The interchange is very good, and I hope on a better foot than before. Thanks.
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Keith Larman wrote:
I in no way dismissed religion as "convenience". My point was that since religion provides a very strong basis for morality due to its very nature it is an easy position to defend assuming you accept the religion as true to being with.
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That was actually Voltaire's point in rebuttal: If He did not exist we would have to invent him. He contended that some understanding of God was proved by history to be necessary to human societies, and even systems that seemed to espouse being explicitly non-theistic ended up creating "gods" by other names (viz. in no particular order, Maitreya, Amida, Marx, Lenin.) Now the live question in that inquiry is: "Does God exist or did we invent Him?" O Sensei seems to affirm existence vice invention.
The answer actually seems resolved against any active invention on our part.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...html?full=true
We seem evolutionarily hard-wired to perceive the nature of universe as being on personal terms. To say that evolution would construct a perceptive illusion requires a bit of explaining -- which some one will, no doubt, now busily be doing... but surely (complete solipsim aside) the default hypothesis is that if humans are evolved to perceive something there is a reality to be perceived. Even if it is a "illusion,"
maya -- many of such brain tricks are representational illusions that actually get at deeper revealing of truth -- for instance, stereoscopic vision takes a two dimensional retinal field as a three dimensional construct -- because our brain has evolved to believe that reality is three dimensional -- no matter what our lying eyes say ....
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Keith Larman wrote:
Non-religious ethical systems tend to be much more difficult to discuss due to the lack of an appeal to a higher authority.... The point here is the psychology of acceptance of an idea rather than the actual truth value of it.
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Whitehead and Russel tried very hard to reach a point where mathematical conclusions could be made without resort to higher authrotiity. They ended up by determining the formal impossiblity of making even mathematical conclusions without ultimate resort to higher authority outside the axioms of the system. Whitehead and Russell showed empirically, in exhaustive logical effort, what Godel later showed formally -- that the "meta-position" outside the problem can never be logicked away.
Science is process of revelation, meaning something is there to be revealed -- but it has come to believe that it is the ONLY valid process of revelation, which is close to identifying itself with the reality it is attempting to reveal -- leaving no conceptual or emotional space for the "meta-position" outside the problem. Religion would call this blasphemy, but science has no ready label for it, which may be why (in addition to human nature, which aspires to god-hood) it falls into this error from time to time.
Whitehead ended by essentially concluding that the positing of God was necessary to the positing of reality, and could not be avoided, rationally. Or in short, he took Voltaire's inquiry that next step and determined that "We could not even invent Him." In fairness, Russell's work was later taken by the logical positivists to conclude the opposite -- that neither reality nor God could be posited, a position he himself never held. One wonders who was doing the positing.
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Keith Larman wrote:
Much like the ad hoc attempts to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment via ether wind rather than relativity theory. The ether wind was the more "comfortable" explanation for many physicists rather than the more difficult to accept (at the time) relativistic explanation Einstein had offered up.
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The ether boat has actually come back into port under a new flag -- in the form of the vacuum flux and "dark energy/matter" --- so hold the phones on that one.... What M&M measured did not seek to address what the vacuum flux turned out be (or whatever the dark energy or dark matter may be -- since those are at the level of accounting problems at the moment.)