WHEN I said that I chose to believe that the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition of monotheism was true I was being provocative but I was also being honest about things and how things are. I choose to believe in physics, chemistry, well-supported areas of biology, I choose to believe in evolution while I most certainly don't believe in natural selection, I choose to believe that the assertions and proofs of the quite separate realm of mathematics are generally true in some, though not all, of the applications to things in the physical sciences, though I most certainly do not believe that the so-called social sciences have any level of demonstrable reason for believing that their mathematical manipulations relate to anything much that is real. If mathematicians and scientists were honest the would admit that what they know they would not accept as being known without a long series of choices to believe things being in place by the time they arrived at their first bit of scientific knowledge.
Philosophers would be far more honest if they admitted there is not only NO sharp distinction between belief and knowledge but there is the most intimate of relations between the action of believing and knowing, knowing, as we talk about it, being a product of belief at the earliest of ages, I would say predating our first sentient use of words and language. Social scientists are seldom honest enough to even admit the scientific illegitimacy of most everything they do and teach so maybe they're a lost cause, the odd one here and there excepted.
The assertion that things happen by random chance, that nature is not aimed at goals and that the progressive conception of reality is a delusion is nothing that is knowable through science, mathematics or philosophy, the millenniums arguing about that have produce nothing except a few temporary periods where one or the other conception has seemed to get the upper hand, I think that the idea that the materialists who invented and asserted those conceptions, including those pagans who conceived of their gods as aspects of the material universe (Paul had interesting things to say about that in Romans, by the way) . . . that those guys had somehow escaped the realm of expressing ideas from the realm of belief is unbelievable considering how consonant their exposition of the universe and reality is with their hostility to revealed religion as found in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic and other traditions which believe in a God (generally from those I'm aware of an expression of the single God who is definitely NOT an aspect of the material universe but its Creator).
What you assert is the real, right sciencey, modernistic knowledge of the universe is not scientific, it is ideological, as modernism is an ideological framing in itself, a materialistic, scientistic, atheistic one. What atheists misrepresent as superior thinking on that account merely expose themselves as the victims of their own allergy to rigorous examination of their own thinking, testing themselves for the sins they accuse religious believers of because, brother, you guys are as bad as the worst of the fundamentalist Bible thumpers in that regard.
Update: Back during my long period of agnostic cowardice I fell into the place of being impressed with G.E. Moore's A Defense of Common Sense which, in light of philosophy's inability to come to a single universal truth established to the claimed requirements to be considered as "known," threw up his hands and said that there were things known by "common sense" that are known to a higher degree of reliability than the kinds of things that philosophers had been disputing the reality of like forever. I wasn't as impressed with his clear motive in the paper of using his claims to assure his fellow Brit atheist philosophers (and the general run of academic philosophers) that he was safely atheistic - they are generally less pluralistic in their ideological purity than even many religious people are, certainly not within their profession.
I think after that long, long period of philosophers running up against the impossibility of their being able to find a single thing they can hold to be known absolutely, the problem is with their claimed requirements for holding that. I think it's a problem that does, in fact, go back to Socrates as Plato likely invented him, of running up against the idealized conception of pure knowledge as it runs smack into the limits of our minds. I think the standards of Western Philosophy along that line are what is unsupported and likely is a product of uninformed imagination and unacknowledged wishful thinking based on a dislike of religion.
Let me turn to one of my favorite dear old commies, I. F. Stone who I think said it best in his wonderful book The Trial of Socrates.
Socrates demands not only perfect definitions of the shoe and the horse but - more difficult - a perfect definition of knowledge, itself. Here is how Socrates puts it to Theaetetus, who is perhaps the least wide-awake of all of the submissive yes-men given Socrates in the Platonic canon:
Socrates: Then he [the shoemaker] does not understand knowledge of shoes if he does not know knowledge.
Theaetetus: No
Socrates: Then he who is ignorant of knowledge does not understand cobbler or any other art.
Theaetetus: No
Any bright Athenian could have made the obvious objection to this stratospheric nonsense: A shoemaker need not to be a philosophizer, and a philosopher is not necessarily a good shoemaker. Indeed, the customer who brought a piece of leather to the cobbler was interested not - as a philosopher would say - in universals but in particulars. He wanted a pair made to fit his particular feet, not some metaphysically perfect definition of a shoe. Then as now, the right foot was not the same as the left. So no shoes even in the same pair were identical, however perfect the definition of "shoe." And the customer wanted his particular pair made in such a way as best to utilize the particular piece of leather he had chosen. At every point the "particular" was more important than the "universal." In one vital aspect the shoemaker is ahead of the philosopher. The shoemaker can make a shoe. But the philosophers still can't turn out an absolutely perfect definition - either of shoes or of knowledge. Insofar as their respective crafts are considered, the shoemaker is clearly the better craftsman than the metaphysician.
I don't think there is any obligation on the part of anyone to wait around another 2.5 thousand years to see if they're going to come up with one before admitting that what they claimed about the nature of knowledge as compared to belief was worth less than a load of bullshit which at least could be composted and used to fertilize crops.
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