> On Aug 31, 2016, at 10:20 AM, Søren Brier <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have tried several times to get through on this list with the third point > you have. But I think some of my mails on fundamentalism has been censured > away. We must be aware when we pass from empirically based science to > philosophy and from there to religion. Religion can of course absorb > scientific and philosophical knowledge, but it is difficult for science to > absorb knowledge from religions with a personal creator god when they are > fundamentalistly based on belief or personal spiritual revelations. Nothing > wrong with them, but we have found no way of using that in a systematic > intersubjective way as the basis of science with their internal demands of > critique and ongoing improvement and expansion. The same goes for the > problems of basing science on the various traditions holy writings. Which > tradition or faith are we going to choose? We can make some science on the > general human capability of mystical revelations as well as their existential > meaning for us, but not from there to a hypothesis of a personal god. One can > say that theology goes the opposite way, namely from a personal god to give > meaningful explanation of the rest of our knowledge of the world. >
I think this is important. To the degree religion is empirical it is private experience. And many traditions eschew even evidentialism. Given that it’s hard to see any unity between science and religion although one can always try and make religion more concerned with evidence as opposed to textual fideism. (Recognizing that evidence marshaled by critics of religion against religion is often misleading) But in general the problem of fundamentalism (although I strongly dislike that term as being misleading) is being closed to different ways of reading their sacred text as well as being overly dismissive of scientific or historical evidence. Sticking with Peirce, I think he gets at this in his four methods in “Fixation of Belief.” Fundamentalism tends to fall prey to several of the problems in belief he notes.
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