[MD] Metaphysics

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mark,

Mark said:
Belief in God is an awareness.  It is not a concept, but a 
feeling. This is similar to belief in Love, or morality.  There 
is nothing logical about those.  Dawkins is talking about 
some kind of belief in mythology.  It is not the same thing.  
He is trying to rationalize Love.  I suppose since genetics 
does not support the concept of love, he may think it is 
delusional.  But to those of us that have experienced it, 
it is very real.  The same is true about the awareness of 
(a) God.  All the dogma and rules and rituals are 
something completely separate, in the same way that a 
Valentine's Day card is not Love.

Matt:
Hey, I agree with you.  I'm not sure if you were just 
telling me the above, or you were saying that because 
you thought it was apposite to something, but I have 
no disagreement with the first-person perspective of 
religious experience.  That's not what concerns people 
like me (and it should not concern, so much, people like 
Dawkins and Dennett).  What concerns us are the 
"dogma and rules and rituals," and ecclesiastical 
institutions set up to manipulate them, because that's 
where the violence comes from.  When I sit down to 
write large cultural bildungsromans about the progress 
of our civilization, I still like pointing to the Protestant 
Reformation as a good thing, a big step away from the 
clerics towards the experience.  But the dangers are 
still real and the improvements not complete.  (And I 
don't think genetics can prove or disprove the "concept 
of Love"--asking it to is a wrong-headed question; all 
of the ink spilt on the biological roots or non-roots of 
altruism seems to me ill spent on a largely pointless 
inquiry.)

I've written a little about the analogy between love and 
God in this post:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/02/rorty-religion-and-romance.html

Mark said:
One cannot rationalize Love or God or faith, but they 
certainly exist for people.

Matt:
While I think it would be silly to say love, God, or faith 
don't exist for people, I'm not sure the sense in which 
you are using "rationalize" gets us very far in 
understanding what those three things are.  I wrote a 
little about belief change and a new understanding of 
what "rationality" means here, and appended at the 
end is a discussion of what this means for the idea of 
"faith":
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html

Oh, let me also say that I (and most pragmatists) use the 
word "belief" in a very particular way.  I caught 
something Andre wrote to Steve about not needing 
"belief" because of direct experience, but that's not how 
Steve was using the term "belief."  In a lot of 
philosophical parlance (particularly amongst 
English-speaking professionals), "belief" is simply 
shorthand for a proposition that a person would mark as 
true.  For instance, "there's a rock on the floor" and "God 
is Love" are both beliefs in this sense--both are 
propositions that a person may or may not mark as true.  
(How "belief" came to mean this for anglophone 
philosophers is a specific story, but necessarily relevant.)  
In the post, I talk about a "web of beliefs," and all that's 
a stand-in for is all of the propositions an individual would 
mark as true, a metaphor for all the stuff in their minds.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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