Dear Joseph,
thank you for your interesting argument. As I have mentioned, I work as
a professor in a university. I'm thus surrounded by some people who
consider themselves as rational beings. Most of them are interested in
spirituality, religion, and stuff like that, while they do not consider
themself as spiritual or religious, and I did not meet any colleagues
who define themself as being on a spiritual quest. I thus have some
evidence that makes me doubt your claims.
My argument in this case is as before: The religious idea of truth and
the scientific idea of truth are two different things. They are both
called truth - but that's the same word for two different things (a
homonymy). The consequence is simple: If a person says something true
about religion as a scientist, that's a scientific truth, not a
religious truth. And if a religious person says something true about
science as a religious person, that's not scientific truth, but
religious truth. And neither religions nor sciences are art.
Additionally, religion and science are not politics, which is connected
to a third idea of truth. What happens quite often is that scientific
arguments are picked up in politics to justify the execution of power.
It's sometimes difficult to distinguish these things, but asking who
says what through which channel with what effect already helps a bit: If
politicians argue with data, that's politics, not science. Same for
journalists - in journalism, "truth" is defined by attention rate, not
but "research method".
Beside the problem of "truth", you referred to some other points I would
like to comment on:
A second point is "the apparent meaningless of our existential
condition". Again, I would doubt the "our" - for me at least that's not
true. I can not see an apparent meaningless of myself. The meaning of my
existence is cultural and biological transmission. It's thus apparent
meaningful, has an essence and is not mysterious. I do not claim that
this makes sense for anybody else, but I do claim that the "our" is wrong.
A third point is that describing people as indigenous people who
believed in a cosmos and coexisted with nature might be considered as a
western description that contributes to western discussions (this one
seems to be one). If I remember the stories told by David Graeber in
"The Dawn of Everything" correctly, other western descriptions are also
possible, as well as descriptions by people who do not identify as
western. On the other hand, the idea to live in peace with nature is
quite familiar in western cultures (and in sciences), including
corresponding theories of peace and nature. And there are theories of
the cosmos as well.
A fourth point is the interesting idea to use spirituality as a metaphor
for unattainable knowingness, since with considering spirituality and
unattainable knowingness as a words with meaning, it's necessary to
assume that you know what unattainable knowingness is. That was my
question in the first place: How do you resolve this problem? Same with
the cosmos: You need to know what the cosmos is and what it wants in
order to reconcile with the cosmos. But what if I do not want to live in
your cosmos? Or actually do not live in your cosmos? In my cosmos, for
instance, transcendence is a word for the difference of symbols and
their physical presence. We are thus not simply automats for sure (the
term has been well definied by Turing and certainly does not include
human beings) and consciousness is certainly not an operating system,
since opcodes and assembler commands are matched 1:1 - no difference
between symbols and physical presence, and thus no consciousness. I do
not follow data religion and do not beliefe in the information god.
And since you said that science rips things appart: If you take a look
at theories of wholeness and structure, you will see that this is not
true for every scientific theories. What scientists do not tell you is
eternal truth. The consequence is: You have to take part in the decision
of what is considered as truth. As I said: There is no truth unless you
make it.
But despite these discussion, we can probably agree that it is a good
idea not to use any vehicles with fuel powered engines (and so on ... ).
--
Liebe Grüße,
Christian Swertz
https://www.swertz.at
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