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Snail wrote: As is education because to my knowledge, philosophy isn't taught in school.

I used to think teaching philosophy instead of religion in school would be good too, but this is what they do in France, where religion is kept quite separate from school, and it doesn't seem to have done much good there (though to be fair there is still a strong religious culture outside of school).

I think it would probably be better just to have classes that actively address what's wrong with religion (all of them).... wouldn't the parents just love that!?!

Ue wrote:"you would not be a simple naturalist/atheist. For someone coming from a Dawkinsian/Harrisian point of view"

You're mistaken

UE: "either aren't interested or are quite convinced that you know enough already"

You're mistaken but my thinking is becoming more concrete.

Snail wrote:Ue wrote:"you would not be a simple naturalist/atheist. For someone coming from a Dawkinsian/Harrisian point of view"

You're mistaken

OK. You do sound rather like that's where you are coming from though...

Shrug. I did say like Sam Harris's approach.

Buddhism can be pruned right back to something more resembling the original/earlier message. But still contain substance, stuff to think about. As can Christianity, the gospel of Thomas for example. I don't think layering meanings in myths is good. Or needed. Tao te ting is simple (its short for instance), yet not-simple.

Yes, Christianity isn't just Jesus's teachings and taoteting isn't what became religious taoism. But I think these additions just muddy, and have become sinister in use.

I think Kierkegaard's Christianity was very different to most lay-christians's Christianity.

But yes, I'm still reading and thinking about things😊.

Snail wrote:
I think Kierkegaard's Christianity was very different to most lay-christians's Christianity.

Of course it was. Kierkegaard was an existentialist and an early post-modernist. Very few people at the time, Christian or otherwise, were in a position to really be able to understand what he was saying.

Automaton wrote:

UndercoverElephant wrote:
I am not saying religions are perfect. I am saying they aren't child abuse.

You don't think that forcing children to believe nonsense (or else) is child abuse?

No. I don't think all religions are nonsense. Some religious claims are nonsense, but then so are some of the things said by Dawkins and co.

You don't think, for example, that teaching young girls that they will always be inferior and should be subservient to men is child abuse? I'm sure I could list many more ways it most definitely is abusive if I tried. I'm sure you could too. Or maybe we just have very different understandings of the term 'abuse'.

We have different understandings of the nature of reality, and therefore the relevance of religion in general.

Firstly, I think you've made a metaphysical mistake.
Secondly, not all religions are the same, either in terms of their metaphysics, or their morality and cultural teachings. They all have to be considered on their individual merits.

UndercoverElephant wrote: Unless they are causing overt harm (as Islam is) then I think it is better to leave religions to do what they do.

Seriously UE? You think religions do a good job, so we should just let them get on with it? That's funny, I'll just hope that you were joking.

I'm deadly serious. Do religions do a good job? Some do a better job than others. Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism do a pretty good job, yes. The three main Abrahamic religions are more problematic, and Islam is the worst of the lot.

As long as we won't face this and stop protecting ALL religion, then nothing will be done, and they/we will be overwhelmed.

"Protecting" religions?

Protecting them from what exactly?

Most religions are not in mortal conflict with the modern world.

Christianity struggled for a long time to accept first the loss of absolute divine authority of the Catholic church and secondly the loss of authority about the physical world to science, but those battles are over apart from in the US "Bible Belt".

The main eastern religions are not in conflict with the modern world, and never have been. On the whole, they have adapted quite well. Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism have never been in major conflict with each other, and never been in major conflict with either science or democracy.

All religions are not the same.

Automaton wrote:

Snail wrote: As is education because to my knowledge, philosophy isn't taught in school.

I used to think teaching philosophy instead of religion in school would be good too, but this is what they do in France, where religion is kept quite separate from school, and it doesn't seem to have done much good there (though to be fair there is still a strong religious culture outside of school).

I think it would probably be better just to have classes that actively address what's wrong with religion (all of them).... wouldn't the parents just love that!?!

That would be a very bad idea.

Teaching philosophy in schools, from an early age right through to the end, would be a very good idea indeed. It certainly would have taught you a thing or two.

You think you understand the way reality works. You don't. You understand one half of a process that has two halves and are completely oblivious to other half.

UndercoverElephant wrote:

Automaton wrote:

Snail wrote: As is education because to my knowledge, philosophy isn't taught in school.

I used to think teaching philosophy instead of religion in school would be good too, but this is what they do in France, where religion is kept quite separate from school, and it doesn't seem to have done much good there (though to be fair there is still a strong religious culture outside of school).

I think it would probably be better just to have classes that actively address what's wrong with religion (all of them).... wouldn't the parents just love that!?!

That would be a very bad idea.

Teaching philosophy in schools, from an early age right through to the end, would be a very good idea indeed. It certainly would have taught you a thing or two.

You think you understand the way reality works. You don't. You understand one half of a process that has two halves and are completely oblivious to other half.

You are not coming across as particularly rational on this UE, Sorry to say that, but there it is. In other words, I am suggesting that this is something of a blind spot for you. The good news, however, is that you are entirely free to completely disagree with that since it is a non-material matter and is therefore non-falsifiable. However, notwithstanding the above, there are two things I am noting:

1) The extent to which your particular version of religiosity/spirituality dominates your thinking is such that you are allowing it to muddy the waters of the very practical concerns that emanate from the very real and material actions of followers of the non-falsifiable ideas of militant Islam and, in doing so, you are diverting intellectual energy away from that in this thread. That is surely not a good thing.

2) The manner and tone of your replies to anyone who thinks differently to you visa vis your version of spirituality/religiosity is bordering on supercilious and implies an overinflated sense of intellectual/spiritual superiority on this. Also, surely not a good thing.

Indeed, UE, do the accusations I have just made sound familiar to you? They should do. The irony being who they are normally, (quite appropriately) directed towards.

It matters little in the non-material realm of ideas that something is "true" or not, UE, until someone begins to insist that I must think or, indeed, live a certain way because they believe something is "true" or not. That is, more than anything else, what this thread is about is it not? On matters material, of course, we cannot simply believe what we want because, eventually, the material world will bite us on the arse for doing so. However, on all matters non-material, you can believe what you want mate. Just back-off on the telling everyone else they are wrong because they do not also believe it.

Sorry to be so blunt about it and, for the sake of the real topic of this thread, I have held off properly commenting on this till now.

But, there it is.

Little John wrote:You are not coming across as very rational on this UE, Sorry to say that, but there it is. In other words, I am suggesting that this is something of a blind spot for you.

I'm not coming across as rational?

Also posted by me:

Of course it was. Kierkegaard was an existentialist and an early post-modernist. Very few people at the time, Christian or otherwise, were in a position to really be able to understand what he was saying.

They didn't understand, because they didn't understand the chain of intellectual events that followed the publication of this book, over a century earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason

Kierkegaard understood both the limits of pure reason, and the consequences of its consequences.

However, notwithstanding the above, there are two things I am noting:

1) The extent to which your particular version of religiosity/spirituality dominates your thinking is such that you are allowing it to muddy the waters of the very practical concerns that emanate from the very real and material actions of militant Islam and so are diverting intellectual energy away from that in this thread. That is surely not a good thing

If you mean by "muddy the waters" that I do not reject religion, and Islam, outright and completely, then I can try to unmuddy the waters.

There is a general theme connecting all religions, including Islam. In the case of Islam, it is Sufism.

This is Sufism:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 68191.html

2) The manner and tone of your replies to anyone who thinks differently to you on your spirituality/religiosity is bordering on supercilious and implies an overinflated sense of intellectual/spiritual superiority on this. also, not a good thing.

Criticism accepted. I'd be happy to start a thread on this topic to go into the subject at a much deeper level, with respect. Would you be interested in taking the time to have that discussion?

The thread would need to start with a long post by myself on the relevance of Kant to Western intellectual history, and particularly the relationships between Kant's book, science, religion, rationalism and direct personal experience. Bear in mind this is all 100 years before Darwin, but just as relevant now as it was then.

UndercoverElephant wrote:....I'd be happy to start a thread on this topic to go into the subject at a much deeper level, with respect. Would you be interested in taking the time to have that discussion?

I certainly would UE. Indeed, I would very much appreciate going into it in greater detail

Little John wrote:

UndercoverElephant wrote:....I'd be happy to start a thread on this topic to go into the subject at a much deeper level, with respect. Would you be interested in taking the time to have that discussion?

I certainly would UE. Indeed, I would very much appreciate going into it in greater detail

Ok. But not tonight...

My job for tomorrow.

Little John wrote: You are not coming across as particularly rational on this UE ...

Very well said, Little John.

I'm stepping out of the discussion from here on; I don't think there's any point arguing with UE, his mind is closed (to protect his 'metaphysics', I suppose), and I'm not interested in being the target for his resultant condescension.

But I wish you the best of luck!

Ok, this cannot be done briefly. It's also simplified in ways that might not be acceptable if I was teaching a group of neutrals philosophy, but is appropriate in this context. Why was the work of Kant so important, and what was his influence on the future of philosophy? We need to start by rewinding to the beginning.

The discipline of philosophy was founded in ancient Greece, largely by Plato and Aristotle, of which Plato is by far the most relevant here. Plato believed that the ultimate, most fundamental level of reality was a realm of absolute forms, and that the world we know is little more than an illusion – a mere shadow on the wall. He was a mystic, who believed that all things are united and that this absolute unity could be experienced by humans (by mystics).

By the start of the dark ages, most of Plato's work, along with almost all of the rest of ancient Greek philosophy had been lost/destroyed in the western world, but they were preserved by muslim scholars. For 1000 years, western philosophy was Catholic philosophy. Eventually the lost works of Plato were re-discovered and translated from Arabic into Latin, provoking new, non-catholic debate. The first “proper” philosopher of this new age was Descartes, who in the 1630s presented the first attempt at pure rationalism. Instead of starting with the Bible, he started with “I think, therefore I am.” His approach was called “rationalism” because he attempted to use reason alone to come to conclusions about the nature of reality.

Descartes' work had a profound effect on Newton, who in 1687 published the book that laid the foundations of modern science. But Newton's work also fed back into philosophy, because it presented another way of finding out about reality – empirical research. For the next century philosophy was defined by a great debate by these two schools of thought – the rationalists who believed that pure reason was the correct route to knowledge of reality and the empiricists who believed that research and experience was the correct route.

On the whole, the empiricists were materialistic, while the rationalists had a tendency to be more Platonic and idealistic, but the last of the empiricists bucked this trend. George Berkeley was an Irish bishop who believed that a materialistic metaphysics (a belief about the absolute nature of reality) was getting a free ride on the coat-tails of science. He argued, very effectively, that if we are going to base our beliefs about reality on experience, then we need to recognise that the only things we ever actually experience are mental, and that therefore reality must be made of mental stuff (not material stuff). When asked about the nature of reality when nobody was experiencing it, he replied that it always exists “in the mind God”.

Meanwhile, the last of the great rationalists was Leibniz, a brilliant mathematician whose theory about reality was also idealistic – reality was made of individual mental “monads” with blurred boundaries.

Enter Kant, who totally changed the course of intellectual thought on these matters. His book The Critique of Pure Reason, initially published in 1781, ended the battle between rationalism and empiricism by taking a step back and asking an even more fundamental question. He called this his “Copernican Revolution in Philosophy”. Instead of asking how we should find out about reality and what it is made of, he asked “How is it possible for us to know anything at all?” This was truly revolutionary, because it changed the subject of enquiry to the human knower rather than the objective reality humans are trying to know. To this day, it is impossible for any philosopher who wants to be taken seriously to avoid Kant's reframing of the question. It was a permanent shift, and it has profound consequences for anyone who thinks science provides us with knowledge about the deepest level of reality (and this is 2 centuries before quantum mechanics turned up the same problem directly from science – anyone who thinks science has nothing to learn from philosophy take note.)

Kant introduced a mind-boggling array of new concepts, but the most important of them are “the world as it appears to us” aka (roughly) “phenomena” or “the phenomenal world” AND “the world as it is in itself” aka (roughly) “noumena” or “the noumenal world”. Note these are NOT analagous to “mind” and “matter”. The world investigated by empirical science is the phenomenal world. It has to be, because science proceeds by experimentation and observation, and it is impossible for us to observe the noumemal world. In fact, there is apparently very little we can say or know about the noumenal world because it is forever “beyond the veil of perception”. Depending on your interpretation of Kant, maybe it is possible to say some negative things about it (e.g. it is highly unlikely that the noumenal world is just like the phenomenal world – what an extremely bizarre co-incidence that would be, were it true...)

At this point modern materialists/atheists/skeptic tend to object, because they have been brought up to believe that science provides knowledge of the objective (and therefore noumenal) world. However, they should take note that no philosophers take this argument seriously, at least not on the naïve/simple level the materialists are operating at. Berkeley's argument, and Kant's response, are too secure to simply dismiss them with “Science, doh!” and on top of that, 20th century quantum mechanics has thrown up purely scientific reasons for accepting Kant's position. It turns out that “normal science” really does just investigate the world as we experience it and the world as it is independently is a very strange place where particles can be in every possible location simultaneously and cats both dead and alive. “Noumena” or “unobserved reality” is the realm of metaphysics – which is why the various “interpretations” of QM are called “metaphysical interpretations” and why science students are told to “shut up and calculate”.

This is a handy way of figuring out whether you are unintentionally straying into metaphysics or not. Science investigates physical reality, but there are two different concepts of physical reality available. We could call one of the “phenomenal-physical reality” (PP), which means “the physical reality we are directly aware of “ - that keyboard you can actually see (keyboards are physical objects, yes?) But we can also think of that keyboard you can see as a mental representation of a the real keyboard, and think of the real keyboard as being beyond the veil of perception – out there in noumenal reality. We could call this “noumenal-physical reality” (NP). Now...when we're doing science, it doesn't matter whether we are talking about PP or NP because PP keyboards and NP keyboards both obey the same laws of physics. If, instead, the distinction between these two concepts is of crucial importance, then we are doing metaphysics. An example is the question about consciousness. If you ask “how does consciousness arise from a brain?” then the brain in question has to be an NP brain (because a PP brain is just a mental representation of a brain) and “mind” refers to the whole of PP reality. This is a typical example of a modern materialist, priding themselves on their rationalism, ending up making metaphysical claims without any idea what “metaphysics” means and zero knowledge of the relevant philosophical history: ignorance masquerading as rationalism.

But I digress. Perhaps it might be better to leave it there and see what questions need to be answered, but there is much of importance to follow. Kant's work marks the beginning of modern philosophy, and the point where science and philosophy went their separate ways. Before Kant science and philosophy were mixed up together. After Kant, the only people who mix(ed) up science and philosophy were people who do/did not know about, or who have/had failed to understand, Kant.

Kant spawned what is known as “German idealism”. Hegel and Schopenhauer were important figures in this intellectual movement, and it ended with the work of Nietzsche. However, the most important of all, and arguably the only philosopher who can rival Kant in terms of his influence on intellectual thought was Wittgenstein.

Finally, regarding philosophy of religion, it should be pointed out that every one of these philosophers, including (arguably) the atheistic Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were mystics. Plato, Berkelely, Liebniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein: every single one of them believed there was a metaphysical basis to religion and that humans could have genuine mystical experiences. There is nobody of a similar status or importance in the history of ideas who held the simplistic materialist views believed by many modern day scientific atheists (e.g. Dawkins). This is not because they were ignorant of science. It was because they understood things about the nature of reality that Dawkins is completely oblivious to, because Dawkins has never studied philosophy, and doesn't know why people like Kant and Wittgenstein cannot be ignored.

As a last note: nothing I have written in this post is anti-scientific. No scientific knowledge contradicts any of it.

It has occured to me that I should have made some other things clear.

This is an offshoot from a thread about religion where I was accused of "holding irrational views". I don't want people to think my argument is "all the important philosophers agreed with me, hence I'm being rational."

Instead, I'm going back to first principles and tracing the history of the relevant questions about what it means to be rational and what knowledge is. You can't just make assumptions about these things. You have to justify your answers to questions like "what do we know about the nature of reality?", "how is it possible to know anything about the nature of reality?" and "what does science provide us knowledge of?" People like Dawkins think they know the answers to these questions without ever having studied the history of intellectual debate about those answers. As a result, their answers usually suck.

So we need to start with Kant, because Kant is the single most important figure in that intellectual history. The debate can go in any direction from here, but I will try to bring it back to its relevance to the questions which spawned this thread in the first place, i.e. "why should we allow religions any credibility at all?"

So, in summary there is an NP world out there and we cannot directly experience it because our experience of it is necessarily filtered through our evolutionary limited sensory apparatus and then passed on to our PP perceptional apparatus. In other words, our "mind".

So what?

We can say, with some confidence, that although our PP perception of, say, sound is not the NP sound itself, whilst not a valid NP perception, is reliable enough to make very accurate predictions about the NP world it is based upon. At which point the distinction between reliable (PP) perceptions and valid (NP) perceptions is largely moot for all practical purposes. Where this breaks down completely, of course, is in the arena of quantum physicality. But, like the combined throwing of a die, reality at the level at which our sensory and perceptual apparatus evolved, is a game of averages. It is hardly surprising, then, that way down below that level at the point where the individual throws are being made, that things can appear to be strange and unusual.

None of which is any kind of basis for extrapolating the existence of a mystical reality over and above the NP world which we (indirectly and reasonably reliably) perceive via PP. and it provides even less basis for extrapolating whether one religion is more or less valid than another. They are all equally invalid and they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, unreliable. However, it is of course easy to state that some of them are clearly worse than others in their material effects on the world due to their specific doctrinal practices.

The way in which I would compare and contrast the scientific approach in explaining reality to religious explanations is not, as might be expected, by stating it is valid in comparison to them. In the end, validity is always a relative term because it requires a further validity underneath it and there is no bottom to that hierarchy of requirements (so far). What we can say, however, is that science provides a deeper level of reliability of explanations that anything else. Thus, in this hierarchy of validities (which are really just different levels of reliability), science wins hands down. Thus, the "valid" explanations science provides are, in truth still only reliable. Just to a much deeper degree in that hierarchy. Those scientific explanations don't (or, rather can't) directly access the base-level NP of the world since those explanations are constructed inside PP minds. But, again, so what?

Your position seems to be basically that, due to our perceptions (sharply tuned by the application of science) being merely a reliable PP model of the world beyond themselves rather than the valid NP world itself, then a level of mystical reality must exist and, further, that some religions are "accessing" this mystical reality more than others. That is a completely unnecessary and nonsensical extrapolation. In other words, it is a made up "explanation" for stuff we don't understand. Which is, of course,, the raison d'etre of all religions.

It's really okay to just say we don't understand. It's even okay, though, to make up explanations for ourselves, if that helps psychologically in some way. Though, I would not recommend it because such practices can be a slippery slope to insisting that others adopt those same made up explanations in order to provide a false validation of our own.