On 18 Mar 2013, at 21:15, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, March 18, 2013 11:33:17 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:
G K Chesterton wrote:
> For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true
or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion.
That is absolutely true, there are more ways of being wrong than of
being right, so if you don't care if your ideas are self consistent
or not (for example if you don't care that X is not Y and X is not
not Y) and if you don't care what words mean (for example if you
don't care that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always
changes X that doesn't mean that X caused Y) then you have much more
freedom over what you can believe than a logical man does.
The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. There are
many things related to consciousness which can't be defined in the
terms we have learned from manipulating public objects. No state of
awareness is uniquely one thing and not another. All phenomenology
is multivalent and impacted by intention and expectation.
I can make sense on this.
If you want all the parts of your belief system to fit together the
range of things you can believe in is severely limited. And finding
ways all the parts of the universe fit together in a self consistent
way is hard, very hard, so often the logical man must just say "I
don't know I'm not certain", they religious man on the other hand is
always certain but seldom correct.
The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Not that I'm
opposed to logic, it just can't penetrate to the cause of awareness.
Logic is always an a-posteriori analysis of a sensory-motor
experience.
I can agree with this. But no more if your replaced "logical" by
Turing universal. Machines and numbers are beyond logic. That is the
unexpected lesson of the 20th century math, and which makes comp
consistent with experiences.
> there is a very special sense in which materialism has more
restrictions than spiritualism… The Christian is quite free to
believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and
inevitable development in the universe, but the materialist is not
allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of
spiritualism or miracle.
The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt
that a invisible man in the sky sent His son, who was also Him, to
be tortured to death by humans even though he loved His son, who is
also Him, very much because otherwise he could not forgive humans
even though He is omnipotent. Even though He is omnipotent torturing
His son, who is really Him, for the crime of eating a apple is the
only way He could forgive the torturers. The Christian is not
allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that it makes sense
that if I'm mad at you and then you torture my son to death I will
no longer be mad at you.
No argument there. I only disagree with you on religion in the sense
that I don't think the fictions which have been created are
arbitrary. They reflect metaphorical illustrations about
consciousness itself, and when taken figuratively all myths can
reveal important insights. It's only when people take them literally
that it causes problems, and as long as physics refuses to take
consciousness seriously, people will continue to take religion
literally.
> The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a
chain of causation…"
I don't know when Chesterton wrote that but he lived until 1936 and
by 1925 physicists, the ultimate materialists, did not believe that
history or anything else was "simply and solely a chain of
causation"; however it is unlikely that Chesterton ever knew this
and like most self styled philosophers remained blissfully ignorant
of all scientific and mathematical discoveries made during the last
century or two.
Are you referring here to the addition of randomness or probability
to the chain of causation?
Incidentally I found some more ideas of Chesterton. In 1290 Edward 1
expelled the Jews from England and Chesterton writes that Edward was
a "just and conscientious monarch" and acted correctly because the
Jews were "as powerful as they are unpopular and the capitalists of
their age" so when Edward "flung the alien financiers out of the
land" he acted as "knight errant" and was the "tender father of his
people". Even in 1920 Chesterton thought there was still a "Jewish
Problem in Europe". Hitler had his Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
Even anti-Semites can have valid insights.
Correct. An example is Henry Ford. He was correct on health, oil and
hemp, but close to the nazis about the Jews. Clark argument was of
course invalid.
Craig
John K Clark
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