Kathryn Blackmond Laskey wrote:
>
> David challenged me to justify why my prior belief in God should be any
> different from my prior belief in the Tooth Fairy.
>
> Let's hearken back to the point Jonathan made what seems like such a long
> time ago. We are never in complete ignorance. We are not talking about
> two arbitrary interchangeable labels here. We start with some knowledge.
The rest of this argument goes on to list observations that we interpret as
manifesting meaningful belief in God vs the whimsical notion of tooth fairy.
But I would like to start with Kathy's last sentence above... We start with
some knowledge. The knowledge that a realist begins with is:
(1) there is a real existing world
(2) there must be a cause for the existing world
Cosmology seeks to trace a very similar but radically different path; it seeks
a causal explanation in terms of physics for as far as technology allows us to
see. But the cause I speak of in (2) is meta-physical; why should there be any
thing at all unless there is an efficient cause, that is, a cause which is its
own cause for being. This cold and remote efficient cause is logically necessary
if we are to answer the question of why is there something rather than nothing.
This much gets the realist to the necessity of an entity that must exist if any
thing exists, and which does not depend on anything else existing since it is
self-sufficient. This much alone should set the "priors" on *God* pretty high.
Cordially,
Greg.
>
> For example:
>
> 1. How many people have risked the lives of themselves and their loved
> ones for the tooth fairy?
> 2. How many symphonies have been composed for the tooth fairy?
> 3. How many people have retired to a safe place away from an unbelieving
> society that punished them for being different, in order to have
> unpressured time to learn the difficult skill of experiencing communion
> with the tooth fairy?
>
> It is extreme hubris to imagine that we can safely throw away the
> accumulated wisdom of humanity when setting our priors. The accumulated
> wisdom of humanity is a form of knowledge. If we ignore it, our learning
> will be highly inefficient. One could make an argument that Hitler and
> Stalin were the direct result of a depressing philosophical framework that
> became fashionable in the nineteenth century, in which a deliberate choice
> was made to attribute all of humanity's accumulated spiritual wisdom to
> unfounded supersition. On what rational basis could one make this choice?
> Is it a choice we want to continue to make?
>
> Aldous Huxley wrote a book called "The Perennial Philosophy." In it he
> argues that the world's religions exhibit enormous diversity in their
> exoteric manifestation, which consist of systems of intertwined metaphor,
> mythology, and cultural practices. However, if one digs deeper, one finds
> a stunning similarity in their inner, esoteric, mystical core. Huxley's
> argument is carefully made. He draws examples from many different
> religious traditions to make his points. One could describe that book as
> articulation of a scientific hypothesis together with justification of that
> hypothesis on the basis of empirical evidence. What I've been trying to
> articulate in this dialogue are some of my understandings of fundamental
> aspects of this esoteric core, gained from years of reading and thinking
> about the writings of serious religious thinkers from all the world's
> religious systems (with an admitted bias toward the Judeo-Christian
> tradition because I find those writings far more accessible).
>
> David, you have set up a straw-man definition of God by taking literally
> the mythology of one particular religious tradition. What you have done
> would be as if I based my view of physics on my son's seventh grade science
> textbook. Then you proceed to debunk that straw man. Well, I agree with
> you. That straw man should be debunked. But we've known that for
> centuries. You're fighting an old war, one that was won by Galileo
> although it took a few centuries for the fighting to die down.
>
> Buddha said, "Don't look at my finger. Look where it is pointing." In
> other words, don't believe the literal truth of the words in religious
> texts. The purpose of the words is to spark an understanding of something.
> Buddha is urging us to seek that something. I hypothesize that if try, we
> can articulate a new, 20th century global exoteric manifestation, which
> will work far better as a finger pointing the way to that something, than
> the diverse collection of ancient traditions that have lost much of their
> force because the patent falsehood of their cosmologies and explanations of
> empirical phenomena impedes understanding. We will never pin down the
> esoteric core in any model. But building the exoteric manifestation could
> be classified as a scientific activity.
>
> Kathy
--
Cordially,
Gregory M. Whittaker
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Lead Engineer
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The MITRE Corporation
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