreds of religions, and every single one offers a complete description of the whole cosmos.
Science offers only one description and there are huge parts missing in it.
bottom-up approach vs. top-down approach.
And IMO, just one more argument why science and religion don't mix. The philosophic foundations are opposites of each other.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...and even different things to the same person on different days.
For example, a Topos Theorist might consider Truth to be an special distinguished arrow, called the "subobject classifier". (The corresponding logic would be a form of intuitionistic logic, rather than a classical logic. Heyting algebras would replace Boolean algebras, here, for example.)
The days of a single overarching notion of Truth has fallen by the wayside in mathematics, in favor of more pluralized and diversified versions of Truth appropriate to various different contexts.
As an atheist mathematician, my view of Truth is probably a bit more diverse than that of most folks, but it kind of goes with the territory in my profession.
A single overarching Truth just doesn't capture the reality and the needs of modern mathematics in todays' world.
Not sure how Mathematics fits onto the Science vs Religion dichotomy that you present here. Perhaps Mathematics offers a third way, opening things up for more nuanced, subtle, and diverse visions of Truth?
a "God" one is the truth the other isn't. There is no just a little "God". It's binary.
The Law of Excluded Middle, while valid in classical logic, doesn't always in all logics.
For example, it fails in intuitionistic logics, such as the natural underlying internal logics of a Topos, for example.
It also fails in most orthomodular lattices (ie: "quantum logic"
, often considered as an internal logic of Quantum Mechanics, which may very well make it unsuitable for use in discussions regarding the Quantum World, that is, assuming that you believe in Quantum Mechanics.
has nothing to do with belief, it portrays certain aspects of the sub-atomic Universe. Though that understanding will certainly be expanded.
Not sure what point you were trying to make?
...then one is making a leap of faith that presumes that reality cannot be some sort of superposition of states in which both are true.
Just like when one says that Schrödinger's cat is either alive or dead, one is making a leap of faith in presuming that a superposition of both states is impossible.
Maybe in reality, God is neither alive nor dead, but simply in a superposition of states.
