[MD] Food for Thought

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Arlo previously]
Thus, a belief informed by "authority" is a social pattern. A belief informed by
"science" is intellectual. But then I'd have to conclude that my belief in
astrophysics is social, because it rests on authority.

[Craig] 
Don't give up this line of thought yet.  It is true that your personal
belief/disbelief in astrophysics may be based on authority.  But ultimately for
society & the scientific community, it is based on experiments following
the scientific method.  Otherwise you fall into the creationist trap that
Stephen Hawking says one thing & Moses/the Bible says the opposite, so
they're both equally likely right.

[Arlo]
Well, that's exactly what I don't want to do, and why I am leary of considering
the "social-intellectual" split to be "authority-science" in how ideas are
fixed. (And, you see, I struggle with the notion that some IDEAS can be social
patterns while other IDEAS can be intellectual patterns. It seems more accurate
to me to place all IDEAS on the intellectual level and then sort them by
low-quality and high-quality.)

So then the social patterns would be the church, the rituals, the hierarchies,
etc., but the IDEA of god (of ANY particular "god") could be weighed as a
low-quality alternative to science, which itself is not perfect because of its
"materialist" leanings.

Another "problem" for me is noticing that the intellectual level seems to inform
the social level in a way not evidenced (at least not as dramatically) between
the other levels. The social level does not inform the biological level (it
controls it, to be sure, but social patterns don't alter biological patterns,
cities don't change DNA). But our social patterns are now controlled and
changed and manipulated by intellectual patterns. "Free speech" has drastically
altered social patterns of action. "Physics" has sent people to the moon, and
in doing so ordered a whole mountain of social pattern industry, activity and
labor.

Perhaps this has something to do with a larger split of "inorganic-biological"
and "social-intellectual" into realms of "object" and "subject". One would
expect, then, a different sort of downward informing between intellectual and
social as between social and biological. Perhaps the analog is to be found in
how the biological level manipulates inorganic patterns.

At any rate, the intellectual patterns of "god" and "science", in addition to
being rated by virtue of their openness to DQ on the intellectual level, could
also be judged by how well they maintain balance on the socical level (between
providing order AND keeping the door open for DQ). Here, again, we seem to see
"god" as a lower-quality intellectual pattern because it causes not only
intellectual stagnation but also social stagnation. Science, then, in addition
to being criticizable for not recognizing morals on the intellectual level is
also criticizable for its undermining of social patterns (not providing a
harmonious balance on the social level). ("God", then, as an idea, overly
restricts Dynamism on the social level, while "science", as an idea, overly
destroys staticism on the social level.)

But, I'm just thinking outloud, and appreciate your indulgence.