What Can We Believe, Then?

[QuestingHound08]

Our faculties never gather objective information, everything we perceive is filtered through everything we have experienced and what we have decided about those experiences. That doesn't mean we can't know anything, it just means that we have to develop a standard for knowledge that is based on more than just our own perceptions. For me that would be peer reviewed opinions based on evidence and the scientific method.

Quite right--we start with our experiences, and what we've decided about them. But the interpretative step we take in deciding to believe something is a real step, something like the difference between having vague and disconnected sensations, and having a unified concept formed in the brain. My understanding is that animals are able to respond directly to experiential stimuli, without understanding them. We have instincts that make us jump when we hear a loud noise, before our understanding interprets it. When we interpret it, however, we impose or accept a meaning giving form and coherence to that information. Why we should ever take that step at all is a big question...

Peer review and scientific method--both those standards show that you are a person of common sense--by which I mean, you believe in a sense of reality common and objective, able to be checked up against the experiences of others, and tested by a consistent method. A fool is (at least, in the explanations I have heard) someone who lives in their own mind, and is unaware or purposely ignoring its connections to others, and its sources of meaning. Such a one is by necessity, perpetually isolated from anyone but themselves, because they insist on only mediating reality (including their knowledge of others) through their own artificial lens.

But with you, that doesn't seem to be the case. Why we have that reliance in the experiences of others, or a stationary empirical method...that is another question. I think of it as part of our natural (at least, present in infancy) orientation towards receiving the experiential world as if it can and ought to be understood. That basic positive direction of learning allows us to use different tools like the experiences of others, and a system of examination, to grow in a systematic and relational way. But none of it, none of it would be any good if we didn't have the conviction that there was a real world to come to know. And that conviction ultimately gets down to a personal experience of life--an experience telling you that life has to be either ordered and purposeless, or ordered and purposeful..and, if you're Christian, experience is grounded in a permeating experience of relationship to a Person--a Someone shining through the order of the world as a pen-pal's personality-ness shines through the lines of ordered symbols on a page. We not only see the organization--we understand some hint of a message. So you're right--whichever way you choose, a view of reality is based upon a subjective experience, taken either to order and purpose, or order and purposelessness. And a lot of temptation remains to make the rest of our lives simply an evidence-gathering expedition for the conclusion we've already made. Although, in a purposeless universe, I don't much see the purpose in that . I humbly submit that life be explored to the 'enth degree, by opening up all the doors that reality provides. That means exploring what the world would be like without purpose--but that's a dead end. It's like that dead-end street in the first matrix movie. I've just found that belief in God is a door which opens up possibiilities for living that are huge--curiously without shutting down any of my other doors. Even out of sheer love of adventure alone, and out of integrity of searching, I'd have to check it out. Also--there are just creepy ways that it starts fulfilling desires and intuitions one picks up as a kid, just looking at the world. Personally I think that's why Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, these guys who just hunted the truth ruthlessly down--believed in a God, even if they couldn't understand Him personally, yet.

Sorry--I'm blathering on. I DO appreciate your comments and your thoughtful remarks.