(Go ahead, baby ... Title me!)
General comments
The first page of this topic tells me that specific address is out of the question, so a few general comments.
On the topic question itself
"Such a self-contradictory undertaking" is not doomed outright, though the odds speak heavily in favor of that outcome.
I almost missed an aspect of the question because I tend to think of life as a statistical necessity of the Universe, but in the Creation/Evolution debate, it is asserted by Creationists that humanity could not have evolved or otherwise come about without Divine Assistance. As someone (
Revbill2001) noted, "Some of the damnedest things have been discovered while stumbling around in the dark." Well ... life didn't come about according to an intentionally organized design, right?
In General
I have in the past asserted of Catholicism that it is
very logical in its philosophical tradition as long as you accept a minimal number of ultimately significant presuppositions, such as the existence of God, the necessity of redemption, and however it is Catholics phrase the status of Scripture.
While other allegedly objectivist perspectives on life bear more subtle presuppositions, at the root of all beliefs is presupposition. At this point, we could revisit the question of why murder is wrong, but let's short-circuit the poodle act by simply stating that the reason murder is wrong, when you get right down to it, no matter what that reason may be, is subjective. It is rooted in presuppositions about human value, human propriety, and human progress, among other human aspects.
And while the objectivist perspectives may be more subtle they are also often more functionally relevant and practical.
But this does not make any of those perspectives right; the idea of a right or proper way to think or be is in itself a presupposition.
How far do reason and objectivity go? If you watch carefully, applying reason consistently makes life very tedious; not in the sense that I would complain about boredom, but one ought to, I think, consider the reduction of various measures of efficiency that comes from proper deliberation of all available, relevant evidence. More often than not, in a consistently rational scenario, parents would find themselves unable to discipline children, and while my daughter is too young yet to make me regret my apathy toward this condition, well, it's not my apathy toward the condition--at present I prefer the idea--but rather my apathy toward other parents' concerns. I don't even object here to letting a rule stand and expecting to fill the child in over time on the hows and whys of the structure, but I haven't seen a survey yet suggesting that American parents spend nearly enough time communicating with their children (especially
listening to their children) to expect that later communication of the values motivating rules to take place at all. In other words, I don't intend to beat, ground, or otherwise "punish" my daughter inasmuch as any objective examination of her actions will bore her to tears and serve well enough as "punishment". You who know my posts--imagine being, oh, pick an age, and putting up with Tiassa's Excruciating Details every time you transgressed the prescribed order.
So quite obviously, everybody's got their line. There comes a point when everybody, as (Q) puts it, "
reject(s) reason and science in favor of their belief."
And, as cakes go, we're just looking at two standards of presupposition. On the one hand is the presupposition of the scientific method, that what is not observed cannot be said to be there. To the other is the intuitive assertion of what one knows and how one regards it. Science and theism are not mutually exclusive, and I would remind all that if theists were, at their core, as irrational as Sciforums tends to cast them, it would have been ages ago, and not the Second Bush League, that saw the shredding of the Constitution for God. My father, an essential atheist, also sold out to the antiexpressionism of the 1980s. I can remember long-winded lectures in which he tried to explain to me that my music was inappropriate, and if I was going to enjoy a free society, I had to expect to sacrifice certain things ..... (Sound familiar? Tipper "It's not that we advocate censorship" Gore, anyone?)
Everybody caves to presupposition at some point. I would advise our topic poster that the conundrum is artificial and symptomatic of the generalizations and stereotypes limiting the possibilities of other peoples thoughts and actions which have been suggested throughout the topic.
Reason
is faith in the practical. It is only its proper and reasonable self in the abstract.
Science is incompatible with
certain religions; it is erroneous and irresponsible to state that science is not compatible with religion.
Remember that all you observe and all you write down is valid only to you. It is valid to others by convention.
And remember, in addition, that what you
feel is just as important. Atheists are no more prone to understanding the relationship between what they think and what they feel or how they think and how they feel than anyone else.
So here's a personal message for atheists:
You must understand religion before your rejection of it is valid. If religion is so simplistic as it is cast by many atheists (and, for that matter, many believers) then understanding religion and figuring out how to overcome the obstacles it poses ought to be quite simple, as well, right? Look: Most atheists criticizing "religion" have no freaking clue what they're talking about, and just because you're not calling God an old man with a beard who sits in the sky and judges everything doesn't mean you're not treating it as such. An atheistic argument so pointed as to address only the prevailing cultural motifs is a mere reaction against perceived authority.
And, in the meantime, to claim the "truth of science" is about as infantile and religious as claiming the "truth of God".
But come on: If religion is such a simple matter, how come so few atheists understand it? If religion is such a boneheaded assertion, why does it evade the grasp of most of its atheistic critics? If religion is so unnatural, why did atheism have to evolve from superstitious people?
Once upon a time, I got myself into a long-running argument about atheism with atheists because, frankly, Sciforums' atheists at the time rejected the very brand of objective integrity which must be presupposed in order to leverage the stiffer of the atheistic arguments going about in this topic, including the topic post.
And so I invite those atheists to be truly objective. Be as objective as you can be. Be as rational and reasonable and unemotional and non-superstitious and complete and logical as you can.
Not only will you be bored inside a week, your friends and family will find you the ultimate drag.
While science may not care about philosophical issues, what of the introduction of scientific evidence into philosophical discussions? Of course, this is only problematic if we enter such a discussion with enough presuppositions bolstering a sanctimonious parody of scientific inquiry.
And what of the argument that all theists do, at some level, abandon reason for faith? True, but ineffective, because it begs the question:
As opposed to who or what?
Evolving definitions only point to evolving languages. A nineteenth-century definition may reflect a notion of faith before the advent of modern post-Newtonian atheism. A twentieth-century definition with greater focus on religion only demonstrates that the editors of that edition of the dictionary felt the word has come to be used in that context more than in others. While it is not to be blamed on atheists, we must remember that atheism has undertaken many discussions over the last while which examine ideas of faith in the religious context. The atheist contribution to the evolution of language ought to be recognized here. And no, nobody will argue with the perverse assertions of faith coming from the American "awakenings" which persist like a venereal rash. But I have to admit, only atheists and born-again Christians focus so intently on the religious aspect of faith, in my opinion.
The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is."
Istigkeit --wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy--except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were--a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing--but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion." (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception)
:m:,
Tiassa
