What you believe, and what is factual, do not necessarily intersect.
Except there’s a problem here, which I’ll elaborate upon shortly.
Well first of all, we need to distinguish between bringing knowledge and presuppositions to the table, a distinction that many mythology fanboys demonstrate routinely that they fail to understand.
Apparently, an elementary concepts flew past you here, namely that the vast majority of human beings possess sufficient commonaliy of experience with respect to their surroundings, to arrive at reasonably congruent views with respect to a host of ready observables. Pretty much everyone with functioning trichromatic vision will agree that the leaves of trees and plants are various shades of green in colour (certainly during the summer months in temperate latitudes - note I’m aware of what happens to deciduous foliage), though some may have a better appreciation of the subtleties of variation through artistic or biological training than others. You won’t find people possessing functioning trichromatic vision saying that the leaves of trees are blue or purple.
The fun part being, of course, that even people with colour vision defects will, as a result of basic education, have an appreciation of the idea that the leaves of trees are green, even if their colour vision defects prevent them from experiencing this first hand. Indeed, a trained science teacher can easily demonstrate the existence of the visible light spectrum, and use various instruments to measure the wavelength of the light in different parts of said spectrum, to the point where even a severely colour blind student can appreciate what’s happening, even if that student can’t see the colours in question.
Matters become even more interesting when we examine the visual response of other organisms, perhaps the canonical example being mantis shrimps. Which have no less than twelve different colour receptor opsins in their eyes that are stimulated by visible light, and they also have receptors for UV (which humans can’t detect by eye alone) and polarised light (which again humans can’t detect by eye alone). Here’s an example of research into the polarised light aspect of mantis shrimp vision, and the development of a camera that converts that polarisation into human visible form.
Now just because we don’t share the matnis shrimp’s ability to detect and respond to polarised light, doesn’t mean that we won’t, for example, fail to detect a crab or other food item moving into the mantis shrimp’s striking range. Our vision adequately allows humans to observe this, and multiple humans taking part in a reef dive will be able to observe such an event, without reaching wildly divergent conclusions about what they saw.
The big problem comes, in the case of humans, of allowing unsupported assertions to override sensory data, a frequently observed part of the mythology fanboy aetiology. Humans who have allowed themselves to become seduced by cosy but infantile notions of a cartoon magic man being responsible for everything, will bring that magic man into the picture regardless of whether or not doing so is in the least bit tenable. Here’s a particularly toxic example of that aetiology in action:
Indeed, this epistemological infection leads to all manner of treating sensory data as something to play apologetics with, instead of something to learn from. Creationists in particular take this basic faulure of reason to a noxiously duplicitous level.
Quite simply, in the absence of dialectical indoctrination, humans will enjoy a commonality of experience allowing them to arrive at a broad consensus about their surroundings. Some may be more eloquent in this regard than others, but the phenomenon is readily observable. That broad consensus only breaks down in malign fashion after an ideology is installed.
But of course, one of the lessons we learn from science, is that our surroundings can be, at times, interestingly counter-intuitive. The moment we start moving out of the realm of everyday experience, and start investigating entities and interactions that are beyond our normal sensory remit, those entities and interactions have a habit of behaving in ways that defy everyday intuition, and in that realm of experience, proper training is required to make sense thereof, along with a large helping of mathematics in the case of certain parts of physics.
Before the predictable and tiresome erection of a fake “symmetry” between scientific training and “indoctrination” is peddled here, there’s one key difference. Scientific training includes testing and verifying postulates by experiment, a practice completely absent from ideologies, be they religious or political. If you don’t subject your postulates wherever possible to experimental test, or labour diligently to devise tests where none existed previously (I appreciate that pure mathematics operates in a separate, but no less rigorous, manner), then you’re in the business of apologetics. Which at bottom, consists of concocting rococo fabrications as a substitute for genuine evidential support, and is useless as a result.
And with that, I’ll return everyone to their normal schedule.
