there is the payoff at the end, though, that i actually get us back to the subject line! see if you can find it!
On 6/16/05, snitsnat <snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> also curious what jeffrey thinks..
i've been ignoring these threads for the last couple of days, but i think kelley mentioning my name my ears burn. so i'll bust out a post.
i will do my best not to piss anyone off.
ok, i take that back. i will do my best not to piss off kelley. :)
> and a bit for ravi and yoshie on
> explaining the whole scientist/relig/asian thing.
and btw - part of what stopped me was yoshie being yoshie -- namely, in this case, completely (i think deliberately, because she's not that stupid) misreading my point about scientists rejecting religion, which was not that it's all western religion, but that to reject ""religion" is utterly non-sensical, especially when no one on this list has -- unless i missed it, which i admit is possible -- satisfactorily defined religion. and i'll bet those scientists can't, either. unless precision only matters with atoms and molecules (aka, "real" knowledge), and not with cultural phenomena. the disdain of so many scientists for the humanistic disciplines is really staggering, sometimes. and i encounter that in my work.
>
> At 01:59 PM 6/14/2005, Carl Remick wrote:
> >>From: "Dennis Perrin" <dperrin at comcast.net>
> >>
> >>Personally, atheist disdain doesn't really bother me. I view it as a form
> >>of despair, esp when it's expressed through insults or, if one is feeling
> >>generous, condescension.
> >
> >How interesting. IMO, it's *religion* that is a form of despair
>
and how condescending both of these approaches are. ahh, armchair psychoanalysis, especially when bolstered with sociology!
and we wonder why "both" "sides" here can't talk to each other? jesus h christ, people.
<snip>
> So, for instance, to speak of religion the way sociologists often do,
> showing how --as John Thornton did re: drugs -- that all of this can be
> explained by natural processes that have gone on for ages -- or as Yoshie
> did when she brought up the language of "disciplining minds and bodies" --
> is to defile the experience, to reduce it to "mere" nature, to mere
> society, to, as DP put it, mere slabs of meat.
>
> It is, alluding to Max Weber, removing the "charm" from the experience --
> because it is removing the supernatural and replacing it with explanations
> that move entirely from the natural/social.
>
> In which case, I don't think the chasm can ever be bridged between the two
> approaches.
well, what chasm is being bridged, exactly? are religion and science supposed to speak the same language?
but if we stopped using god to answer scientific questions, that would go a long way toward straightening things out. it would also help to admit that no science can ever disprove the existence of some something outside of science (either in general or in some specific scientific discipline). that's by definition, folks.
again, and i will not stop beating this drum: gilkey, _creationism on trial_ and dawkins, "god's utility function". talking about this issue with my religion and culture class, last semester, i had a bottle of water in my hand. i threw it up and caught it. repeatedly. then, i tried to get them to tell me the difference between explaining that process with a concept like gravity and explaining it as god pushing the bottle back down. part of this goes back to -- you knew it was coming -- thomas aquinas's talk about proximate causes (gilkey actually uses this). *if there's a god*, it's not god waving her hand and making rain, or staring intently at my water bottle and pushing it down. repeatedly. when does god get tired of that? it's god putting in place the rules, or possibly the rules that establish the rules. (go back now to someone's post days ago of wilson talking about being deistic.) that's *if there's a god*. but how can we know? how does science even address that?
so, in practice, the scientist is distinguished from the religionist (and i'm using "religion" fairly narrowly here) mainly by the simple rule that scientists are not allowed to appeal to god to explain anything. this is exactly why "intelligent design" and "creation 'science'" are not scientific theories, but religious (or at best, and this is only even close in the case of the design argument, philosophical).
conversely, try proving that there's no god. go ahead. in an ethics class once, i was trying to explain this, and one of my true believers said, "you can't prove there's gravity, either". i picked up the desk in front of me and dropped it back to the floor: "there's gravity. next question?" of course, he had neither an answer not another question. then i said, "so do the same for me for god"? and of course, it can't be done.
science can disprove religious theories masquerading as science. but it seems to me that the real lesson of flew's parable of the gardener is what dawkins is getting after in "god's utility function": stop-gap gods.
and this is why i keep saying that scientists don't reject "religion" or "god", but fairly specific conceptions of religion and god. to claim anything else is to be, well, unscientific. that is, imhho (in my humble humanities opinion -- i know i ain't no scientist or nothin', so ain't as smart as they are). but that's sure the way it seems to me.
so the biggest problem with religion conceptually is that it keeps trying to be science. but when religion is at its best is when it doesn't (try to be science). religion of course is a world-construction/maintenance project. and when i say world, i don't mean a physical world, but a world of meaning.
more on this in another time. but as a marker: which scientific discipline studies meaning and values? bio? chem? physics? where do meaning and vaues come from? where *should* they come from (and note that's a value question! d'oh!)?
>
> Now, for Jeffrey:>
> I think you were wrong to think what the scientist meant was that people
> were too stupid.
> If someone is religious, they're likely a supernaturalist. If that means
> that the scientist believes that there is something other than nature
> creating the laws that nature exhibits.
>
> In which case, why doesn't the scientist just set about studying God? I
> mean, if this is what you really believe, then why not set out there to
> show that something supernatural actually orders nature's laws? Why settle
> for merely figuring out the laws of the Big Guy in the Sky? Why be just an
> engineer (not to denigrate engineers!) But really, isn't the scientist
> who's religious in that sense settling for much less than she really
> believes. Why not use science to seek god or the supernatural or the beings
> from another universe that made us
i think i answered this above? but see below.
> On second thought, the more I think about it the more the scientist that
> got Jeffrey's back up is right:
>
> How can you be a really good scientist if, in fact, you don't really
> believe that the explanations for what is going on in the world is
> contained entirely within nature?
yes, that's what the scientist was saying. and he's wrong. not that he would ever listen to a humanist about anything, mind you. we're at martin's high priests of scientific knowledge: meet the new boss, same as the old f-ing boss: you peons don't know anything. listen to us. we will tell you.
>
> If, as a sociologist, you ultimately believe that we are going to hell if
> we sin (or whatever) then why bother to adhere to a discipline that shows
> us why we're moral in a way that has nothing to do with god and everything
> to do with people?
(1) i think this illustrates my point that every time we talk about "religion", we are in fact talking about certain sets of very particular religious beliefs, however widespread they may or may not be (in this case, the idea that you go to hell for sinning). this is what i'm trying to pull us away from. we need to be more precise: we can't talk about "religion" meaningfully without talking about *specific religions* and *specific religious beliefs*. so let's do that, instead of talking about "religion".
i also think we tend to shift around among those sets as they are convenient to our own arguments (i'm not casting stones, here), and we can avoid that if we talk more specifically. of course, that doesn't let us make Grand General Observations very easily, and so it is frustrating. but there it is. maybe most of our Grand General Observations are bogus. and that's fine, as long as we recognize them for what we are. but i think we keep forgetting that simple fact.
(2) so, setting aside the terminological/categorical issue, let's take up the point kelley is really after, here. the question really is, why would anyone who believed they would go to hell for sinning go into sociology in the first place. for example, stupid people like venus williams, who gave up archeology studies because they conflict with her religion? there's an interesting question, here, about the consistency of religious and scientific views among religious people (e.g., many people believe god is "up there" somewhere, but they don't subscribe to a pre-copernican cosmology). setting that question/possibility aside for the moment, one way to approach it is simply to say that in order to understand what god is doing, you need to use all the tools at your disposal, including these scientific methods that atheists use to argue that god doesn't matter. just because they have the wrong frame doesn't mean you can't use their science.
>
> Can you be a really good scientist, in the sense that it's a calling,
> something you really really find joy in, if, in fact, you really don't
> believe it? I mean, if you really believe in god, again, why not study how
> it is that god exists, how god created the universe. Why not set about
> using science to pursue what you really believe: that there's a god or
> something beyond nature that created nature?
how could you possibly do that scientifically? how does the study of nature study what is outside nature?
>
> Why settle for second best? If you're settling, like a person who wants to
> be a novelist, settles for writing ad copy, then are you truly motivated in
> the way that I could feel about sociological problems and the discipline I
> just love?
>
> As a scientist, I can now understand what that guy might mean. People who
> really love the science wouldn't settle, would they? (NOw, as leftists, we
> can say: oh but there are so many reasons they might have to.... But this
> guy ain't, as far as I know, a leftist , so we shouldn't expect him to
> think in those terms.)
but if you think that the universe might be precisely some activity of god, then you study and interpret it just like you study and interpret a shakespeare play, or the funny look that chick gave you from across the bar, or the ruins of a long-dead civilization. the universe is god talking to you.
anyway, that's one way of thinking about it. there are others. this one begs the question of the supernatural (can we say hypernatural? or is that too annoying? it's just that supernatural is so . . . new age. ick -- there's a sneer for you ;-) and how what is beyond or outside nature could possibly interact with "nature", but it's certainly no worse than trying to figure out how science would study what is outside nature.
>
> Finally, I misquoted the Roger Dodger thingaroo. It's too good not to pass
> along:
>
>
>
> Roger: You can't sell a product without first making people feel bad.
> Nick: Why not?
> Roger: Because it's a substitution game. You have to remind them that
> they're missing something from their lives. Everyone's missing something,
> right?
> Nick: I guess.
> Roger: Trust me. And when they're feeling sufficiently incomplete, you
> convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So
> instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to
> root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid
> looking pair of cargo pants.
>
> on that note, Bellah said something spot on about the "deprivation thesis"
> to explain why people are religious or spiritual or what have you.
> "Everyone feels deprived of something, so you've got a theory that explains
> nothing because it explains everything."
absolutely. and a lot of religion does that. they're like conspiracy theories, except they've got an awful lot of mainstream traction. ;-)
by the way, this brings me back to something else i forgot to address: the whole idea that we're missing something. maybe we are, but what disturbs me is the idea that we need something outside ourselves, "beyond" us, to give meaning to our lives. this is, in my estimation, utter horse manure. no doubt about it. and the truth is, every time i ask students in my ethics class why they need a god to make life meaningful, all they can come up with is, "well, where would it come from if not god?" (cue yoshie).
and this brings us back to the big question, whether absolutes are necessary for meaning, and we are back at plato. sorry, friends, but two millennia and change haven't gotten us very far in some very real ways.
peace
j
-- Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments.
- Alfred North Whitehead