My OCT thesis (on conflicting truths) is the following:
Clashes between religious and scientific truths arise either when core cultural values threaten to limit the scope of a scientific discipline or when scientific theorems jeopardize the credibility of a culture’s core values.
Is my OCT thesis itself religious in nature and could it be / become, for example, a philosophical or a Catholic theorem? Could the Roman Inquisition in 1615 have felt that way toward Galileo?
Or is my thesis itself scientific in nature and could, for example, it be / become a social scientific theorem? Could the legal opposition (sic!) In the US against replacing Darwin’s theory of evolution with creationist stories in biology education be based on it?
Or maybe both? Would the US Supreme Court have shown that broad view by pointing to the opportunities offered to make their point in non-biology school subjects when assessing efforts to ban Darwin from biological education? I quote a series of fascinating legal proceedings from Wikipedia (accessed March 17, 2021):
In American schools, the Genesis creation narrative was generally taught as the origin of the universe and of life until Darwin’s scientific theories became widely accepted. While there was some immediate backlash, organized opposition did not get underway until the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy broke out following World War I; several states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution while others debated them but did not pass them. The Scopes Trial was the result of a challenge to the law in Tennessee. Scopes lost his case, and further states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution. In 1968, the US Supreme Court ruled on Epperson v. Arkansas, another challenge to these laws, and the court ruled that allowing the teaching of creation, while disallowing the teaching of evolution, advanced a religion, and therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the constitution. Creationists then starting lobbying to have laws passed that required teachers to Teach the Controversy, but this was also struck down by the Supreme Court in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard. Creationists then moved to frame the issue as one of intelligent design but this too was ruled against in a District Court in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005.
An effort to find out whether my OCT thesis could become a scientific theorem does not only require (i) valid religious reasoning from (all?) core values of a culture (all cultures?) to cultural theorems about the (all?) results of the scientific discipline concerned, but also (ii) for valid scientific reasoning from (all?) disciplinary theorems to the same results.
I do not know. These requirements are not realistic. If those are the efforts you have to make to assess (let alone develop) scientific theorems, then that is de facto impossible, even for those who are extraordinarily gifted.
This is one of the reasons why I cannot fully understand why scientists as scientists allow themselves to be tempted day in and day out to make theorem-like statements about COVID on TV and why I distrust the statements made in this way. Why?
For the same reasons as I distrust my OCT thesis as a scientific theorem, even while I do believe there is something to it. But the scope of the OCT thesis is too broad and vague, both substantively and historically. It must first be refined and transformed into a better and more verifiable explanatory story.
I will of course come back to this.