1. God is real but does not exist: so the best way to worship him is through the religion of science
I thought this sums up nicely Section 9.6 in Kees' book and was a good way to start the discussion of: God, science and religion. Peirce's theory of the relation between science and religion is one of the most controversial aspects of his pragmaticist semiotics only second to his evolutionary objective idealism influenced by Schelling (Niemoczynski and Ejsing) and based on his version of Duns Scotus' extreme scholastic realism, which Kees' did an exemplary presentation of as well. Peirce's view of religion and how science is deeply connected to it in a way that differs from what any other philosopher has suggested except Whitehead's process philosophy, but there are also important differences here. I have no quarrels with Kees' exemplary understandable formulations in the short space he has. That leaves opportunity for us to discuss all the interesting aspects he left out like Peirce's Panentheism (Michael Raposa , Clayton and Peacock), his almost Neo-Platonist (Kelly Parker http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html ) metaphysics of emptiness or Tohu va Bohu (see also Parker) and ongoing creation in his process view, and from this basic idea of emptiness ( that is also foundational to Nargajuna's Buddhism of the middle way ) a connection to Buddhism. This was encouraging Peirce to see Buddhism and Christianity in their purest mystical forms integrated into an agapistic Buddhisto-Christian process view of God. Brent mentions an unsent letter from Peirce's hand describing a mystical revelation in the second edition of the biography. This idea of Buddhisto-Christianity was taken up by Charles Hartshorne - one of the most important philosophers of religion and metaphysicians of the twentieth century - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/ who also wrote about Whitehead's process view of the sacred (see references). I have collected many of the necessary quotes and interpreted them in this article http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/A%20Peircean%20Panentheist%20Scientific%20Mysticism.pdf , and in Brier 2012 below. Even Peirce's evolutionary objective idealism is too much to swallow for most scientists who are not fans of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. So even today it is considering a violation of rationality to support an evolutionary process objective idealism like Peirce's, which include a phenomenological view. Even in the biosemiotic group this is dynamite. We have had the most wonderfully heated metaphysical discussion and quarrels about what it means to be scientific. That is when Marcel Barbieri left the group being tired of Peirceans "unscientific stance". In my days studying in the sciences it was really a problem to be a true religious Christian and a scientist at the same time as one of my teachers in comparative physiology was. She reflected a lot on it in some interesting seminars. (By the way I am not a member of any church or religion). But it is difficult to be part of main stream science today if you are an objective evolutionary idealist and you have the Peircean family's conviction (see some of Steven Ericsson-Zenith's contributions to this list and Benjamin Peirce's book on Ideality in The Physical Sciences) that science reveals the truth about God's nature. Look for the truth and you will find God seems to be their view. Science is driven by the ethic of finding truth and as such in the end it is a religious search, as Pierce has integrated phenomenology with ethics and aesthetics in his theory of science. Not keeping them apart as traditional views of science does in the slip stream of logical positivism. But, what is also interesting is, that Peirce's view is close to a combination of modern quantum field physics, thermodynamics, systems theory and self-organization theory - except for his integration of phenomenology, ethics and aesthetics in his theory of science. No system theorist and cyberneticians have made this including, though there are some objective idealists like Erwin Làszló standing out in meticulously working an integrated view of modern physics with a pure mystical objective idealism and system thinking through a concept of information. See for instance Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. But he also started as a musician http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3 . Let us end with John Sheriff's wonderful summarizing statement about Peirce's theory: "It places humans in a universe of signs that connect mind and matter, inside and outside, transcendence and immanence. It gives us a theory of human and cosmic meaning that does not lead to the dead-end nothingness of pure form or to the decentering of the human subject, but to the possibility of unlimited intellectual and moral growth..." (Sheriff 1994 p. XVI). Interesting works dealing with Peirce's view on religion and science: Brent, J. (1938): Charles S. Peirce: A Life, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Brier, S. (2010): The Conflict between Indian Vedic Mentality and Western Modernity. I: Mentality and Thought: North, South, East and West. red. / Per Durst-Andersen ; Elsebeth F. Lange. Frederiksberg: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2010: 53-86. Brier, S. (2012). C. S. Peirce's Complementary and Transdisciplinary Conception of Science and Religion, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Volume 19, Numbers 1-2, 2012: 59-94 Corrington, R. S. (2000) An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993) and A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Clayton, P. and Peacock, A. (2004). In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World, Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Ejsing, A. (2007). Theology of anticipation: A constructive study of C. S. Peirce. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Hartshorne, C. (1972). Whitehead's philosophy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hartshorne, C. (1984). Towards a Buddhisto-Christian religion. In K. K. Inada & N. P. Jacobson (Eds.), Buddhism and American thinkers (pp. 1-13). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Innis, R.E. (2013). The Reach of the Aesthetic and Religious Naturalism: Peircean and Polanyian Reflections, https://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD38-3/TAD38-3-fnl-pg31-50-pdf.pdf Orange, D. M. (1984). Peirce's Conception of God: A Developmental Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), Peirce, B. (1881). Ideality in the Physical Sciences , Boston: Little , Brown, and Company. Potters, V.G. (1997): Charles S. Peirce: On Norms & Ideals, American Philosophy Series, Fordham University Press. Raposa, M. (1993).Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) Sheriff, J.K. (1994): Charles Sanders Peirce's Guess at the Riddle: Ground for Human Significance, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Niemoczynski , L. (2011). Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). Best wishes Søren Brier Professor in the semiotics of information, cognition and commmunication science, department of International Business Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Home page: www.cbs.dk/staff/sbibc<http://www.cbs.dk/staff/sbibc>. , Cybersemiotics.com
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