Seeing both sides

[Randall R. Young]

Did I say he was a creationist? I certainly don't have that impression. In my view, a "creationist" is someone who supports "special creation" of the species, as opposed to darwinian evolution.

[Chris OConnor]

I sure hope you guys join some of our book discussions on these very subjects.

[johnson1010]

Welcome to the forums, Harry!


I started this thread so as to draw debate about mainstream and creationism away from your introductory thread.

http://www.booktalk.org/whats-the-diffe ... 10717.html


Jump in and speak on it.

[Harry Marks]

so as to draw debate about mainstream and creationism away from your introductory thread

Hello, johnson1010, I am not sure if I did the quote right. Anyway, sounds like a find idea. I may extend discussion on the intro thread, but I will steer it away from debate on religion. Looks like an interesting topic.

Cheers,
Harry

[Harry Marks]

Randall,
Simply put, what is to be gained by calling the universe a "creation"? Suppose it isn't. Then who needs a creator?

Well, as you know from your former sojourn in amazonia, I am not exactly Tillichian. (How many sides, indeed? A good question. I once praised Bernanke for being a "two-handed" economist, but one needs all the hands of a Hindu deity, and then some, to have one for each perspective on religious questions). But I respect that his faith was tested in the fires of WWII.

I think the "calling" question is particularly apropos. In the church I grew up in, all the men called each other "Brother Mike" or "Brother Jay," and, IMHO, it made a difference. Sandel suggests we need to perceive our lives and characteristics as "given" and that as soon as we start buying and selling characteristics for our children, they lose that givenness. So even if we have no scientific reason to think the universe was created, it might be a good literary idea, so to speak, to call it creation. Vonnegut deals in such mysteries, and well, I think.

Anyway, I am taking johnson's hint and moving the religious talk over to "Mainstream vs. Creationism." Good to chat again.

[Randall R. Young]

Harry, did you ever see a movie called "Second Hand Lions"?



This little excerpt is a little out of context, but it nicely encapsulates your view, I think.

I'd say that utility is the only reason I believe anything by choice. Of course, not all my beliefs are so flexible! Most of these existence questions are not available for voluntary adjustments in this fashion. I would say they are simply judgments that come prepackaged and stamped "YOU BELIEVE THIS!" from the inner recesses of my brain/mind--much as I might hold two weights in my hands, and judge their relative mass. I can't "will" myself to change that judgement; It just is what it is, whether I like it or not.

But there is a residue of potential beliefs that are not so decided by my automatic judgements. I can, for instance, decide to believe in Newtonian mechanics for the purposes of making ruff calculations about forces & objects in my everyday world, or euclidean geometry, to help with my kid's math homework or plotting out the layout of my swimming pool. This is because these approximations are reasonably good ones, and they do not fall outside the range of plausibility. Consciously, I know they are false, via a reasoning process... But my unconscious mind hasn't stamped them as such, and so I can entertain them for present purposes quite easily.

So, it seems to me that it works like this:

There is this thing out there called "reality"; the set of things which are true.** I don't know what things are in this set, any more than anyone else. But some of the things which are proposed for me to believe fall into the category "Plausible, with likelihood 0 < P < 1." If this P value exceeds .5, then I guess I am judging it to be "Believed". But some things come with P set to 0, or "Negligible", so I can't use those. They seem to me to be lies, and I don't often believe in lies, even if it might have some utility for me. (I assure you, there are aspects of my life that would probably be going quite a bit smoother if I COULD believe in lies!) If P is high, like around .8 or so, I guess I can use those ideas as first approximations, good for "back of the envelope" calculations, as expedient. But they aren't lies, they are "truth approximations", in my view. I can rationalize them by noting that I never get EXACT answers about what is true, anyway, so I have to settle for good enough for present purposes. (Newton and Euclid are like that. Astrology, though, is an instance of something which isn't totally absurd, it just doesn't approximate reality as a calculational matter; It isn't useful.)

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**Note: This is not actually something which I know to be true, itself! It is more of a working assumption which seems true. However, there are many cases where I can see how I have been misled by my own mind/senses to believe things which have little or no correspondence with reality. And it may be that nothing is entirely true or false; but I need to assume that something is true, or else I am stuck doing nothing, for sure! (THAT much is certain!)

Aren't these posting windows way cooler than Amazon?

[Harry Marks]

Randall,

I had not seen the movie. But Duvall does that kind of stuff regularly. He "gets it", I guess because he is a recovered alcoholic. Your comments go on to talk about what you believe in an intellectual sense. Which says to me that you do not "get it." The question is "why is that story meaningful to me?" and not "is that story really, really true?" We don't really care whether Mortenson told only the strict truth in "Three Cups of Tea." The fact that he really did become a salesman for this cause and really did build, and cause to be built, a lot of schools in a benighted place, has a meaning that transcends the concern for 100% factuality. In somewhat the way you find Newtonian mechanics "useful" even if it is not "100% correct". That doesn't change the fact that stretching the truth is a character flaw (to which nearly every CEO has fallen victim, if rumors be correct, and lets face it, nearly every human being,) it just means that mythos resides in a different social space and works on different epistemologies, from science and logic and courtroom trial.

So yeah, you are understanding what I am saying, but I am not sure you grok it yet.

[Randall R. Young]

Do you have beliefs that you can turn on and off?
Are they intellectual, or foundational?
Can you freely adjust what you find plausible?
Can you believe that which you find implausible?
Can you believe what you find impossible?
Can you believe two contradictory things at once?
Can you believe what you don't believe?
Can you hold a 10 lb. weight in your left hand, nothing in your right, and believe the opposite?
Can you spend the next five minutes believing that God doesn't exist?

Can you implement Moore's Paradox?

[Harry Marks]

Do you have beliefs that you can turn on and off?

Randall, the image you want is Escher's staircase, or a paradox from Gestalt psychology. Look at the box as receding, and it is. Look at it as projecting, and it is. The mind forces certain coherences onto things, and you live with them, even though you know that a minute ago you saw the box the other way. It is okay. You haven't lost your reason.

Think about mythos literally, it will get your heart pumping and your palms sweaty. That's what the movies do all the time. Think about it intellectually, and you have a bunch of symbols and they show a deep emotional attachment to something. No need to deny either one. Think about David and Goliath. Without any "God guiding the stone," just a boy with courage who was delusional enough to believe he had been chosen. Who faced a man 8 feet tall and known for dispatching Judean heros without breaking a sweat. And he kept his cool and let the guy laugh, because as long as he didn't throw the spear, David had a chance. He was on a mission, like Joan of Arc many centuries later, and if he played it just right . . .
it would mean something for hundreds of generations to come, and a sculptor named Michelangelo would take it as the symbol of a humanist revolution.

Why fight it, Randall? Myths are as true as the news, just in a different way.

[Randall R. Young]

Myths are true in the same way that Moby Dick was white, and was the object of Ahab's obsession. They have internal consistency, perhaps, and a message. But can one reasonably maintain they are factually true?

Further, not all the messages (morals) of these myths seem to be equally true, even in the sense you seem to mean--at least, not once they have passed through the filter of human interpretation and prejudice: The "moral" of the Bible can be squished into fairly unpalatable boxes, such as when the antebellum slave owners would quote Bible verses to support their "morals".

If I were God, writing for the ages, writing for everyone alive, I'd have made some attempt to make my moral message as clear and "uninterpretable" as Euclid's Elements. It will forever elude me why God couldn't have written a more generally understandable treatise. Or, failing that, why He wouldn't issue periodic amendments to this basic handbook to update us all on how these items are to be applied to contemporary society. Why does it need to be translated and paraphrased by fallible humans (who all have agendas)? Why are there no "books of the year", a la the Encyclopedia Britannica?

(BTW, citing the news as being a model of truth leaves me somewhat baffled. Personally, I find news reportage to be oversimplified distortions of the truth, more often than not.)