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Re: Healthy agnosticism
j. marie said:
> i _like_ this thread. :)
Me too! :-) Can't resist jumping in on this one...
Kelvin set off the bomb with:
> there is a wrong and a right. We can argue all day as to who is wrong and
> who is right, but there is an objective truth to who God is and what
> Christianity is, a truth that is universal, constant, and objective.
This is way too Platonic for my taste. I can deal with God having an
ontologically objective nature, but Christianity? A set of human-constructed
sets of socio-cultural belief and ritual systems that are demonstrably
different in both time and geography??? No, I can't buy that as universal,
constant, or objective. For almost two thousand years, at least since Marcion,
if not earlier, people have been pointing fingers, saying those *other* guys
are not Christians. I don't see any evidence for a universal, objective,
bedrock, including C. S. Lewis's efforts to find one. The split between Arius
and Athanasius still runs hot in modern Christendom, among many who have never
heard of either of them. No, I don't think there is, has been, or even (I
would claim) *could be* "an objective truth to... what Christianity *is*".
Even as far back as the New Testament writings, the different authors had
different ideas of what the significance of the resurrection. Note that I am
not saying they disagreed with each other (although I think they did on some
things -- that's another discussion), my point is that they looked at the same
*event*, and drew different conclusions as to what it *meant*. It took the
orthodox church several hundred years and a whole lot of nasty politics to come
up with some kind of authoritative statement of what Christianity *is*, and
that only lasted a few centuries, anyway. Most American Christians, I suspect,
couldn't tell you the difference between the Athanasian, Apostles' and the
Nicean creed. I once had a Evangelical high school kid tell me (as his youth
pastors nodded approvingly) that Jesus was only a human-looking shell,
inhabited by God's spirit, not a real honest-to-goodness human being.
Docetism! Alive and well in Kansas, 1997, after being declared heresy in the
2nd century. And when you expand beyond the Orthodox and the Catholics to try
to include Coptics, Gnostics, Montanists, Manicheans... what *is* Christianity,
again?
Now, the idea of God having an objective ontology is one that sits much easier
with me, but I agree with j. marie about the danger of our own limitations in
our subjective interpretations when we try to express that ontology. I'm an
astrophysicist, so I think of it in terms of scientific theory. No physicist
will doubt that there *is* a fundamentally objective reality that we test and
probe in our experiments (as we do in all of life, really). However, we know
that our theories are (hopefully) ever-improving approximations of what's
*really* going on. Newton compared the acceleration of a falling apple to the
moon's orbit and concluded that bodies act on each other over a distance.
Einstein looked at the equivalence between acceleration in different reference
frames and concluded that mass/energy curves space-time, and that curvature
affects the paths that objects take. What's *really* going on? We don't know
for sure, only that the idea of curved space does a lot better job of
explaining what we see (bending of light around massive objects like the sun,
for example) than action-at-a-distance does. But this time we *know* that
curved space can't be the whole story, because Quantum Mechanics demands that
on the smallest scales, space and time become quantized and abrupt: this
rquires infinite curvature, in other words, infinite energy. Doesn't work.
String theory (or its newest variation, M-theory) may provide a unification of
these ideas, and that will demand yet another radical reimagining of what's
*really* going on, even more so than the switch from Newton to Einstein did.
My point in all that is that we construct descriptions -- models -- of the
objective reality with which we interact, and these models are of *necessity*
less complete than that reality. In the case of physical phenomena, we can
quantify how accurate the approximation is, but in the case of God, we can't
(some would say we are by definition infintely far off, since God is infinite,
and any description of God of which we can concieve is of necessity finite).
Baudrillard (French post-modern philosopher that heavily influenced _The
Matrix_; Neo kept computer discs in a shell of one of his books: _Simulacra and
Simulation_, thus making a visual pun, since the hollowed out shell of the book
was a simulation of a book. But I digress...) argues that in fact, with
respect to God, there *is* no objective reality: the rituals and beliefs of
religion have created a simulacra of God: a copy that disguises the fact that
there is no original. I wouldn't go that far, but it's important to remember
that there is a difference between the object and our perceptions of it, and in
the case of God, where there is no objective, universal, *data* to which we can
point, we have to be doubly careful about our personal subjective biases. My
brother and I as children used to argue about what a "spade" was. He thought
it was a kind of small pitchfork, I thought it was a pointed shovel. Although
we couldn't agree on the word, we could point at the garden tool and say
"*that*", and then we would at least both agree on what we were pointing at.
With God, it's much trickier to point and say "*that*".
So, while there may be a wrong and a right, I think one has to be really
careful about when one decides to end discussion and conclude "this is
it", one way or the other.
Epistomologically yours,
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Go to red alert!" "Are you *absolutely* sure, sir?
It does mean changing the bulb." - Red Dwarf
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