Hi Mark, Mark said: Belief in God is an awareness. It is not a concept, but a feeling. This is similar to belief in Love, or morality. There is nothing logical about those. Dawkins is talking about some kind of belief in mythology. It is not the same thing. He is trying to rationalize Love. I suppose since genetics does not support the concept of love, he may think it is delusional. But to those of us that have experienced it, it is very real. The same is true about the awareness of (a) God. All the dogma and rules and rituals are something completely separate, in the same way that a Valentine's Day card is not Love.
Matt: Hey, I agree with you. I'm not sure if you were just telling me the above, or you were saying that because you thought it was apposite to something, but I have no disagreement with the first-person perspective of religious experience. That's not what concerns people like me (and it should not concern, so much, people like Dawkins and Dennett). What concerns us are the "dogma and rules and rituals," and ecclesiastical institutions set up to manipulate them, because that's where the violence comes from. When I sit down to write large cultural bildungsromans about the progress of our civilization, I still like pointing to the Protestant Reformation as a good thing, a big step away from the clerics towards the experience. But the dangers are still real and the improvements not complete. (And I don't think genetics can prove or disprove the "concept of Love"--asking it to is a wrong-headed question; all of the ink spilt on the biological roots or non-roots of altruism seems to me ill spent on a largely pointless inquiry.) I've written a little about the analogy between love and God in this post: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/02/rorty-religion-and-romance.html Mark said: One cannot rationalize Love or God or faith, but they certainly exist for people. Matt: While I think it would be silly to say love, God, or faith don't exist for people, I'm not sure the sense in which you are using "rationalize" gets us very far in understanding what those three things are. I wrote a little about belief change and a new understanding of what "rationality" means here, and appended at the end is a discussion of what this means for the idea of "faith": http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html Oh, let me also say that I (and most pragmatists) use the word "belief" in a very particular way. I caught something Andre wrote to Steve about not needing "belief" because of direct experience, but that's not how Steve was using the term "belief." In a lot of philosophical parlance (particularly amongst English-speaking professionals), "belief" is simply shorthand for a proposition that a person would mark as true. For instance, "there's a rock on the floor" and "God is Love" are both beliefs in this sense--both are propositions that a person may or may not mark as true. (How "belief" came to mean this for anglophone philosophers is a specific story, but necessarily relevant.) In the post, I talk about a "web of beliefs," and all that's a stand-in for is all of the propositions an individual would mark as true, a metaphor for all the stuff in their minds. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/ 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/
