Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?
In one way or another, and over a few years now, my main concern is exactly in this area. The way that BigMike posed the question, obviously, had the intention of ridiculing that which he refers to as ‘religious’ — which in his view has fallen in the face of *science facts* and which refers to nothing real and has become a pursuit that is understood to be valueless.
Within this context, and here on a philosophy forum in which there is almost across the board no agreement between anyone (and this is a special factor that must be examined) we have among us what Atla has referred to as a religious nutter who, again according to Atla, invaded the philosophy forum some years back and have contaminated it everything that BigMike connotes deviates from genuine knowledge; important knowledge; and knowledge which, one assumes, brings liberation. (Atla refer to a number, including myself, who are inclined to *religious nuttery*).
What must be stated, that is if *religious concern* is to be understood, is something that is impossible for BigMike and most others here to understand, yet if it is clarified it will help all concerned to understand a great deal about Our Present. It is that essentially what is expressed through a religious symbolism (the symbols of religion are symbolic references to Ideas) refers to sets of ideas that have been realized (perceived, understood) through intellectual intuition.
There is actually no correspondence between what is understood on this *intellectual* and intuited plane and all that is discovered and known in the realm of the physical sciences. So, what BigMike does, and indeed what is done in this Age generally, is to play one episteme against another in a rehearsal that renders one absurd and meaningless. The function, therefore, of BigMike’s presentation — his entire show — seems then to be an expression of his psychic state (I have said his psychology) in which he exteriorizes his internal conflict with a former *belief* that, now, can no longer be believed in. I would not say that I blame BigMike nor anyone who has arrived as this state. If one’s only reference is ‘the physical world’ as realized and apprehended by the senses and our instrumentation, there is clearly no way to give assent to the *validity* of those ideas, values, imperatives and meanings that are expressed through intellectual symbolism. Again when I use the word intellectual and intellect I am referring to the definition offered here:
Now, obviously among those who participate in these *discussions* what I am asserting here, just as it is with BigMike, will be dismissed as ridiculous, non-factual, and in BigMike’s sense as “the impossible”. This is actually important. Because again, if the facts to science, and what can be sensed through the physical senses, is one’s only criteria, one could come to no other conclusion.The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.
Now here is the interesting thing and it seems crucially important. In any case it is so for me. We have a representative of a religious system and outlook of a uniquely rigid sort against which we are forced to take issue because, to put it bluntly, he holds to beliefs of such an outrageous nature that, frankly, it shocks every sensibility and we feel we confront not just a *religious liar* but the very face of a deliberate and acute stance taken against all that is reasonable. There is no one who writes here (that I am aware of) who can *support* Immanuel Can’s deliberate retreat into a child’s fantasy story and who could double down on it as *literalism* in the way that IC does. It is shocking to our modern mind. And here is the thing: It renders Immanuel as, very literally, an emblem of ridicule. And this one odd element of believing what is impossible stands in contrast to a great deal else that IC expresses in nicely reasoned form.
Now here is what I consider to be the ethical and moral crux here. Recently, and with IC this happens from time to time in his discourse, he goes for the jugular (so to speak) when quoting the words of Jesus from Gospel scripture.
Here is what I am attempting to get at, and obviously I do this *for my own purposes*. In this sense I try to *bridge* that is being communicated in that pithy quote in such a way that its meaning is clarified, not lost, and made sense of. I think even Dubious stated that it could be taken in various ways.“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
But here we have to take a step back from the statement as an acute imperative and examine it fairly but also analytically. And I suggest seeing its imperative just as we sense that Immanuel means it: its purpose is to tell you that you are off-track, but that Immanuel is on the real track. There is something very typical in this sort of self-arrogation. My assertion that the root of it is in a Hebrew mentality which is very convenient for Christians: “You will either submit to the h that I hold, and which I tell you you must accept, or I will assert that you will be damned forever”. It is (seen in this way) the ultimate power-play. And its terms are literally that of your existence as a being, as a soul.
What I have learned, or perhaps what I have decided, is that Immanuel destroys the possibility of understanding even what could be suggested by the existence, in this life, of a that ‘narrow gate’. Why is it presented in such imperative terms? You must do this-or-that or you will face what is essentially annihilation. He sets it up that, when rejecting a silly, outmoded story, that you are simultaneously rejecting a great deal that is connoted when the religious symbols — what is communicated through them and what is *meant* in them — is necessarily rejected if they are tied to ridiculous impossibilities.
