Posted on 10/28/2006 3:22:14 PM PDT by betty boop
Absolute Truth must be beyond dualism thats why God reserved it(truth) for himself..
i.e. more facets of "truth" than a dualist approach can identify..
I must consider this in more detail.. Thanks..
True, in a way. God's unity doesn't exclude the duality consituted by creation. As long as there is creation, there is a dance.
WoW.......
"The Creative Dance/Ballet of God".. sounds like the title of a novel.. pregnant with spiritual toe tapping begging to written..
Of course, it all depends upon the subject at hand. Sometimes two cases are the only two possibilities, and they are mutually exclusive. It either is or it isn't. Sometimes, however, the two mutually exclusive possibilities mark two extreme ends of a continuum; reality can be found somewhere along the line between the two poles; as you point out, this is mostly where we live our lives. Principles and ideal states are often clear cut, but when those principles and ideal states are translated into the physical world, into flesh and bone, into human history, principles and ideal states and even the mutually exclusive get expressed in interesting amalgams. Sometimes it takes good eyes to see the ideal and the principle being worked out.
Since I have already pushed this little line of thought this far, I'll go just a little farther.
Life is full of contradictions, between the mutually exclusive, between what is and what ought, there is damage caused by destructive agents, and these contradictions have to be bridged by people, by human hearts and human lives. In the story the little Dutch Boy shoves his finger in the dike to hold back disaster, but in every day terms, human lives are shoved into the breach. When there is a "tear" in the time-space continuum, people bridge it with their lives, sometimes resolving the contradictions, sometimes just providing a living patch, sometimes absorbing them like a shock absorber, and sometimes taking them to the grave.
Pardon the non sequitor. I don't know what came over me.
Fascinating truths. Thanks.
Sorry to disappoint, FreedomProtector! My next post on this thread will likely go in the other direction (i.e., existence of truth of a higher order).
Information is fundamentally a mental entity, it is not a property of matter. While information is stored and transmitted via the unique designs utilizing the laws of physics and chemistry, information is neither matter or energy.
I really wish a scientific materialist would explain to me how information can be a product of matter plus pure chance. This seems to be the materialist position; but I just can't figure out how it can be justified.
Thanks for a great post, FreedomProtector!
Hmmmmm...
What IF information was/were a spiritual matter..
Limited and filtered by translation by a human brain..
That ideas came from a spiritual source..
Fruits from "a spirit/Spirit" but inhibited by the human brain..
And that; no human brain could contain the ultimate good or evil of a matter..
And the Fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was UN-digestible by mankind..
The Genesis story could take on a whole nother light..
The duality's of ugly vs beauty, debits and credits, good vs evil, dream vs reality, matter vs energy, up vs down, and much more in a dualistic world..
Information can indeed be partial but true yet only half of the truth.. i.e. Einstein vs Bohr....
I'm a classical music lover. Analog recordings can only capture part of the full sound of a live performance, not to mention other factors, like being in the presence of the musicians and seeing them. And digital recordings degrade the sound further.
Moreover, each live performance is a unique event. Ben Jonson, who wrote masques for performance at the court of James I, pointed out that although is words might live forever, the full actual performance only happened one time, because it involved courtiers and the king celebrating a particular occasion that would never recur.
That is a problem when the either-or analysis is misapplied. True, it works great for computers. It also holds for certain levels of human thought. We could say that the antinomies you call complimentary are compatible with other relations that inhere.
Reductionist views prefer one of the antinomies (or aspect) at the exclusion of the others. But a resolution is something else entirely. You want to call it an ultimate standard of logic or reason, but warrants this move? I know of a patristic author who said the world is full of these antinomies simply to keep mankind from raising any aspect of creation to be divine. But calling it Logos, reason, or divine and you've already got yourself a nontraditional trinity. I'm following Freedom Protector's notice here, I think: "Your essay could be compared to to a movie, where there is a surprise twist...reading along I was expecting a Kierkagaard like statement of existence of truth of higher order which results in the resolution of a paradox, but went down the path of refuting reductionism."
But the coin thingy is misleading. The reductionist doesn't recognize the other side. The resolution is not a side.
So he (Phillip) got up and went; and there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure; and he had come to Jerusalem to worship,Syntax, code, grammar: What does it say?
and he was returning and sitting in his chariot, and was reading the prophet Isaiah.
Then the Spirit said to Philip, "Go up and join this chariot."
Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, "Do you understand what you are reading?"Semantics/Meaning: What does it mean?
And he said, "Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
Now the passage of Scripture which he was reading was this:
"(AR)HE WAS LED AS A SHEEP TO SLAUGHTER;
AND AS A LAMB BEFORE ITS SHEARER IS SILENT,
SO HE DOES NOT OPEN HIS MOUTH.
"(AS)IN HUMILIATION HIS JUDGMENT WAS TAKEN AWAY;
WHO WILL RELATE HIS GENERATION?
FOR HIS LIFE IS REMOVED FROM THE EARTH."
The eunuch answered Philip and said, "Please tell me, of whom does the prophet say this? Of himself or of someone else?"Action/Pragmatics: What do I do about it?
Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning from this Scripture he preached Jesus to him.
As they went along the road they came to some water; and the eunuch said, "Look! Water! What prevents me from being baptized?"
And Philip said, "If you believe with all your heart, you may."
And he answered and said, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."Apobetics result/goal: What is the purpose?
And he ordered the chariot to stop; and they both went down into the water, Philip as well as the eunuch, and he baptized him.
When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the eunuch no longer saw him, but went on his way rejoicing.
But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he kept preaching the gospel...
It wasn't disappointing...it was exciting.
A most excellent post! Bump that!
Jeepers, cornelis, I didn’t imagine I'd made such a move. Maybe I did; perhaps I wrote carelessly. I was critiquing the seeming illogic of the reductionist view of nature. Let's see....
Just to get us all on the same page here, an antinomy is “a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles.” Examples of antinomies: beauty and evil, or slavery and freedom.
On that basis, I just don’t see how the “reductionist view” can be an antinomy. It doesn’t say there is any “contradiction” of anything; it simply refuses to recognize anything outside of itself. This strikes me as being a blatantly incorrect inference.
We were speaking of complementaries in Niels Bohr’s sense of the word. I don’t think complementaries are antimonies, either. The most obvious example of a complementarity is the particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. The complementarity principle basically says that the observer is able to discern either one or the other, but not both at the same time. Particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer, who should know that both descriptions are “true,” and both essential to the “complete description” of the system which is constituted by both particles and waves. In an experiment, the observer must choose which he would like to see, because you can’t see both at once, as Heisenberg pointed out – i.e., his uncertainty principle (Bohr preferred to call it the indeterminacy principle), which is based on the recognition that you can’t know both the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle at the same time. If your experiment calls for viewing the “particle aspect,” the wave aspect utterly falls away from view, and vice versa. But it is “still there.”
So complementarity essentially refers to a paradox in epistemology. The observer cannot see or know the two entities “together”; but nature is constituted by both. Indeed, it is a superposition of both: This is the “higher resolution” I was referring to. The human mind cannot directly see this resolution (because man is utterly involved in it and so can’t find a point “outside” from which to view it?); but it’s already a given in nature. And to me, nature and the universe are evidently “ordered” at a “higher” principal level that we do not directly discern (e.g., physical laws and/or mathematical axioms), though we do see the “lawful results” in the created world. And so I am led to the idea of a Logos. Without a rational standard, nature could only be a random, accidental development: nothing distinct or definite could ever come to be or persist in time.
By analogy, I think an argument can be made that the human knowledge domain involves complementariness, sometimes referred to as the “Cartesian split.” On the one side of the divide are the natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.); on the other, the humanities, or “sciences of the spirit” (e.g., philosophy, theology, the arts, history, etc.). In recent times it has become fashionable to say that the natural sciences are “exact” and “objective,” while the humanities are inexact and “subjective,” and therefore of inferior value (if they have any real value at all and aren’t merely exercises in superstition referring to illusory objects). Fans of this presupposition find reason to believe that the universe is in fact reducible to the matter-only, monist proposition.
Well, that’s enuf for now. Sorry for not replying sooner. I’ve been a little distracted by the election lately. Now that it’s over, and irrationality seems to have triumphed big-time, it’s time to move on….
Thanks so much for writing, cornelis!
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