are you an atheist?

Again, I don't understand this 'working backward' idea, how you think it applies to religion. Do you think people start off believing in God and then go through the Bible and read it for evidence to back this up? You realize evidence has little/nothing to do w faith, right?

I'm not understanding how you'd see science to be more anthropocentric.

"Do you think people start off believing in God"

Well, yes.

"You realize evidence has little/nothing to do w faith, right?"

The faith needs a basis. That's how you decide what you have faith in. The basis, I believe, is anthropocentrism that comes from or along with a fear of death and the appetite for answers that are easy to conceptualize. As pattern seeking animals, easy to conceptualize = paralleling our ability to create to a hypothetical entity(ies) that must have created everything else we see and could not have created ourselves.

sure. sorry for the poor writing. im working off an assumption that religion seeks to communicate transcendence, which if taken seriously means that any *particular* communication of transcendence is in fact a betrayal or erasure of that transcendence it's trying to communicate.

― ryan, Wednesday, April 2, 2014 11:11 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks! Wasn't poor writing. I just need spoon feeding sometimes.

Seems to me a constant problem for religion in modernity is a lack of present authority to produce transcendental utterances. Religion needs to constantly recur to traditional practices and ancient texts, since no sui generis transcendental utterance can possibly be convincing coming out of someone today. Just to sound right (and not like cultish idiocy), it has to position itself within a tradition, which means that 'worldly presumptions' are an inescapable part of religion's prestige.

i agree--that's why id argue for a particular tradition (negative theology) that's often left by the wayside because it's a tradition that performs a more fundamental questioning of itself and doesn't allow for the supposed security of definitive utterances.

furthermore id even go so far (and this is prob where i lose people) as to say that those kinds of medieval theology offer a model worth adapting (stress on *adapting*) for a great many social systems, science among them.

Faith needs no basis. At the most objective level you could say it is an inherited trait, much like your eye color or geographic location of birth. To many people, belonging to a religious organization is something they were born into.

As far as anthropocentrism in science, how about the commonly accepted theory of evolution? You know, where humans are the end-all-be-all and the pitch of the evolutionary process over millions of years? Not that this isn't true (tho it might not be) but how is that not anthropocentric way to view our place in the world?

You could also bring up that we experiment on animals before humans, or that science benefiting humans far, far, far outnumbers science benefiting the environment or other animals therein. Maybe the fact that we think nothing at all of destroying some natural habitats in order to make room for progress.

Ryan, who are some writers re: negative theology you would recommend?

michael sells' book Mystical Languages of Unsaying is the place to start.

going through some notes i find this passage from hans blumenberg which is pretty great:

The crisis-laden self-dissolution of the Middle Ages can be linked to the systematic relations in the metaphysical triangle: man, God, world. This presupposes an ambivalence in Christian theology. On the one hand, theology’s theme is anthropocentric: the biblical God’s concern, within history and beyond its eschatological invalidation, for man’s salvation is transformed with the help of the received Stoic idea of pronoia [providence] into an idea of world government and the coordination of nature, history, and man, which is fully unfolded in the Scholastic system of pure rationality. On the other hand, there is the theocentric motive: the dissolution of Scholastic rationality through the exaggeration of the transcendence, sovereignty, hiddenness, fearsomeness of its God. The first motive holds the metaphysical triangle of theology, anthropology, and cosmology together; the second tears it apart. The ability of the second motive to prevail shows at the same time that the systematic consistency of the structure constituted by the first motive is insufficient, that it is superficially harmonized heterogeneity.

ah here's the bit from sells i wanted:

At least three responses to the primary dilemma of transcendence are conceivable. The first response is silence. The second response is to distinguish between ways in which the transcendent is beyond names and ways in which it is not…The third response begins with the refusal to solve the dilemma posed by the attempt to refer to the transcendent through a distinction between two kinds of name. The dilemma is accepted as a genuine aporia, that is, as unresolvable; but this acceptance, instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse.

"As far as anthropocentrism in science, how about the commonly accepted theory of evolution? You know, where humans are the end-all-be-all and the pitch of the evolutionary process over millions of years? Not that this isn't true (tho it might not be) but how is that not anthropocentric way to view our place in the world?"

It's not quite the same as deciding from the get go that we're the focus of all existence to the point we are awarded the ability to continue existing after death.

how about the commonly accepted theory of evolution? You know, where humans are the end-all-be-all and the pitch of the evolutionary process over millions of years?

Epic fail. Nobody who actually studies evolution, like, professionally, or works in the field, believes that second sentence. At all.

pretty sure fungus is the end-all-be-all of evolution. that stuff is incredible.

Like, literally the entire point of the "commonly accepted theory of evolution" is that we are just one particular branch of a limitless tree with millions of different possible and actual outcomes, all pointing back to a single common ancestor. That's exactly why the fundamentalist monotheist religions tend to find it threatening - it denies quite emphatically that we're the "end-all-be-all" or pitch of anything.

I think Adam perhaps misunderstands "science" in a much more fundamental way than he's perceiving people are misunderstanding "religion" here.

^absolutely. Adam, your statement about humans wrt evolution is just completely wrongheaded, ugh.

this is a bit of a caricature of the scientific method, one that sees science as somehow exempt from the difficulties of the hermeneutic circle. to think we start from the bare "facts and evidence" and move from there to theoretical explanations is to deny the circular relationship between them, that what counts as "facts and evidence" is often pre-determined theoretically.

this is not to say that science doesn't develop/evolve. but there's really no standard to say it's developing in the teleological way you are describing ("removing bias from objective truth"). teleology, of course, being a concept science often rejects. for that reason the notion of "objective truth" may be shot through with bias as a very condition for existing at all, even a culturally conditioned object--some may even argue that objective truth may be defined most comprehensively through less accuracy!

Missing the point that the GOAL is removal of basis, the GOAL is being a blank slate and letting the facts and evidence be the only guide towards reaching a conclusion. Of course it doesn't yet and probably never will reach these goals 100%. That's irrelevant to this discussion because merely having these goals differentiates it (and I'd say elevates it over) religion.

and being all lol'y "good luck with that" is just such a lazy, misguided and useless attitude.

"hey newton, good luck with your lil 'experiments' there buddy lol"

There actually is a contingent that believes that humans are the end-all-be-all product and the entire point of evolution. They're called "Catholics." ("Sure, evolution happened, but it was 'directed' by God to result in human beings.")

science is a better method for discerning empirical "truth." no one disputes that. but its "regulative ideal," what you call the goal, is something imported from something other than science.

Maybe the fact that we think nothing at all of destroying some natural habitats in order to make room for progress.

― ▴▲ ▴TH3CR()$BY$H()W▴▲ ▴ (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 2, 2014 11:39 AM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well if someone put it here specifically for us to make use of why not?

kinda feeling like we need a dedicated thread for a no-holds-barred evan vs adam to settle everything once and for all debate about atheism

is something imported from something other than science.

so?

haha xp

never ending debates get me through the work day

How's next Weds for everyone? We can run through this all again?

Also, the afterlife thing, I've read the Bible three times and haven't run across a single mention of it.

thanks for the spoiler

the "so" is that science is not a self-sufficient generator of objective truth; nor could it be; nor should it be.

this definitely not to say this is some flaw with science. the "blank slate" is not something that even makes sense scientifically (where is the observer?) and even suggests that, were it achieved, science would cease (or at least cease to develop). and then what?!

pointing being that the highly contingent basis of scientific investigation is its condition--that distinction between known/unknown, say--and if you want to get really into it you could even say that the very logic of science *produces* the unknown as its postulate of investigation. does this mean science presumes the hidden transcendental as the very horizon of its own progress, that science materializes or actualizes what earlier ages called God and that is essentially what science *is*? I sometimes wonder!

other point being that, yes, science does a good job of leaving itself open to revision (in some ways, not others) and religion should adopt similar methods (and has before).

Ryan otm. I need to just read this thread for a while and stop posting.

that's a nice lil post but still has nothing to do with what I'm saying the advantages science holds over religion, which you've already agreed with.

the "so" is that science is not a self-sufficient generator of objective truth; nor could it be; nor should it be.

right. Don't know why this is a "but" to "science is a better method".

feel like that's getting back into Science being a capital S thing rather than science being a method.

How's next Weds for everyone? We can run through this all again?

Also, the afterlife thing, I've read the Bible three times and haven't run across a single mention of it.

― ▴▲ ▴TH3CR()$BY$H()W▴▲ ▴ (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 2, 2014 12:51 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...heaven? Grandpa is smiling down on me but he would like a word with you and your denial of the afterlife

lso, the afterlife thing, I've read the Bible three times and haven't run across a single mention of it.

This is preposterous.

Evan, may I recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for a more modern theory of scientific methods than the logical positivism of Popper?

all for lower case science!

there's perhaps a bigger discussion to be had, in which id like to fold science into a more general semiotics of determination. but just to focus things: insofar as science distinguishes itself from other endeavors it achieves scientific meaning only insofar as it reproduces that distinction. this means that things like art, history, religion, politics, and all that are necessary, well not parts of science, but co-participants in society with science. I'd even argue that non-scientific ways of knowing are a necessary part of how science evolves.

that's really only true in the same sense that art, history, religion, politics also play a role in how baseball is played.

well sure, but then no one is saying the World Series winner is really the objective champion of the world
or that the MLB playoffs are a path to metaphysical certainty.

close enough tho, right?

no direct references to the afterlife in the OT

well if there were any, I'm sure it'd just be a metaphor

one oblique ref: "Jacob was gathered onto his people" when he dies otherwise nada

whatever else that fact should challenge the assumption that religion is primarily about fear of death

There is a sequel to the OT tho

I disagree

more of a spinoff I guess, none of the same characters but based in the same continuity. a lot of crazy retcon, too.

If the major religions don't believe in spirits I concede

"O get this I was around the whole time, even before Abraham. My scenes just all got cut for time."

At best NT is fanfic