As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

Same goes for Martijn. But I'd rather he make his own port first.

When Buzz Aldrin (a Presbyterian elder himself) administered Communion on the Moon's surface (after getting back to the Landing Module, I think?), it was of course off camera

Then you are right, my details were sketchy here.

Back to what we discussed recently, I am reading William James right now (his Pragmatism lectures) and little did I know that I am making some of his points myself. I had some reflections, which I will explain once I flesh my thoughts out a bit better.

Umm, the link goes to a wrong place?

This guy seems to think that "The selfish gene" somehow represents conservative politics and that it may have influenced his political views. I haven't read it, but at least I have read enough to understand what it's about. It's amazing how many people who say that they have read it only seem to have read the title of the book.

Peter

Exatly my view of Dawkins: Brilliant biologist, terrible philosopher.

Volker

Whoooo! I missed months of discussion here... But it's too much to read now.


Nice

Nice.

And just to give Steven an orgasm, this guy is pure awesomeness.

Peter

Yep, a brilliant and passionate speaker, and each point is so well articulated. I've bookmarked the full debate, as I'm sure there are more gems from him. I'd watch this guy over Dawkins any day.

Peter

Indeed. I like Dawkins as a person and as a passionate and influential scientist, but he's not the great communicator and debater that some people seem to think. Harris is a great communicator, who always makes his sometimes complicated and controversial points easy to understand for everyone. I think the guy in the above video is as skilled a communicator as Harris, but he sounds much more passionate, which will probably have a broader appeal, while Harris sounds more like an intellectual.

Btw, here's the full debate-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5NkdKw2txw

Peter

Troll level: Expert.

I came across a very interesting book by an agnostic who defends the doubting mind but also actually moderate religion. He is as against religious fanaticism, creationism and all these things, as he is against, actually, against the "militant atheists" or rather, to be precise, anti-theists as Dawkins, Harris (the translation of the book constantly corrects his last name, which is reportedly written wrong all around the book). I haven't read it in full, I am just regularly skimming over it, but his arguments are interesting enough to warrant a full read when I have a bit more time and I have less of a backlog in reading than I have now.

This does lead me to interesting thoughts actually. I found out that I am on a similar stance with rather choosing to be theist than agnostic. My choice of theism is to be honest partly about the fact that I don't find how scientific discoveries negate or prove God's existence. The regular religious argument is that if it can be proven, then we don't have to believe, which is the point of being religious. Now, I think I can make a more argumented defense of my views, based on a certain readings I had recently in philosophy, a bit of psychology and things like that. Granted, the psychological knowledge is a bit out-of-date, but the author is actually regarded as seminal (he was also a philosopher, but his philosophy came largely from his psychological research and what has been happening around him philosophically at the time) both in terms of psychology in general and psychology of religion. The name is William James. The other philosopher that has influenced me in this regard is Ludwig Wittgenstein, a very important language philosopher, who was "agnostic, but close to the Catholic Church" in terms of his views and never spoke of religion, but rather defined a basic approach to the world as we see it.

When I said that lack of belief is a form of belief I basically repeated William James' logical argument that I didn't yet fully know about, but he shares my sentiments: "I don't believe in X" means "I believe that not X". This was an atheist philosopher and psychologist who was fascinated with religion and actually analyzed philosophy in pragmatic terms. For him "pragmatic terms" meant assessing philosophical views by assessing their usefulness. Is religion useful (that means a good system for a person)? Yes, because it gives hope. Then it helps getting by, it helps living. It may be seen as shallow. And yet, the inclusiveness of James' philosophy says some big things, because it's a kind of "life philosophy" rather than a huge system, which pretty much agrees with the antisystematic mind that James had. It's not that he thought religion influenced his scientific views. No. He wrote a very nice compromise that settles down the relationship between religion and science from a researcher's point of view. In his seminal "Psychology", James considers if a deity influences human psychology (I don't exactly remember the chapter where it was discussed, that's why I am so general). James, after an analysis, said something along these lines: "God is not a concept useful in psychological research, because this hypothesis wouldn't hold together. It doesn't mean that a psychologist can't believe in God. You can believe in God, but God is academically irrelevant". A nice way of putting "Believe in what you want, you're allowed, but don't use your beliefs as academic hypotheses".

Ludwig Wittgenstein on the other hand discussed what the world is in a linguistic fashion. His books are VERY difficult to read, but given proper attention, they reveal very interesting views in the relationship between science and metaphysics. Again, reading Wittgenstein made me realize (not influence) what my own views are and have always been. As a language philosopher, a seminal one at that, Wittgenstein argues that the world could be explicated as "a set of sentences describing reality". Basically a set of "linguistic beings" (he'd kill me for that) that logically explain how the world works. It could and should be argued that this basically means that the world is what science says it is with "says" being the key word due to his linguistic and logical (radically, at that) approach. Then comes, however, another argument: What is not describing the world is metaphysics. What does that mean from the standpoint of a religion argument?

Imagine a geometric figure, a flat one for argument reasons. That doesn't mean I am a flat-earther, it's just a philosophical argument about how the relationship works. Physics, the set of sentences explaining the way reality works, is the field of this figure. It contains everything we know at the moment from any science. But a figure doesn't have only the field, there is also the delimiting circumference. Now this is where it gets interesting. It's easy to say that religion belongs to the metaphysical realm, but what is the metaphysical realm? Wittgenstein says that everything that is not in that set of sentences is in the metaphysical realm. Which I find correct.

If the physical realm can be explained, that doesn't mean that we have one thing. A definition. My philosophical adventures (I read a lot of it, especially recently) led me to the conclusion that every big philosophical system could be analyzed by finding what I call the metaphysical keyword. It's easy to find, because it's all over a certain system or even set of systems. It could be God (Middle Ages, mostly), it could be Reason, Nature (17th and 18th Century), it could be Hegel's Spirit/Mind (Geist), the Nietzschean Will to Power would probably fit there, Dilthey and Simmel's Life would for sure, the vital force of Bergson... The arguments for these keywords is often quite vague, it must be said. When I was researching 17th century literature I had problems (and I never found it!) finding the 17th century definition of nature. They would just throw the word in poetry and philosophy wouldn't really explain it. Is it what we call physics today? Is it the opposition of nature and grace in theology? I never found out. Hegel is a bit better with his concept of Geist, but Simmel and Dilthey never say what is Life to them. Is it an overarching vital power? "Poetry is the explication of life". Of what? Etc. This is quite a philosophical problem, but when in the 20th Century philosophers appeared who argued against metaphysics as something impossible they didn't realize that by rejecting metaphysics they created a new one which they stuck to. Whatever keyword ruled at the moment was replaced with Language or maybe, to be more precise, actually Logic. Logic started to rule the world. Not in Cartesian terms. Language defined everything we do and they argued that the only way to analyze what we say is through highly developed logic.

And there is God. What is God? God is the metaphysical keyword some people choose to believe in (metaphysics is the domain of belief not knowledge). Now, even if you by principle reject any metaphysics, you don't reject it for real, because metaphysics is the source of our definition of the world. Chance? Whatever like that? It's metaphysical. We all have a set of beliefs, we just reject often to call it so. Some people choose to pick God. Does that influence their actions? Yes. Does the belief in Nature as an overarching power explained by the genius of Science which has the advantage of being disputable by logical arguments influence someone's actions? Sure, or we wouldn't have Dawkins arguing for atheism so much. Or Harris or someone else. Picking God is a choice, not always easy (Kierkegaard would argue that the path of religion is actually way more difficult, also because we doubt constantly and there are things that are hard to grasp) contrary to most of arguments here.

Most of theism vs. antitheism discussion looks like: "You're wrong!" "And you're UGLY". There should be more of a dispute here, because only that way something could be gained here. For the sake of culture and development.

Hmm, you've lost me on most of what you've written there Pawel, sounds like you've been hanging out with Deepak Chopra too much. But here's a few thoughts:



I'm sure, as you know, that's never been the point of science. What science has done has decreased the likelihood of God's existence, and has simply been a side effect of science, not its aim. The more we've learned about the natural world, the less we have needed God to explain anything. It also depends on the type of god you're referring to, since the god of Christianity, in its strict Biblical form, is pretty much refuted by the evidence (not the almost undefinable, slippery notion of God of so-called modern Christianity that we often encounter today, at least outside of churches).



Nope. It means "I haven't encountered sufficient evidence for X, therefor I have no reason to believe in X, but I am willing to believe in X given sufficient evidence."

I do not believe in a great many things, but this does not mean I believe they all do not exist. This is a horribly misleading word game that tries to put a person's lack of belief -that is, 'atheism'- on a level playing field as someone's religious beliefs.



I think you're confusing hope with belief. You are no more free to choose your beliefs as you are to travel back in time, but you are free to hope for a God - and this is where the struggle lies. Reason will often tell you that God's existence is very unlikely, and in turn will cause your belief in God to wane, but it doesn't necessarily affect your hope (in fact, it may even increase your hope, which is perhaps why when theists are presented with reasonable arguments against God, they just buckle down further and bury their heads in sand).