Experience the horror of this very crudely paraphrased argument I had with someone on the IMDB message boards. I searched my darndest to find the original but it’s been lost in the black hole of Internet history, possibly for the sake of its participants’ sanity.
When you are raised in a philosophical climate—the techno-Enlightened West—that tries to reduce every epistemic phenomenon to Science, Baby!™, this is the result: an equivocation fallacy (I think) of the highest order.
[A bunch of posts about science vs. religion, Galileo, spherical vs. flat earth theory, etc.]
Guy: Well, the church taught everyone that the earth was flat, so there ya go…
Me: There were different theories but the Church went with the prevailing opinion of a spherical earth from what they got from the Greeks. There was always a little debate. You don’t need science to know the earth is round anyways. You can just look at it.
Guy: How is that?
Me: Well, find the nearest spaceship, climb in, go into orbit (or further), and look at the earth. Bam. If there’s no spaceship available you can climb on top of a mountain and observe the curve of the earth and reasonably conclude a spherical form. Or you can induce it by looking at the spherical shape of other planets. Probably other ways, but those are pretty much nearing science anyways.
Guy: That makes sense. But going into space…you need science for that.
Me: Yes, but the science of shooting into space isn’t going to tell you the earth is round*. It’s your sensory input concluding it, not the scientific method. Sphericity is primarily a sensed thing. You can theorize with a blind man that the object in front of him is a ball but he can’t really understand sphericity until he touches it with his hands.
Guy: I disagree. There would be no conclusion that the earth was a sphere if science didn’t make the orbiting aircraft possible.
Me: Again, in this example, orbiting didn’t prove sphericity*, someone observing the earth’s sphericity from space did. If I were born on a space station, I would know the earth is round as a toddler by looking at it, long before I knew the any formal geometric proofs.
[Guy continues to reinforce science as the only way of knowing earth’s sphericity. Conversation disintegrates.]
* I actually think I was wrong on this point. Is it possible to orbit around non-round objects?