I intended this thread to be a general discussion about epistemology, western history, postmodernism, metamodernism, the meaning crisis and the future of humanity. What I personally do or do not know, and how I justify it, is a distraction, because it personalises a discussion which needs to be generalised. In other words, this thread should not be about me.
The Pope doesn’t need to justify his claims about truth in terms of science or reason. He just decides things, based on Catholic doctrine and his own understanding of history and the world. Essentially, he “just knows”, and everybody else must accept his judgement as truth. That is how Abrahamic religions have always worked.
Science and analytical philosophy (AP) have never worked like that. Nobody in science or AP can just “profess to know truth”. In both cases, rigorous justification is required. In science this involves reductionism (breaking things into small pieces) and empirical evidence. When science fails in this respect, then it has internal procedures for correcting the mistake. And when this goes wrong then it causes big arguments. If you want to see an example of that, google for Sabine Hossenfelder. Sabine is an ex-physicist who has spent the last decade calling out contemporary cosmology and physics for failing in exactly this respect: it has stopped doing proper science, and has effectively given up searching for the actual truth. Cosmologists and physicists are jumping through the required academic hoops, but doing so in cynical ways: they produce mathematically elegant theories which are falsifiable, but which everybody knows will be falsified. But the culture is “publish or perish”, so if the physicists want to keep up with their mortgage payments, they must play the game (in bad faith).
So my approach to truth is consistent with both science and AP. I never make any claims on objective truth unless I can back them up with reason and empirical evidence. What I am doing that science does not do is insist that truth must be holistic. It must take into account the whole of science and the whole of AP, rather than just focusing on one small part. It must be a right hemisphere process as well as a left hemisphere process.
People on this forum have treated me as if I was acting like the Pope: declaring that I know what truth is, based on nothing but my own imagined authority. Your question implies that this is what I am doing. If that’s what you mean then the answer is no.
What I have actually done is offer a detailed argument, based on holistic science and reason, as to why certain things must be true. Nobody here has engaged with those arguments. I started a thread about the crisis in cosmology, and nobody responded. That lack of interest is a direct consequence of the postmodern approach of 2R. Collectively, you aren’t that interested in empirical science, because postmodernism declared science to be “just another narrative”, with no epistemological privelege. As a result, it is impossible for yourself and the other people here to distinguish what I am doing from what the Pope does. I am pointing out that this is a very serious problem.
How can there be a paradigm shift which resolves the conflict between science and spirituality, if 2R is not interested in engaging with science with respect to truth?
Does 2R believe it can arrive at the truth by a process of negotiation within its own group? If so, that isn’t going to work. If not, then it needs to start taking science seriously, and view the crisis in cosmology as a golden opportunity, instead of totally ignoring it.