Would Polytheism Be Better For Us ?

[drogulus]

     The expedition was successful. 

     This is a vast subject and I've explored parts of it in other posts but here's a little bit more. I'll focus on this part:

Now the rejected questions may be nought but fluff. I make no claims for them at this point. But that area where the preliminary exclusions/inclusions occur - that fuzzy blob wherein these metaphysical (or antimetaphysical) decisions are made - that's the one that interests me. Those initial decisions are crucial. Because after all, there's no point in asking a pragmatist what was happening when Blake saw the angel in the tree: I know what he'll say.

     1) No, it probably isn't crucial just exactly how verificationists started out or exactly what tipped the scales since everything verified tips it on its own. We bootstrapped our way into a procedure and found it worked and then worked out the reasons why. The myth of the alternative is a strong one but for thousands of years our default operational philosophy has been materialist and the option to dissent from it occurs only around the edges, dealing with angels that may disturb us but don't take a bite out of us. We know this well enough to complain about angels being kicked out of the ontology without actually demanding that they be put back in. I wish the right hand paid attention to what the left does. What people want is to take an attitude towards angel impressions that goes beyond what can be said to be true about them and to deem it a kind of honorary truth. Like this:

     No they not entities except we're free to say they are when someone says they're not, but really we know better when we need to.

     I find it creepy that people resort to this and sneer at anyone like me who wants to keep things a bit more tidy.

     2) We know what the pragmatists will not say, which is more to the point. The pragmatist will not admit entities because they are wanted. Instead impressions will be seen as reports of experience and that is in my view the correct way to go if knowledge is your aim.

   

[Elgarian]

The expedition was successful.

Excellent. One day, I may make such a voyage myself to the far-flung corners of the word beyond the greengrocer's shop where, it is rumoured, sightings (and even tastings) of pizza have been made.

No, it probably isn't crucial just exactly how verificationists started out or exactly what tipped the scales since everything verified tips it on its own. We bootstrapped our way into a procedure and found it worked and then worked out the reasons why.

There's a bone of contention there, and I can't see a way of removing it at the moment. I agree that the bootstrapping has occurred, and that it has produced a self-consistent system, but it is a system that, by excluding certain kinds of questions, makes the character of its insights predictable. Your verificationist who says 'I won't believe in angels until I detect one with my voltmeter' knows he's safe. Not because there are no angels, but (very reasonably, for the sake of reliable electrical measurements) because his voltmeter is designed to keep them out.

The myth of the alternative is a strong one but for thousands of years our default operational philosophy has been materialist and the option to dissent from it occurs only around the edges, dealing with angels that may disturb us but don't take a bite out of us. We know this well enough to complain about angels being kicked out of the ontology without actually demanding that they be put back in.

This is the pragmatist speaking, I realise that, but it seems to me that it comes dangerously close to accepting the maxim 'if useful, therefore true'. And I'd say there's a great deal of human experience that people associate with angels biting us. (I don't offer this as evidence for angels - I'm just commenting on the occurrence of the experiences, and questioning the accuracy of your statement about the lack of demand - reasonable or otherwise - for their inclusion.)

I wish the right hand paid attention to what the left does. What people want is to take an attitude towards angel impressions that goes beyond what can be said to be true about them and to deem it a kind of honorary truth. Like this: No they not entities except we're free to say they are when someone says they're not, but really we know better when we need to.

I agree with you about that. But the suggestion that they may be fabricating a convenient truth based on their wants is not exclusive to them. Just as some people find comfort in a world containing angels, there are others who find comfort in a world that excludes them. The motives of the angel-excluding verificationists are not necessarily purer than those of the angel-seekers. The question of whether one is finding the truth one wants to find applies to both sides, and isn't an argument against angels.

I find it creepy that people resort to this and sneer at anyone like me who wants to keep things a bit more tidy.

I hope it's obvious that I'm not resorting to that, and that I'm never going to sneer?

Tidyness is a good in science, and Occam's razor is a useful - though not infallible - tool. But our science is tidy because we've designed it to be tidy, not because the world is. I need to keep on bringing back Whitehead, and his point about the fake exactness, even to the point of tedium, because otherwise these discussions slip away like the soap in the bath.

We know what the pragmatists will not say, which is more to the point. The pragmatist will not admit entities because they are wanted. Instead impressions will be seen as reports of experience and that is in my view the correct way to go if knowledge is your aim.

I've mentioned the two-way 'wanting' problem above, so I don't think I need say more about that. And I don't disagree with your final sentence. My aim in all these discussions is not to advocate 'angels for all', but to expose what Whitehead calls the 'faked adequacy' of systems of thought (like science) that purport to aim at a complete description of the world.

[Homo Aestheticus]

Elgarian,

I've mentioned the two-way 'wanting' problem above, so I don't think I need say more about that. And I don't disagree with your final sentence. My aim in all these discussions is not to advocate 'angels for all', but to expose what Whitehead calls the 'faked adequacy' of systems of thought (like science) that purport to aim at a complete description of the world.

Do you believe that science affirms the validity of the religious quest ?

[Bulldog]

Elgarian,

Do you believe that science affirms the validity of the religious quest ?

I don't believe that science has anything to do with a religious quest (whatever that might be, perhaps the search for the Holy Grail).

[Elgarian]

Elgarian, Do you believe that science affirms the validity of the religious quest ?

Science is a self-contained system for seeking a very particular kind of knowledge about the world, based on an ongoing process involving repeatable observations and the construction of predictive models whose predictive capabilities are testable through further observations. It's been designed to provide very specific kinds of answers to very specific kinds of questions. Because of that, anything science says about what you call 'the religious quest' excludes from the outset any possibility of the kind of answer you're hoping for. Faced with a human being engaged in spiritual activity, science will examine the human being according to its own special criteria, and come up with what seems to be a self-contained model of what is happening in terms of psychology/brain chemistry etc, - but as Whitehead points out so crucially, that exactness - the self-containedness - is faked. When I say I see an angel, science doesn't even try to examine the angel; it has no means of doing so. Instead, it examines me. And of course, fails to find any angelic presence there. How could it?

To think that science might offer any bearing on your 'religious quest' involves a category error - it's like asking whether bananas are friendly. But one can of course turn the tables, and study the behaviour of scientists. When it comes to the big life questions, scientists (and I am one myself, so I'm not knocking them) don't seem to attach much weight to the scientific method. When it comes to love, trust, faith, admiration, gratitude and indeed the employment of all the essential human (or spiritual) values, their actions and beliefs are not generally determined by the results of scientific enquiry. Why should your 'religious quest' be any different?

[Fëanor]

Science is a self-contained system for seeking a very particular kind of knowledge about the world, based on an ongoing process involving repeatable observations and the construction of predictive models whose predictive capabilities are testable through further observations. It's been designed to provide very specific kinds of answers to very specific kinds of questions. Because of that, anything science says about what you call 'the religious quest' excludes from the outset any possibility of the kind of answer you're hoping for. Faced with a human being engaged in spiritual activity, science will examine the human being according to its own special criteria, and come up with what seems to be a self-contained model of what is happening in terms of psychology/brain chemistry etc, - but as Whitehead points out so crucially, that exactness - the self-containedness - is faked. When I say I see an angel, science doesn't even try to examine the angel; it has no means of doing so. Instead, it examines me. And of course, fails to find any angelic presence there. How could it?

To think that science might offer any bearing on your 'religious quest' involves a category error - it's like asking whether bananas are friendly. But one can of course turn the tables, and study the behaviour of scientists. When it comes to the big life questions, scientists (and I am one myself, so I'm not knocking them) don't seem to attach much weight to the scientific method. When it comes to love, trust, faith, admiration, gratitude and indeed the employment of all the essential human (or spiritual) values, their actions and beliefs are not generally determined by the results of scientific enquiry. Why should your 'religious quest' be any different?

This is all well-said, Elgarian.

Science doesn't answers "spiritual" questions.  Nor does it purport to although some misguide souls make the claim for it.  And I say this as an atheist.  Scientists in the human and animal behaviour fields are attempting to explain (that is, present theories relating to), the behaviors that we refer to as "love, trust, faith, admiration, gratitude"; some of these theories are likely to lead to more research.  But the purpose of science is basically as more science; science is long way from a unified theory of " the meaning of life, the universe, and everything".

Personally I no longer seek answers to life's meaning.  I have come to the conclusion that "42" is as good an answer as any.

[Elgarian]

Scientists in the human and animal behaviour fields are attempting to explain (that is, present theories relating to), the behaviors that we refer to as "love, trust, faith, admiration, gratitude"; some of these theories are likely to lead to more research.

Yes of course they are. But could I just make it clear that that is completely different from the point I was making in the second part of my post? I was saying that even we scientists generally live our lives in non-scientific ways. We make our 'life' decisions about friendship, love, and so on intuitively - we don't make those decisions based on the results of scientific enquiry. We scientists trust our friends and our families and our lovers not because we have scientific evidence that suggests they're trustworthy, but because we rely on our intuition coupled with our general experience of life, and of these people. That's no different, in essence, to the way in which people come to adopt what we might loosely called a 'religious' attitude to life. If it feels intuitively right, then that tends to be the way people go.

So this curious dualism emerges from the evangelical scientific atheist, in which the question of religious faith must be singled out for scientific enquiry (and inevitably dismissed, and the category error issues ignored), on the one hand; while on the other, the rest of our intuitively-held beliefs - the ones we use daily in our lives - are acceptable without being subject to scientific testing. So it's OK to fall in love, make a friend, or carry out a charitable act without recourse to scientific rigour (of course it is - try to imagine the impossibility of living a life in which all decisions are subject to scientific testing!). And yet, to pray in faith is an activity to be challenged and confronted by a lack of scientific evidence. That looks suspicious, to me. I don't want to pray, myself - but even so, this has me looking over my shoulder for the Thought Police.

[Homo Aestheticus]

Elgarian,

Thanks for that thorough answer...

But do you see the reaction of the neo-atheist movement over the last few years as represented by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others as largely obtuse, both intellectually and psychologically ?

[Elgarian]

But do you see the reaction of the neo-atheist movement over the last few years as represented by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others as largely obtuse, both intellectually and psychologically ?

I think I've broadly answered the first part of your question in my two posts above. It's a sham debate, constructed from category mistakes. As for the psychological aspect -  Dawkins in particular gives the impression of being driven by a neurotic need to vilify the non-scientific. That doesn't in itself disqualify his statements, but he does seem to do a lot of setting up of straw men deities in order to have the pleasure of demolishing them. I greatly admired The Selfish Gene as a first rate piece of science writing, but I stopped reading him years ago, when he started in earnest on his crusade.

[Homo Aestheticus]

It's a sham debate, constructed from category mistakes.

Yes, even though I cannot fully comprehend their arguments that has always been my impression...'a sham debate'. On the other hand it is refreshing to see more criticism of organized religion.

Do you agree ?  And isn't fair to say that  all  organized religion is a lot like politics ?

[Elgarian]

On the other hand it is refreshing to see more criticism of organized religion.
Do you agree ?  And isn't fair to say that  all  organized religion is a lot like politics ?

That's a matter of sociology rather than philosophy (and/or science), and I don't think I have anything useful to contribute in that respect. Put a bunch of people together for any reason at all, and you'll end up with something 'a lot like politics'.

What interests me is primarily the existential predicament of the individual, and how best to relate to the fact of being in the world. So when I walked by the river the other day, with a gentle breeze blowing through the trees, and the may-blossom filling the air with its heady perfume, and the grass rustling under my feet, it seemed 'truer' to that experience to think 'Persephone is back again' than anything else I can imagine. Not because I believe, literally, that Persephone exists in any objective sense, but because that thought is so laden with centuries of belief and story-telling, and with so many people's love of the return of spring, and also because it summons an archetype that links me with the landscape and the air around me. I become part of it, and it becomes part of me, and also of all the other people who have ever been enchanted by may blossom and new life on a spring day. It's a matter of how best to be fully human - to enter into who we are, and who we might become, most effectively. Maybe this is a useful response to your original question at the start of this thread?

[Homo Aestheticus]

So when I walked by the river the other day, with a gentle breeze blowing through the trees, and the may-blossom filling the air with its heady perfume, and the grass rustling under my feet.....

Wait a minute, that sounds exactly like my avatar...    

It's a matter of how best to be fully human - to enter into who we are, and who we might become, most effectively.

Maybe this is a useful response to your original question at the start of this thread?

It is... thank you.    

But one final question if I may relating to the original:

Do you see any value in studying theology in the year 2009 ?  Do we really get a better perspective by studying the works of, say, Saint Thomas Aquinas or Rheinhold Niebuhr ?

Isn't it the case that Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Wittgenstein were much more sophisticated thinkers who came closer to 'the truth' than those men ?  

[knight66]

Are you under some bizarre misconception that only 'sophisticated thinkers' discover or communicate truth? If you don't think that Aquinas was an able thinker, then you don't know much about him or his output. Chipping away at a paragraph here or there is all too easy with any writer and Plato believed some highly odd things from a modern perspective.


Mike

[Homo Aestheticus]

Mike,

Plato believed some highly odd things from a modern perspective.

Perhaps, but they are not comparable to those of Aquinas.

Aquinas thought that women were intellectually inferior to men and thought that heretics should be put to death.

Worse, he thought that knowledge of God came from General Revelation and Special Revelation (the Bible).

Special Revelation is a fancy way of talking about mystical thinking and mystical writing. Basically, someone gets a notion in their head of how the universe works and assumes that God put it there and so it must be true.

Aquinas leads to madness. I am not saying he was not able and intelligent... smart people can be wrong. But his reasoning is deeply flawed. The barbarism that he supported shows the shortcomings of his world view.

[knight66]

Care to tell us what Plato's teaching on women was?

Mike

[PSmith08]

Aquinas leads to madness. I am not saying he was not able and intelligent... smart people can be wrong. But his reasoning is deeply flawed. The barbarism that he supported shows the shortcomings of his world view.

Aquinas leads to madness? Get a grip. Your zeal in the pursuit of a position as logically insupportable as belief is well established. There is no reason to talk nonsense. If you wish to engage with Aquinas with an eye on refuting him, then do so -- but ridiculous assertions and ad hominem attacks do not carry their burden of really engaging with Aquinas. Or any philosopher.

Care to tell us what Plato's teaching on women was?

Mike

But, Mike, that's different.

[knight66]

Without being explicit Eric, what I was really pointing out is that with most great thinkers, they came out with arguments or suppositions that we now like to overlook. However, that does not undermine the significance of what we think of their great work. I am no Plato basher. He was no kind of rationalist and was completely connected to what he felt was the godhead. This rather in contrast to how you present him.

Mike

[Elgarian]

Do you see any value in studying theology in the year 2009 ?

I don't know how to answer that. There's some value for someone in studying anything at all. For me, personally, do you mean? Not right now. For you, personally? You're the best judge of that.

Isn't it the case that Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Wittgenstein were much more sophisticated thinkers who came closer to 'the truth' than those men ?

1. How are you going to estimate 'closeness to the truth'?
2. I'd say you're in danger of compounding a category error with a chronological one. It's as impossible to compare the thinking prowess of Plato, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein as it is to decide whether Newton or Einstein was the greater scientist, or indeed, whether apples are better fruits than bananas.
3. I think I'd join Mike in asking why you think 'sophisticated thinkers' might offer a more secure route towards 'the truth'. I'll quote Whitehead again:

"Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience carefree, experience antivipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal."

I'm not trying to be evasive; I just think that although the question seems to imply it might be answerable, really it isn't.

[DavidRoss]

Elgarian--I just spotted your handle for this thread on the board index so popped in to see what's up.  You're still fighting the good fight, I see, offering clarity and common sense to help others sort out muddled thinking built on faulty assumptions.  It's great to have you around--think I'll play a recording of Elgar's VC in your honor! 

[Elgarian]

think I'll play a recording of Elgar's VC in your honor! 

It's a pleasure to think of you doing that. Inhale the musical scent of Anemone nemorosa!