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health advisory Hospital Doctor Yu 2007-11-8 19:09:51

However, people can become very psychologically attached to theories. If someone has worked their whole life in a particular field, and their entire thinking revolves around a particular world view, they can be very resistant to change. What they 'know to be true' has become a fixed belief rather than a process of discovery. This is another case where what they believe is psychologically inseparable from what they know to be true.

What other factors can influence scientific belief? Well the threat of torture and execution is one e.g. Galileo. Pre-existing prejudices (alias untested assumptions) is another. The structure of language can be another. Language shapes thinking, so if ones language gives preferences to thinking in a certain way, you might have several untested assumptions built into the very way you think (e.g. use of nouns predispose us to think of things rather than processes).

Until the beginning of the 20th century there wasn't a rigorous foundation for arithmetic (although the whole process of making mathematics more logically rigorous had been going on for 100+ years before that). Nonetheless people continued to successfully use arithmetic. People (including scientists) believed in things that they simply accepted to be true, and probably would have been surprised to discover that if you dug hard enough there weren't really firm foundations. In a sense 'they knew it to be true' because it hadn't failed them in use but that isn't rigorous knowledge.

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If this threory is used worldwide, then i guess most of the religion will be doing a bad business.

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Its a bit of a rhetorical question, to believe in something you must be convinced of its current state (ie. existence/non-existence), regardless of definitive knowledge (or the elusive 'proof'). That in turn means it becomes what is perceived as a 'truth' to the observer.