Taking the least first: although a relatively formal writer, I used to be even more attentive to things like dangling prepositions and split infinitives. After a time, though, I decided that I would seek a balance closer to speech and ordinary usage, because I was a bit too stilted. That resolve has been encouraged by the exigencies of the threads, where one is moving pretty fast (even the essay was between other work, and therefore not highly edited). Thus, I am not very punctilious about "that" and "which", certainly not unedited.
I am sorry if I seemed too dismissive, but I really was taken aback, and tired, and unsure of how to respond. Given what we have so commonly discussed, it did not seem too obscure. Here is something I have quoted from Bertrand Russell which might help to clarify what was on my mind:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
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The world presented to us by "scientism", science in its pretension to being philosophy, is a world of "matter in motion", mechanistic and devoid of spiritual qualities, underlying meaning, or objective value and beauty. This world is an utter abstraction based upon reliance on the senses and the theoretical framework of physics. The world that world that we actually live in sits in stark contrast to it.
The key sentence, in contrast, is this:
The idea that there has to be more than matter in incidental configurations, that there is purpose and beauty in things, is the base line, elementary insight.
People believe in some form of divinity because they perceive meaning in the world they inhabit, meaning as pregiven and not imputed. I thought you would particularly recognize the reference to "making sense", since you so splendidly invoked "resonance" in a prior post.
This is not an attempt at conclusive proof. However, it is an attempt to ground the acknowledgement of the sense of divinity in our fundamental, and best attested, situation in the world......... |
