[MD] Are theists irrational?

[John Carl]

Ian said:



> I agree 100% with John, bar one word ... when he says ...
>


Heck Ian, for a 100% mark, I'll give you two.



> And that word is "objective". I prefer "contingent", and then look at
> the processes people use to evaluate their beliefs. (At which point we
> jump into the other thread on pathesism and whoreshipping nature ...)
>

I like your creative misspelling of worship, btw.  very nice.

Yes, contingent upon... further information, deeper reflection, more
knowledge.

The wise call it "humility" but unfortunately it is one tendency that tends
to get wiped out in the pyramidal hierarchies of modern man.  Which is why I
go all "grrr..." at the pyramidal hierarchies of modern man.



>
> In a way, exactly as Platt (and myself) have said many times before ..
> "As Godel's Theorem reminds us, all knowledge is ultimately faith-based."
>
>
It is interesting, having this forum to edge me on in my reading royce.  I'm
getting to the place now where he is leaving Absolute Pragmatism behind and
boiling it down to Interpretation.  A very relevant and interestingly
developed metaphysical stance.

"We can best grasp interpretation if we consider it as a sign translation.
 A sign is anything that determines an interpretation, but, hinting at the
full doctrine we must explicate, Royce notes that a sign indicates the
existence of mind."

Ian:


> The scientists are "losing their edge" as John puts it, because they
> tend to ignore their faith in their process and simply claim higher
> moral ground.



"The orthodox scientific view reduces the world to measurable and
predictable units, to that which can be charted, graphed, statistically
analyzed; the traditional religious or mystical view reduces the world to a
reflection of human, anthropomorphic desires and intuitions.  Both have in
common the psychological compulsion to scale the world down to humanly
comprehensible limits, and both have in common, also, at their most profound
level, the tendency to think of the world as essentially (and only) a *
process* that lies beyond direct sensory  perception.  At this point the
Yogi and the physicist come close together, and both, I would like to
suggest, are mistaken, guilty of the most obvious reductionism, insofar as
either insists on the fallacy that existence, nature, the world is nothing
but the flow of process, and that the beings of this life whom we know and
love-- a woman, a child, a place, a tree, a rock, a cloud, a bird, the great
sun itself--are mere ephemera, illusory shadows, nothing.

They are wrong.  Even a rock is a being, a thing with character and a kind
of spirit, an existence worthy of our love.

To disparage the world we know for the sake of grand abstractions, whether
they are called mesons and electrons or the vibrations of an endlessly
slumbering and reawakening Brahma, is to be false to the mother who sustains
us.

Be true to the earth, said Nietzche."

Doncha love that Abbey?

Me too Ian, me too.

John