ToK Question

How we ‘know’ and with what ‘certainty’ differs across areas of knowledge.

There is a clear divide in how many different areas of knowledge are known and validated. In natural sciences, the clear prerequisite to knowledge is testing and observation. Such as in Physics, the plethora of understandings we have accumulated over history has come with testing as well as mathematical proofs. We were very unsure if Black Holes were a fancy concept of nothing or an actual body in the universe and we were not able to confirm or deny until we first, derived Einstein’s laws, and Second, actually got data from black holes. This begs the question if the data was accurate – and further is any data always accurate but we can confirm that the many data points we have gotten can allude to the finding of black holes due to the number of ways we found these data points. Whilst I am no expert, I am certain that LIGO detected infinitesimally small gravitational waves which originated from a binary black hole system finally colliding. And we have also gotten more proof as of 2019, with the first pictures of a black hole being released. That was a long example to explain something quite simple – that Physics and to an extent, all of the natural sciences base their findings off of observations and clear statistical analysis. This, however, is not the same for another very real area of knowledge such as History, Religion, or the Arts etc. An easy picking of these would be religion, whilst theologians might make the case that religion is just as easy proven as Physics, it’s easy to see that the process would be quite different. Where we had statistical values of the arc degrees that lasers moved to prove Blach Holes, we have in religion, the spiritual connection to the beautiful thread stories in many religious texts. This area of knowledge in itself, very difficult to describe because whilst we had tangible evidence for Physical qualities of the universe, we have instead feelings that emerge when reading these texts. Cain and Abel depict the values of not realising the higher presence of god but it’s hard to validate that knowledge when we can’t see, or experience god, in any of our senses. This is my point, whilst physics is based in reality, religion is based on abstract and feelings. Does this make it any lesser than physics? Perhaps. But perhaps we should alter our understanding that there may be more than one answer in different AOK. Physics always has it’s constants but religion doesn’t share many values universally. So then the question is how can we ever disprove religious gainings. And my question is, do we need to?

(Sorry I know it’s a lot of words).