From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 6:19 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On 31 December 2013 09:43, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com>
wrote:
Dear LizR and Brent,
I will try to go at this from a different direction. What exactly does
"fundamental level" mean? Does there have to be "something fundamental"?
Consider Leibniz' monadology: strip it of the anthropocentrism and
religiosity and one obtains a nice "any one thing is made from combinations
of other things" concept that has no need for something fundamental.
>> Obviously there doesn't HAVE to be "something fundamental"*. Lots of
religions, for example, posit two almost-fundamental things - Yin and Yang,
God and the Devil, the dark and light sides of the Force, and so on.
However, physical theories have been extremely successful at using
reductionism, which tends to lead one, ultimately, towards there being
something fundamental. All the unifications - electricity and magnetism,
mass and energy, space and time, the four forces merging into one - all
indicate an explanatory arrow in which two or more things turning out to be
aspects of one simpler thing. Continue this long enough, and you should
eventually hit the last turtle.
True, but often these dualities, are presented as aspects of something more
fundamental, which is made manifest for example in one of the examples you
provided "the dark and light sides of the Force", yin/yang are also
inextricably linked. Yin or yang can make no sense unless understood in
terms of and in relation to the other. Duality crops up over and over in
many traditions; however often if you look, even in those traditions you
cited they also allude to a deeper whole (different myths/stories of course
- the Abrahamic god for example said to have cast the devil out from heaven
- whatever works I guess, but in any case even in the Abrahamic case the
dualism is underlain by a more fundamental singularity.. i.e. the omniscient
all creating God - again in the monotheist tradition -- (who when seen in
this light is the ultimate source of all that is evil in the universe. as I
love pointing out to unlucky evangelicals who come knocking on my door to
give me the good news and to save my sinning soul)
* (By the way, I'd feel happier replying if you'd miss out all the
unnecessary quote marks. It looks like you're trying to hedge against being
pinned down into actually taking a viewpoint when everything under
discussion has to be "quoted" for no obvious reason...)
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