Text 3961, 138 rader
Skriven 2006-07-16 09:59:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4434.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:hpjgb2t0q37gmofuis9ffk9vgergdua653@4ax.com...

>>There's two ideas of purpose.  You may or may not hold a concept of
>>a greater purpose above your own, and then there's the ideas that you
>>might decide your life has a goal or purpose.
>>
>>If the latter is illusion, then you're fooling yourself? :)
>
> Seems to me that a goal and a purpose are two different things, in
> that you can have the first without having the second (or, I suppose,
> the second without having the first). Then too, "greater purpose" can
> be local or it can be global. My greater purpose, forex, might be as a
> carrier of DNA, or it might be as a thermodynamically-driven chemical
> reaction that creates order from chaos or chaos from order, depending
> on whether you look at it from the future or the past.

Sure...If you allow your consciousness to be dominated by trans-self species 
concerns, or the mechanics of metabolism.  Very few humans make that a 
central structuring form of their lives.

Moreover, would you like talking to them?  :)


> Or it may be
> something devised by a deity, albeit such explanations tend to be weak
> on what purpose the deity serves herself -- more a putting off than a
> solving.

You treat the deity as a purely human construction, picking logical nits. 
To someone who believes, stuff concering the diety(ies) isn't a construction 
or at least isn't enitrely.  Strikes me the choice to keep that filter in 
place is to never see what a believer sees.  I'd wonder if it would be 
possible to even conceptualize what a believer sees.  When I try on that 
filter and look back at a beliver, all I see is self-deception on the part 
of  the believer, which doesn't grant much respect.

Anyway, if there is actually a deity out there and you desire supplemenatary 
information, go right to the source and ask the horse.


>>> And can't it?
>>
>>You can certainly use science to provide evidence of consequences... but
>>morality judges whether those consequences are good or bad ones.
>
> Why can't science examine what makes those consequences good or bad?
> It seems to me that both psychology and neuroscience have done that,
> as more recently has evolutionary biology and even mathematics.

Depends on what you're looking for.

Science as psychology can plumb the depths of why people think what they do. 
As statistics, it can tell you what percentage of a population believe a 
certain way.  As history, it can tell you how belief has evolved over time.

Science cannot tell you what "good" is because that's subjective, albeit 
subjective centered in a common region.  As explained above, science can map 
the region but it cannot make that ah-ha leap to what IS good.  Scienctists 
can make that leap but science, methodological tool that it is, is denied 
the ability by the very nature of its Method.

Put another way, science can tell you about the story but it can't make you 
experience it.  "Experience" requires imagination and imagination is not 
empirical.


>>>>From a scientific perspective, the problem would in large measure boil
>>> down to the role of cooperation in evolution.
>>
>>Only on a large scale.  Just to clarify, your position is that science is
>>only capable of answering moral questions on an evolutionary level?
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by moral questions. As you point out below,
> science doesn't attempt to assign moral values. It can tell us where
> our moral values come from, examine the process whereby we form them.
> It can even recognize that some acts are moral and some amoral within
> a given context and aid in the refinement of moral strictures and
> judgment, by for example refining the primitive incest taboos into
> modern ones based on a knowledge of genetics. But by the same token,
> science recognizes that moral systems are at least to some extent
> contingent, personal, and arbitrary. It can suggest changes only
> within the context of externally-supplied parameters.

....Which means science is great at mapping out known moral terrain but 
incapable of exploring or reshaping that terrain.


>>>>  Science can't measure
>>>>whether I look at my life as being a good or wasted life.
>>>
>>> Again, can't it? At the very least, it could ask (and I'm sure
>>> psychologists have).
>>
>>What measurement would science possibly use to quantify how I measure my
>>life?
>>Anyone can ask...that doesn't make it science.
>
> But asking questions can be a part of science. Psychologists, for
> example, ask them all the time, and I'm sure they've asked questions
> about the very phenomenon you describe.

The best a psychologist can do is be able to forumlate exactly what and how 
Carl (or anyone) defines his life.  Again, we're back at being told about 
what's going on. Psychology gives me information about the individual not 
the experience.

If I experience a momentary intense connection to God, psychology can talk 
about how past experiences might have colored the way I perceived God or 
measure how the experience has altered me.  Biophysics could tell me what 
was happening in my brain at the time, etc.  Can't tell you beans about what 
it was like for me to touch God.  Just run analysis on what I say.


-- 
John Trauger,
Vorlonagent


"Methane martini.
Shaken, not stirred."


"Spirituality without science has no mind.

Science without spirituality has no heart."

-Methuselah Jones
                                                                             
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