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Mike Miller wrote:
On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
Alright, I think this is good.
Let me try to paraphrase what you have said into my own words. I am
going to slightly distort the meaning of what you have said, but not
much, and maybe you will agree with my version as well.
The way we determine what is "true" or "false" is to make our best
effort to fit an explanation to our experiences (the evidence).
I would say, instead, that we cannot determine what is absolutely true
or false but we can use evidence to compare various claims.
There is nothing we can know with real certainty - as your quote from
Bertrand Russell put it, for all we know we have only existed for five
minutes and our memories are simply illusions.
Right. But the point of the Russell quote was to expose the absurdity
of claims that the Earth is 10,000 years old, or so.
But it makes no sense to live life in this Russellian fashion. We
have to eek out the life we have, and so it makes sense to make basic
assumptions, like our memories are reasonably correct, our minds work
in a reasonably logical fashion, and what we experience with our
senses corrolates reasonably well with the reality that exists outside
of ourselves.
That was really Russell's point: We can't prove that the world wasn't
created 5 minutes ago with all of our memories intact. But that is
absurd, so we shouldn't waste our time on it.
It is from this perspective that I became a Christian. The scientific
method follows this approach, but ultimately can only determine
certain facts that occur in a systematic or universal fashion.
OK, but Christianity can determine nothing at all. Science: something,
Christianity: nothing. But you choose Christianity.
But if someone like me has had certain experiences that cannot be
communicated in a systematic or universal fashion to the satisfaction
of his listeners, does that make his experience any less valid?
Let's just say that your brain was having a bad day and you had a couple
of crossed wires and you saw/felt/heard a presence that seemed like God,
but it was just bad wiring. Yes, I'm dismissing your revelation as
temporary "bad wiring" in your brain. That is a possibility, so why
rearrange your whole life around this one experience?
Trivers, it seems to me, sets forth an almost utilarian approach to
knowledge. Knowledge is good for me when it helps me live better (in
some utilitarian sense of the word "better" e.g. my genes are more
likely to be passed on.)
So my goal in aquiring knowledge and understanding is primarily for the
purpose of me fitting into the world better.
Since knowledge is merely how I perceive it, it carries no content in
the moral sense - there is not some knowledge that intrinsically more
"right" than someone elses knowledge, except that it causes the former
person to relate better to his world.
But then, if my personal experiences cause me to come to the conclusion
that God exists, and if this knowledge causes me to relate even better
with the world around me, why is it then bad for me to rearrange my
whole life around this set of experiences?
Next, to obtain this knowledge we have our senses. In the old days we
had really know idea how they worked - I have heard that some medieval
people believed that the eyes worked by having feelers that extended out
(and as such looking at candles was a good thing because it burned the
impurities away). Now we have more knowledge about many of these
senses, for example, eyes seem to react to local electromagnetic
disturbances, ears react to vibrations in the air, the nose detects
certain chemicals in the air, etc, etc.
But most, perhaps all, of us (as I said in my other post I think this
includes you as well) also have this inner sense, that there is a
greater being out there, and that there is a greater purpose for our lives.
Now it could be that this is merely some psychological anomoly that many
of us suffer from, or it could be that we are sensing something just as
real as that which our eyes sense, except we are still in the same place
of ignorance as the medieval scholars are.
In any case, the medieval scholars, who did not understand how the eyes
worked, and who certainly did not understand the systematic nature of
the universe as we do, felt it wise to take note of what their visual
senses told them. At the very least, my life is greatly improved when I
take note of what my eyes tell me. Similarly, my experience, and the
experience of many others, tells me that life gets incomparibly better
when I take notice of what my inner senses tell me.
Stephen
--
Stephen Montgomery-Smith
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen
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