I would like to give you an overview of my book; The Rational Trinity:Imagination, Belief and Knowledge.
It is the first to define the difference between knowledge and belief by showing that reality stimulates the imagination to rational beliefs transformable to knowledge by evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with reality, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond reality-evaluation in practice or in principle, but which cannot be accepted as knowledge.
Thus, this book shows that reality-evaluation of specific beliefs produced the craft- and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science and technology which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards, while our knowledge-based development of social cohesion was variously disrupted by conflicting religious beliefs, by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs or by the reaction of ignored-reality in ways which belief is unable to anticipate and avert.
Thus, this book seeks ubiquitous acceptance that secular beliefs, whether implemented or not, must now be reality-evaluated; that the absence of reality-evaluation leads to belief-driven violence and war; and that its lax application corrupts the social, economic and environmental sciences to the pseudo-science now responsible for deteriorating personal behaviour, diminishing social cohesion, recurring financial crises, and increasing uncertainty of material and energy supply by diverting resources from real to unreal problems.
Thus, this book concludes that our current maladies can only be rectified by general recognition that knowledge-based policies conducive to our species survival and to our social and physical welfare are properly defined as right and good, and counter-beliefs as wrong and bad; that political manifestos must start to prioritise knowledge-based policy options and identify as such any belief-based policies necessitated by pro tem ignorance; and that this defined Change will render continuous our otherwise disrupted progress.
Thus, Chapter 1 defines the terms used to analyse our knowledge-based progress and its belief-based disruptions, while Chapter 2 shows how our innate capacity for reality-evaluation created our craftsmanship and social cultures from time immemorial to the Iron Age. In contrast, Chapter 3 outlines our search for knowledge through rationality alone when the Beyond was believed to be the source of the here-and-now. Chapter 4 then shows how contending religious beliefs beyond resolution by reality-evaluation could only be resolved to orthodoxies by Imperial Edicts, while Chapters 5, 6 and 7 show how religious and secular beliefs touching on reality were gradually resolved by reality-evaluation, initially by direct observation and later by the experimentation which initiated physicochemical science.
Thereafter, Chapter 8 shows how physicochemical science transformed craftsmanship to technology and provided other sciences with deeper knowledge than the directly observable, while Chapter 9 shows how physicochemical science explained the evolution of Universe, Earth and Life and took technology to its current levels, all within our innate and finite capacity to imagine beliefs capable of reality-evaluation by experimentation. In contrast, Chapter 10 shows philosophy to be pure belief in its rejection of reality-evaluation, while Chapter 11 shows how the secular now legislatively implement arbitrary interpretations of belief in equality, freedom, rights and environmentalism to the extent of corrupting commonsense, general and specific knowledge, and even scientific method itself in ways never attempted by the religious.
Finally, Chapter 12 shows how knowledge can harmonise religion with secularism, environmentalism with technology, and economics with commonsense, and how current disillusion with belief-based politics can become enthusiasm for its knowledge-based alternative to the benefit of all at home and abroad.
The Rational Trinity:Imagination, Belief and Knowledge, is available from Amazon, and Bookshops.
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