Can political, economic and religious ideas ever be put to the test? ?

Question

In the way that scientific ideas are tested. Or are we living our lives according to rules which we hope are valid but can't be sure? How do people a lot cleverer than me actually know they are right about what they believe? Especially if there are different views.

Answer 1

We wouldn't need those if we had a Technocratic Democracy.

Answer 2

Political and economic ideas can be put to the test. Religious ideas are more difficult to test because they are based on faith.

But political and economic ideas can definitely be tested, to examine the results of these tests look back at history.

Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism, Democracy, Theocracy, Federalism, Liberalism, constitutionalism, Feudalism, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism etc etc etc

There are examples of all of these. The failure rate of some is far greater than others. No system has been perfected but they have been tested and are being tested every day.

Answer 3

To an extent perhaps but emember the social sciences are not like the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. You can't put an entire society into controlled laboratory conditions and experiment with it. To try would be highly unethical at best. And as it is there are too many unknowns.



Religious ideas- the skeptics would say they haave been put to the test and found wanting (at least creationism)- though I dispute some of that, since a lot of it is extrapolating based on assumptions of uniformitarianism and radiometric dating that happens to work, but still relies on assumptions- but we have to understand that God and the spiritual realm can't be directly tested, and many reigious texts were written in a pre-scientifc age and can't be expected to easily make sense to our modern, perhaps literalistic, scientific minds.

Answer 4

Political and economic ones can. For example, the West's economies have largely been run along laissez-faire free market lines for the past thirty years or so, and we can all see how well that's worked out...



I don't see how religious ideas could be tested directly, except by enforcing religious teachings on a society.

Answer 5

By any tests with honest results political, economic and religious ideas usually benefit a few at the expense of many.

Answer 6

They all have been tried and Conservatism works every time. Communism fails every time.



Communism sounds so good to two year old's, and they think they can to it better. We have not been conservative for a long time.