Posted by Woody on January 29, 19101 at 19:29:51:
In Reply to: Re: Christ OS-Sure, DarwinOS has its bugs posted by Loretta on January 27, 19101 at 13:47:24:
Loretta wrote: Challenges from science and philosophy have helped religion to discard irrational elements, to achieve a unity of its beliefs, to relate them to knowledge and to beliefs that have come from other sources. These challenges also help to clarify its concepts so they can better be communicated.
Loretta,Ivan, et al
There is a temptation to throw around words like metaphysics and cultural evolution, too, shall we say, loosely?
What might be involved here? May I suggest, perhaps the four capacities: attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility?
Fair enough? Then you may wish to read Bernard Lonergan.
Are you a scientist, Ivan? A good metaphysician, Loretta? Doesn't a good scientist apply her attentiveness, intelligence, and reasonableness in order to get to know some aspect of the
material world? Doesn't a good social scientist apply them to get to know some aspect of the more or less attentive, intelligent, reasonable,
and responsible persons and institutions which make up the human world?
Whether a nuclear physicist or a Latin literature scholar (Fe), one crucial thing to note here is that the use of intelligence to excogitate theories, true or false, about the world, is a matter of mental creativity. You invoke Darwin, Ivan, so often. Kepler did not arrive at his account of planetary motions, or Darwin of the origin of species, just by letting observable facts soak in and then recording them!
You invoke Marx and Freud, Ivan. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, in their different ways, have drawn attention to the manner in which our wishes, fears, and prejudices may make us shy away from attentiveness or neglect or abuse intelligence and reason so that we may avoid difficult decisions or judgments that would tend to violate our personal or social interest. This is a REAL concern! For instance, in the American south, early in the nineteenth century, it was widely held among whites that blacks had less attachment to their children than they themselves. This made the custom of separating black people from their children, in the economic interest of whites, seem less cruel than it would otherwise have appeared.
One is reminded of the discussion by two Roman ladies of the crucifixion in Dorothy Sayers' play, The Man Born to Be King. One lady talks with horror of the agony endured by the victims only to be reassured by the other with the comfortable reflection that members of subject races would not feel the pain to the degree that a high-born Roman would.
The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. What is culture, Loretta, but largely a means to the examination of life?
George Eliot called her novels a set of 'experiments in life.' To be acquainted with the novels of Jane Austen is part of what it is to be a cultured English speaker; and this is largely
because, through their prose style and their interplay of character and plot, they show with such clarity, depth, and precision what it is to be authentic in human relationships and what it is to fail in such authenticity.
In general, it is part of being a cultured person to have some appreciation of the arts; and the arts give satisfaction by stretching our capacity to experience and to envisage possibilities-that is, they involve the attentiveness and intelligence which are necessary conditions
of reasonable judgment and responsible decision.
You might say that they exercise the soul rather as physical activity exercises the body (and I think of Loretta, who is so attentive to both body and soul!) . In both cases the satisfaction obtainable, both immediate and long-term, is great; but a certain amount of effort has
to be invested! Coleridge had this in mind when he contrasted true reading with perusal of the popular novels of his day, which he declared to
reconcile those apparently contradictory propensities of human nature, indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy. (And, Ivan, that was before the invention of television!)
Ivan, you are somewhat open-minded, so, don't take this as a criticism but as an affirmation: Knowledge is not to be had by mere attentiveness; the basic blunder of empiricism, as Lonergan has adroitly expressed it, is that what is obvious in knowing is what knowing obviously is (B. Lonergan, Insight. A Study of Human Understanding, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1992, 441).
THE BASIC BLUNDER OF EMPIRICISM IS THAT WHAT IS OBVIOUS IN KNOWING IS WHAT KNOWING OBVIOUSLY IS!
The idealist, on the other hand, Sweet Loretta, notes the creativity involved in the acts of intelligence which are necessary for us to get to know the world, but tends to infer from this that what we call 'the world' really is created by human intelligence, not sufficiently attending to the fact that what is postulated by human creative intelligence must be confirmed as belonging or disconfirmed as not belonging to the world by the office of reasonableness.
It is usual for idealists to fudge the issue and avoid the grosser forms of subjectivism by, for example, more or less identifying the divine with
the human in the manner of Hegel or making human society creator instead of the individual, like Durkheim. Loretta, you recall our earlier thread and Hegel?
To consider properly attentiveness, intelligence, and reasonableness in our account of the world is to be led to a critical realism which does not exaggerate the role of experience, in accordance with empiricism (Ivan), or that of creative intelligence, in the manner of idealism (Loretta).
It is also to be led to the intelligent conception and reasonable affirmation of an intelligent will which provides the ultimate explanation of the world; this intelligence accounts for the fact that the world can be understood at all, and this will establishes just what this intelligibility will turn out to be-in terms of oxygen rather than phlogiston, evolution rather than special creation, relativity rather than a luminiferous ether, and so on.
In other words, a critical realism gives good reason for affirming the existence, as Thomas Aquinas would say, of what all call God!
most respectfully,
Woody
your foremost ally in the pursuit of truth, citing all the points which evaded Ayn Rand and her objectivist's epistemology, but that's okay, Howard