Philosophy Now Forum

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 1:26 pm

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 1:15 pm

Skepdick wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 12:58 pm
In the Dirac equations the electron neither exists nor doesn't exist. It's a mathematical field without any particular location.

This has explanatory power and makes the Mathematics/physics work.

That's actually interesting. Keep it up.

Well, we seem to know that neither God nor unicorns nor people neither exist nor not exist. I suppose that is "interesting".

I'm not thinking beyond particles at the moment, Gary. I'm not very interested in God and unicorns.

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:54 am One of the major differences between us, I regard IC and his type, of which there are many millions, as write-offs of no value whatever in offering any new or interesting insights. You regard him as a mystery; I perceive him as severely mentally inhibited in not ever allowing for other views, whether they be facts or not, to at least allow a reconsideration of what is offered. His responses depend solely on simple negation, complete distortion, and total neglect of the most fundamental questions and arguments presented. These techniques, if one may call it that, are the easiest to employ in refuting any argument regardless of its merit.

It is a bit too broad, in my opinion, to refer to 'IC and his type' without clarification. However, and I think this may contradict your interpretation of myself and my position, I have recently expressed that I regard this particular man IC as an example of a third-rate intellect. It has seemed to me that his way of thinking is machine-like and non-creative. His dogmatism is, in my view, a sign of a diseased personality, and this personal failing is, as you might admit, shared by hundreds of millions.

So, and with that said, having read IC for months (indeed years) I concur that I have received nothing from him, and indeed I do not believe he has anything to offer, except to Mesoamerican peasants, or South American peasants, who can be convinced by extremely reduced Christian apologetics to *convert*. I know these people (I live in South America) and I know that the conversion to a Christian ethical lifestyle is often a sound and indeed sensible turning -- given the alternatives. My approach to such things is, perhaps I can say, sociological.

But here, in this environment, I think we can avail ourselves of a more intense degree of analysis. An uneducated peasant in South American cannot do that. And note that IC's belief and doctrine is that the *acceptance of Christ* is something a mere child could agree to, and thus gain *salvation*. An idiot therefore can become a *Christian*. While I reject this understanding completely, I am aware that simple people have simple needs, and need help to organize their understanding of their position in this (confusing, overpowering) world. So I have great sympathy for their spiritual, and hence, religious struggles and choices.

But if I say that (that IC is of a third-rate intellectualism), then who, and among those who hold to the sort of metaphysical understanding that I admire, would I reference as 'first-rate minds'?

What I have concluded (reflecting on these conversations and strictly for my own purposes) is of a need to return to the 17th century and the conflict of view, interpretation and understanding that developed at that time between hard empiricists (taking Hobbes as exemplary) and those men who, for various reasons, opposed this merely *materialist* and *sensuous* interpretation of our existence in this world with another view that was also a *vision*. I am referring generally to the Cambridge Platonists.

From Fancy & Imagination by R.L. Brett (1969):

The Cambridge Platonists fought against Hobbes's views along a wide front whose sectors comprised theology, metaphysics, ethics, and theory of knowledge. But fundamentally they all disagreed with his reduction of reality to matter and motion. For, as Ralph Cudworth, one of the leading Platonists, who was Master of Milton's college at Cambridge, wrote in his True Intellectual System (1678), the followers of Hobbes allowed

...no other causes of things as philosophical, save the material and mechanical only; this being really to banish all mental, and consequently divine causality, quite out of the world; and to make the whole world to be nothing else but a mere heap of dust, fortuitously agitated.

I think we have to work with reductions -- simplifications -- in order to clarify what is really at stake. So let me say the following: the Cambridge Platonists saw the soul of man as a part of or a spark of divinity within man. And they saw the world (the cosmos) as God's creation and as arising, if I can put it this way, out of God's mind. So inside of man is a divine soul sharing quality or capability with God. That is, as creative and constructive. They veered away from a merely mechanical interpretation of both the world and man and believed that through intellect, intuition and imagination we can gain a true sense of what Reality is. Again, this is a simple reduction just to illustrate a point.

Now, and whether I like his style, his approach or his dogmatism or whether I detest it, I am aware that in these conversations Immanuel Can is attempting to express what I might call a version of what the Cambridge Platonists were working to present. And that is that 1) the entire creation can only be understood as a *creation* of a Being which Immanuel Can calls 'God'. And 2) that man is a spark, or has in him a spark, of *soul* that, when it is attuned properly (everything hinges on that word), conceives understanding as revelation. That is, the soul of man is capable of illumination when it attunes itself to whatever it is that is meant by the term *divinity*.

Now, if you were to ask me: "OK fine. And where do you stand in relation to this Question?" I would have to say, and I think this has been plain over the many months, that on some level I concur with this general view. So I am in a strange and I think untenable position: I detest, vehemently, Immanuel Can's ugly, reductive dogmatism and his interpretation of what Christianity is, but I do not dismiss, disregard nor invalidate what I understand to be the core metaphysical properties that operate in an exalted level of understanding in respect to these questions.

You may remember that I have from time to time included a snip from one of Blake's poems:

This life's five windows of the soul
Distort the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro', the eye.

Do you know that I have never got a response from anyone on this forum as to what, if anything, Blake is expressing here? Be that as it may I have my own way of taking it. But again we have to return to the 17th century to understand what he meant by *life's 5 windows* and also what he meant by *eye*.

To me *the eye* is exalted imagination that is impelled and moved by something internal to ourselves which is not mere apprehension of facts (the list that those 5 windows will accumulate), but rather a quality, or a quantity, inside of us that we can develop and hone. All religious traditions deal on the issue of self-cultivation. A Christian will do this through prayer. A Hindu (of some schools) through purification and cultivation of *subtle* energies that get corrupted by worldly activities and preoccupations (yoga philosophy and practice). I could refer to any number of traditions including Islam (Sufi).

And I myself am literally incapable, for good or for bad, of denying that a) life is essentially an experience of the divine, and that the world, somehow, I do not have the means to express it or demonstrate (prove) it, is, to put it rather conventionally, an *adventure in consciousness*. So my closest identification is with the Cambridge Platonists and with this intellectual school of understanding.

And so what I say -- again this is only for my own purposes that I make such a declaration -- is that we need to see that all religious forms correspond to Plato's Cave and that *wall* upon which images have been (are being) projected). What we see, what appears and moves before us, connotes all manner of other things. Or to put it differently, in each things there is a message & and a meaning that we can extract, and indeed we do extract, to the degree that we are open to it. "But to what?!?" you will ask. I have no bloody idea. Not because I could not submit some language-symbols that are stand-ins for whatever is meant by *existence* and also *consciousness* (Sat/Chit/Ananda to use a Sanskrit term) but because it is best to leave the ineffable as a sort of cypher.

So when I step back from this Conversation, and when I try to discern and explain what you Dubious, what Ibn Wilbur Boneman, what Gary, what Harbal and what so many others who are attracted, like moths to a flame to this *discussion* are trying to achieve, I do not have a great deal of clarity. Your positions are not very clear to me. Or, and to put it another way, the arguments and discussions seem eternally locked into inane and irresolvable conflicts.

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2024 3:47 pmIt doesn't do much for your contention that science would not exist but for Christianity.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2024 4:24 pm It does for Theism more generally. And Islam being evidently a false form of Theism, one has only one option left, one would think.

For those who have been paying attention to this recent diversion into the question of how *scientific method* developed and why, I cannot say that I have an answer. Does anyone really? I mean among those who study the evolution of Occidental (or any other) thought?

But I think that Immanuel's assertion must not be taken as enough of an answer. Because I might say, OK, If Jesus and Christianity are the key to the beginning of science-methods, why is it that Jesus Christ himself, right then and there, did not teach his disciples the elements of this method, and thus set the world on a far more advanced path?

St Paul's mission would have been very very different.

When you put it this way, of course, it shows how absurd is the assertion.

But could one subtract from the equation the history and contribution of Christians, of theology, of the Medieval universities, and a great deal else? That would be equally absurd.

"how *scientific method* developed and why, I cannot say that I have an answer. Does anyone really?"

I already explained all that, bruh. The scientific method has existed as long as bipedal homos have roamed the erf. Anytime someone makes a prediction, attributes causes to some phenomena, observes events and draws inferences, repeats (controlled) experiences/experiments with minor variation and notes the differences, they're doing science.

U guys are arguing over who established what formal fields of science, not when, why or what the scientific method is... not what makes a scientist.

It's like everybody getting all excited over Socrates the great philosopher. As if he were the first bipedal homo to ever aks 'why?'

I mean the claim that Christianity is responsible for the advent of science is so utterly absurd u can't even.

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 2:41 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 1:26 pm

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 1:15 pm

That's actually interesting. Keep it up.

Well, we seem to know that neither God nor unicorns nor people neither exist nor not exist. I suppose that is "interesting".

I'm not thinking beyond particles at the moment, Gary. I'm not very interested in God and unicorns.

Fair enough.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 3:25 pm ...I might say, OK, If Jesus and Christianity are the key to the beginning of science-methods, why is it that Jesus Christ himself, right then and there, did not teach his disciples the elements of this method, and thus set the world on a far more advanced path?

For the very good reason that "bringing science to humanity" had absolutely nothing to do with His mission. Why would we expect Him, since His concern was spiritual, moral and salvific, to give us electric toothbrushes instead?

Whitehead's Thesis is that scientific method was a byproduct of Theism. But I don't see anywhere that he thought it was anything more than that.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:05 pm

Whitehead's Thesis is that scientific method was a byproduct of Theism. But I don't see anywhere that he thought it was anything more than that.

And his thesis was the by-product of fanciful, over religious speculation.

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:16 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:05 pm

Whitehead's Thesis is that scientific method was a byproduct of Theism. But I don't see anywhere that he thought it was anything more than that.

And his thesis was the by-product of fanciful, over religious speculation.

You might wish that. And I understand if you do. You have obvious reasons to prefer that.

The only question is, is it true? If Whitehead is wrong, then what is the truth? It certainly isn't that secularism or one or another form of Atheism gave rise to science, or that polytheism did, or that science and faith are polar opposites. So, correct the story, if you can.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:05 pm Whitehead's Thesis is that scientific method was a byproduct of Theism. But I don't see anywhere that he thought it was anything more than that.

I read and appreciated the Whitehead paragraphs. It is not difficult to grasp what he means.

It seems there was a whole set of things that came together to create the circumstances that produced the scientific revolution. (As distinct from scientific methods which, as Promethian points out, have always been applied).

However, your insistence on the assertion, bolstered by your quoting him, has a different purpose. It is that “all things are revealed by God”. All goodness comes to man through God or through subservience to those Jewish/Christian values. Put another way, separation from God (i.e. both Harbal and Ibn Wilbur Boneman’s stance and attitude — there are others, too) leads directly to Hell. But that also means a direct route to the loss of *all goodness* here on Earth.

So obviously there are layers to you apologetic assertions that must be exposed to the light of day.

Nevertheless, the stance, the understanding, the attitude and the belief that *the universe and all its mysteries is a book that can be opened to penetrating intelligence* and then to prove it — that is a unique stance to have developed.

It is not impossible to see it linked to the notion of being given *dominion* over all things (here).

We have that attitude now but it seems possible to say we did not always have it.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:21 pm

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:16 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:05 pm

Whitehead's Thesis is that scientific method was a byproduct of Theism. But I don't see anywhere that he thought it was anything more than that.

And his thesis was the by-product of fanciful, over religious speculation.

You might wish that. And I understand if you do. You have obvious reasons to prefer that.

The only question is, is it true? If Whitehead is wrong, then what is the truth? It certainly isn't that secularism or one or another form of Atheism gave rise to science, or that polytheism did, or that science and faith are polar opposites. So, correct the story, if you can.

The Greeks were polytheistic, and yet they were apparently exemplary in their intellectual pursuits. Some say there's nothing we know today that the Greeks didn't investigate or come up with first.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:43 pm However, your insistence on the assertion, bolstered by your quoting him, has a different purpose. It is that “all things are revealed by God”.

This "quotation" of yours is not a quotation at all. I never said it, nor would I. You faked it.

Sorry: you're just plain wrong again...or more likely, being deliberately deceptive. I see that, once again, I wasted my time by even responding to you.

Too bad. You had one interesting thing to say, and then you blew it.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:46 pm Some say there's nothing we know today that the Greeks didn't investigate or come up with first.

Yes. They were very big on iPhones, steam engines and electric toothbrushes, I hear.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:57 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:46 pm Some say there's nothing we know today that the Greeks didn't investigate or come up with first.

Yes. They were very big on iPhones, steam engines and electric toothbrushes, I hear.

They came up with the foundations of math, engineering, medicine, atoms, the sun-centered solar system, one of them calculated the circumference of the Earth with reasonable accuracy. As far as iPhones, steam engines, etc, the Greeks didn't give us those things, nor did the church, so I'm not sure how theology fits into the picture with those things.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 8:00 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:57 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:46 pm Some say there's nothing we know today that the Greeks didn't investigate or come up with first.

Yes. They were very big on iPhones, steam engines and electric toothbrushes, I hear.

They came up with the foundations of ...

You did say, "there's nothing we know today...etc." Don't blame me for what you said.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 8:03 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 8:00 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 7:57 pm
Yes. They were very big on iPhones, steam engines and electric toothbrushes, I hear.

They came up with the foundations of ...

You did say, "there's nothing we know today...etc." Don't blame me for what you said.

Fair enough.