The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Oh, I see! You were confused by my statement that one magisterium is for science and one is for faith when I simultaneously seemed not to object in any way if you wanted to assert that science applies everywhere.
In the statement, 'one magesterium is for science', 'science' must be meant in some limited sense. Specifically, I guess, the set of scientific facts and principles we've learned that apply to X.
Maybe this could happen in Flatland. X is a two-dimensional world and the people there learn rules that apply to 2D. But Flatland is embedded in a 3D world X'. I'm not saying the people in flatland can't comprehend X' with a different set of rules, but they would be justified in parsing their world as X and X' -- especially if they experience 2D things usually but encounter understanding of 3D things only exactly when they happen to collect in a square with a plus sign affixed to one side.
So here is something that looks like it would qualify as reason for the flatlanders to reject their two-dimensional science. In Flatland an object that is trapped in a square cannot escape. To a flatlander seeing an object escape a box is going to look like magic. They will be forced to question their most basic beliefs about the nature of the world. Would this count as an inconsistency that cannot be resolved with their scientific facts and principles... the kind of thing that would make it reasonable to believe in an additional magisterium?