Humans can understand the world

Principle 1. Humans as a group have the capacity to understand how the world works, using their intellect and senses, and tools to enhance both.

The truth is out there and we humans can discover it. Maybe not now and maybe not ourselves, but when some day we find it we can know it and test it to be true. There is much that escapes our senses, but we're widening our range inventing enhancements to them. Instruments to see infrared, cells and far away stars. Robots to explore space. Think of what seemed like magic or madness only decades ago and is taken for granted today. This isn't to say that there are no limits to what humans can grasp and experience. But I'll use it to limit my thinking to what makes sense to think about. There is little point in trying to reason about things that are beyond our power of reasoning or beyond our power to one day put to the test. Maybe there are things that we will never know. I'm content to leave it at that.

Our tool of choice, the one that brought us dazzling progress in our condition over only a few hundred years, is the Scientific Method. It is about forming ideas about how the world might work (hypotheses) and how these ideas manifest themselves in our world. Then you set up and carry out experiments to see whether these manifestations actually do occur. As long as the experiments confirm the occurrence of the predicted manifestations, the hypothesis might be a correct description of reality. True knowledge. When an experiment contradicts predictions from the hypothesis, the idea is probably false (or the hypothesis not specific enough).

Rigorous application of the scientific method is not easy (even understanding it is not so simple). Also, I don't want to suggest that it is static. But at least at the moment it is the best tool that we have. We need to think and question and test everything, and apply our tool to decide what is true and what is not, at least given the knowledge and experiments available at the moment.