Skip to main content

Introduction to Ockham's Beard

Toward the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, some authors began talking about a conflict between science and religion.  Science, they proposed, offers explanations that can be proven true through measurement and observation--or at least can be proven false.  Religion, on the other hand, offers no method for testing the truth or falsity of its claims, but instead begins and ends with wishful thinking, as in the wish to live forever, to be loved unconditionally, or the wish to return to infantile bliss.  If these critics do not associate religion with childish wishful thinking, then they associate it with fear.  That is, the fear of a judge from whom you cannot escape and a punishment that never ceases.  Religion is anchored in these irrational hopes and fears, say these critics, while science is anchored in  tests through which we

I am sure that there are some religious people whose lives and words might make these criticisms seem particularly apt.  But I also see that there is much that is beautiful in religious experience to which the modern critic is blind.  The aim of this book is to show both this beauty, to explore whether it offers any evidence of God's presence in our world, and to give an account of the blindness that besets modern atheists. This blindness, I will argue, is owing to a misunderstanding of of the scientific method.  This book will therefore clarify the scientific method in such a way that casts light upon its connection to religious experience.  I will show that scientific inquiry is made possible by something within humanity that impels us to seek the divine.  To deny the religious aspect of our humanity, therefore, is actually to undermine the scientific method.

(need to discuss the title of the book and define scientific method)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more