 I wasn't really surprised when Ken Ham got totally schooled in that debate. After all, creationists generally don't have a great response to nihilism. A few months ago, Bill Nye responded to some questions about philosophy that earned him a lot of flak from philosophers. I mean, just google Bill Nye philosophy and you'll see what I mean. It's not pretty. This was mostly because the way that his critical evaluation was phrased meant to clear that his negative opinion wasn't based on a real familiarity with the subject, but on a caricatured stereotype of philosophy as portrayed by popular culture. You know, like, philosophies about when you drop a hammer on your foot is the hammer really real or something. Now, that's not intended as a diss on Mr. Nye. He's an engineer and an educator, not a philosopher. Why someone would ask for his opinion on philosophy is a little peculiar in the first place. Almost as peculiar as the fact that many scientists have taken it upon themselves to comment on philosophy in very much the same way, with very similar results. Popular science figures like Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking have called out philosophy, asserting that while science is out discovering new truths about the universe, philosophy just sort of sits around pondering aimlessly and not getting anything done. You get a job, but why compare them in the first place? I mean, science and philosophy are both interested in truth, sure, but while science is occupied with figuring out how stuff works, philosophy is more about how we might think about it, what it might mean, how our limited perception of things might influence our other beliefs. Those sorts of things. Well, there's a familiar pattern to this debate that appears in a ton of different places, and its participants very rarely know that they're reciting a very old script. Let's rewind a little more than two thousand years ago, back before we knew anything about germs or which organs did what, really anything about medicine at all. There were still physicians, but let's just say that you'd probably prefer to walk it off whenever you could. In this period of general medical ignorance arose two medical schools with fundamentally opposing ideologies, the dogmatic or rationalist school, and the empiric school. Just about anybody in ancient Greece who claimed to be a physician belonged to either one or the other. The rationalist school emphasized understanding the underlying hidden causes of disease, the whys and hows of what made people sick. They believed that medical knowledge primarily came from careful analysis. Maybe your fever was due to an imbalance in your humors, or maybe you had too much of one of the four elements in your diet. The rationalist school focused on figuring out the principles behind health and manipulating them to make people well again. They believed that knowing stuff like why we breathe or why our heart speed was essential to fixing those things if they stopped working properly. They were very into dissecting cadavers and learning anatomy, which is something that's considered to be pretty important for med students nowadays. Counter to this approach was the empiric school, which instead focused on treating the apparent causes of diseases, fixing what was wrong without really worrying about what was causing it. They believed that medical knowledge came primarily from precedent and experimentation. The empiricists believed that it didn't matter at all why eating this herb or drinking that concoction made someone with diarrhea feel better. In fact, they didn't even think that it was possible to know why. All that mattered to them were results. They used a metaphor of a tripod of medicine consisting of history, observation, and analogy. Read what other physicians have tried before, record your patient's response to various treatments, and if they have something that you've never seen before, then try treating it like other stuff that kind of looks like it. Looking back on this little tiff in ancient history, you see some very familiar lines being drawn. Data versus interpretation. Understanding versus results. Yeah, this isn't anything new. The thing is, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see just how ridiculous this ideological divide was, especially in the context of medicine, which is more important, making people feel better or knowing how to keep them from getting sick. The central problem upon which that question turns is how human reason interfaces with the world, how we acquire knowledge and use it to think. Bear with me, this is going to get a little abstract. So one way to think about thought is as a world simulation process. We gather information about our environment through our senses. We find patterns in that information. We assign abstract symbols to those patterns and then combine them in various ways to try and figure out what's happening and what might happen. Like if I asked you, could a cat sit on a mat? You might never have seen a cat sitting on a mat before. You might have no real world experience to tell if that's possible or what it would even entail. But you can work with abstractions of your experiences to figure out what that could be like. You could use a symbol, an abstraction, a general concept of what a cat is formed through hundreds of interactions with the world. Everything from the My First Animals book that your parents read to you when you were a child to your own pets to all of those poorly spelled internet memes. Then you can do the same thing for sitting and for mats. Your brain then combines those abstractions into a general idea of what that situation might look like in the real world. And using rules of logic and probability, which are also abstractions, you can say yes with relative certainty. And there's no real way to say which part of that process of thought is more essential for answering the question. Could you do it without having learned anything about cats? No. Could you do it without using those abstract symbols and putting them together to see what works? Of course not. And yet we can see people asking which is more important in a ton of different places. You've probably figured out how philosophy and science fit into this framework, but if you look closely, the fields themselves are often split in exactly the same way. Many philosophers are probably already familiar with rationalism and empiricism, to beliefs about where knowledge primarily comes from, either sensory data or reasoning. For them, this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you talk to a modern day experimental physicist, you might get in earful about how theoreticians think they're so smart for coming up with cockamamie ideas to explain the real, meaningful, concrete data that they collect. There's some real sass within many fields of science between theory and experiment, which recapitulates this divide perfectly. And to this day, there are still arguments within the field of medicine about clinical application versus research. Now, to be fair, just because this divide is mostly an argument about emphasis doesn't mean that it's not worth examining. Too much of one and not enough of the other can lead to some big problems. Some philosophers have been paralyzed by meaningless dissection of abstractions with no real understanding gained. A whole bunch of brilliant scientists have been so caught up in number crunching and collecting data that they failed to grasp the bigger picture. Both extremes have had drastic effects on human history. However, I think that it's most important to recognize that both processes are necessary for thought, that if you really want to understand the world, you have to do both. That if you're a thinking human being, you already do both. Ancient false dichotomies non-withstanding. In my mind, the most telling part of this whole kerfuffle is that science itself, to pursuit of understanding the underlying rules of the universe, was known in ancient Greece by a different name. Philo Sophia, the love of knowledge. That's all any of us are after. And let's be honest, there's nothing to be gained by either research or contemplation without the other. Unless you're a mathematician, but that's a whole other can of worms. Where have you seen the rationalist empiricist divide at work? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.