----- Original Message ----- From: "Shane Mage" <shmage at pipeline.com>
>It's a quest for an explanation. No mendacity is involved. Ontology is
not
>reducible to politics.
>
An "explanation" of what? Certainly not of the *present* existence
of the empirically known universe, since that (in principle) can only be
"explained" by derivation from its own prior state. Of a postulated
origin for a postulated initial condition of this *becoming*
universe?
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Well one could argue that you're confusing ontology with cosmology. The question "why is there something rather than nothing" is not a scientific question. However, I was pointing out your ascription of motive or cognitive 'state' to those who ask such questions. There's nothing dishonest about asking the question. Would you assert a small child is being dishonest when they stumble on the infamous *"why"*? And I, for one, don't think questions of ontology are reducible to physics or cosmology even as I'm totally comfortable with knowing that such an assertion is not a claim made within the discourse we call science.
>
But this obviously depends on what has been postulated
as that initial condition, and in the absence of any empirical or
rational grounding whatsoever any such postulation is just as obviously
an absolutely arbitrary and indiosyncratic assertion admitting
of no discussion and permitting no rational application to the
*present* universe however defined.
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Quite, but again the issue of God as ultimate explainer does not stand or fall on cosmological arguments alone.......Your use of the terms 'admitting' and 'permitting' point to the issue of free speech and the problem of authority as it relates to issues of ontology.
(by the way, for anyone living in a totalitarian system like that of the Inquisition or of Stalinism ontology is an intensely political matter, a question literally, for one, like Aquinas, suspect of heresy, a matter of life or death)
Shane Mage
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Examples as close to proof positive as history gets that issues of ontology can't be reduced to politics because of the horrors that follow in the wake of said politicization. I'll take live and let live pluralistic polities any day of the week thank you very much. Societies with members that compel or forbid certain varieties of ontology [as discourse] and explanation are tragedies waiting to happen, nay, ongoing tragedies.
"How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place?...The question of being...[is] the darkest in all philosophy. All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs." [William James]