On 6/16/05, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> >[lbo-talk] An Appeal to Ignorance
> >Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
>
> >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.
> <snip>
> >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.
>
> By that logic, not just scientists but no one else can reject
> religion, since, in your opinion, "true rejection" should entail not
> only rejection of actually-existing religions but also all possible
> religions (which are unlike actually-existing religions and which may
> never even come to exist).
ok, i know you're not this dense. which leads me to infer that you're trying to distract me from the fact that you (apparently) don't want to define "religion". did i miss your definition?
why don't you try taking on the rest of my argument, because i believe i have set out workable beginnings of a useful definition of religion (which no one has yet challenged). i believe that understanding of religion may be able to co-exist with science. i may be wrong. i am just trying to figure this shit out. but then responding to my argument might mean not just writing really long posts, but also reading them.
> That's like saying that one can never
> reject X (e.g., capitalism), because rejecting actually-existing
> forms of X (e.g., capitalism) doesn't mean also rejecting other
> possible forms of X (e.g., capitalism) which may or may not come to
> exist. It doesn't seem possible to reject anything by your standard.
does your debate handbook tell you that's an argument from analogy? in fact, it doesn't work, because it's really the inverse of my argument, which is that the scientists in question are rejecting fairly specific religious conceptions (whichever conception it happens to be), but calling it "religion" that they are rejecting. the question is whether they can generalize from the religion(s) they are rejecting to something called religion in general, and so claim that "real" scientists will reject "religion". that requires a coherent definition of religion which is taken to apply to all religions. otherwise, it is what your debate handbook might call an "ambiguous term", or perhaps even "equivocation", depending on how the argument is made.
right? isn't that the way it works? a definition of capitalism that fits all capitalism(s)? and how many competing definitions or understandings of religion are there? do you see the problem yet?
how about an analogy. i reject soviet state socialism (aka, "communism"), and i say, see, communism is bankrupt. and you say, well, ok, soviet communism was bankrupt, but that wasn't *really* communism (or, which is functionally to say the same thing, that wasn't the only possible form of communism). what's my response? that i can reject "communism" based on what i saw in the soviet union and china, despite your argument that there are other possible realizations of communism, because communism is communism -- and if i can't reject communism just because you can imagine some other form of communism, how could i reject anything?
doesn't what we mean by "communism" matter, here? a lot? i'm not a logical positivist, but clarity in concepts terminology can go an awful long way (this has been my main point through this whole dad-blamed discussion).
now, if these scientists expressed a coherent definition of "religion" which they claimed to be rejecting, that would be one thing. but that's what i've been requesting for days and days, and the only attempt at a response that i remember was from wojtek. and that was a long time ago. i admit i've ignored these threads for the last couple of days. maybe i missed something.
my argument is essentially this: for scientists (or anyone else) to say they reject "religion" is practically meaningless until they tell us what they mean by religion. my suspicion is that it will turn out that it is better to call it something else that they are rejecting (theism, for example), or that we will have to admit that maybe the high priests of science have reached the limits of their knowledge (since god by definition transcends nature, which is generally considered the purview of "science"), or both.
but since you're the one talking about rejecting "religion", why don't you tell me exactly what's being rejected? religion as providing scientific answers? see the rest of my post that you cut off. or is it something else?
i'm sorry, but i'm getting really tired of your condescension. you're smart and often right. AND i have agreed with a lot of what you've said in these threads (as carrol noted), but you treat everyone like an idiot and it's f-ing annoying. it only gets in the way of making your points, and, well, and learning anything, but since you don't seem to think you have anything to learn from anyone here, i can see why that wouldn't bother you.
but hey, ymmv.
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