[MD] Intellect and Religion: Individuals and Society

[david buchanan]

John said:

...Thus, intellect is individual and religion is social. This might seem to you, like it does to me, a "duh" sort of realization, but for some reason it never occured to me to formulate the conflict between the two exactly like that before.  It must be all this philosophical debate is doing some good after all.  I made a realization! Religion is static. Intellect is dynamic.  A religion that doesn't allow intellectual questioning is doomed to become outmoded in time.

dmb says:

Well, no. Intellect is more dynamic than tradition in the sense that it is more flexible, more open to change and it's self-correcting but it doesn't work without a certain amount of stability. We are talking about a level of STATIC patterns after all. Also I think it's a mistake to construe the social-intellectual distinction as a difference between collectivity and individuality. Science and philosophy, for example, are both constituted by specific conversation or "discourses" within the culture. That's what peer reviewed journals and repeatable experiments are all about. The history of science shows that progress almost never occurs except when it is preceded by a long period of what Thomas Kuhn calls "convergent thinking", which is opposed to "divergent thinking". In terms of the MOQ, you'd say that dynamic changes can only grow out of static consensus. 
 
John also said:
This is where the MoQ missteps, imo.  By making "Good" subservient to a hierarchical system of values, the intellectual individual becomes paramount, but you can't have individuals without a society anymore than you can have an intellectual questioning of current values without some current values to question.  Pirsig makes the point in ZAMM when he describes the Mythos roots of Virtue.


dmb says:

Ummm, no. 

"In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the MOQ makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to science by static lower levels of evolution: static BIOLOGICAL values such as biological fear that threatened Jenner's small pox experiment; static SOCIAL values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack. The MOQ say that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns.   But the MOQ also says that DQ, the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether. DQ is a higher moral order that static scientific truth, an it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science, It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." (Lila, end of chapter 29)





 		 	   		  
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