On 09 Sep 2012, at 13:50, Roger Clough wrote:
Why we debate religion: two completely different and frequently
confused types of truth.
There are two completely different types of truth.
The first is rational or objective or public truth, discussed
in philosophies of "truth" and logic.
The second is truth known only privately or subjectively
This is the kind of truth that police must rely on when a
dead body needs identifying. There is an immediate
certainty of identity that the surviving relative knows inside,
but only he can be sure of that.
This is also a part of the show-and-tell aspect of courtroom trials.
The jury must decide on the guilt of the defendant v partly
logiocally, but to a great extent from the show and tell of evidence.
Objective truth is shareable but not determined personally,
and may be debsatable by philsophers.
Subjective truth is not shareable because it is private and personal.
But to many (including me) it is the most certain form of truth,
A mother will always be certain that it is or is not her son
lying on
the table in the morgue. And in another context, one cannot argue
on matters of taste.
This difference in forms of truth is where all of our religious
debates
come from. Religious truth is only certain to a an individual
and cannot be shared.
I mainly agree. But then why coming with factual assertion, about a
Jesus
guy. I can accept the parabolas, but I can't take a witnessing of 500
persons, in the writing of a quite biased guy (Paul), from a
reasonable
perspective, as an argument, and it all make dubious any assertion
you can
add.
Your theory above is better, though, and close to the universal
machine's
own theory, actually.
Science is only a modest and interrogative inquiry. It is rooted in
the
doubt, and ask only question. Theories have all interrogation mark.
It is the separation between science and theology that makes people
believing that science = truth, when the truth is that science =
doubt, but
with a willingness to make the assumptions as clear as it is needed
to be
sharable, and questioned.
You say "Religious truth is only certain too an individual and
cannot be
shared", but note that is the case also for consciousness, and all
hallucinated states. If you cannot share, don't try, perhaps.
As a computer scientist, and logician, I study what ideally correct
machine
can discover about themselves and that they cannot share, or even
express,
from different person points of view. Very small machines already
provide
quite non trivial observations on that. Books exists on the subject
(Boolos,
Smorynski, Smullyan, ...).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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