Since most would affirm that you cannot verify God by any of the fives senses, this of course excludes Him.
Suppose you were to ask one who sought to live their lives by the above philosophy, on what rational basis do they do this. You can be sure that any valid reason they may give you, will not be based on the fives senses. In other words, it would eventually become clear that they do, in the end, accept something other than the five senses. In a similar way those who believe that “reason is the unique pathway to knowledge” will not, by reason, be able to give you a valid reason why he or she does this. It would be circular reasoning.
You might ask how can I be so sure. Have I for example heard all possible arguments? Well no, of course not, but what I do know, is that it would violate a theorem of the Austrian Mathematician Kurt Godel. Without going into this in detail, his theorem implies that no system of any sophistication is closed. What this means is that you cannot prove the validity of the system from within. In mathematics we have systems based on axioms, such as Euclidean geometry. You use the axioms as presuppositions and based on the assumption that these things hold true, you prove things. But you cannot prove the axioms. This is not to say that the axioms could not be proved from outside the system. But to prove them from within the system would be circular reasoning.
On the other hand Godel's theorem has implications for just about all the systems we would normally consider. This includes the various philosophical systems, science, the systematic theologies, etc etc. Godel's theorem tells us, that if we want to know if our system is valid, we need to go outside the system to validate it. In other words all these systems are based on, often hidden, presuppositions. These, if we are to arrive at the truth, need to be sussed out and discussed.
I hear many such “disproofs” of God.
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Bravo!
ReplyDeleteThere are no absolutes. Are you sure? yes. Are you absolutely sure?
"""In other words all these systems are based on, often hidden, presuppositions. These, if we are to arrive at the truth, need to be sussed out and discussed."""
That is a new word I learned today: "sussed". Great - I love it!
Even when looking with the most empirical of sciences - physics - we see the same; and not only in entanglement with concepts outside of physics, but with concepts within physics itself. Galileo sussed out the significance of change in motion by distinguishing it from motion itself as the correlate of force. It was a masterstroke of intuition, and Galileo is recognized as one of the giants for such as this.
Instead of "entanglement with [other] concepts" I wanted to speak of "coherence". The physical world, the biological word, the world of economics through on to the world of committed trust and worship are worlds that are interlaced with each other. By "disentanglement" I do not mean severing the concepts of one world from another, but sussing out their mutual coherence, and even interdependance. The relationship between the "systems" of the world is knot, not to be cut in a Gordian way, but to be lovingly untangled. The tangled knottedness is in our understanding only. When that is untangled, we see that the world is not a know, nore a collection of independant threads, but a tapestry.
(All this is just an elaboration of by Bravo!)
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The verification word was "weefic". Is this not a glorious word! I mean, if we take as meaning something "both wee and terrific"?
- Largo
To push the analogy just a bit further. We "worship" some of the strands of our tangle, often bull-headed-ly pulling one, aware (or unaware) that this is pulling the rest into a tighter not -- and what we do see so far of the tapestry becomes warped under the tension.
ReplyDeleteAnd if I am to keep commenting, I need to become a better typist, or else help you figure out how to allow editing of comments! :-p
ReplyDeleteWhich five senses? Which are excluded? Our sense of proprioception, whereby we know the relative position of parts of our body (especially our limbs)? So you say that this falls under touch. What then of equilibrioception, or sense of balanced, rooted in the vestibular system of the inner ear? When this gets out of synch with our vision, we can experience nausea. Do we have a "sense" of our senses telling us conflicting things? And by which sense is nausea experienced?
ReplyDeleteIf I tell you (a): "the moon rattled like a piece of angry candy" -- nonsense! you may reply. But what if I told you (b) "moon the candy of piece" -- you would say that this made even less sense. Well then, (a) must have made some sort of sense.
There is a syntactic structure to (a) that is absent in (b) which we sense when we read it, and it is not reducible to the "five senses" -- the sensory ability is the same whether we read it or hear it.
Sensory function, in its unqualified or foundational 'sense', is a proper subject of psychology, which can address such things as sensory thresholds, habituation, and a list of things other things much longer than I know. But the ability of a person to sense something, to become aware of some phenomenon it one's environment (or even in one's interior mental life), transcends psychological concepts, even as it cannot avoid adopting them. We all possess certain "lingual" sensitivities, and "social" sensitivities, that are reducible neither to each other nor to our paragon, organic sensitivities. (You Phil, I am sure,
are more sensitive than me to what may be a fruitful approach to a mathematics problem, even before you have any justification formulated in your head. Is not mathematical intuition a kind of sensitivity?) Now -- what might we say about a Sensus Divinitatis?
This proves that true linguistic insight depends on psychological concepts, (just as true psychological knowledge depends on linguistic concepts, but I have not demonstrated that yet), even as neither is reducible to (accountable in terms of) the other. Just as parts of the body support each other, so do the different aspects of creation enrich the others with meaning, in mutual coherence. We may struggle with distinguishing and relating the concepts of "sense" and "grammar", but our ability to effortlessly make grammatical sense of one another does not hinge on that little trifle.
(Google keeps complaining that my comments are too long to go through -- fortunately this has not actually occurred yet!)
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