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Re: Healthy agnosticism
Hi,
Gilhamilton raised some great questions, which I am going to try to
answer, but then I'll try to take a break, because I know this is
off-topic (not that that has ever stopped me before), and before we
get *too* far afield, I want to give people a chance to let me know
if we should take this off-list.
Gilhamilton wrote:
> Ah, but there is universal objective data on God. I see perhaps you don't
> believe there is and from you POV I would concede that yea, there is no way
> to truly know this mystery God.
I am almost sure you don't fully know my POV on that question. :-) It
depends on what you mean by "truly know".
> He revealed himself to us through the many people that wrote what became the
> Bible and there,finally, through Jesus Himself .
But even if I stipulate that, it doesn't change the facts that (a) we're
dealing with some kind of intermediary (text and/or story). Even if we all
agree what the words on the page *are* (i.e., that we all have the same
translation or edition), that doesn't mean by a long shot that we all agree
what they *mean*. If that's supposed to be an objective "reference point
outside us", I don't think it works. If you want to know what I think, I
think the only objective reference point is within us. But the only way
we can know that point is subjectively.
> I don't buy the idea that because we taint objective fact with our subjective
> *reason* that that makes the objective meaningless.
I think you're getting what I said turned around. I didn't say "taint", and I
wasn't intending to use meaningless in a perjorative sense. I mean that an
event, a fact, merely *is*. That's the default. Once you start *describing*
it, you give it a context; you put it in a story; you give it a *meaning*.
That's an active process that you participate in, and you're going to do it
differently than any other human being (with varying degrees of overlap).
Something happens. The event of itself has no meaning. But if I say an
electron falls into a nuclear potential well, suddenly to you those words will
evoke an image; tell a story, have *meaning*. Depending on your scientific
background, that meaning will have different degrees of accurate relation to
the original event. To use another example, the resurrection stands as an
event; a fact (whether or not it happened doesn't affect what I'm saying; let's
stipulate it did). An occurance of a particular thing at a particular time.
That in and of itself, as bare fact, has no meaning. It's when we start
talking about redemption, lambs, heaven, etc. that we supply the meaning.
Now the event becomes part of a narrative. It connects to us and how we
perceive the patterns in the world. It has meaning.
> I'm not a scientist but I gather from your previous post that we don't know
> all there is to know about physics, does that mean we know nothing meaningful
> about it?
Not at all. You've extrapolated past what I was trying to say. It's
not an all or nothing proposition. I'm drawing a line between events
and the meaning we construct to explain/describe those events. If you
tell a different story about those events (e.g. Newton vs. Einstein),
you've changed the meaning (e.g. action at a distance vs. curved
space/time), but not the event (an apple falls to the ground). The
meaning gives you understanding, which means that you can predict what
will happen next.
> couldn't an objective fact (depending on the fact that is) but, let's say an
> eternal fact, have even more ramifiations to the past and future than our
> personal knowledge can ascertain. In fact, its ramifications would stretch
> outside of man's space-time continuum.
What's an "eternal fact"?
I would say that the ramifications are part of the story we tell that
includes the fact. The story is a construct, which approximates
the sequence of events.
I have to go. Thanks to everyone for indulging us in the philosophy.
Fiat Lux,
--
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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