RE: Atheist VS Naturalist - the latter sounds more appealing to me...
May 26, 2020 at 4:33 pm
(This post was last modified: May 26, 2020 at 4:38 pm by Belacqua.)
I'm afraid that this commitment to the idea that everything is knowable by scientific means is a hold-over from religious thinking. Science itself should cause us to be more skeptical.
The metaphysical underpinnings that gave rise to modern science were religious and optimistic. They held that God is Idea and God is rational. They said that the universe operates according to God's Logos, which is a set of principles or logic.
While God itself is too much to be known directly by the human mind, we can know a great deal about the Logos, which is orderly and consistent. The human mind operates according to this Logos, and the intellect of man is a miniature version of the intellect of God. The two are inseparable, so the one is knowable by the other.
We no longer believe this metaphysics, for the most part.
We don't hold that the mind is some sort of spark of the intellect of God. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is meat. It evolved for survival, not truth. It has different sections which may think different things. It can contradict itself.
Likewise we no longer believe in a single metaphysical Idea (i.e. God) holding the universe in existence and in order.
Therefore there is no reason at all to believe that the human intellect, through its rational tools, can have access to everything that's going on. To think that our useful methods exhaust the possibilities -- that nothing lies outside the approaches we currently use -- is pure faith.
Skeptical thinkers have to hold open the possibility that all kinds of things are going on which the human mind can't understand. Some of these may be affecting us. Some of them may eventually be knowable, but there is no guarantee of that.
To say that we don't know of anything inaccessible to science, or we can't imagine anything like that, therefore nothing like that exists, would be arguments from ignorance or personal incredulity.
The metaphysical underpinnings that gave rise to modern science were religious and optimistic. They held that God is Idea and God is rational. They said that the universe operates according to God's Logos, which is a set of principles or logic.
While God itself is too much to be known directly by the human mind, we can know a great deal about the Logos, which is orderly and consistent. The human mind operates according to this Logos, and the intellect of man is a miniature version of the intellect of God. The two are inseparable, so the one is knowable by the other.
We no longer believe this metaphysics, for the most part.
We don't hold that the mind is some sort of spark of the intellect of God. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is meat. It evolved for survival, not truth. It has different sections which may think different things. It can contradict itself.
Likewise we no longer believe in a single metaphysical Idea (i.e. God) holding the universe in existence and in order.
Therefore there is no reason at all to believe that the human intellect, through its rational tools, can have access to everything that's going on. To think that our useful methods exhaust the possibilities -- that nothing lies outside the approaches we currently use -- is pure faith.
Skeptical thinkers have to hold open the possibility that all kinds of things are going on which the human mind can't understand. Some of these may be affecting us. Some of them may eventually be knowable, but there is no guarantee of that.
To say that we don't know of anything inaccessible to science, or we can't imagine anything like that, therefore nothing like that exists, would be arguments from ignorance or personal incredulity.
