Boy, there were a lot of typos in my last post -- I was in a hurry because I was off to my design review!! The reason I mention this is because it is precisely the activity that I'm suggesting for one's philosophical inquiries. In a design review, ideally, one prepares a package of ideas and designs. This is then subjected to objective challenges by others of varying skills and disciplines. This process improves one's designs by forcing the incorporation of input other than one's own. It produces a better design. It probably improves one's philosophical clarity as well if used there.
There seems to be a common misunderstanding between Creationists and those of scientific bent. Scientists aren't necessarily atheists. We are truth seekers. I don't know any scientist who wouldn't like to meet God, if such a deity presented itself. But I don't believe in a corporeal being as presented by the Bible - there just isn't any evidence. If I am in God's image, then we are discussing my mind, not my body. If I was only a living head in a jar, I think I would still be mostly me. If I was a living body in a jar without a head, I would mostly not.
And in that mind, I have reason. That is really all the mind is for, producing reason and rationality. Otherwise we might as well have been born without it and just had reflexes. But what I assert, and this thread's charter statement suggests, is not that there isn't a God, but rather that his nature is not accurately depicted by the Bible.
How do I know this? Well, your right, it IS through a belief. My first principle is a belief that the world is knowable through reason. It seems to make sense to me. But really that is only one belief, albeit, an all encompassing one. When dogmatic beliefs have been presented in the past, they tend to be wrong. If you want to read something heart-breaking, read the Recantation of Galileo. Here is a feeble man of 70 years (ancient in his day) telling the Inquisition that he didn't see anything that he saw through his telescope and that the Church was right.
I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, of the movement of the earth.
Systems based upon belief seem to produce this effect more than systems based upon reason. Reason is testable. Belief is not. Reason is supported by objective fact, belief can exist in a vacuum. So what we have is something of a slippery slope. We all have to accept some things as given: "I think, therefore I am". That's really just a belief. Am I a man dreaming he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man? Maybe neither. I just don't know. I lean more toward a man dreaming he is a man.
If you choose to be swayed more belief, you are at odds with the data visible to others. My only belief is that my observations can be affirmed by others through objective experience. But there is a caveat: reason only takes you so far. Experiment can take you further, but ultimately, at the bottom of the well of reason and experimentation, lies the unknowable. The difference between those who choose reason and those who choose belief is that we have a bottom to our well of knowledge. We know it. Belief has no bottom and is infinite. But being unbounded, it is capable of great contradiction and arrogance. A kind of arrogance that would not stand the light of the scientific method. |
