I loved Lord Russell, especially in college and when he was alive but he also said that applying the rules of one domain to another often gets you lies. That's why his examination of religion never had much to do with what we call religion and his criticisms of Christianity I found consonant with my experience with missionaries. However, it had nothing to do with theologians of his caliber in science. Tillich, Barth and Niebuhr would all three have said that he wasn't living up to his own rules. Science establishes generic reality that is mutually agreed to. It doesn't tell us what we can know but only that which is predictable within certain parameters. It establishes generic domains in context. That generic can then be used for the creation of human models of the numinous reality that we can't truly know. Knowing is complexity solved. "Nothing is complex that you know." John Warfield. English is a wayward wench that has a confidence game in mind. That's the problem and why you can't just quote people who are dead as if they were the law of the land.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2012 10:43 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'Keith Hudson'; 'pete' Subject: Re: [Futurework] 'Dark Knight Rises' shooting: Three heroesdied inAurora taking bullets for their girl friends - NY Daily News "Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it." Bertrand Russell, "A History of Western Philosophy. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2012 5:20 PM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'pete' Subject: Re: [Futurework] 'Dark Knight Rises' shooting: Three heroesdied inAurora taking bullets for their girl friends - NY Daily News I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about... -- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)(Nobel Physicist) From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2012 2:02 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; pete Subject: Re: [Futurework] 'Dark Knight Rises' shooting: Three heroesdied inAurora taking bullets for their girl friends - NY Daily News At 17:58 24/07/2012, Pete wrote: On Tue, 24 Jul 2012, Ed Weick wrote: > We all need our gods because we exist in an insecure place, somewhere > between birth and death (what comes before, what comes after?), > between the infinitesimal and the infinite, and between humanity and > brutality. We don't know where we are and have always needed a god or > gods to guide and protect us. > > Ed [PV] I dont know, I rather think we would all be better off if we would stand up to the challenge of learnig to be comfortable with just saying "I don't know". I think it's the first step required on the journey to discovering what is actually going on. But will we ever know "what is actually going on"? It's only been comparatively recently that we've realized that 95% of the mass-energy of the universe is quite unlike anything else we know and is, at present, completely unknowable. Then, too, as the particle physicists peel away yet another layer (e.g. the Higgs boson) in particle accelerators, will we ever get to the end of it? To me, the biggest mystery of all is that, whether we believe in a God-created universe or, simply, in one as-is or, at creation and shortly thereafter, as-was (when we're talking of Higgs' and other particles) then how come that we, a by-product of it, are actually asking questions that are far more incisive and curious than anything that might have been selected for mere daily survival by the normal process of evolution. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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