I am feeling sleepy...

Its time for some ramblings. I need to freshen up my brains. So lets do this quick.

The other day, as I was reading a book, the author of the book tried to convince me that scientific theories are only a product of the human mind and thus they dont "exist" in some sense.

Even though things that happen in real life are explained through various scientific theories, time and again, many of these scientific theories are found wanting and are either replaced by or supplemented with newer theories. The author of this book seems to argue that if some people believe in ghosts (lets say), then it is just another theory that they believe in. They have reasons to believe in their theory in the same way that proponents of science have reasons to believe in theirs.

Just for the sake of this argument, it would be good to have Newtonian Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity in mind as examples. Even if we dont understand this, it will be good to have in mind during the course of this argument.

We need the help of science to give us "reasons" for things happening in real life, and we believe them, only later to be asked to believe another theory of science (for explaining the same things). So as the human mind evolves (or rather suits itself to a newer Universe), newer scientific theories are born. And thus newer beliefs.

It might help at this time, to just stop here and make a mental note that some theories (or should I say Truths) don't fall into this category. The Pythogoras Theorem, or for that matter the Theory of Numbers etc (even if they exist only in the human mind and can be classified "scientific") are different from the kind of theories that I am referring to here. As a Mathematics enthusiast, I was tempted and am happy, to point out that these are not the ones I am trying to equate to belief in Ghosts. The author of the book seemed to ignore this difference, and I think it is mainly because he is not a Math enthusiast.

So, getting back to where we were, as far as the other kind of accepted scientific thoery goes, all we can say is that they are the "best" explanations for things happening around us at a given point in time. I qualify "best" in quotes because not everyone seem to consider them best. And all of these theories are answers to "why things are happening the way they are". But then, so is the belief in God.

People believe in God because they think there is some power that is the "reason" for certain things happening the way they are. I can see two Atheist arguments here.

1. The question "WHY these certain things are happening like this?" is invalid. There needs to be no "reason" for these things to be the way they are. That is their "natural" state.

2. The question "WHY" is very valid. But "God" is not the correct answer.

Replacing "God" with "this particular scientific theory", both the arguments above remain with the same plausibility levels.

So, I conclude - At this point in time, I should admit that I dont have a convincing argument to say that the bias towards scientific belief (as opposed to other beliefs like Ghosts, God etc.) is entirely justified.