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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (39318)	6/5/1999 8:15:00 PM
From: melinda abplanalp	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I know nothing about metaphysics but my boss is totally into it. How does metaphysics work with religion and spirituality? I am sure this is a dumb question but if you have time.....

To: nihil who wrote (39318)	6/5/1999 10:42:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Nihil, I don't quite understand why you describe Plato and Anaxagoras as "perfectionists", like Leibniz. Responding just off the top of my head, it seems to me that Platonic idealism should be considered the very opposite of the perfectionism of Leibniz. After all, Nature is only - and can be only -- a dim reflection, as through a glass darkly, of the "ideal forms" that lie beyond it. Plato's cave, remember? As for Anaxagoras, and the other pre-Socratics, most of them were preoccupied with what we would consider scientific questions; and, judging from the fragments they left behind, they did not "require the hypothesis of God to learn about the physical universe" any more than you did. Not until the Christian era was that considered obligatory. The Atomists were complete materialists -- and atheists; Epicurus believed that there were gods, but since they didn't concern themselves with mankind, there was no need for mankind to concern itself with them; the skeptics were the granddaddies of today's agnostics, and so forth. I am also not comfortable with what strikes me as a false antithesis, which you express as follows: I see in the paper that half of Americans think faith is important in their lives, and a fourth of Europeans. It takes a very long time to extinquish the myths and fantasies of the past, especially when the alternative is the recognition that we live in a self-constructed human society in a universe that doesn't care if we live or die or vanish entirely, that we are responsible for any future that we have and that there is no God to look after us or reward us for our useless individual struggles to survive and the hopeless hope that as a human species that we may prevail. In the first place, it seems to me "faith" is not necessarily based on the literal acceptance of "myths and fantasies", although the latter may provide some poetic support for faith. There are many forms of "faith", that is, of religious belief, some of which are infinitely more sophisticated than garden-variety atheism. I say that, even though I myself am an agnostic. Secondly, why do you give us only two alternatives: myths and fantasies on the one hand, and the cold reality of a heartless and soulless universe, on the other? You sound a bit like a disllusioned mid-Victorian gentleman: a Matthew Arnold, looking out at Dover Beach, and seeing the Sea of Faith.. Retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. And then, turning to his companion, and saying: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new. Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. Ah, speaking of love, I love those lines! But is that really the way it really is? Joan