Some thoughts, from yesterday:

[wolven7]

mech_angel told me about the fact that Time's 100 Most Influential People list had Michael Behe do the write-up for Richard Dawkins. You can read it Here.

Now, when people talk about "The New Atheists," they tend to make a bad comparison, in saying that they are just like the fundamentalists against whom they rally. That's not quite right; you see, what people mean to say is that they are Just as Zealotous as those fundies. They are exactly as spit-in-the-face-of-those-with-whom-we-disagree as any other person who holds an essentially groundless belief.

Yeah, I went there.

Science, rationality, religion, emotional entanglement, every label we make and name we give things is essentially Empty. They are ways to describe what we see and feel via the apparatus we have developed, over billions of years. We are not Right or Wrong, Helpful or Harmful, Dangerous or Safe, we are instead on More or Less Successful. Religious intolerance may have been a cause of war and persecution, down through the ages, but let's take a look at simple political theories, shall we? When we had our war against "the Commies," sure we called them "godless," for mister and missus Joe and Jane Sixpack-Zinfandel, but it was mostly a political war, causing fear and hatred, and suspicion.

You can make more people do things more easily with a religious angle, than without, but that's not what makes people do things. People are emotional creatures, they are rational and irrational. They Have Internal Conflict. It's what makes things Very, Very Interesting, for all of us. If you remove the irrationality, then things become simple, easy, yes-- but boring. Not a logically valid reason, perhaps, but what did I just say about logic? Empty.

I'll talk more about this, later, but the basic fact is we have no evidence for the way in which we evaluate our evidence. Under optimal conditions, all structures of evaluation can be made to function perfectly. We do not have what could be called "optimal conditions," under most rubrics. It's strange, in that we latch on to whatever best describes the world, for us, and run, from there, seeking to exclude all other views.

That's pretty funny, to me, honestly.

Later

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Science is empty as a religion sure. There's no ultimate truth there. That (and a complete failure to confront serious theologians) is why Dawkin's brand of atheists are so vile.

Science is great as a tool for doing stuff.

yrs--
--Ben

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Most certainly. We agree on a descriptive mechanism, and then we use it to do stuff, and understand the world. It's great.

The problem comes in when, as you alluded, we try to think of what we have in science as Truth rather than 'truth.' 'Truth' is just what the evidence shows, when we use any one particular system, or any combination thereof. Truth is "the way the world IS."

I think observation can only ever get us 'truth,' and a more or less functioning combination of the interconnections, if any, of those systems of evaluation that we use to get there.

And that's the Truth.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Have you read Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu 庄子)? His essay "The Sorting that Evens Things Out" lays out the difference between observation (science) and reason quite clearly. 2500 years ago! Of course, no one listened then, either.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've read some, but not a lot. I have a couple of collections of his writings, somewhere, and I just put them away, last night. I'll have to dig them out, again.

Dawkins

[gamoonbat.livejournal.com]

Agnosticism has always made more sense to me than atheism. Trying to argue the religious out of belief in God is just as difficult as trying to get away from encyclopedia and life insurance salesmen.

Re: Dawkins

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. Take a look around and Wait and See stance, rather than a No and Never.

Re: Dawkins

[unknownbinaries.livejournal.com]

See, atheism isn't the problem, here. It's forceful, proselytizing atheism. And that's just Fucked Up.

[gamoonbat.livejournal.com]

Futile was what I meant. Some things are difficult and worth it.

Dawkins is tilting at windmills with a fragile telescope.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Precisely.

Word from Douglas Adams:

[karishi.livejournal.com]

"A lot of scientists forget the proper order: See first, then test, then think. Do it in the other orders and you make way too many decisions about what you'll see before it happens. Always see first."