dmb said: faith ..is a belief held outside of intellectual standards in general.
gav replied: i disagree. faith is a knowledge complementary and ultimately inclusive of intellectual truth. the faith/science schism is only apparent because arguments on both sides are usually naive and inaccurate. dmb says: I think the issue of faith is about the differences between social level values and intellectual values. But I think you are on a slightly different topic here, a more subtle one about the way scientific materialism and traditional empiricism ignores or even denies the validity of anything that might be called "spiritual". For example,... gav said: faith is a knowledge born of transcendent experience. the intellect can only reflect upon this experience. the experience itself, the nature of the experience is the empirical 'data'. ...you can't kick faith out of an essentially mystical metaphysics. dmb says: I think it's like Steve said, "The mystic doesn't say, "accept what I am saying on faith." She says, "see for yourself". Joseph Campbell used to say he didn't need faith because he has experience. This is not the sort of thing a positivist or objectivist would accept as empirical data, but a radical empiricist certainly would. And even if you were debating a positivist SOMer of the worst kind, he'd still have to admit that a belief in the existence of mystical experience is based on some kind of basis in reason and experience. At that point it's a matter of rival interpretations of the data, not a contest between faith and reason. As I see it, the problem of "faith" is not an academic issue about the nature of truth and reality so much as a political, social, cultural problem. I think Sam Harris holds a very Pirsigian view and his quest for the end of faith is basically just a specific way to assert intellectual values over social level values. He's saying that we ought not accept beliefs on the basis of tradition or authority but on the basis of reason and evidence. And unlike the other atheists writing books these says - Dennett, Hitchens, etc. - Harris goes out of his way to say that he's not excluding meditation or mysticism. He realizes these are actual experiences and need not understood as supernatural. If I recall rightly, he practices meditation himself. He's also a brain scientist, but I think the issue for him and me and probably Pirsig too is practical, political, and cultural. I think its based on a desire for betterness in the ordinary world. One of my favorite sections of Lila is around chapter 22, where it describes the 20th century as a political "hurricane", a giant storm caused by the conflict between social and intellectual values. We get a ton of historical examples from the Victorians to Hitler and it goes along way toward explaining what these values are and why they conflict. I learned some interesting things about social values from Nietzsche and Marx last semester. Marx especially. He describes how the whole cultural acts to legitimize the status quo. For him, everything followed from the modes of production and even, or rather especially, the most cosmic and metaphysical beliefs were aimed at supporting the arrangement of society. The creation myth of the West, for example, construes agriculture as god's favorite. The Cain and Able story de-legitimizes the hunter's mode of production in favor of settled farmers. And guess what sort of development was going on when this story was first told? And notice how Adam and Eve are prohibited from enjoying the fruits of knowledge and are condemned to a lifetime of labor for the sin of wanting that fruit. This legitimizes slavery, misogyny and anti-intellectualism. We still hear the echo of this in today's attitudes. Big time. This is where social level values come from and lots of them can now be seen as wildly immoral. I mean, its not just about who's correct and that's why its a moral issue. When we weigh social level values against human rights or freedom of speech, for example, we see how ugly they can be. There are social level morals that prohibit theft, murder and adultery. The MOQ's idea of social level values as the tamer of biological forces points at those codes. But we don't accept them on the basis of authority or faith such much as the list of reasonable justifications. But farmers are not more divine than hunters and the story of Eve's sin has been used to justify bullshit in too many ways to count. Even now there is an anti-feminist backlash and at least one of the Republican frontrunners thinks it makes more sense to make the constitution conform to the bible rather than the other way around. The whole culture (such as it is) in the USA is still storming over these rival sets of values. The negative consequences are enormous. So I see the problem of "faith" in that context. I'm talking about beliefs based on nothing more than tradition and authority and the consequences that follow from holding those beliefs. Truth is a species of the good. And faith is a species of the bad, I guess. _________________________________________________________________ Helping your favorite cause is as easy as instant messaging. You IM, we give. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Home/?source=text_hotmail_join Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
