[MD] False Messiah

[Scott Roberts]

Peter,

Peter said:
you reminded us that some religious people are trying hard to reconcile
their old religious dogmas with the findings of  science and you pointed out
that 'the official doctrine of the Catholic Church [is] that not only does
reason require faith, but also faith requires reason'. I think the catholics
are just being slippery here - they know that reason works but can't throw
away their belief and so plug the gap quickly with faith.

Scott:
This doctrine on faith and reason goes back to the third century (Clement 
and Origen). It was not dreamed up when science started to cause 
difficulties in the 17th century.

Peter said:
 I looked up
'faith' on wikipedia and it's use as a word  mainly has the religious
connotation and 'tends to imply a transpersonal rather than interpersonal
relationship – with God or a higher power'; I am an atheist and as I said in
another post I try to remove faith from my thinking. The closest definition
wikipedia gave that could come close to me accepting the idea of faith was
'In its proper sense faith means trusting the word of another'; better to be
good at reading body language and relying on your memory of your historical
relationship with them; use your intelligence and make your prediction then
wait for the result - don't simply have faith, that's just negligent.

Scott:
What about the claim that inorganic static patterns are static patterns of 
value? Or the Buddhist faith in the possibility of Enlightenment? Do you 
reject these as well?

Pater said:
Scott you also said 'all theologians, other than fundamentalists, recognize
that God-talk is necessarily metaphorical. Only fundamentalists and
anti-theists take it literally, and their problem is to privilege the
literal over the metaphorical'. OK , so they accept 'God' is not some old
man with a white beard and smock flying about in the clouds but in their
case what is 'God' necessarily a metaphor for then?

Scott:
*All* God-talk is understood to be metaphorical. Calling God "the Source of 
all things" is to be understood as being metaphorical. The only thing one 
knows for certain about God is that God is a mystery. One uses metaphors 
because one doesn't know what they are "for".

Peter said:
They are still secretly
thinking of an omnipotent being who they want to be on the right side of;...

Scott:
This is your static baggage about Christianity. Of course many, perhaps most 
Christians do think this way, but that is changing. If you want nothing to 
do with Christianity or any religion, that's fine, but if you are going to 
criticize it, then I suggest that you allow a little Dynamism into your 
thinking, as some Christians are allowing in theirs.

Peter continued:
...some of them might then have a secondary background thought that
'omnipotent being' is also stretching it a bit and would say instead
something like 'the Source of all things' - but we know nothing of that -
even the postulated Big Bang may be found to be only the other side of a
Black Hole.

Scott:
In that case you should reject the MOQ, since we know nothing about 
electrons experiencing value, right? And neo-Darwinism, since we don't 
actually know what the probabilities are for evolution to have happened 
through random genetic mutation and natural selection, right? My point is 
that one must make some assumptions, or the only alternative is nihilism. 
Neo-Darwinism assumes that space and time are fundamental -- in apparent 
contradiction to quantum physics. Mystics say that space and time are not 
fundamental. So if I listen to mystics and a neo-Darwinist listens to 
Dawkins, who is being more irrational?

By the way, I don't want to conflate "operating under certain assumptions" 
with faith. The difference, or so I see it, is that with faith the 
assumptions contain mystery, while a neo-Darwinist's assumptions (say) are 
understandable. Ironically, I see this as being the problem. As Coleridge 
put it, it is falling victim to "the despotism of the eye", by which he 
meant that one has taken the contents of sense perception (in particular, 
the spatiotemporality of things) as being really real, and one does so 
because that is the limit to one's imagination. It is impossible to imagine 
in one's mind's eye the non-spatiotemporal, yet quantum physics demands 
it -- or rather, it demands that one face the fact that quantum reality is 
not understandable in this "mind's eye" manner.

What this means is that faith poses a greater challenge to one's thinking 
precisely because what one has faith in is a mystery. Because of this, those 
with faith who think about their faith are more likely to be Dynamic in 
their thinking than those who reject mystery. I'm not sure if it matters 
just what one has faith in, as long as one has it and, of course, as long as 
one doesn't settle too quickly on  particular metaphors, turning them into 
something literal.

- Scott