Harbal wrote:It's not so different, in a way. When everyone believed that the Sun and the Moon were pushed around the heavens by the hand of God, they probably felt they had an understanding of what they were observing. Now, we think we understand how the laws of physics is doing the job. The thing is, understanding is just an illusion. I may believe in the laws of physics rather than in God, but I don't know how the laws of physics make things happen and neither does anyone else, the only thing the scientists can discover is what happens, they can never know why. They may be able to tell you what kind of force a particular sub atomic particle possesses but they don't know how it came to posses it. When we look at the world and beyond and think we have an understanding of how and why things are the way they are, I imagine that sensation of understanding we experience is pretty much the same as that of those whose only available explanation was "God dun it".
Rarely do I see a post that makes as much sense as this one.
Sometimes progress in understanding occurs when we realize that what we thought we knew we didn't. We realize how baseless our claims were. We didn't find some other answer, we just justifiably lost one we only thought we had.
And sometimes progress occurs when we cease to know and realize that we don't, won't, can't on principle know certain things.
But awareness of the mysteries is subtle causing calous boredom and cynical dismissal in some - a callous disregard of even considering the questions - and wonder in others.
That capacity to wonder as opposed to asking in a tecnical sense, or we might say that bringing to real asking that is not satisfied by answers that are essentially non sequitors, can be an awareness of how some questions are just not answerable.
It is ridiculous the claims that are made for science and reason these days. A man limited to science and reason ignores sense; and is truly ignorant and impoverished - and NOT because he lacks other "answers" from religion but because his misconstual of science as providing any answers at all is surpassed only by his missinterpretation of religion as providing alternative answers instead of an understanding of the limits of answers and a sense of the significance of that.
I agree with Heidegger IN A SENSE when he says: "Science does not think". But I literally study science virtually every day. I'm no genius but I was able - and so proud of myself - when I was able to calculte the fine structure of the hydrogen atom's emission spectrum. I am working on calculaing the advance in the perihelion of Mercury and am trying to understad wave structures on compact manifolds - and I love it! I m just not so stupid as to belive it explains anything of what happens.
That is just simple non sequitor.
Its description for crying out loud, nor do I think that Religion is to somehow replace that void and provide alternative answers. What religion does is allow you in the face of the necessary absence of explanation to hear the voice at the heart of it all. To hear the speaking. And it is the heart of intellect that kind of knowing.
Many of the claims of science are wrong technically but the problem is that often they are not just wrong technically. The are like someone trying to wield a bat as a club. They are a mask for arrogance. And a failure to just listen to the truth of the contradictions in what they are saying. Truth then, philosophy itself , becomes rhetorical and worse. Things become Fox-news-ified and the outrageous claims come at so fast and furious a pace that you end up with a Jerry Springer show instead of a presidential debate.
Its no longer about the truth. Its about winning.
It disgusts me and my understanding of primate behavior is such that it also scares me.
Apparently only material forms are supposedly "real"... and the non-material is fantasy. Groovy. Go with it.