----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2005 4:26 PM Subject: Re: Bill Moyers: There is no tomorrow
> * William T Goodall ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > > In the case of the Soviet Union and the United States, for example, > > there are several overwhelmingly more significant differences than the > > matter of religion to consider. So much so that I don't see how any > > conclusion at all could be reached about the relative contribution of > > religion to the development of science in either. My point was that the tendency to go with one wishes to be valid instead of what one sees to be valid if one really looks carefully is not a function of religion. To establish this, I looked at atheistic states. We can agree, I think, that it was clearly true for the first state based on "scientific atheism." Further, this state did not represent a minority viewpoint. For most of my life, the overwhelming majority of atheists were Marxists. I didn't cherry-pick some crazy group that happened to be atheistic. I picked the uniquely prevalent atheistic system of the last 200 years, that the overwhelming majority of atheists during that period accepted to one degree or another. It is valid to state that there are atheists who rejected the problematic aspects of Marxism, just as there are many Christians that reject the false dichotomy between evolution and scripture. (As an aside, this rejection goes way way back. One of the two great doctors of first 1500 years of the Christian church specifically addressed this. He stated that Scripture was not intended to be used as a source for natural philosophy, natural philosophy was the precursor to science, because God intended us to use our reason to determine the nature of the world.) I was just arguing like vs. like. If one can use fundamentalists as an example of Christian thought, then one can use Marxists as an example of atheistic thought. > It's really kind of funny. He keeps making that reference, but as near > as I can figure, his reasoning goes something like: a society needs some > sort of ideology, and if that ideology isn't a religion, then it could > be something worse like totalitarian communism. It's more that societies have always had ideologies...so lets look at the prevailing ones over the last 100 years or so, and see if we can find one that is inherently atheistic and see how that one worked. -- Societies have had and do have ideologies. Indeed, the idea of history as a class of competing ideologies is widely accepted in the fields of history and international relations. Look at the two main theories of historical development that have come out in the last 20 years: Fukuyama's end of history and Huntington's clash of civilizations. If one wished to make a subtle point about the differences between ideological worldview differences and civilization based worldview differences (although as Hoffmann points out the latter is hard to nail down), then I could appreciate that. So, yes, I do assume that societies do have ideologies. if you want to argue for the existence of a viable society without any common viewpoint that is capable of taking action, then I'd be interested in that thread. > Certainly England seems to be doing okay, and you Brits are much less > religious than Americans. Ideologies do not have to be religious. They are better understood as a basic way of understanding the meaning of what goes on. It's a framework from which things are viewed. Indeed, a problematic set of assumptions does not need to be part of a broad worldview like the one that religion provides. They don't even need to qualify as an ideology. I can think of many of these off the top of my head: supply side economics; free trade hurts the world poor; the rule of law is sufficient can deal with dictatorships; we are on the verge of an environmental catastrophe (including subset assumptions about nuclear winter, the evils of nuclear power, etc.), those who are now 70 plus did not get much more back from Social Security than what the put in (after considering how such an investment would have paid off.) So, my point was that religion is not the source of this type of difficulty. There are a number of reasons why people would want to cling to comfortable assumptions instead of questioning them. Some assumptions can lead to predictions of observables, and so lend themselves to empirical testing. I feel that those that can be subjected to testing and are found to be inconsistent with observations should be modified (to match observations) or discarded. But many assumptions made by people are not subject to empirical testing. I realize that one might argue for not making any assumptions that are not grounded in empirical models. But, before doing so, however, one should look at what is left after one does that. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
