Jesus Criticized Handwashing! He´s "Anti-Science"! Anachronism and Other Fallacies

Avatar Lark62 • 2 days ago Humans have lived on this planet for approximately 200,000 years. Human ancestors go back approximately 2,000,000 years. The Earth is approximately 4,560,000,000 years old. This means the Earth coalesced, oceans formed, tectonic forces moved continents and created mountains and so forth for 4,559,800,000 years without the presence of humans to wonder about the "meaning" of it all. The universe existed just fine for 13,999,800,000 without humans to declare it has a "purpose." 4 • Reply • Share › Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Lark62 • a day ago That´s not actually the issue here. The question is, do you understand that science only exists because people cared enough to know that Jesus taught about a lawful God, who created a lawful Universe, and the purpose of human beings is to follow 2 Commandments, including no 2, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It was the approximations of Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity that managed to change monastic schools into Universities, and organize the resources to inspire the likes of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, etc. in science, which wasn´t where the Christianization of ancient Greek philosophy stopped. Descartes and Newton exemplified how their access to the church-monastic-University societal network of community resources made their philosophical forms of efforts possible. As for the human condition, human rights and sustainability are the current objectives of those able to clear their heads. Growing wistful about negating the Universe´s purpose is something a psychosocial analysis could illuminate well. What exactly is distracting from the threats driving consumerized Western and globalized humans to the nihilistic reductionistic focus about a "purposeless Universe", as far as your aware, do you think? Ever heard of the profiteering business model, or right wing propaganda intended to indoctrinate the population? • Edit • Reply • Share › Avatar Lark62 greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 13 hours ago Jesus - the all powerful deity that helped create microbes - mocked people for washing their hands. Pro science he was not. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "treat others as you would like to be treated" are found in every human culture. Jesus was not original. And given the track record of his followers - from the crusades, to the inquisition, to genocide by conquistador, right up to the treatment of LGBT today - christians as a group have NEVER showed even basic kindness, much less love. The legacy of Jesus was centuries of official suppression of science. Gallileo!? That's your example!? He avoided torture by the christians only by "recanting" his conclusion that the earth orbits the sun and even then spent the rest of his life in house arrest. The fact that most of the European scientists at that time were christian is about as meaningful as saying most of the European scientists were European. Science continued despite christianity not because of it. Human rights are being defended by those "ebil woke libruls" not by christians. It is christians who en masse condemn anti-racism initiatives. it is christians who fight for the right to discriminate against LGBT and deny them civil rights. It is christians who fight against accurate science and accurate history in public schools. Do not accuse atheists of nihilism. Ever heard of the profiteering business model, or right wing propaganda intended to indoctrinate the population? Under Trump, that was daily. 2 • Reply • Share › Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Lark62 • 10 hours ago • edited "Mocked...for washing their hands. Pro-science he was not" You´re a little anachronistic, there. In fact, ideologically so. Truth, like much that is important in modern University scholarship and science included, is a philosophical exercise that uses different methodologies. Yes, science fans have tried to put it on a pedestal, but just can´t escape Icarus´ metaphorical fate and the implications of reality. Truth is well-served by the philosophical principles of coherence and correspondence. Just as you miss the psychospiritual and cultural assumptions of the orthodox handwashers and project anachronistically modern scientific hygiene, Jesus was working according to a different logical scheme. He overwhelmingly asserts a modern, science-friendly cause-effect viewpoint that unsurprisingly can raise interpretive issues for the judgmentally inclined. Yet, his parables of building a house on rock, not sand and significant numbers of others are not even that subject to easy misinterpretation. Sorry. You dig your own hole. The historical sociological evidence then is no less clear. Monastic schools reflected the successful understanding of psychospiritual practice by a subgroup of Christians, and that was conducive to valuing knowledge by their own leading subgroup. By the proto-scientific Bishop R Grosseteste and scholarship of Thomas of Aquinas, translation had been advanced, Universities set up, and Aristotle´s limiting assumptions eliminated with reference to the omnipotent lawfulness of the Christian God. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" has its foundations in love and good that can naturally exist piecemeal among people, indeed. But you confuse existence with psychosocial forces that anchor and with prevailing tendencies. Julius Caesar had some good ideas or intentions as he was asserting dictatorship, and poof. Was it love that killed him with how many stab wounds? The Gracchus Bros and Spartacus are other instructive lessons, as was Alexander the Great, who you don´t seem much up on. Jesus, emerging from his heritage, linked the Golden Rule with love and God´s Commandments, in his very key life story, mission, healing, miracles, and message, and Resurrection. He is a combined phenomenon linked to God the Creator, no less. You don´t quite get scholarly integrity in your self-serving stereotyping of Christianity. Not quite clear about all the key people like Anthony of the Desert up to Francis of Assisi, over to Martin Luther and George Fox, besides the role of University scholarship? No less comes Jefferson and FDR and Eleanor´s UN human rights, and Gandhi as an innovative pioneer unaware of his own example in the Judeo-Christian tradition that scholars have identified with Elijah, up to T Clarkson´s seeking Quakers to pioneer modern social movements in his anti-slavery activism. Your blaming religion reveals your lack of scholarship. Brutal tyranny is essentially universal from China to India to Central America, and reflects human bio-psychosocial inclinations. Chimpanzees can attack and kill neighboring troops simply because they have evolved the capacity to do it. Thus, Christians who don´t follow Jesus´ integrity are acting on their human impulses. Christians ability to overcome those tendencies is what accounts for Clark and the Quakers´, T Jefferson´s, and FDR, Eleanor, Gandhi, and Rev MLK´s kinds of accomplishments that you bad cherry pick out of your sights. I didn´t just mention Galileo, dear soul, to your myopia. Try figuring in the others and getting at a little more detail. Galileo´s details don´t make him out an angel. Kepler himself, by contrast, benefited from Luther´s acts and being supported and had the insight to refuse an invitation to work with G man in Italy. Your ignoring the necessary and sufficient details from monastic schools to proto-scientists like R Grosseteste and scholars like Thomas of Aquinas is simply a crude lack of literacy and stereotyping. Your definition of modern Christians is similarly crude. Not quite clear that "liberals" like Obama are not Muslim? Liberal Christians and their derived lapsing associates welcome Muslims, no less, where they are coming up. "...nihilism" Why, because it gives you a headache to look up a relevant term, much less reflect introspectively, an unorthodox methodology to a scientific materialist? Yes, tRump. And the necessary and sufficient social analysis reveals that your stereotypes also interfered with your ability to reason socially. Fundamentalists reflect the reality projected by profiteers, not Jesus Christ and the resurgent integrity that authentically reflects JC´s loving integrity. You miss the basics because your understanding is pop specious, not scholarly and empirical. Sorry, but you are hardly seeing the puppets pulling your own strings, in your own mythologies. • Edit • Reply • Share › Avatar Lark62 greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 9 hours ago LoL. How can the behavior of an eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful deity be “anachronistic"? How is that even possible? Jesus as God Almighty created disease causing microbes. And he was too much of an as swipe to tell his followers to wash their hands. 1 • Reply • Share › − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Lark62 • 6 minutes ago • edited God isn´t anachronistic. Your ideas and unexamined assumptions are. Philosophically, you are falsely equating, and in fact confusing, the eternal omnipotent, omniscient God with his temporal Creation, and the philosophical framework and question of their interrelationship. Your assertion of "Jesus as God Almighty" is an apparent source of the problem. A good question to add with authenticity is, "Who was Jesus, really?" You clearly don´t know the signficance of Jesus´ teaching, "Humankind doesn´t live by bread alone." Pop music is a fun debunking of various fallacies, whether your scientific materialism or related ones. Rock stars normally don´t get past their sell-out phase, but even so, greats like Sting with The Police have come up with the classic modernized rock Christian spirituality of "Secret Journey" and "Invisible Sun." You obsess about the modern insight of medical scientific hygiene oblivious to its foundations, and you are no less uncomprehending of the historical context of Jesus addressing the unpsychological, unspiritual legalistic obsession of the religious leaders. The answer about Jesus is amazing, and ineluctably so special that it is indeed irresistibly and intimately connected to the Divine loving parental transcendental Entity. However, Levels of Analysis and Explanation are key to understanding things clearly since the invention of modern Universities by Christians like Thomas of Aquinas and proto-scientist R Grosseteste. The complexity of phenomena has been accompanied by the complexity of knowledge development. It is fundamental to understand to basics: University-based knowledge is philosophical in nature, including "almighty science." Second, it is all subject to empirical and methodological distinctions from the concrete to the abstract, from experimentation to introspection. As for Jesus, his role clearly exceeds your anachronistic fallacies obsessed with the medical scientific interpretation of handwashing that exposes your lack of functional literacy in the very psychosocial and cultural foundations of University-based society itself, of which science is a subset. No Jesus, no monastic schools, no modern Universities. Are you aware of how the Muslim Golden Age ended? Centralized learning centers patronized by centralized power figures gave way in the face of political infighting. They became subject to higher forces, historical and otherwise in the layers of Levels of Analysis and Explanation. Western European Christians had a sufficiently complex society layered among monastic schools, a powerful, but vulnerable church hierarchy, and political authorities that were diverse and principled enough to develop Universities. They were also decentralized enough to allow the German principalities to support Luther, followed by Great Britain, with University centers already in place from Bologna and Padua to Paris to Oxford and Cambridge, not to forget Salamanca and Coimbra. You raise two questions, which have the appearance of the necessary method to pursue truth, through philosophy´s various methods including "science," i.e. scientific philosophy. Asking the questions is, however, not sufficient. Your intention becomes rhetorical as your own assumptions prove dictated by your own presumptions of assumptions. Firstly, my embracing the inescapable truth began after being raised an atheist humanist. I immersed myself in the simple tools of modern education, and began slowly protesting social and ecological injustice. I also paid attention to my feelings of angst and desire to be happy, healthy, and wise. Financially secure would be nice. What we observe is that we are in a modern society with a history. I pursued an interfaith spiritual path through the starting anchors of Unitarian Universalism´s advocacy of individual "spiritual paths," and scholar Huston Smith´s description of the Tao in his great book on The World´s Religions. My college exploration took me through the evolution of speech and symbolic behavior in liberal arts Biological Anthropology. The rest of my biography so far are richly informative. We humans are not the Almighty Deity, and it is our historical development that we are experiencing, following biological evolution after Big Bang hypothesized astrophysical cosmological evolution. The history of science has only been artificially separated from religion, as its attempt at mechanicism and objectification has gone to many people´s heads. I realized that my spiritual interests are a natural restoration to what Descartes began to formally separate, to the historical objections of Pascal, no less. I have been re-sanctifying what has been desacralized, artificially and historically, to be clear. Some of my earliest insights reflected the meaning of therapeutic psychology, a la Freud, Jung, and so on. Love heals, although many professionals have stayed away from the word "love" it appears. I began tracing the historical roots more precisely in my masters in International RElations. Universities are key, as are social movements. I was intrigued by the pairing of Francis of Assisi, who died as Thomas of Aquinas was born. Assisi´s proto-type of social movements proceeded through Luther´s courageous and insightful acts leading to T Clarkson´s young college grad fire to end slavery, for which he sought out the largely amazing Quaker-Friends. That was the 1780s. The Quaker-Friends´ quite amazing reputation for integrity began with the amazing 17th century story of George Fox, a great little-known story from the era of Descartes, Newton, Locke, and so on. And so, we have the amazing University-based tools in Jesus´ very legacy that relate to him in terms of integrity, hypocrisy, history, and philosophical interpretation. Jesus´ 2 Commandments for Moses and God include No 2, "Love thy neighbor as thyself, as Jesus loved others." However, Jesus also taught the need for spiritual practice, a psychophysiological and metaphysical process. Freud represents a modern breakthrough from his medical and neurological orientation to the psychological. Talk therapy is not about neurochemicals primarily, but shows how neurochemicals can be affected by symbolic human communication. That communication is individualized and in turn can begin to undo chemical imbalances. "Mind over matter." Freud´s key insights weren´t the fraudulent "Oedipal complex," but his "Seduction Theory of child abuse", which effects were ameliorated by the talk therapy, including aspects of psychoanalysis, achieving two primary results: 1. abreaction emotional reconnection and 2. catharsis. Jung and others went beyond Freud and on alternative pathways to reveal human complexity, with Jung unequivocally pursuing the anthropological foundations of spiritual-religious experience not least of all with his concept of the Higher Self based on the Imago Dei, the loving, effective Christ the Son as God the parent´s image on Earth. And in temporal history. Thus, Jesus taught love. It took Christians time, effort, astuteness, and blood, sweat, and tears to develop monastic schools into Universities that led to the Reformation, Science, the Enlightenment, Jefferson et al´s Civil Rights, and FDR´s and Eleanor´s UN human rights, Gandhi´s and Kasturbai´s examples of interfaith Christian practice, and Rev MLK´s and Fannie Lou Hamer´s own examples of same. Jesus emerged from his temporal heritage from a spiritual-religious experiential process that began before Abraham, but gains historical clarity with his prophetic experience. That led to Joseph, Moses´ watershed of the Top Ten Commandments, down through David to Elijah to Isaiah et al to Jesus. Jesus´ teachings weren´t simplistically, "God rules. Now suffer." He taught, "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven (where? within and among you)," "Clean the cup on the inside where there is wickedness," go and learn...," and "Do good, even if it means breaking unjust rules." These are the human duties in spiritual practice and the seeking of personal growth in God, knowing and loving God´s love. The traditional understandings need to be studied. Anthony of the Desert was a key historical Christian and also much ignored. The Father of Christian monks, he got that historical reputation through his own psychospiritual growth process resulting after much time, 33 years in his case, in what they began to call theosis, or divinization. Anthony suffered cyclically, and emerged rejuvenated, tranquil, and wiser than ever. He had a cool transcendental dream, no less. Technically, we just need to ask, "How is the eternal transcendental God´s relationship to temporal reality possible?" Then philosophy involves researching and reflecting. Empiricism has been overly associated with "science," or the "social sciences." However, it is that as empirical philosophy that supplements all modern disciplines. Scientific philosophy as "science" has given us such insights as wave mechanics as Einstein´s mass-energy equivalence has informed the new breakthrough field of Quantum mechanics. As mechanistic processes go, wave mechanics captures matter´s nature energetically, and corresponds to human rhythmic experience, key notions to shamanic and spiritual experience. The Buddha´s focus on meditative breath, among others, aligns with Jesus´ teachings about prayer and prayerful retreats into nature. It is a process of our alignment with God´s nature, and God´s will. Our study also contributes to, say, understanding why Einstein could have been informed about Wilhelm Reich´s breakthrough treatment of a schizophrenic with breathing. Reich wrote about it in 1933. In 1930, Einstein´s son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Why don´t we hear at least that Reich took a shot at working with Einstein´s son? In Joseph Campbell´s work decades later, he referred to medical work that correlates "schizophrenia" and other related "mental illness" with a precondition for shamanic training and traditions. Jesus´ prophetic heritage is supershamanic, and Jesus´ role super-prophetic. Buddha´s too, and Gandhi´s as well, most obviously.

The Limits of Math and Science: A Look at Einstein, Reich, and Jung

So, tell us about "the limits of mathematics and science". Thanks in advance. •

− greenpeaceRdale1844coop eno ard • a few seconds from now You mean besides what I´ve mentioned already, actually. You´re welcome for that. In fact, my points stand. Both math and science are cognitive tools following logical formats being used by humans. That is, they are both philosophical in nature, meaning they refer to mathematical philosophy and scientific philosophy. As forms of philosophy, they are part of an epistemological spectrum. Thus, Einstein´s enormous accomplishments weren´t achieved in an atom smasher. He was working in a patent office. He was making advances in scientific philosophy through pure scientific philosophical activity. Meanwhile, one of his sons was diagnosed with schizophrenia, around 1930. His physics philosophizing didn´t help his son much, no matter how fundamental the principle is.. One of Freud´s diverse former students diverging from his orthodoxy, Wlihelm Reich, however, published in 1933 his successful therapeutic work with a schizophrenic. Reich didn´t develop his approach with math, but did use his natural science medical training in recognizing the interrelatedness of his extension into psychosomatic muscular tension and breathing. However, he ignored the issues of social sensibilities, giving massages to disrobed patients in his vegetotherapy and equating his bio-orgone energy to God. Carl Jung had already visited Africa and developed ideas around the Collective Unconscious, along with ideas about the Higher Self and the Imago Dei in relation to Jesus Christ. The Jewish geniuses often failed to acknowledge Jesus altogether. Not math, not science, but a very empirical issue. As Heinrich Rickert points out, science tries to generalize from individual cases. Human historical activity produces individualized phenomena and concepts, including the very circumstances of the History of Science (i.e. scientific philosophy). That accounts for Einstein´s niche. His work is not considered Quantum mechanics, but "old quantum theory" or semi-classical approximations. Those are more examples of philosophical distinctions in "science" itself. The Big Bang theory was first developed by a Catholic who noticed nebula distance data before Hubble´s red shift data. Einstein had stuck with the "Static Universe" hypothesis, not grasping the full weight of Lemaitre´s critique of the "eternal past." Einstein had developed his cosmological constant, and after Hubble´s red-shift etc corroborative evidence, got upset that he had been wrong. Those are the historical etc philosophical details of science itself. Not math, not "science." Wilhelm Reich´s healing a schizophrenic didn´t help Einstein´s boy even though they happened contemporaneously, because of human psychosocial relations issues. Wilhelm Reich´s reputation got crazier, no less, one of those issues. Not math, not science. As for the abiogenesis issue following your post, science itself is predicated on Christians develping it historically to investigate God´s lawful physical Creation. Life is squeezed between chemical processes and biological emergence. The same holds for physics becoming chemistry, and pre-human biology becoming symbolic psychology and anthropology. It´s called "emergentism," another philosophical development that applies to scientific, social scientific, and the rest of the disciplines, i.e. epistemologies. Including the philosophy of religion, metaphysics. enoch arden greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 5 hours ago • edited The Big Bang theory was first developed by a Catholic who noticed nebula distance data before Hubble´s red shift data. This is a popular Catholic lie. The theoretical concept of the expanding universe was developed in 1922 by Friedmann, a Russian mathematician. Einstein accepted this model which is now called Friedmann-Einstein model. So, what is the difference between science and "philosophy of science"? And what does either of these have to do with Freud, Jung or other charlatans swindling the stupid public with their entertaining fables? • − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoch ard • 17 minutes ago • edited I didn´t get the information from a Catholic site, for one thing. Your crude assertion really reflects your own distorted mindset more than any misrepresentation by noting Lemaitre´s spiritual-religious orientation as a scientific philosopher. Friedmann´s ideas were and are noteworthy, but a cursory examination also indicates how you yourself misunderstand and misrepresent them. Friedmann published his ideas in German in 1922 and 1924. He was apparently in touch with Einstein, who didn´t take on its empirical implications. However, the German language appears one contributing factor to the Belgian Lemaitre´s not citing Friedmann´s theoretical work in his 1927 paper. Lemaitre did study in the UK and US, it is worth noting. Lemaitre´s work is thus considered independent. Nevertheless, the 1929 English translation by A Eddington, I believe, did include a reference to Friedmann. Friedmann, interestingly from the point of view of religious psychology, was raised Russian Orthodox Christian. https://inspirehep.net/file... As for your preferred name, it is the Friedmann-Lemaitre models because of their insights, while the FLRW metric is based around Einstein´s field equations is used by my source. Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric, for the Standard Model of cosmology. I see that a Lambda-CDM model annex has been added on, no less. Einstein, meanwhile, did NOT accept this model, apparently, until Hubble confirmed Lemaitre´s use of earlier data. "...What is the difference between science and 'philosophy of science'" The conventional terminology of the "philosophy of science" thus needs to be adjusted by correctly referring to scientific philosophy. As Popper developed ideas about "falsifiability" and Kuhn about social processes and paradigms in Scientific Revolutions, it is actually a subdiscipline of some other form of philosophy, probably epistemology, addressing how scientific philosophy develops knowledge. Similarly, the sociology of science observes related processes. That´s why I´m developing the need to refer to Multidisciplinary Philosophy as the more complete way to elevate the relevance of Philosophy in general, and the true relevance of its branch Epistemology and all the academic disciplines as de facto knowledge domain "epistemologies," which is a powerful and fundamental unifying viewpoint. I´ve seen contemporary sources still referring to knowledge in terms of "sciences." That´s incorrect in a fundamental sense, and merely derivative or a specific contextual viewpoint if desired. It appears to largely reflect the scientific materialism of science fans, and their fears of their stereotypes of the non-sciences. M Pigliucci went from biologist to philosopher addressing the limits of science in an interesting development. He has nailed L Krauss, who called "philosophy a kind of science" by pointing out that Krauss had the epistemology exactly backwards. As for Freud and Jung, and Reich, et al and what I mentioned, the issue is the limits of math and science. Your own disparaging comments don´t reflect a qualified assessment, but your own scientific materialism and in-group/out-group social psychological reactiveness. That would include projection fallacy issues, no less, underlying what is in fact ad hom fallacy. You don´t argue from empirical evidence and establishing a logical argument. You insult as if that distracts from your own issues. It doesn´t. It is your issues that you are confusing with the need to pay attention to epistemological details and domains for understanding knowledge about phenomena. The specific point I raised concerns Einstein´s son who was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1930. A powerful approach that offered potential help lay in Freud´s legacy with W Reich. Reich, as I pointed out, had published his own case study of successfully treating a schizophrenic patient in 1933. As far as a logical survey of such information goes, wouldn´t it make sense in a rational world for someone to have noticed this and informed Einstein to look into it? My additional points, however, note that Reich´s pursuits also exposed him to the potentially powerful and destabilizing factors of a psychosocial and cultural nature that he simply treated in a polarized and indiscreet manner. Later practitioners have taken Reich´s less unorthodox and imprudent work to create thriving traditions that illuminate the more stable alternatives that were in fact open to Reich. That includes Jung´s already established work, as I noted. However, that appears to be reasoning already outside your comfort zone based on your apparent scientific materialism. Again, Reich´s veering into imprudence doesn´t equate with invalidation of the field of therapeutic psychology, and so on. That is a false equivalence, that you combine with ad hom and its underlying projection fallacy. Those are your issues, and basically reflect a poorly informed mindset and lack of appropriate literacy. enoch arden greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 6 hours ago The same holds for physics becoming chemistry, and pre-human biology becoming symbolic psychology and anthropology. Physics becoming anthropology. Remarkable. Are you sure you understand what you wrote? • Reply • Share › − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoch arden • 6 minutes ago • edited greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoch arden • 3 hours ago • edited I´m presenting a phenomenon that has a philosophical term associated with it, "emergentism" or even in addition to "Levels of Analysis and Explanation," that you neglect to mention to demonstrate that you yourself understand what I am discussing. Your simplistic formulation in reply seems to demonstrate a failure to grasp the significance of my point, and its implications. "Science," i.e. scientific philosophy, is a term that I´ve already mentioned in terms of its misleading nature. It is a technophile euphemism that has accompanied scientists´ psychosocial inattentiveness to the distinction between phenomena and human knowledge development activity. The switch to the term "Science" has been accompanied by the tendency to confuse the philosophical nature of scientific models with the physical basis of scientific phenomena, and the distinctions of other phenomena, especially human psychosocial and cultural phenomena. That has served the psychosocial status ambitions of scientists, but has advanced out of appropriate balance with socioeconomic factors that the Social Gospel identified as early as George Fox´s trans-aristocratic innovations as he founded the Christian Quaker-Friends, and how T Clarkson sought out the Quakers to anchor his pioneering social movement organizing activity, by the 1840s and the co-op social biz model, and by 1877 in workers´ rights and Afro-Am post-slavery education. And, revealingly, the externalized focus that glorifies the scientific materialism appears to be the very crux of your simplistic reply. Given your demonstrated attitude of scientific materialism, the appropriate reply to you is to indicate that the statement "Physics has become anthropology" is made as a human philosophical activity, that itself occurred within the realm of anthropology, first, not transmitted by an astrophysical event to a scientist in a telescope. In fact, in talking about philosophical model of emergentism in phenomena, we are exercising philosophical faculties that in anthropological development, have been built around the legacy of Descartes, Newton, Locke et al in Christian society operating with the growing influence of Universities. Microwave background radiation didn´t directly cause the appearance of Newton. Jesus´ legacy did, as Bishop R Grosseteste was a proto-scientist and the monk Thomas of Aquinas demonstrated the necessity of clarifying Christian assumptions in modernizing ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle ignored the First Cause and deferred to his belief in an eternal Universe. Not Aquinas. Aristotle also assumed limiting assumptions like no curvilinear motion. Not Bishop Tempier and his Condemnation of 1277. It is thus that the observation of the phenomena "Physics has become anthropology" has a contemplative dimension, a self-referential dimension that reflects the philosophical introspective method because this is an explicitly philosophical discussion. Treating words about phenomena as if it is "science" merely observing physical phenomena that indicates that the physics of atoms underlies the existence of a spearshaft or shamans rattle, or human church-based incense, doesn´t equate with scientific materialism´s intent to eliminate religion logically. It is this clarity of Multidisciplinary Philosophy that I mentioned that deconstructs, demystifies, and levels "science" epistemologically, and can anticipate the maneuvering of your own distorting mindset and psychology. In a word, "anthropology observes physics becoming anthropology and observing physics becoming anthropology." That´s emergentism, where a low intensity emergent reality assumes awareness and can calculate and represent high intensity forces like the Big Bang and manipulate forces like subatomic force. It is our self-awareness that is in operation, and why deconstructing and demystifying the term "science" is helpful. It also recalls the dynamics that lead to distractions from the urgency of addressing issues like sustainability, pluralism, and human rights. While the Big Bang hypothesis and the size of an inflating Universe can be calculated in their enormity of referent phenomena, it is our own continued survival that requires attention and action, as well as its spiritual-religious foundations in relation to the transcendental source and Jesus´ 2 Commandments, including no 2, "Love thy neighbor as thyself, as Jesus loved others." It turns out that anthropology observing physics becoming anthropology and observing physics becoming anthropology," actually includes the origin of Newton and Descartes et al in Thomas of Aquinas and Bishop R Grosseteste, and their roots back to Jesus, with all the monastic school praying and meditating that went with it, sustaining the sense of the value of what that Jesus guy brought from his Jewish heritage and its particular spiritual religious prophetic experience of something else, a Higher Power. THE Higher Power that made Christians able to rescue Aristotles´ abandoned First Cause argument. The Transcendent perceptible through meditation, prayer, and devotional study. God through Jesus, and Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity. Humans who can make atomic bombs thinking it can keep the peace, with many understanding the tragic excess of that. And the drama amidst the UN´s ideals, established by FDR and his Christian service values, derived from the Social Gospel movement. The answer to why there is something rather than nothing, and why there was a Big Bang hypothetical event. And the relevance of UN human rights and sustainability.

Origin of Life: A Challenge for Science and Religion?

Just_PrimalSoup (aka Susan) • 2 hours ago Why Does The Origin of Life Pose a Challenge For Science But Not Religion? It seems to come down to a threshold of what each (I’ll cal them ) “disciplines” can accept as truth. Science’s threshold demands a much higher bar of what is true/real, and what isn’t. Religion’s threshold depends more on “subjective feelings” about possible truths. What is it about the origin of life that has so confounded scientists and persuaded atheists to become deists or theists? How life can be derived from lifelessness. Last I heard, it’s never been done. Even though the “ingredients'' might all be there, getting them promoted to “life status” is the tricky part. Once that can be done, no God is needed to perform that magic trick. Until then, God is the placeholder, the Spark, by default. IMO. 😊

− Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Just_PrimalSoup (aka Susan) • 12 minutes ago I admire your use of the term "disciplines," which is not just a random use on your part, of course. In fact, it gets at a profound issue that is just badly handled overall. However, I´ll point out that you don´t have the details down. Science´s "discipline" is actually not compartmentalized from religion except by its own reductionist tendencies that people have driven into popularity. Thus, awareness of the history of science reveals that science is nothing but Judeo-Christians´ way of exploring the truth of an ordered Universe that they expected because God, in particular and originally through Jesus and his historical legacy, is described as a loving and lawful God. In the case of science, actually better called natural or scientific philosophy, the focus is on the physical aspects of the Universe, with the rise of the social sciences raising further issues that help clarify things. Is "religion" more about "subjective feelings"? The general term actually has broad application that has been part of the broader context of all knowledge about all "disciplines," the rise of the University-based system. Religion has roots in Paleolithic, "Stone Age" shamanism and its modern versions, and deals with more than just "feelings." In fact, philosopher H Rickert by the 1930s was elaborating on the idea that the sciences are different from the historical "sciences" or disciplines because the natural sciences generalize and treat individuality as case examples of "laws," while historical disciplines build concepts to understand "individualized" phenomena. He uses the example of diamonds, that have such high value that alone they are given names and their historical human handling is tracked, The Hope diamond is a famous example, as are a few in the British crown jewels, among many others. The Jewish religion, with their name from "Judah" and reliance on an extended line of prophets, has a broader cultural basis that preceded, and famously diverged from Christianity, is based on historical and other factors that feed any subjective participation in it. The same goes for Christianity, although it is based around the details of the life of the individual Jesus Christ of Nazareth and his Apostles, and the church around their legacy into its larger societal development. Similar broader dynamics apply to Islam, Hinduism, and so on. Religion isn´t just subjective "feelings," nor just "subjective." Maybe subjective elements based on individuals can be said to influence others psychosocially. Luther´s act of confronting the autocratic Roman church and monarchical political authorities. Additional elements and factors of interest include how the Christian FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt as political figures demonstrated the influence of their religious values up to the vision of the United Nations and its human rights. That system then has become signficant in tracking the value dimensions that are more directly understood in their religious origins. The UN role in organizing science around environmental sustainability demonstrates how modern science is not itself oriented to values, action, and the community´s public interest. Not merely subjective, but those factors, values, action, and the community´s public interest are generally religious, and elements for evaluating Christianity in terms of integrity or hypcrisy. As for "life" from "lifelessness," that´s a good way to pose the conventional perception of the issue. If you look at my comment below, I get at the issues related to Fritjof Capra´s developing the Systems Theory of life. Identifying such issues as dissipative structures, structures that dissipate metabolic energetic waste or the like, is part of the developing of the philosophy of the processes. It would appear to be the search for the concept that borders mechanistic process concepts with that of the spiritual-religiously related "sacred," as talked about by pioneer scholar M Eliade. Your referring to the matter as a "magic trick", for one, the "placeholder" for another, and the "Spark" for a third, also gets at that conceptual border interestingly. It occurs to me that geo-historical events on the Earth system´s scale have been involved that bring the subject back to the nature of historical reality, involved in the quality of 3rd order emergent properties, as I´m coming to understand it. The appearance of photosynthesis in evolution was key, for example, and increased the role oxygen in the Earth´s atmosphere, which is a geo-historical landmark. The switch to valuing life isn´t necessarily related to God´s intervention, but people recognizing the connection between University-based philosophical study, the origins of human rights and sustainability values, their spiritual-religious origins, modern pluralism in the UN human rights community of nations, and modern notions of the transcendental. The values embedded in concepts like "magic trick," "placeholder," and "Spark" in relation to God are ultimately given serious weight in relation to the issues around sustainability and human rights.

Science, the Supernatural, and Black-Box Mechanisms- E Anderson

MAGIC, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION: USEFUL LABELS IN THE PAST? USELESS IN THE PRESENT? E. N. Anderson Dept. of Anthropology University of California Riverside, CA 92521-0418 http://www.krazykioti.com/articles/magic-science-and-religion/ "Malinowski was guilty of many outrageous statements, such as “The road from the wilderness to the savage’s belly and consequently to his mind is very short, and for him the world is an indiscriminate background against which there stand out the useful, primarily the edible, species of animals or plants” (p. 44). This was retrograde even at the time; no Boasian would have been caught dead writing such a line. But, in general, Malinowski was on the side of the angels in this book. He was hardly the first to say that traditional people had a wealth of solid empirical knowledge and high-flown spiritual experience—anthropologists from Morgan on had said that—but he was one of the more influential people saying it." "2. Religion Malinowski saw religion as basically a way of utilizing belief in inferred, imaginary supernatural beings and forces to satisfy the emotional needs of the “savage.”" He said nothing about the civilized folk, but one assumes he was, as usual, sideswiping them via the Trobriands. He never forgot his self-imposed mission to confront his elite European readers with an ironic reflection of themselves. One can also assume that, like many early-20th-century social scientists, he expected religion to wither away in the near future. "Malinowski’s “religion” was strongly individualistic and psychological. He rejected Durkheim’s idea of religion (Durkheim 1995/1912) as the projection of society, and, by implication, Marx’ somewhat similar (though materialist) view. He dismissed Durkheim’s theory as mere mysticism, which, along with much else, proves that he did not understand Durkheim very well. (This is nothing against Malinowski—Durkheim did not go out of his way to make his case easy to follow. A frequent mistake, not well avoided by Malinowski, is to claim that Durkheim himself thought society was a mystical reality! No, he thought that Australian aboriginal rituals represented it so.)" "I think most anthropologists today would agree with Durkheim that religion is an emergent phenomenon of society, and is, by definition, a system. It has structure and social institutionalization. The lone-individual side of religious sentiment is now called “spirituality” rather than “religion.” The religious and cosmological belief system of a given society tends to reflect that society more or less closely. Sometimes, to be sure, there are time lags; Chinese religion still sees a Heavenly Emperor with his magistrates, courtiers, and classic dancers, reflecting the reality of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Revolutionary change comes slowly in Heaven. On the other hand, religion can and does change fast to accommodate new conditions; the meteoric rise of “fundamentalist” hate-based violence in the name of religion is a natural and, I think, inevitable reflex of the rise of hierarchies and giant government-business hookups in the late 20th century, with the consequent destruction of face-to-face communities, reduction of individual agency, and rise of mass violence." As human symbolic use has tool-using and socio-affective external realms, that impacted hunting and group-living contexts. As wholesale deprivation of maternal and peer stimuli can be harmful to an individual young growing monkey, it can be to a human. That begins to suggest the emergent properties of the human social symbolic context. "Religion is now almost invariably defined as belief in supernatural beings (see Atran 2002). However, Malinowski (and others of his time) differentiated religion from magic, which also depends on supernaturals. And belief in supernatural beings is generally not considered adequate to make a religion. For Scott Atran, author of one recent major book on the anthropology of religion, Mickey Mouse doesn’t count, and neither do devoutly held but allegedly “factual” or “scientific” belief systems like Marxism; religion must involve not only supernaturals but also counter-evidential beliefs and emotional sacrifices (Atran 2002:13). Others disagree, finding Marxism and “capitalism” more like religion than like science or spirituality (Atran 2002:13; David Kronenfeld, personal communication over the years, most recently on drafts of this paper, 2004; Kronenfeld points out that ideological concepts, such as the Dialectic in Marxism, take on supernatural and counter-evidential qualities when made into mass slogans)." Chapple´s behavioral-biological view focuses on emotional-interactional management by a leader to a group through rites of passage and rites of intensification. "Recent anthropological accounts of religion tend to exaggerate the distinction from science by highlighting the aspects of religion that seem most exotic and irrational to the writers. Thus, to pick only the most reasonable and sensible recent exemplars, Atran (2002) and Sosis and Alcorta (2003) emphasize supernaturals, counterintuitive beliefs, and the like; Sosis and Alcorta also emphasize visions, hallucinations, shamanism, sacrifice, and all the other favorite exotica of anthropology. The problem here is that religion, everywhere in the world, is far more often a matter of going politely and sociably to church, temple, ch’a’chaak, or witchetty grub ceremony, there to sit patiently and be bored to death. The ordinary humdrum side of religion is far more common, typical, and important to believers than the exotica. At least in the United States, mystical experience is rare, and true religious ecstasy is very rare. Religion for the vast majority of Americans is a much more ordinary affair, involving no altered mindstates. Romantic anthropologists might argue that this is because capitalism and other political ideologies have taken over so much of the American mind—driving, often, the religious beliefs. However, my observations in China, Mexico, and elsewhere convince me that the vast majority of humans have ordinary and practical religious lives, even in shamanistic and spirit-mediumistic religions. Transcendent experience of every kind is rare and disruptive, not common, causal or constitutive. Religion, usually, is mindless ritual conformity." "mindless" is a presumptuous and extreme term, and emphasizes a scientific bias. Religion involves "ritualistic conformity," while it is dedicated, perhaps unquestioned at a certain point. Heisenberg was Christian, nationalist enough to stay in Nazi Germany, but of Christian integrity enough to have gotten nicknamed the "White Jew." By contrast, spirituality is, by definition, emotional; it is the individual’s experience of awe, reverence, entrancement, enchantment, or similar emotions or transcendent feelings, inspired by natural or supernatural entities or forces. Religion usually stimulates spirituality, and may be influenced by it. As emotional, it is also relational, leading to the sense of the sacred and holy. Objectification involves controlling or eliminating emotional-relational features. Environmentalism provides a good comparison. Environmentalism involves not merely the study of objectified ecological interactions, but the concern with human-ecological interactions. The current claim that “secularism” or “secular humanism” is a “religion” does not make the grade by any standards. First, secularism has no supernaturals—by definition. Second, it has no communitas; nobody purports to be part of the secularist church or congregation or communion, nor does secularism have festivals, rituals, temples, or anything else to show. (The French Revolutionaries briefly tried to impose such, but were laughed to shame.) Third, it has no body of beliefs. The few secular humanists out there do agree on some facts, but they have no litmus test, no professions that they must accept. Indeed, skeptics differ enormously in worldviews—they are united only by skepticism (see journals like The Skeptic and The Zetetic, passim). "3. Science The division between magic, science, and religion was also important to Lévi-Strauss (1962) and others of the time. All the thinkers of the structural and cognitive traditions of the 1960s emphasized the rational, systematic, empirical side of traditional knowledge, Lévi-Strauss’ “science of the concrete.”" "In the 1950s and 1960s, interest in such systems climaxed in the development of the field of “ethnoscience.” This field arose from the researches of several of George Murdock’s students, sent to work in Micronesia and the Philippines (Conklin 1957; Frake 1980). The word was coined from the earlier term “ethnobiology,” introduced by John Harshberger in 1895. Soon, terms like “ethnobiology,” “ethnozoology” and “ethnoornithology” followed. The word “ethnoscience” seems to have disappeared somewhere in the intervening years, but the other terms persist, in spite of an attempt by Scott Atran to substitute “folkbiology” and other “folk-” words (Medin and Atran 1999) /1/. Many of these systems are as purely empirical, self-correcting, developing, and truth-driven as any western science (Anderson 2000, 2003, 2005). They also share with scientists a concern with insight, sensed experience, testing and probing, and the like (David Kronenfeld, personal communication, comment on draft of this paper, 2004). As science, they are limited more by lack of scope and equipment than by lack of some (mythical?) scientific mentality or method. However, many, as we shall see, have supernatural entities built into them. These problematize still more the basic distinction. Insight and sensed experience are basic to both science and religion, narrowing somewhat the gap between them." "As ethnoscience was developing, the term “science” was being subjected to a great deal of critique. For thousands of years—ever since the Greeks began to talk of scientia—it had had something like the straightforward, common-sense meaning that Malinowski knew. It referred to systematized knowledge, as opposed to faith (belief without evidence) on the one hand and techne, mere craft, on the other." In the early 20th century, Viennese logicians attempted to confine it to an exceedingly formal, even artificial, procedure, with very strict rules of verification or—more famously—”falsification” (Popper 1959). Science was even supposed, in some positivist quarters, to be reducible to mathematical rules; anything not mathematically expressed was not science. This was wildly out of line if one wanted to continue talking about Greek or Renaissance science, or even about the actual practice (as opposed to rigorous ideals) of 20th century science. (Try expressing paleontology mathematically.) Inevitably, a counterreaction set in, spearheaded by Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), but anticipated earlier by the brilliant work of Ludwig Fleck on medical history. Kuhn concentrated on biases and limits within scientific practice, but the critiques of science rapidly expanded to include the lamentable tendency of scientists—all too human as they are—to believe pure nonsense and claim it to be scientific if it fit their biases. This was especially noted in the cases of racism and sexism, but extended to economic theories, animal psychology, medicine, and indeed most fields. However, one must note a very important difference. Kuhn was attending to real problems with science itself, whereas the critiques of racism and sexism—however necessary—were simply rewarmings of Francis Bacon’s critiques of bias-driven pseudoscience." "In any case, we all came to realize that science as practice is a very human affair. Pure science may be an ideal—or may not—but real-world science has its biases, mistakes, blind spots, and so forth. Culture and economics intrude. People try to justify their prejudices and errors. Not only such socially convenient lies as racism, but even such neutral ideas as stable continents (Oreskes 1993, 2001), persist long after their time /2/." "We have many well-established facts that were once outrageous hypotheses: the earth is an oblate spheroid (not flat), blood circulates, the sun is only a small star among billions of others. We also have immediate hypotheses that directly account for or predict the facts. However, we then move on to higher and higher levels of abstraction, inferring more and more remote and obscure intervening variables—up to the almost mystical cosmology that now postulates multidimensional strings, dark matter, dark energy, quark chromodynamics, and the rest. Even the physicist Brian Greene has to admit that “[s]ome scientists argue vociferously that a theory so removed from direct empirical testing lies in the realm of philosophy or theology, but not physics” (Greene 2004:352). To people like me, unable to understand the proofs, modern physics is an incomprehensible universe I take on faith—exactly like religion. The difference between it and religion is not that physics is evidence-based; astrophysics theories, especially such things as string and brane theory, are not based on direct evidence, but on highly abstract modeling. The only difference I can actually perceive is that science represents forward speculation by a small, highly trained group, while religion represents a wide sociocultural communitas. (Religion also has beautiful music and art, as a result of the communitas-emotion connection, but I suppose someone somewhere has made great art out of superstring theory.)" "The ethnoscientists proved that traditional ecological knowledge is not just random facts, but is systematized, elaborated, and often axiom-driven or theory-driven as much as any modern science. (The theories are, necessarily, far less comprehensive and sophisticated, because of lack of equipment and so forth.) Conversely, the historians of science have proved that contemporary laboratory science can be as culturally and socially negotiated, even “constructed,” as any traditional worldview. Old-fashioned racist ideas that contrast the superior, rational, empirical Science of “the west” with the mystical nonsense of the rest are still sometimes aired (e.g. Wolpert 1993), but few scholars take them seriously. The world has accumulated vast amounts of factual knowledge and reasonable theory in the past couple of hundred years—more than we had before. We also have developed many formal algorithms for guaranteeing that we have the most accurate data possible. However, even so, the process is not as different from what went on before as we used to pretend." "Consider, again, modern physics. The universe is approximately 96% composed of dark matter and energy—matter and energy we cannot measure, cannot observe, cannot comprehend, and, indeed, cannot conceptualize at all (Greene 2004). We infer its presence from its rather massive effects on things we can see. On a smaller and more human scale, we have the “invisible hand” (Smith 1776) of the market—a market which assumes perfect information, perfect rationality, and so on, among its dealers. We have abstract and unverifiable black-box mechanisms in psychology (e.g. Freudian dynamic personality factors), anthropology (“culture,” at least in its Whitean form), and sociology (“class,” “discourse,” “network.”) All these and other abstractions have become mystical entities in at least some theoretic discourses. Modern schools in the social sciences often rest on beliefs, assumptions, and global abstractions more than on data. Thus Atran’s specifications merely allow us to split an arbitrary realm, which we may please to call “religion,” from all the other realms of human knowledge. All substantial scientific knowledge must rest on at least some inferences about unprovable, abstract, obscure entities." http://www.krazykioti.com/articles/magic-science-and-religion/ "Thus, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish science from religion. However, we can say that science is made up of facts that are empirically proved and ideas that can be theoretically proved, or at least tested, while religion is made up of things that must be taken on faith because they simply cannot be proved or disproved by any evidence. Stephen Jay Gould (1999) has recently given us a strong argument for this position, and for the fundamental complementarity—and therefore the fundamental difference—of religion and science. Yet Gould has to admit that his own science, paleontology, cannot be directly tested—and that not only traditional religions, but also modern fundamentalist religions, make a number of statements that can be tested. At least, like paleontological ideas, they could be proved or disproved if we had a time machine. The reality of six-day creation in 4004 BC, Noah’s flood, and Joshua’s musical destruction of Jericho have all been established as fact to fundamentalists’ satisfaction; geology, archaeology, and other sciences are bent to their ideas. The same objective data serve to disprove the same events, of course, in the eyes of other observers." The rationalist definition, not empirical-behavioral. That is, spirituality-religion is based on relation to the Universe´s Creator aspect, its Ultimate Cause, through meditation, prayer, and devotional ritual. Eliot Chapple´s behavioral-biological anthropology observes the emotional-interactional processes in rites of passage and rites of intensification. Science is made of empirical philosophical objectification of phenomena with the intent to quantify and predict. "Meanwhile, the postmodernists have shown, quite correctly, that all too much of modern “science” is really social bias dressed up in fancy language. “Scientific” racism is the most obvious example of this. Discredited “scientific” ideas about women, children, animals, and other vulnerable entities are only slightly less obvious." "Descartes, Newton, and others of their time were deeply and devoutly religious men. Descartes imported Catholic dogma into his science; his separation of “mind and body” is actually l’âme et le corps. Moreover, scientists of that day did much that we would call “magic.” Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the prototypic early-modern seeker, saw magic as an alternative to science and philosophy. Newton sought the philosopher’s stone. Alchemy is now dismissed as magic; chemistry is science—but the two were one until the 18th century. Astronomy is science, astrology is magic—but every competent stargazer did both until the late Renaissance, and saw them as part of one agenda. It is this sort of thing that makes it difficult to contrast an essentialized, superior “Western science” with the mystical lore of the rest of the world. We can count the Greeks and the Renaissance scientists as part of the modern positivist agenda only by the most outrageous back-projection and selective quoting. In fact, the conceptualization of science as strictly factual-rational, religion as strictly otherwise, is quite recent, and seems to be evolving as we speak. Concepts of “religion” and “science” not only differ from culture to culture; they differ within the same culture over time, often over quite short temporal intervals." "Religion is heavily involved with morals, while science is traditionally considered to be values-neutral. The separation owes a great deal to David Hume’s argument that one cannot deduce an “ought” from an “is” (of course, Hume was more nuanced and subtle than this canned, though useful, summary of his philosophy; see Hume 1975). Religion can prescribe morality, justifying it from divine law. Science cannot. Supposedly, it is about “is,” not about “ought.” Ethical bias in science is often seen as a contamination, inevitable or not. (The fundamentalist claim that science is really a religion of “secularism,” faked up to sell evil and cutthroat morals under the name of “evolution,” is based on complete lack of knowledge of science.) However, once again, the real world is not so simple. First, science has its own morality: one is not supposed to lie, fake results, trash one’s fellows in anonymous reviews, or plagiarize. Second, some sciences are specifically and openly moral. Medical research makes no sense except as a healing art, and agricultural research is targeted at feeding more people, or at least producing more of some desired commodities. Third, we can see from this that if one allows oneself even a single simple moral postulate, one may create an open-ended universe of scientific research. If we ought to cure sickness, a great deal of “ises” follow from that one “ought.” Medical science is the result. If society is desirable, then there must be some way to hold society together and keep it from self-destructing by failure to adapt; this opens the door to otherwise relatively values-neutral applied research in anthropology, sociology, and political science. This point, complete with the analogy to medicine, was already made almost 2500 years ago by Plato and Aristotle! (See Lloyd 1996.)" (Science does have its own inherent context of morality. The historical origins of science in Christianity make even more sense of this. Science, i.e. scientific philosophy, required a community of scholars. In their community already by 1277, with the proto-scientists like Thomas of Aquinas´ teacher Albert Magnus, contemporary Bishop Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon, among others of the Oxford Franciscan School), there were complaints about Aristotle´s assumptions, including "objects can´t move in curved lines. They just move straight out, then fall straight down." "In short, separating religion from science and both from magic is analytically important, valuable, and interesting, but it must always be a somewhat arbitrary separation. It is constantly being problematized by the messiness of the real world and the messiness of real human thought. No matter how defined, “religion” and “science” (to say nothing of “magic”) are ideal types—idealtypen—that do not describe the real world very neatly. They are valuable ways of modeling thought and discourse, but not really descriptive, though they have considerable heuristic use in describing the western (and now the international) world since 1800 or 1850." Again, by "messiness", Anderson seems to be referring to overlaps between science and religion. The empirical-behavioral distinction is advanced by clarifying the more general basis of distinguishing forms of Science, Social Science, and the Humanities. Fritjof Capra´s Systems Theory is focused on assuming the empirical nature of knowledge based on observed phenomena, its epistemic nature. While fundamentally useful, it is actually a philosophical process of knowledge modelling, and epistemological. Thus, knowledge systems reflect phenomena systems, and those knowledge systems form the familiar academic disciplines, their Levels of Explanation, and based on emergent properties that give new systems fundamentally unique and differentiated, discontinuous characteristics. An atomic bomb is technology that involves physics phenomena, but it could not affect biological, psychological, anthropological, and sociological etc phenomena without having been designed by the psychological etc activity of people. Similarly, South Africa´s leaders used psychosocial and cultural reasoning and decision-making processes to eliminate their nuclear power infrastructure entirely. "This brings us back to Tylor, and to Atran (2002). Religion can be seen as partly based on plausible but wrong inferences about ultimate cause. Thus, in explaining the world, people naturally infer spirits and gods. There appears to be a genuinely natural tendency for people to assume that trees, rocks, and animals are “people,” in some sense—having volition, consciousness, and humanlike will. The Durkheimian observation that religion is a projection of the social order naturally follows from this (a point Atran rather misses). There is obviously a great deal more than this to what we normally call “religion,” but inferences about the “people” out there clearly comprise one of the building blocks from which religion is made." If it is a "natural tendency for people to assume that trees, etc are 'people'", then they are "plausible, but" unscientific "inferences about ultimate cause." They are only "wrong" in a scientific sense.

Christianity´s Legends and Myths, Scientism, Philosophy, and Whitehead´s Process Philosophy

In response to "Christianity´s legends and myths...." MRM The post´s assertion is untenable. It´s basic fallacy that some accounts or aspects of accounts, like Adam and Eve, have mythical aspects doesn´t equate to all events being "legends and myths," but is a demonstration of indulgence in scientism, the misapplication of scientific materialism. Psychosomatic healing alone debunks anti-psychological views, and a combination of kinds of cases establishes links between the healing power of love, and Transpersonal, transcendental referents. The deconstruction of "science" to reveal its true nature as philosophical, a form of philosophy, then demystifies the illusion that scientific philosophy makes things "impossible." Knowing how the brain and nervous system works doesn´t make "mind" impossible. "Mind," as philosopher D Chalmers recently revived, involves an experiential and introspective perception like "I feel happy or sad." That is an emergent phenomenon domain, and domains in psychology, etc, accompanied by an emergent knowledge domain, and domains, of psychology, etc. Each subdiscipline involves that kind of distinction, like cognitive and emotional research, psychotherapy, etc. Physicist Fritjof Capra has done significant fairly popular work to illustrate his search following The Tao of Physics. Biologist turned philosopher M Pigliucci went from anti-theist to the limits of science, for another. An Chri Mark Rego Monteiro, just right. Mark Rego Monteiro An Chris I´m just looking at mathematician -philosopher AN Whitehead more closely and building clearer understanding around a few angles. Whitehead perceived how physical phenomena relate to evil, which emerges in relation to psychocultural qualities that seek to resolve the problems of evil, and I would cite especially Moses´ top Ten Commandments for God, and Jesus´ 2 Commandments for Moses and God, etc. Goodness and love exist in one way or another, here and there in the natural world, but Jesus represented a highly focused, God-related phenomenon. Whitehead drew on William James, who assessed a range of some progressive Christian testimonies about being loved by God, a few atheist anti-theist testimonies, and "mind-cure" testimonies that correlated cures to spiritual-religious accounts. As part of that, Whitehead defines God as having both an eternal atemporal nature, and a temporal one that reflects his relationship to the Creation. Charles Harteshorne was a UU who advanced Whitehead´s Process Philosophy into Process Theology. JB Cobb advanced it further with ideas like Ecological Civilization, and observing the widespread rejection of spiritual practice in Protestant Christianity. Karen King, for her part, talks about women in early Christianity, among other important viewpoints. I´m also noting that Einstein was in touch with Gandhi, no less. Ma Per Mark Rego Monteiro David Chalmers is struggling to define a non-problem, thus he has made no progress on his alleged "hard problem". · Mark Rego Monteiro Ma Per You are referring to the fact that Chalmers asked a question "Why a (symbolically elaborated) feeling exists that corresponds to physical sensation?" which he has called the 'hard problem of consciousness.'" In my case, my college degree is in lib arts Bio Anthropology, so I don´t follow classical philosophy or Chalmers all that closely. Instead, I relate the useful angle he raised to the more secure framework that I´m getting from Capra, which he has been developing in his Systems Theory of Life. Emergence is a key phenomenon that needs to be accounted for. Introspective methodology, rich in its discussion attributed to Husserl, that I know of back to Descartes and Spinoza, and Freud, and many more recent developments like the biologist Varela that Capra talks about. The basic empirical issue is that introspective methodology exists because we can use our symbolic capacity for social communication about our internal states and cognition. It is full of interesting elements, and is a phenomena with various angles in philosophy and psychology, clearly, at the very least. You refer to Chalmers act of wrongly calling it a "problem," apparently a part of his philosophical mindset. You don´t make clear where you stand, but I might agree that I don´t see it as a problem. That would be part of his philosophical orientation. Introspection, along with other anti-positivist views, are, however, kinds of phenomena, and involve Levels of Explanation, and emergent phenomena, all issues that need to be raised to clarify the philosophical nature of scientific philosophy as a limited perspective despite the grandeur of its material. University-based knowledge, its interrelatedness, differentiations, its metaphysical/religious bases, and the subordination/supplementation of scientific philosophy ("science") to its proper limits and roles. Christianity, and spirituality-religion in general, then can more widely be appreciated and modernized with integrity and attention to the meaning of transcendental phenomena. UUism has the profound foundations for that, I submit, being a Christian who appropriates UUism in my identity as an interfaith UU Christian.

Hey, So Science Doesn´t Know All the Answers, But God?

Dou Rasmus 5 hours ago  @Green Peacemst  - You ignore that there is an evolutionary continuum of science and its association with religion, in this case Christianity. As science has filled in more and more of the god-of-the-gaps mythology, the standing of science makes a far stronger argument for natural laws causation and process. I do not understand your hewing to the term "scientism." I do not know of any scientist with wide respect that believes science is going to know all the answers. There is a far greater reality in that science continues to distill what is unknown rather than what is known. It is any assertion that a god is a progenitor of natural causation that becomes increasingly absurd. Look, man. You´ve got your head buried pretty deep in science, and are pretty mixed up about what´s going on. None of the theists in these debates is really making anti-science arguments, although abiogenesis still gets some of them. "A far greater reality that science continues to distill what is unknown...."? Man, where is Al Gore, FDR, Eleanor, MLK, and maybe Barack Obama, when you need them? You can´t refer to anything that reflects the limits of science, or even the actual philosophical nature of science. Mathematician AN Whitehead put a few things pretty well, and the assumption of ORDER and LAWFUL REGULARITIES is one of them, and he even couldn´t avoid implying the foundations of Christian community and value assumptions. All your comments are based on scientism, despite your hollow protests about ad populum personal experience. Truthfully, these debates are inadequately structured to expose science´s delusions sufficiently. Your kind just hold up a test tube and say, “Hey, do you see a god here? I don´t see any god here.” as if that is an argument. George Lemaitre discovered the Big Bang foundations as a Catholic physicist, while the spiritual mathematical physicist and non-Christian Einstein got an earful about the problem of the infinite past from Lemaitre. Then lapsed protestant Hubble couldn´t even grasp the implications of his (rediscovered) red-shift confirmation for some time. God, the transcendent Creator, plays a number of roles in helping a thinker see straight. The initial comment here by JP included the following paraphrase, “Has science disproved a creator? Not anymore than science can disprove any fantasy” and “any God that would condone things like slavery or inequality or misogyny  at any time for any people is abhorrent.” You try to talk to me about science eliminating god of the gap mythology stuff, and ignore scientism anti-theist junk like that? You clearly ignore it because you don´t have much clue. JP tries to assert against a creator by one version of reductionism, demonstrating no knowledge of the philosophical logical necessity arguments, nor historical sociology arguments, etc of creator arguments, but using gradeschool bigotry by equating it with fantasy. That´s not god of the gaps mythology, although you seem caught in your own part of that loop. As far as your concerned, it does not compute. That´s not a literate discussion, nor scientific, nor reality-based. The same goes for JP´s OT reductionism. “God condoned slavery and that´s abhorrent!” That´s not a literate argument, historically, social scientifically, or otherwise. It´s non-literate, or illiterate, bigotry. Fritjof Capra, the physicist turned Systems Theorist for sustainability, and mathematician turned philosopher of metaphysics and religion AN Whitehead´s early stuff are stuff that an ambitious soul would seek out, for starters. Then William James´ Varieties of Religious Experience is a standard classic. Rodney Stark´s series starting with the Rise of Christianity then is a good modern sociological take on things. Then the rise of Christian Universities and modern science as a modern Christian philosophical practice, as in James Hannam´s work. Perhaps by then psychological dynamics will be intelligible to you, like Freud´s talk therapy, abreaction (emotional reconnection), and catharsis not least of all. The quick sound bite comeback to “Has science disproved a Creator?” is “Just like science hasn´t disproved love or social capital or team spirit, and anything that is fundamentally emergent and relational. To “God condoned slavery, etc,” the comeback is, “God created the Big Bang and natural lawful physical laws that led up to slavery, etc, and despite shamanic healers, humans were ruled by calculations that invented slavery, basically universally. The most successful path to ending slavery was in the Judeo-Christian line, in Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity carried in its complex modernization process that includes a mix of new levels of social demands, integrity, hypocrisy, and worse. The hypocrisy and worse is caused by the bio-psychological impulses that are humanity´s animal nature that are in need of psychospiritual management. When Islam expanded after Mohammed died and invaded Europe in 711, Europe´s Charles Martel didn´t ignore the threat. He gave the church lands early on for certain reasons, then took them back later to professionalize his soldiers. He was no pagan, nor submissive to the church. He was committed to the vision of God through Jesus Christ enough to have clarity of intelligence in the face of the Muslims motivated by God through Mohammed. You and the scientists you know of didn´t study in Madrasa schools, but in Christian-derived Universities. Yet, Charles Martel wasn´t college educated. Nor was slavery ended merely by a college grad. In the UK-British Empire, college grad Thomas Clarkson sought out the Quakers to anchor his effort to end slavery. They had been started by George Fox who had little formal education, and had developed uncanny Christian integrity as a denomination, including opposition to slavery. With their support, Clarkson became a pioneering investigative researcher and organizer. Scientists like Darwin may have supported the abolitionists, but they were hardly the leaders. Nor had they founded the Quakers, nor determined the Christian conversion experiences of people like Parliament´s W Wilberforce, Sr and their complex contribution. Wilberforce was inspired in his conversion by the minister P Doddridge´s book, The ...Progress of Religion in the Soul, not Galileo, Newton, or Descartes. So, just like they didn´t use British cannons back in Moses´ day, they had slaves like everybody else, and God was related to at their level. The top 10 Commandments and Hebrew-Jewish prophets have a rich experience as Jesus´ heritage, no less. While scientists did not lead the anti-slavery movement, they had been an earlier byproduct of Christian spiritual practice that led to the Universities. Jesus´ loving Commandments for Moses and God are still the basis for the “ethics” that haunt modern science. All of that is at least Historical Sociology, and related to Transpersonal Psychology, which you can begin to approach with the kinds of scholarly resources I´ve suggested. So, as much as you go on and on about all your scientism talking point words, it is not the “god in the gap mythology” you should be parroting só much in response to someone like me. It is learning from me that your kind swims in a Gap in the God mythology.

Epistemology

1 below- F Remedios, Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller`s Social Epistemology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 2 below- Scandinavian Political Studies, Bind 2 (1967) EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 3 below- Jurgen Habermas Stanford Encyclopedia 4 below- Christian List: 2016, Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontologicalChristian List∗LSEMarch-April 2016 Retjo Wilenlus 1- F Remedios, Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller`s Social Epistemology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. "Because Fuller’s and Goldman’s social epistemologies differ from each other in many respects, it is difficult to compare the two.[1] The points of difference concern the goals, the conceptions of knowledge, and the scope of study for each of them. The goal of Fuller’s social epistemology is to democratize cognitive authority in terms of science policy and install a constitution of science: How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access to one another’s activities (Fuller 1988, 3)? The goal of Goldman’s social epistemology is to evaluate social practices in terms of whether they promote or impede epistemically valuable states, such as knowledge. Fuller’s conception of knowledge is in terms of products of normatively appropriate institutions of inquiry, while Goldman’s conception of knowledge is based on the acquisition of true belief, which is what he calls W-knowledge, or knowledge in a weak sense. S-knowledge, or knowledge in the strong sense, consists of true belief, plus some additional element or elements (Goldman 1999, 23). The scope of study of Fuller’s social epistemology is science, while the scope of study of Goldman’s social epistemology is all forms of social interaction that produce knowledge." https://social-epistemology.com/2013/07/12/orienting-social-epistemology-francis-remedios/ 2) Scandinavian Political Studies, Bind 2 (1967) EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Retjo Wilenlus Side 26 University of Helsinki Political scientists have long been in a special position among the social scientists in having continuous conflicts and diverging opinions about the basis of their science, despite the surge and predominance of the "positivist" behavioral approach. This is due to the fact that political phenomena (e.g. those concerning democracy) necessarily also have philosophical aspects that steer the discussion to the basic issues of their science. This discussion, however, is too often isolated from the more general epistemological problems of the social sciences.1 Perhaps the social scientist may feel uneasy when the discussion turns to the epistemological foundations of his science. "A serious economist hardly likes to be caught at the trivial occupation of discussing foundations," says I.M.D. Little. (1957, p. 4) Yet, at the present stage of the social sciences this kind of discussion seems relevant especially from the point of view of the methodology of these sciences. The aim of this paper is 1o show that the presentday discussion about the methodology of the social sciences implies two different ideas of what amounts to a "social phenomenon" and what it is to "explain" or "understand" social phenomena. These two ideas, in turn, are part of two different conceptions of epistemology and philosophy in general. An excellent introduction to what we mean by the epistemological problems in social sciences is Peter Winch's monograph, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1965). The present paper is largely based on Winch's analysis of the basic ideas upon which the study of society is founded. Use is also made of Charles Taylor's, The Explanation of Behavior (1964), which contains a sharp criticism of the conceptual framework of the 'behaviourist' methodology as well as an analysis of the nature of teleological explanation. A third important work from the present point of view is G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention (1958), a study on the concept of intention, a concept that has been much discussed lately. An interesting historical background has been added to this discussion by the revived interest in Aristotle and Hegel. ....Winch does not seem to be aware that his thesis is a newly formulated Aristotelian (and Hegelian) theory about the relationship of knowledge and action. Aristotle's theory can be simplified by saying that the occasion (or cause) for an agent's action is the knowledge he has of the end the action, or that the action or resul: of the action expresses this knowledge. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle presents the following example: "The master builder has the idea of a house in his soul; he knows 'what being a house is'. In a way the house is born of the conception of the house; something immaterial gives occasion to something material." (VII, 7, 1032b 14) In medieval philosophy, Thomas Aquinas represents; essentially the same idea of the relationship between knowledge and action,' while in modern times we meet this idea in Hegelian psychology.10 To be sure, what Aristotle presents relatively clearly, later thinkers generally present more obscurely and in a way evasively. (Thus e.g. Winch speaks of 'the force of the concept of reality'.) Winch's conception of the relationship between knowledge and action differs from Aristotle's, for example, in that he speaks principally of knowledge in terms of reality (also later about knowledge in terms of norms), while Aristotle speaks of knowledge in terms of purposes.11 For some reason Winch seems to avoid the concepts of end and purpose. In a way Winch's thesis is amended by the earlier mentioned Anscombe study, 'Intention', which gives to the concept of intention the importance that belongs to it in the field of human behavior. But, Anscombe seems to be satisfied with rather ambiguous Side 31 expressions in explaining the relationship between intention-knowledge and behavior. Winch's view of the relationship between knowledge and behavior is clearly a part of his epistemology. If we are of the opinion that "the world is for us, what is presented through our concepts", then we will also be inclined to think that our ideas and concepts are une quantité non-négligeable of our behavior, that our behavior in some sense is an expression or a realization of our ideas about reality. Therefore, the explanation of behavior must include those ideas, which the agent (Winch's use of the term) 'exercises' in his behaviour." Although Winch is not aware of the historical background of his thesis, he does know that it conflicts with a certain, widely-held modern notion of behavior and explanation of behavior. This opposing thesis is expressed — in the field of social sciences — e.g. by Emile Durkheim: "I consider extremely fruitful this idea that social life should be explained, not by the notions of those who participate in it, but by more profound causes which are unperceived by consciousness, and I think also that these causes are to be sought mainly in the manner according to which the associated individuals are grouped. Only in this way, it seems, can history become a science, and sociology exist." 13 Durkheim's unvoiced assumption is that the agent's notions are not an essential factor in his social behavior. These can be by-passed and his behavior explained "by more profound causes which are unperceived by consciousness"; these causes are in the social environment, "in the manner according to which the associated individuals are grouped". (The question arises, whether Durkheim does accept this theory as valid in the same way in relation to such a person as for example, a sociologist, who has become aware of those "profound causes".) In order to elucidate the contrast between the above two ideas of social science, we must examine certain viewpoints, which have been reflected in recent discussions on the concept of behavior (action). von Wright points out (1966, p. 14) that the concept of action has drawn little attention in modern philosophy. "But, if we return in time from Descartes to Thomas Aquinas, or to his master, Aristotle, the picture changes. Their thinking about action seems now uniquely modern..." I want to add to this list Hegel and Marx, both of whose thought on human action also seem so 'modern', perhaps for the reason that they have a common ancestry in the thinking of Aristotle. This interest in the concept of action may be in part a reaction against that concept of behavior which has been developed from the conceptual apparatus of certain natural sciences. Based on a notion from the field of physics, human behavior is interpreted as mere motion, which can be explained by a conceptual apparatus analogous to the explanation of the movements of inanimate matter. One culmination of this endeavor is the movement of behaviorism, whose ideal it has been to reduce human activity to 'colorless motions'. (Already the term 'behavior' in the place of 'action' often reflects the tendency to interpret human activity in the manner of the natural sciences.) Side 32 Charles Taylor, whose study, Explanation of Behavior (1964), analyzes behaviorist concepts and theories, presents interesting comments on the consequences which follow when these are applied. The talk about freedom, choice, and responsibility loses its meaning, and thus collapses the foundation of the whole modern social structure, which is built upon these concepts.14 A comment about the notion of planning can be added here. According to a certain popular conception, the behaviorist study of man and society, which explains human behavior solely in terms of causal 'natural phenomena', then only makes possible efficient and rational social planning. This conception seems to be basedon an error in thinking. The idea that human activity is guided by concious (intentional) planning conflicts with consistent behavioristic conceptions. (One can perhaps be saved from this conflict through the aid of a 'practical compromise' by dividing society into two castes: on the one hand, there is a purposely acting group of planners, on the other, the causally behaving mass for whom plans are made. The idea of 'social engineering' which belongs to the belief that man finally is gaining the same control over human behavior that he has over natural phenomena, seems to be based unconsciously on two different concepts of human behavior. Taylor's analysis — although we cannot go into its details here — shows, however, that modern behaviorist concepts and theories cannot stand up to detailed critical examination. As to the usual claim that the behaviorial sciences are in their infancy, Taylor remarks that "it begs the question. It may be that these theories are in their 'infancy' precisely because there is a fatal obstacle to their growing up, viz., that they are incorrect. The 'Galilean spirit' has been around in psychology for quite some time, and, if it hasn't produced anything very solid in experimental psychology, this may be because current approaches are wrong." At this time, according to Ta.ylor, there are grounds for the 'rational belief that animate organisms exhibite characteristics which can only be understood through concepts of intention and purpose. (Taylor, 1965, pp. 272—273) ... https://tidsskrift.dk/scandinavian_political_studies/article/view/32014/29479 3 Jurgen Habermas- Stanford Encyclopedia: Habermas's interest in the political subsequently led him to a series of philosophical studies and critical-social analyses that eventually appeared in English in his Toward a Rational Society (1970) and Theory and Practice (1973b). Whereas the latter consists primarily of reflections on the history of philosophy, the former represents an attempt to apply his emerging theory of rationality to the critical analysis of contemporary society, in particular the student protest movement and its institutional target, the authoritarian and technocratic structures that held sway in higher education and politics. 4- Christian List: 2016, Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontologicalChristian List∗LSEMarch-April 2016 Abstract: Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels ofexplanation, and ontological levels. This paper presents a framework for studyinglevels. I give a general definition of asystem of levelsand discuss several appli-cations, some of which refer to descriptive or explanatory levels while others referto ontological levels. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework by bringing it tobear on some familiar philosophical questions. Is there a hierarchy of levels, with afundamental level at the bottom? And what does the answer to this question implyfor physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? Are there emergent higher-level properties? Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains beviewed as one involving levels? And might a levelled framework shed light on therelationship between third-personal and first-personal phenomena?1 Introduction: Scientists as well as philosophers frequently employ notions such aslevels of description,levels of explanation, andontological levels. Although it is widely held – though by nomeans universally accepted – that everything in the world is the product of fundamentalphysical processes, it is also widely recognized that, for many scientific purposes, the rightlevel of description or explanation is not the fundamental physical one, but a “higher”level, which abstracts away from microphysical details.1Chemistry, biology, geology, andmeteorology would all get bogged down with an informational or computational overloadif they tried to explain the phenomena in their domains by modelling the behaviour ofevery elementary particle, instead of invoking “higher-level” properties and regularities.For instance, it would be a hopeless task to try to understand a biological organism oran ecosystem at the level of the billions of elementary particles of which it is composed,rather than at the macroscopic level of its biological functioning.Similarly, cognitive scientists tend to assume that human psychology is better un-derstood at the level of the mind (the cognitive-psychological level) than at the levelof the brain (the neuro-physiological level).2This parallels the observation that it ismuch easier to understand the workings of a word-processing package such as MicrosoftWord at the software level than at the hardware level, where astronomical numbers ofelectrons flow through microchips.Finally, for many social-scientific purposes, the right level of description is not the“micro”-level of individuals, but a social level, involving “macro”-variables.3Despite thepopularity of methodological individualism – the view that social phenomena should beexplained at the level of individuals – macro-economists and political scientists wouldhave a hard time modelling the economy or the dynamics of political systems if they ried to represent the behaviour of every single market participant or every single citizen.Given the ubiquity of higher-level descriptions in science, some philosophers askwhether the world itself might be “stratified into levels”, where different levels are or-ganized hierarchically, perhaps with a fundamental level at the bottom.4The levels inquestion, then, are not justlevels of descriptionorexplanation, butlevels of realityorontological levels. On one view, different descriptive or explanatory levels correspond todifferent ontological levels: they are “epistemic markers” of something “ontic”.How should we think about levels? Are notions such aslevels of description,levelsof explanation, orontological levelsmere metaphors, as is sometimes suggested, or canwe explicate them precisely? The aim of this paper is to present a general framework forstudying levels, whether interpreted epistemically or ontically. I introduce an abstractdefinition of asystem of levelsand discuss a number of applications, some of whichcan be interpreted as capturing descriptive or explanatory levels while others can beinterpreted as capturing ontological levels. One of these applications captures the idea that a level of description may be a marker of an ontological level. The applications buildon some recent discussions of levels in the literature; the underlying abstract definitionis inspired by category theory.5I will illustrate the usefulness of the proposed framework by bringing it to bearon some familiar philosophical questions: are levels linearly ordered, and is there afundamental level?6And what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism,the thesis that everything supervenes on (i.e., is determined by) the physical? Arethere emergent higher-level properties that are not accompanied by matching lower-level properties? Are higher-level descriptions always reducible to lower-level ones? Canwe represent the relationship between normative and non-normative domains as oneinvolving levels? And might a levelled framework shed some light on the relationshipbetween third-personal and first-personal levels, especially on the (often claimed) failureof the first-personal to supervene on the third-personal?7My aim is not to give conclusiveanswers to these questions. It would be preposterous to try to do so within the scope ofa single paper. My aim is rather to illustrate how the proposed framework allows us toframe some of the issues in a helpful way. (1See, among many others, Fodor (1974), Owens (1989), and Beckermann, Flohr, and Kim (1992).2For a classic discussion, see Putnam (1967). On levels in cognitive science, see also Bechtel (1994).3See, e.g., Kincaid (1986), Sawyer (2002, 2003), List and Pettit (2011), and List and Spiekermann (2013).4For a defence of the stratified picture, see Schaffer (2003). The quote (de-italicized) is from p. 498.) http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12040/1/Levels.pdf

Gould´s Non-Overlapping Magisteria In The Eyes of Another Presumptuous Rationalist

" Nonoverlapping magisteria: why Gould got it wrong By Jonathan Meddings Reconciliation between science and religion is as likely as between Israel and Palestine, but that hasn’t stopped the scientific and religious alike from trying. In his 1997 essay Stephen Jay Gould proposed that religion and science are nonoverlapping magisteria, stating that: The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. 1 It says a lot about how the religious have dominated the moral discourse that even scientists defer ethical matters to them without objection. But what is wrong with Gould’s proposition? First, even if one ignores the instances that religion is expressly in conflict with science – such as when it lobbies to prevent stem cell research and have creationism taught in schools – the two nonetheless remain fundamentally irreconcilable. Second, religion does not restrict itself to moral teachings, and the role of science in developing an intelligent ethical framework is unavoidable. " from https://www.academia.edu/6094983/Nonoverlapping_magisteria_Why_Gould_got_it_wrong?email_work_card=view-paper Rigor requires clarity of subject matter. Science is about the physical material constitution of the Universe, not "empirical." "Empirical" is a larger subject meaning perceptible, not even merely observable. "Empirical methodology" has supplemented all the social sciences and humanities as they developed from moral philosophy. Gould´s use of the term "religion," and Meddings discussion of it, is also rationalized, as might be expected from the source, a rationalist. Gould´s own definition, if accurate, would also be rationalized. Anthropologist Anthony FC Wallace formally suggested four categories of religion: *Individualistic: most basic; simplest. Example: vision quest. **Shamanistic: part-time religious practitioner, uses religion to heal, to divine, usually on the behalf of a client. The Tillamook have four categories of shaman. Examples of shamans: spiritualists, faith healers, palm readers. Religious authority acquired through one's own means. ***Communal: elaborate set of beliefs and practices; group of people arranged in clans by lineage, age group, or some religious societies; people take on roles based on knowledge, and ancestral worship. ****Ecclesiastical: dominant in agricultural societies and states; are centrally organized and hierarchical in structure, paralleling the organization of states. Typically deprecates competing individualistic and shamanistic cults. The Philosophy of Religion can involve the following, according to at least two sources: Philosophy of religion covers alternative beliefs about God (or gods)(and Ultimate Reality), the varieties of religious experience, the interplay between science and religion, the nature and scope of good and evil, and religious treatments of birth, history, and death.[1](Taliaferro, Charles (1 January 2014). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Philosophy of Religion (Winter 2014 ed.).) The field also includes the ethical implications of religious commitments, the relation between faith, reason, experience and tradition, concepts of the miraculous, the sacred revelation, mysticism, power, and salvation.{5} Bunnin, N, Tsui-James, The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, p. 453. Meddings´ discussion is circular and simplistically self-justifying. Gould is wrong because science and religion are, "nonetheless, irreconcilable." Excuse me? That´s not logic, that´s a conclusion. He´s not actually arguing, but confusing his conclusion for an argument. A foregone conclusion fallacy, so to speak. He has taken a step to present science and religion as different. To argue that they are "irreconcilable," he then would need to assert that there ARE NO differences between them. He makes parenthetical comments and argues that religion conflicts with science in areas like stem cell research and creationism. He doesn´t suggest how they might differ, or why it´s significant. Science seeks knowledge of things as physical living processes in the case of stem cells. Religion, certain Christian or perhaps other religious groups in particular, to address some issue of the inviolability of some concept of life, depending on the context. These are areas of conflict, for some religious groups. Meddings doesn´t make basic distinctions between certain religious groups, in the first place. Meddings´ second point combines two components. He begins with religion´s involvement in matters beyond simply moral teachings. This point addresses the issues of Gould´s and Meddings´ definitions and the meaning of Magisteria. It also raises the issue of religion and science having their own different identities, and areas of overlap. Meddings´ second component factor is that science has a necessary role in developing an intelligent ethical framework. The definitions so far have limited science to "empirical" or physical-biological-medical matters. He has mentioned stem cell research and creationism. Science wants to conduct experiments, and some religious groups protest, depending. Some religious groups want to include or substitute "creationism" in relation to evolution. Meddings: "On the face of it the argument that there exists no conflict between science and religion seems patently absurd. Numerous conflicts spring to mind, and one doesn’t have to read a history book to find them, only a newspaper. The philosopher Russell Blackford argues that the reason it is even possible to imagine no conflict between science and religion is a result of just how much the religious have had to concede: "Historically, religions have been encyclopedic systems of belief, offering explanations of a vast range of phenomena ... As encyclopedic systems, they inevitably come into conflict with science as the latter provides more and more facts about how the worldactually works. Religion can avoid direct conflicts only by retreating into highly abstract and more-or-less unfalsifiable positions. Some modern-day versions of religion may well have retreated so far from falsifiability that they are no longer in direct conflict with science, but that's a fascinating historical development, not an indication that religion and science exercise inherently different and non-overlapping magisteria.2 Over and over again history has proven religion to not just be wrong, but embarrassingly, fatuously wrong; so much so that it would appear the only thing all religions got right is that all other religions are wrong. And now the religious stand before us clinging to the one thing science is yet to take from them –morality." What are Meddings' categories now? More presumption, not substantive thinking. "No conflict" is absurd. Imagining 'no conflict' is a function of the quantity of historical religious concessions. He quotes an R Blackford referring to religions historical "encyclopedic systems of belief" and the "explanations they offer." Blackford refers to religions avoiding direct conflict by "retreating to highly abstract and unfalsifiable positions." There is projection here, because the discussion is itself abstract without concrete references to ground it. The assumption is that science is "taking things" from religion, and it will take "morality" in the future. The issue of historical concessions, say, geocentrism and creationism, reflects specific religious institutions and their doctrines about those physical phenomena. The writer´s confusion then includes the misguided references to the parties in conflict. The writer´s failure to acknowledge the broader range of religious components interferes further with his ability to make clear distinctions. Blackford´s stating that there are "modern-day versions of religion" that have "retreated" into "unfalsifiability" assigns the expression "fascinating historical development" with no sense of "inherent differences." Denominations like the Episcopalians might reason that the Creator created the Big Bang as the First Cause. "Unfalsifiability" is based on a scientific methodological term that applies to the physical realm. Science itself is philosophical in nature. The argument for a First Cause is coherent with the historical sociology of Jesus´ heritage, for one. It corresponds to the basic Biblical account of Creation in Genesis. Coherence and Correspondence are two fundamental criteria of philosophical truth, and those principles actually involve "falsifiability." Is God the Creator and Parental figure through Jesus incoherent with the Big Bang and Natural Selection? No. Does it correspond to the limits of scientific philosophical knowledge? Yes. Is God incongruent with them? No. R Bradford is defining "highly abstract and unfalsifiable" positions as historical developments, not evidence of different knowledge and phenomena domains. That is the definition of magisteria. Since the Philosophy of Religion includes the First Cause argument(s), while religious experience addresses the issues of Jesus and his heritage in the OT, it is philosophy that clarifies the necessary equivalent categories, not the self-justifying and convenient denials offered by Bradford. God as Creator and Parent through Jesus and his heritage is one category, and the teachings of Jesus and their legacy are another, I believe.