Saturday, October 20, 2018

So you want a uniform, universal explanation of reality, do you?

Someone apparently thinks that the multiplicity of theologies is evidence that discredits theology.  The list I gave the other day, several named, prominent living theologians, Black theology, Mujerista theology, Liberation theology, . . . speaking in different languages, from different contexts and different points of view is asserted to be evidence the whole thing is bunk because it doesn't come up with one universal, final set of laws - laws in the sense that science is asserted in laws - that are fixed for all time.

My first resort was to point out that that view of science is naive and childish, that science has never come up with one law which has given a complete and absolute view of anything in the physical universe, even the greatest of those in history have either been modified through later science or they have given rise to a multiplicity of points of view.

According to several experts I had understood, quantum physics was interpreted six different ways, that is until not long ago I came across a list of 10 and those were listed as merely the Top 10 interpretations of some well established theory about some very simple phenomena in the physical universe. Quantum theory is still young, I'll bet as it is subjected to even more discovery there will be more modification and different interpretations will arise, Given some of the authors of those interpretations are dead and some alive, indeed some of them still elaborating their own interpretations, it's an ongoing thing.  And individual scientists are quite able to hold different pictures of their subject matter at different stages in their life.   Any one of those interpretations can give rise to a multiplicity of interpretations, the listing of what I think is the loopiest of them, #7 the "Many Worlds" interpretation attributed to Hugh Everett, has certainly given rise to all kinds of wild speculations, not only out of this world but out of this universe.  And even those give rise to a multiplicity of interpretations, look at the string-membrane fad within physics as critiqued by Woit and others.

And that is acceptable even among materialist-atheist physicists who insist that they will be or are on the cusp of an all-embracing Theory of Everything, including the atheist ideologue who reluctantly admitted that there isn't a single particle in the universe that science has a complete and exhaustive knowledge of.

A similar situation is typical of science about the physical world, the only place where any universal agreement happens is in mathematics and mathematics is done about objects which are entirely imaginary and have no absolute and securely understood connection with the physical universe or any other realm of reality.  It was an important development in my concept of proof and knowledge when I realized that the only place where something rationally considered absolute knowledge was found was in the imagination.

Knowledge is never objective, it can't be, it is a matter of choosing to believe.  The concept of objective knowledge is a delusion of snobs who choose to forget the development of their own minds.   That is especially true of 20th and 21st century scientists who have probably the strongest reason of anyone in human history to understand that but who, in large part, ignore that extremely important discovery of physics in the 21st century, generally out of motives of conceit and a desire to pretend it isn't true.

God, in the view of just about any theologian of any reputation I'm aware or is considered to surpass not only that level of human understanding but the human capacity to understand.  In Christian theology and, though I've read very little of it, from what I'm told, Jewish and Islamic theology, God is not merely some remote Other but also immanent in the world naturally, biologically, socially, culturally and individually, both universal and local, as it were.  And whatever we can know of God will, like what we can know of physics or anything else, be based in our own minds.  That means that the God we can articulate or conceive of is a product of our own experience, as individuals, as members of our societies and as people with various identities within life.  It is absurd and incomplete, the construction of an idol in place of God to think you can think of God in 21st century America without Black Theologies, Women's Theologies, Latino Theologies, Asian Theologies, various theologies written by various Europeans and all others of different religious backgrounds and different experiences and anyone else who writes or talks out of their own experience.  Any dangers of any of them being wrong at any point is no more disqualifying or discrediting in theology than it is any other part of academic or intellectual discourse, that is merely one of the  vicissitudes of being individual human beings in different societies and other different  levels of classification.

So you want a uniform, universal explanation of reality, do you?  You claim that anything else only means what you're talking about is phony.

The fascist thuggery that we are seeing promoted in the media, on cable TV, certainly on hate-talk radio, and now in the pages of the New York Times is the opposite intellectual practice, the violent coercive pack formation that is based on thoughtlessness and assertions of will.  I have seen that being promoted on many online sites, some of them explicit in their nihilistic, anti-intellectual and overt patriarchal fascism.  A lot of what I saw the last time I researched online porn was promoting fascism of that kind, as I've mentioned a lot of gay porn online is indistinguishable from Russian and, now, other neo-Nazi anti-gay propaganda, including violence as an assertion of will and sexual dominance.  If you want uniformity, that's where you'll find it.  I think in a more dainty form you can find it in the intellectual coersion of the "skeptical movement" which has always been a kind of boys club of that kind, as so many a female "skeptic" has discovered as they've interacted with them.  "Skeptics" are just the would-be intellectual, less physical version of that.  And those "Skeptics" aren't, in any way skeptical.   Boys seem to be prone to that kind of thing.

I would bet you'd find lots of uniformity at a Nazi-style Trump rally where they beat up and throw out any other points of view.  Those they don't exclude to start with.

3 comments:

  1. Biology, chemistry, genetics, just to name 3, have each claimed supremacy in explaining what is most important in the world. And that's just in broadest terms; then there are all the competing theories and interpretations. What manner of dimwit adolescents are you being "challenged" by?

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    1. The college-credentialed kind. It has been one of the great shocks of going online and encountering and interacting with, literally, hundreds and thousands more of those, self-expressed, unedited just how numb so many of them are. And how some might shine in their particular specialty but who aren't merely less than expert but drunken bar blowhard ignorant of anything outside of their specialty. The village square, barroom atheist form of that is probably the most arrogantly but also violently ignorant of that variety. And as they conceitedly claim to be champions of reason and evidence.

      The whole thing is a scam. Intellectual pro-football fandom.

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    2. In Randy Newman's felicitous phrase: "Went in dumb, come out dumb, too."

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