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Religion's Future or Lack of it

RestlessSoul

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
Tomef said:
‘What is truth’ and ‘what is the ultimate truth’ are different questions. Some things are true, some things are authentic and genuine, for example, and others are not. We can establish whether or not some statement is true in the sense of does it relate to an experience of what we call reality. But this notion of ‘ultimate truth’ doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a random fantasy idea. Ultimate truth about what? For it to make any sense, some sort of definition is needed, and that would vary from one person to the next. What is being described is not a quest for ‘ultimate truth’ but a failure to organise one’s mind in relation to meaningful questions.
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Why must you know exactly what you are searching for, before you have found it? With that approach, you’ll only ever find what you expect to find, and learn what you expect to learn. The frontiers of knowledge cannot advance with such an attitude. Especially if we insist on limiting truth to something we can define on our own, necessarily limited terms.
 
Tomef

Tomef

Well-Known Member
RestlessSoul said:
Why must you know exactly what you are searching for, before you have found it? With that approach, you’ll only ever find what you expect to find, and learn what you expect to learn. The frontiers of knowledge cannot advance with such an attitude. Especially if we insist on limiting truth to something we can define on our own, necessarily limited terms.
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You’re confusing this notion of ‘ultimate truth’ with something else.
 
Tomef

Tomef

Well-Known Member
mikkel_the_dane said:
And how do you know as true that you are speaking for a we: "... what we call reality."
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Meaning what each person calls it. Shorthand for humans as ‘we’, each person has their own conception of a given thing, more understandable than ‘what each individual thinks of as reality’, which would be unnecessarily loaded for this discussion.
 
RestlessSoul

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
Tomef said:
Nice dodge! But what do you mean when you say you are looking for the ‘ultimate truth’? The ultimate truth about what?
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What I mean is that there are questions science cannot reasonably ask, and philosophy cannot answer with conviction. But that is no reason not to go on asking them. And that there may be truths which cannot be apprehended by the intellect, which is limited, but only by the spirit, which is limitless.
 
Tomef

Tomef

Well-Known Member
RestlessSoul said:
What I mean is that there are questions science cannot reasonably ask, and philosophy cannot answer with conviction. But that is no reason not to go on asking them. And that there may be truths which cannot be apprehended by the intellect, which is limited, but only by the spirit, which is limitless.
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That’s not really a definition.
 
Tomef

Tomef

Well-Known Member
mikkel_the_dane said:
It could be the truth about objective reality in itself and not the human experince of it. But that is as much philosophy as it is religion.
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Well, yeah, then you narrow questions to be about particular things, like what is the ultimate truth about why some people don’t like marmite. It’s interesting to think about the ultimate nature of reality, but some notion like ‘the ultimate truth about everything’ doesn’t refer to anything known or unknown. The ultimate nature of dogs is a collection of attributes and interpretation of those attributes, and how we feel about those attributes, and so on. Nothing like that can be said to be ‘true’ in some over-arching sense, and it makes no difference what the scale is. Things can have definitions attached to them, but ‘ultimate truth’ isn’t a definition that can be fit to anything, truth never be ‘ultimate’ in the sense of infinitely fulfilling all subjective notions of truth about everything for everyone.
 
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mikkel_the_dane

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Tomef said:
Well, yeah, then you narrow questions about particular things, like what is the ultimate truth about why some people don’t like marmite. It’s interesting to think about the ultimate nature of reality, but some notion like ‘the ultimate truth about everything’ doesn’t refer to anything known or unknown. The ultimate nature of dogs is a collection of attributes and interpretation of those attributes, and how we feel about those attributes, and so on. Nothing like that can be said to be ‘true’ in some over-arching sense, and it makes no difference what the scale is. Things can have definitions attached to them, but ‘ultimate truth’ isn’t a definition that can be fit to anything, truth never be ‘ultimate’ .
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Yeah, as far as I can tell we are doing in effect cogntive relativism as for different cogntive schemata.
 
RestlessSoul

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
Tomef said:
That’s not really a definition.
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Obviously not, since by definition one cannot define what one does not yet know.

But I recognise the trap you are trying to set. Define something out of existence, then claim it does not, indeed cannot, exist. Be careful not to fall into your own trap.
 
mikkel_the_dane

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
RestlessSoul said:
Obviously not, since by definition one cannot define what one does not yet know.

But I recognise the trap you are trying to set. Define something out of existence, then claim it does not, indeed cannot, exist. Be careful not to fall into your own trap.
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The problem is, that it is not a fact that something, which is unknown, is the same, as it doesn't exist,
In effect it is not as such true that unknown is to not exist.
 
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danieldemol

danieldemol

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
I'm personally of those that hope orthodox versions of the Abrahamic religions decline.

I appreciate that @Augustus doesn’t believe that humans should be given the power to scientifically modify themselves to be less violent, but as one who has suffered from diagnosed paranoid delusions and been saved from it scientifically through the power of medicine I feel that as long as people only use science to eradicate demonstrably harmful differences and not to eliminate mere diversity humans will be much better of and feel that C. S Lewis's antiscientific polemics are to a degree unfounded.

The reason why is because beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there is no one beholder. So some people will modify themselves to be taller while other people modify themselves to be shorter, still others will be content with the way they are. But the main thing is that malignant personalities may someday be curable through science, and as far as I can tell - the latter is as it should be.
 
Tomef

Tomef

Well-Known Member
RestlessSoul said:
Obviously not, since by definition one cannot define what one does not yet know.

But I recognise the trap you are trying to set. Define something out of existence, then claim it does not, indeed cannot, exist. Be careful not to fall into your own trap.
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Thinking something through isn’t a trap. Putting it that way implies you have already decided your conclusion is true before you have understood the premises.
 
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