Science and Religion reconciled thru S*
In reply to my friend, defending my claim...
Bill,
Actually, when re-reading your statement, "Katrina was an act of God", Are you one of those vengeful god guys?, just wondering.
Getting more so by the day. I am following Kant’s lead, as well as I understand it, in his moral argument for the existence of God: what it could possible mean, to Reason (as a faculty of knowledge), to predicate of the universe as a totality that there “is” “One” (the “Parmenidean instance”)? His answer to this is something I had never understood, and totally neglected, until now. Katrina has sealed a new deal, if you can follow that.
I’ve posted detailed argument for attaching “Act of God”, as a predicate, to “(the hurricane) Katrina”, as subject term, on my www.sidthomas.blogspot.com. A long read, but I’ve tried to keep it peppy. So anything outside the terms and scope of that argument, such as the kind of guys we are, is irrelevant TO THE OBJECTIVE SITUATION IF THE ARGUMENT HOLDS. Though not, of course, irrelevant to what we MAKE of the situation with such an argument holding in it. Which does go to the kind of guys we are. Which I now understand to be Kant’s point. “We” get to buy and sell God-use products like snifters, according to our own judgment. But look: the price tag on this one is pretty high (metaphysical – cf. John Calvin).
If the increase in hurricane activity is due to global warming and global warming is a result of human's ignorance (1), then wouldn't God be connect to human's ignorance and not to their knowledge? (2)
….
….
1 –
I’ve thought (perhaps mistakenly, I’ll admit) that THIS causal link was a “textualists” metaphysical conceit – something we can see with our new technology, crunching numbers and extrapolating events, therefore a situation we can use our new technology to fix, like heart transplants. Long-term global warming/cooling cycles have occurred before. I am always suspicious of schemes based on new science that will intervene with natural planetary when a. they will cost a lot of money; b. probably get Halliburtoned in execution; c. emerging as proposals without a karmic retributive context now built into the objective historical situation by the sinfulness of neocon Republicans and whoever have accommodated their particular way of being, which I hold to be the chief causal dynamic factor in the psycho/physical decimation of America.
This is not to say that the nation is not under a totality mandate to bring its entire operation under control, as it relates to planetary processes. The possibility of that, as I think is self-evident, means 1. bringing business (and the philosophy of the relation of state to corporations: should they be taxed?) under control of a planned economy, a la Marx (Stalin: United States of Soviet Union – like that?); 2. bringing foreign policy under control of a mass media exercising responsibility to the public for complete, unfineigaled, real-time, behind the scenes, out in the open presentation of alternatives, presented for discussion in a timely manner before ANY big unalterable, irreversible decisions affecting all citizens are made by the U.S. government; 3. A ritual of purification, like the lynchings ordered by West Texas Judge Roy Bean for horse thieves and others deserving it, of which Katrina is a token (for me).
*****
Note on Metaphysics and Sign-use. a. belief v. commitment; b. science v. religion; c. universal v. particular (as causes): d. text v. token
a. Commitment is a mental act regarding use of signs distinct from and not entailed by rational cognition. What is objectively factual, given through true textual sign-use, can be understood and surveyed, as if ‘turned’ under alternative descriptions, independently of haw a person chooses to relate to the situation as an individual. This is the metaphysical space of free will, existential choice, karma, each person’s responsibility ‘to be’. It’s denial is false consciousness (J.P.Sartre: ‘the devil* made me do it..” -- *genes, social order, “God!”, etc.). Commitment carries with it responsibility for the way we are.
b. Science goes with belief. It arrives at truth through causes. If A (given instance of an event, e.g., Katrina) is linked to B (as regular effect of antecedent causes “continguous in space and time” (Hume), then (rational) belief in A. will bring (rational) belief in B, and it be said that “A explains B.” The use of “explanation” has passed to science from religion and theology -- where it once held sway with “God” – due to lack of predictive value in regard to the latter; and to logical analysis of what the notion of an “explanation” is, for us humans, in dealing with common, natural processes concerning the former. “Science”, as rationally organized empirical knowledge, describes, does not dictate, what external, necessarily shared reality is. It is self- correcting by S* looped through the community’s perceptions and processes.
Because its language is used for the totality of factual discourse, it contains no terms for the particularities of being: actual names. Name-tokens are required wherever actual text is applied. As textual formula “(x)(Ax implies Bx)” – analyzed logical content of “All A is B”, or “As are B’s” – requires a “This (Katrina) is a B (weather-cycle, global-warming caused event) to get applied to reality. Science is all text unless and until somebody adds the tokens to apply it. They are the human contribution to “knowledge”. And, as already noted, their application WHEN THE TOKEN IS INSISTED UPON carries commitment. It is determined not just by belief but commitment. The metaphysics is in what things are called, and this cannot be pre-determined by the person. Adam was given the power to name. The connection between God (religion), man and nature is through the token. The connection between science, man and nature is through the text (of Sign-use).
c. “Why me, Lord?” -- Job’s question – takes on a new significance. The distinction between text and token, universal and particular, in the use of signs, can be used to answer it.
Is this question the result of the way Job uses signs? – as if it would go away if he stopped calling on God? – as experts and friends advised; to spare himself and them. .
Reflection: In the particular instance of sign-use, memory is a mediating causal factor. Are we responsible for what we do, or don’t, remember?
If “Why me?” is applied to the scale of particularity relevant to human actions, it’s external situation is determined by causal processes, but it’s use loops expectation of an answer through memory- mediation, as if something was taking note of one’s inner continuity. That little touch of egoism always seemed to me to argue against the attitude of looking for causes of particular events. The essence of superstition: our inner, subjective impulses act in concert with external, occult controlling forces. On this assumption, “God” is the occultist’s final cause. Which empirical science had to beat back, to claim dry land for human consciousness. But that is a misuse of “God” if (as I hold) it stands for the completing totality. It disallows the full use of reason (science) in ark building.
HOWEVER, and this is big …
There are psychic powers (imho), and psychically gifted people who are in simpatico with them at different times, situations, dynamics – more than I even ever want to think of grasping… totally out of my league. By them I only hope to be ignored.
WHAT IF … America was possessed, as even the psychologist Carl Jung came to say of Germany under Hitler? – by those who knew then, and can use more adeptly now, to bring it down to the level of a psychotic default-position military armed camp?
THEN … ONLY some event of the scale of magnitude of hurricane Katrina has the authority, in its manifestation, to deliver a rebuke equal to what America deserves for Iraq. The voice of reason, or “reality”, for instance, is trumped by ‘idealism’. (see column of NY Times columnist David Brooks, pre-Kat,) Except when it isn’t. (see post-Kat. columns of Brooks.) Some guy ringing up 9/11 in Detroit claiming he’s Anu from the planet Nibiru, “the One you lulus”, he called us, “call ‘God’. I have an announcement…” – just not gonna cut it. It took a (Fludd?)
UNLESS ….Katrina, the hurricane, is used under this predicate, “act of God”, it will have particular effects on the grammar of subsequent uses of “God” for the group. 1. It (“God”) will be USED ANYWAY, AT A LOWER, SPLIT-OFF LEVEL (applied to the disaster without seeing it as punishment), ONE NATION, ONE GOD, ONE PROCESS, TWO DISASTERS. 2. … and (second consequence) it will be used to align those fighting insurgents in Iraq, with those providing relief, aid, and law enforcement for New Orleans and the Golf Coast. Who would, or will deny that either or both are on God’s side? (( Check square X for (OTHER) – check square Y if prepared to answer “What, then?”))
THUS …. The consequences will be to extend further the same twisted processes for which America has just been severely punished?
****/
2.
Because of the added dimension to reality made by commitment, it is impossible for knowledge of explanations through science, alone, to complete the human relation to it. Application of commitment-language (as if it were a part of ‘our’ inner metaphysical history) seeks non-universal confirmations – particularities of the instant case that mark it as consonantly related (as if to an external intentionality).
In particular, knowledge of the global warming/ weather patterns etc., brought to bear on this hurricane would ignore: its timing, psychological context, strange behavior,
archetypal symbolic clarity. This includes the terrifying, sudden eye-wall deepening in “the Gulf”, “powering up and taking aim”. It is O.K, not to be assailed, to point out that all this is perfectly explicable by the prevailing high-low pressure, hot-cold temperature, straight or swirling wind currents, etc.. That is the descriptive causal context. But this is not the level of sign-use to which commitment is anchored. For that, the particularities come in marking a deeper historical-causal connection.
The claim that events are explained ONLY under universal causal law, if extended to the totality of what exists, is itself a metaphysical position. One that goes beyond accepting science as the only (or best) GUIDE to realty, to scientISM: the view that only what is subsumed under true scientific text IS reality. If commitment through the tokens carrying text becomes part of the reality, fed-back (re-looped, by a particular self-monitoring process) through and as a result of communication, scientISM can become an obstacle to full, complete knowledge, if it is made a metaphysical dogma (as opposed to defended by philosophical argument)
---cutting to the chase in replying to your last comment: (not sure I see fully, but..)
The way of being manifested by the neo-con Bush/Republican party is self-contradictory, in the particular way that creates a vortex of negativity around itself. It is a way of being has ingratiated itself into the grammar of national discourse, thus corrupting the mentality of whoever would relate to America in old ideal terms. The particular form of self-contradiction is use of “God” for political purposes – preempting the token of the Spirit that would move human free will the opposite way than they have taken. Their inversion, itself tokened by the prominence of homosexuals everywhere – Freud called them “inverts” – is the eye of the hurricane. As above, so below.
(This by no means answers all the questions you raised. But it’s a start.)
-Sid
Bill,
Actually, when re-reading your statement, "Katrina was an act of God", Are you one of those vengeful god guys?, just wondering.
Getting more so by the day. I am following Kant’s lead, as well as I understand it, in his moral argument for the existence of God: what it could possible mean, to Reason (as a faculty of knowledge), to predicate of the universe as a totality that there “is” “One” (the “Parmenidean instance”)? His answer to this is something I had never understood, and totally neglected, until now. Katrina has sealed a new deal, if you can follow that.
I’ve posted detailed argument for attaching “Act of God”, as a predicate, to “(the hurricane) Katrina”, as subject term, on my www.sidthomas.blogspot.com. A long read, but I’ve tried to keep it peppy. So anything outside the terms and scope of that argument, such as the kind of guys we are, is irrelevant TO THE OBJECTIVE SITUATION IF THE ARGUMENT HOLDS. Though not, of course, irrelevant to what we MAKE of the situation with such an argument holding in it. Which does go to the kind of guys we are. Which I now understand to be Kant’s point. “We” get to buy and sell God-use products like snifters, according to our own judgment. But look: the price tag on this one is pretty high (metaphysical – cf. John Calvin).
If the increase in hurricane activity is due to global warming and global warming is a result of human's ignorance (1), then wouldn't God be connect to human's ignorance and not to their knowledge? (2)
….
….
1 –
I’ve thought (perhaps mistakenly, I’ll admit) that THIS causal link was a “textualists” metaphysical conceit – something we can see with our new technology, crunching numbers and extrapolating events, therefore a situation we can use our new technology to fix, like heart transplants. Long-term global warming/cooling cycles have occurred before. I am always suspicious of schemes based on new science that will intervene with natural planetary when a. they will cost a lot of money; b. probably get Halliburtoned in execution; c. emerging as proposals without a karmic retributive context now built into the objective historical situation by the sinfulness of neocon Republicans and whoever have accommodated their particular way of being, which I hold to be the chief causal dynamic factor in the psycho/physical decimation of America.
This is not to say that the nation is not under a totality mandate to bring its entire operation under control, as it relates to planetary processes. The possibility of that, as I think is self-evident, means 1. bringing business (and the philosophy of the relation of state to corporations: should they be taxed?) under control of a planned economy, a la Marx (Stalin: United States of Soviet Union – like that?); 2. bringing foreign policy under control of a mass media exercising responsibility to the public for complete, unfineigaled, real-time, behind the scenes, out in the open presentation of alternatives, presented for discussion in a timely manner before ANY big unalterable, irreversible decisions affecting all citizens are made by the U.S. government; 3. A ritual of purification, like the lynchings ordered by West Texas Judge Roy Bean for horse thieves and others deserving it, of which Katrina is a token (for me).
*****
Note on Metaphysics and Sign-use. a. belief v. commitment; b. science v. religion; c. universal v. particular (as causes): d. text v. token
a. Commitment is a mental act regarding use of signs distinct from and not entailed by rational cognition. What is objectively factual, given through true textual sign-use, can be understood and surveyed, as if ‘turned’ under alternative descriptions, independently of haw a person chooses to relate to the situation as an individual. This is the metaphysical space of free will, existential choice, karma, each person’s responsibility ‘to be’. It’s denial is false consciousness (J.P.Sartre: ‘the devil* made me do it..” -- *genes, social order, “God!”, etc.). Commitment carries with it responsibility for the way we are.
b. Science goes with belief. It arrives at truth through causes. If A (given instance of an event, e.g., Katrina) is linked to B (as regular effect of antecedent causes “continguous in space and time” (Hume), then (rational) belief in A. will bring (rational) belief in B, and it be said that “A explains B.” The use of “explanation” has passed to science from religion and theology -- where it once held sway with “God” – due to lack of predictive value in regard to the latter; and to logical analysis of what the notion of an “explanation” is, for us humans, in dealing with common, natural processes concerning the former. “Science”, as rationally organized empirical knowledge, describes, does not dictate, what external, necessarily shared reality is. It is self- correcting by S* looped through the community’s perceptions and processes.
Because its language is used for the totality of factual discourse, it contains no terms for the particularities of being: actual names. Name-tokens are required wherever actual text is applied. As textual formula “(x)(Ax implies Bx)” – analyzed logical content of “All A is B”, or “As are B’s” – requires a “This (Katrina) is a B (weather-cycle, global-warming caused event) to get applied to reality. Science is all text unless and until somebody adds the tokens to apply it. They are the human contribution to “knowledge”. And, as already noted, their application WHEN THE TOKEN IS INSISTED UPON carries commitment. It is determined not just by belief but commitment. The metaphysics is in what things are called, and this cannot be pre-determined by the person. Adam was given the power to name. The connection between God (religion), man and nature is through the token. The connection between science, man and nature is through the text (of Sign-use).
c. “Why me, Lord?” -- Job’s question – takes on a new significance. The distinction between text and token, universal and particular, in the use of signs, can be used to answer it.
Is this question the result of the way Job uses signs? – as if it would go away if he stopped calling on God? – as experts and friends advised; to spare himself and them. .
Reflection: In the particular instance of sign-use, memory is a mediating causal factor. Are we responsible for what we do, or don’t, remember?
If “Why me?” is applied to the scale of particularity relevant to human actions, it’s external situation is determined by causal processes, but it’s use loops expectation of an answer through memory- mediation, as if something was taking note of one’s inner continuity. That little touch of egoism always seemed to me to argue against the attitude of looking for causes of particular events. The essence of superstition: our inner, subjective impulses act in concert with external, occult controlling forces. On this assumption, “God” is the occultist’s final cause. Which empirical science had to beat back, to claim dry land for human consciousness. But that is a misuse of “God” if (as I hold) it stands for the completing totality. It disallows the full use of reason (science) in ark building.
HOWEVER, and this is big …
There are psychic powers (imho), and psychically gifted people who are in simpatico with them at different times, situations, dynamics – more than I even ever want to think of grasping… totally out of my league. By them I only hope to be ignored.
WHAT IF … America was possessed, as even the psychologist Carl Jung came to say of Germany under Hitler? – by those who knew then, and can use more adeptly now, to bring it down to the level of a psychotic default-position military armed camp?
THEN … ONLY some event of the scale of magnitude of hurricane Katrina has the authority, in its manifestation, to deliver a rebuke equal to what America deserves for Iraq. The voice of reason, or “reality”, for instance, is trumped by ‘idealism’. (see column of NY Times columnist David Brooks, pre-Kat,) Except when it isn’t. (see post-Kat. columns of Brooks.) Some guy ringing up 9/11 in Detroit claiming he’s Anu from the planet Nibiru, “the One you lulus”, he called us, “call ‘God’. I have an announcement…” – just not gonna cut it. It took a (Fludd?)
UNLESS ….Katrina, the hurricane, is used under this predicate, “act of God”, it will have particular effects on the grammar of subsequent uses of “God” for the group. 1. It (“God”) will be USED ANYWAY, AT A LOWER, SPLIT-OFF LEVEL (applied to the disaster without seeing it as punishment), ONE NATION, ONE GOD, ONE PROCESS, TWO DISASTERS. 2. … and (second consequence) it will be used to align those fighting insurgents in Iraq, with those providing relief, aid, and law enforcement for New Orleans and the Golf Coast. Who would, or will deny that either or both are on God’s side? (( Check square X for (OTHER) – check square Y if prepared to answer “What, then?”))
THUS …. The consequences will be to extend further the same twisted processes for which America has just been severely punished?
****/
2.
Because of the added dimension to reality made by commitment, it is impossible for knowledge of explanations through science, alone, to complete the human relation to it. Application of commitment-language (as if it were a part of ‘our’ inner metaphysical history) seeks non-universal confirmations – particularities of the instant case that mark it as consonantly related (as if to an external intentionality).
In particular, knowledge of the global warming/ weather patterns etc., brought to bear on this hurricane would ignore: its timing, psychological context, strange behavior,
archetypal symbolic clarity. This includes the terrifying, sudden eye-wall deepening in “the Gulf”, “powering up and taking aim”. It is O.K, not to be assailed, to point out that all this is perfectly explicable by the prevailing high-low pressure, hot-cold temperature, straight or swirling wind currents, etc.. That is the descriptive causal context. But this is not the level of sign-use to which commitment is anchored. For that, the particularities come in marking a deeper historical-causal connection.
The claim that events are explained ONLY under universal causal law, if extended to the totality of what exists, is itself a metaphysical position. One that goes beyond accepting science as the only (or best) GUIDE to realty, to scientISM: the view that only what is subsumed under true scientific text IS reality. If commitment through the tokens carrying text becomes part of the reality, fed-back (re-looped, by a particular self-monitoring process) through and as a result of communication, scientISM can become an obstacle to full, complete knowledge, if it is made a metaphysical dogma (as opposed to defended by philosophical argument)
---cutting to the chase in replying to your last comment: (not sure I see fully, but..)
The way of being manifested by the neo-con Bush/Republican party is self-contradictory, in the particular way that creates a vortex of negativity around itself. It is a way of being has ingratiated itself into the grammar of national discourse, thus corrupting the mentality of whoever would relate to America in old ideal terms. The particular form of self-contradiction is use of “God” for political purposes – preempting the token of the Spirit that would move human free will the opposite way than they have taken. Their inversion, itself tokened by the prominence of homosexuals everywhere – Freud called them “inverts” – is the eye of the hurricane. As above, so below.
(This by no means answers all the questions you raised. But it’s a start.)
-Sid
posted by Sid Thomas | 11:24 PM
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