"The Truth" -A Sterile Set Of Ideas (D'Souza)

by metatron 13 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Terry

  It sounds as if you have formed your opinions without reading the book. If so, so be it.

  I work in the Religion and Philosophy section of a 2nd hand bookstore chain. I shelve D'Souza daily and read what he has to say. I'm interested in apologists like Strobel, McDowell, D'Souza and the others regularly.

  The only difference between any of these people and the Watchtower is how they bracket their world view and how low they will sink to create a strawman fallacy to puncture.

  I never seem to encounter any materialist who comprehends that the reductionism they love so much is philosphically suspect and may be self contradictory.

  Your view of reality is that big things are only made of smaller things until a magic threshold is crossed and the fuzzy-wuzzy magic takes over.

  How is it you cling to pre-science and myth for your belief system utterly ignoring the advances in human knowledge since the 17th century?

  Once you reduce all effects to simpler causes, you reach the bottom rung of reality and then things exist arbitrarily

  What could possibly be more "arbitrary" than postulating a secret invisible world of gods and demons inacessible except by mystics who invoke them with inside information?

  You do realize that Pre-enlightenment theologians believed the sun and moon moved because they were pushed by Angels!!
• 

  metatron

  Whether you like it or not, the 'fuzzy woo-woo' aspect of reality is there. The ultimately arbitrary nature of the world is not widely discussed - but it's still testified to by people as diverse as Victor Mansfield (Astrophysicist with New Age/Buddhist viewpoint) or Victor Stenger (hard core atheist - when discussing Decoherence as an alternative to entrained particles).

  Once the micro and macro get linked (as in Schrodinger's Cat situations) the 'woo - woo' could enter our mundane reality. Science, by it's very nature is a reductionist enterprise but reductionism itself may have limits. Hence, my point about causation or the lack thereof.

  Considering that Thomas Paine is my favorite writer of all time, I have no problem with the Enlightenment or rationality or modern science.

  On the other hand, I do have a problem with promissary materialism. Having grown tired of Watchtower promises for explanation, I am equally frustrated with the same lack elsewhere.

  metatron
• 

  Terry

  Whether you like it or not, the 'fuzzy woo-woo' aspect of reality is there. The ultimately arbitrary nature of the world is not widely discussed - but it's still testified to by people as diverse as Victor Mansfield (Astrophysicist with New Age/Buddhist viewpoint) or Victor Stenger (hard core atheist - when discussing Decoherence as an alternative to entrained particles).

  Once the micro and macro get linked (as in Schrodinger's Cat situations) the 'woo - woo' could enter our mundane reality. Science, by it's very nature is a reductionist enterprise but reductionism itself may have limits. Hence, my point about causation or the lack thereof.

  The WEST took Aristotle's logic and built science out of it. Logic is the law of non-contradiction. Either/Or and not both simultaneously.

  The EAST did not possess Aristotle or logic. They built Buddhism and Shintoism and all that other nonsense. NO SCIENCE.

  The law of the excluded middle doesn't work for them! The EAST embraces contradiction!!

  The WEST has prospered under science. The east wrestled with stone age mentality, weird religion and sacred cows, poverty and the caste system.

  Where the EAST has grown out of Pre-Enlightenment by copying the logic and science of the WEST it has pulled into modernity.

  And now YOU want to jump into Pre-Enlightenment with those knuckle-draggers in Buddhism who don't understand the law of the excluded middle!

  Why?

  Don't you value your own mind?

  Writers with science backgrounds who happen to embrace Buddhism don't become EXPERTS about reality.

  They use language the way a magician waves a magic wand.

  Science deals with reality. Buddhist/New Age writers who happen to be scientists speak with no special expertise about reality when they abandon math and testabile hypotheses.

  You live in THIS WORLD. Why listen to crackpots who claim special knowledge? They will enter and leave a room using the door and not by walking through walls.

  READ THE BOOK: MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS by JON RONSON (The film is pretty good too.)
• 

  metatron

  Straw men , straw men.... you decry them in others but create more yourself to criticize others.

  I follow logic. I follow reason. I follow science. So does D'Souza, that's the whole point despite warts, here and there. If it was otherwise, nothing would exist to debate at all.

  Aristotle? The guy who missed the point of experimental confirmation about falling weights?

  Here's a better explanation of why 'Christian' nations progressed and others didn't. They believed that God created the world according to LAWS. Muslims and others relied on the caprice of one or more Gods. With law, you can expect to discover things in a predictable, orderly fashion and not quit before you start. Thanks for noticing how 'Christian' culture led to technology instead of other Eastern cultures! Yes, some myths work better than others! It also doesn't help to have vast aeons of chronology weighing on your outlook. An exciting eschatology works much better for motivation.

  Myths that lead to good science? Yes! There were studies done years ago showing a number of engineering students who offered "Scotty" on Startrek as their inspiration! And this got them to study calculus, for Godssake!

  Yes, cause and effect scientific reductionism got us here - and still has more benefits to come, no problem - but we are approaching limits - and those limits appear to concern consciousness , which relates to ideas about life after death and God. The role of the observer is still a critical issue in physics and theoretical physicists commonly lean to mystical thought. Biologists are talking about 'emergent' phenomena - which by definition means that real things come into existence without the strict causation we commonly expect.

  I expect that a crisis will eventually develop in medicine - I am concerned that drug development may be failing because placebo effects are becoming ever more difficult to exclude - a possible result of ignoring consciousness as part of our reality.

  metatron (and yes, I saw Men Who Stare At Goats. It was amusing but is used to ridicule some very serious results observed elsewhere in the CIA about psychic effects during the 1980's)