[lbo-talk] RE: Aetheism

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 24 09:10:50 PST 2003


Jon Johanning wrote:
>
>
> I don't know about that -- it might be true if science *had*
> metaphysical foundations, which it doesn't.
>
That's arguable in principle, but historically, actual scientific work has always had metaphysical foundations, which are particularly clear in the work of the more famous scientists. Darwin's belief (following Lyell), for example, in the "principle of uniformitarianism." Or Newton's belief in a clockwork universe and action at a distance. Though the fact that scientists do no live "outside society" does not justify any cavalier scrunching of science & religion or the claim of (some) (self-labelled) "post-modernists" that science is merely an ideology.

And I agree with you, on fairly simple grounds of keeping a vocabulary that we share, that "organized religion" should be seen as a redundancy. That's what we _mean_ by "religion." If some form of belief sharing generic qualities with "organized religion" exists, a new vocabulary ought to be coined to describe and argue for that species of religious belief. Otherwise we get in arguments such as "X is a mammal," "No, X is a feline," "No, X is a lion," "No, X is a vertebrate." The same difficulty arises when various social theories or practices (and not just marxism) are labelled "religion." A momentary rhetorical ploy such as that merely clogs the streams of discourse. It's bad writing.

Carrol



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