Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
It may be objectively true that the sun will rise tomorrow, but can you conclusively prove it will, in advance? I rather doubt it, and yet we all believe it to be true. Such are the limits of logic - the best we can do to "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow is to point to all the yesterdays where it rose. Of course, that's a logical fallacy at it's core, so we're sort of stuck with no way to objectively prove that the sun will rise tomorrow.
And that's the sort of problem we run into when we try to logically "prove" the existence of God - God may very well objectively exist, but like the objective (we assume) truth that the sun will rise tomorrow, there's just no way to conclusively prove that it must be so...
(is it just me, or is FR slow suddenly?)
We were given the gift of reason to use it. It seems unreasonable to me, however, to use reason to argue against faith; for faith is indispensable, essential to what it means to be fully human, to human living and thinking.
Prometheus' "revolt" can be understood as a revolt against the "intramundane gods" -- i.e., the Olympians. Yet as far back as Homer, and from thence through Hesoid, Parmenides, and Plato human beings have understood that the Olympians were themselves creatures, albeit immortal ones. Which means there had to be a god "Beyond" them, for "creature" presupposes "creator."
I like to think that Prometheus was not asserting his "rights" against this Unknown God of the Beyond (the tetragrammatical G-d of the Jews, the "I Am That Am"), just against another order in nature, albeit one of "superior" status relative to man -- which order happened to be jealous of their own prerogatives. And which order, Plato thought, was in his time perishing out of human consciousness; although the Unknown God of the Beyond everlastingly IS....
Yet it seems to me the scriptures themselves suggest that man can be "assertive" vis-a-vis the God "beyond" creation; for they tell us that if we knock, it shall be opened unto us; if we seek, we shall find; if we ask, it shall be given unto us.
But this is the heart of faith -- that we can speak to God and have Him hear us, and help us. I know that He can and does. And I am certainly not alone in this belief which, if anything, is supported by experience, and mediated by reason.
Your essay is so lovely, general_re. Thank you for writing it!
You must have gotten a new keyboard!
P.S. On reason. Dan 5:25 And this [is] the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
If I can prove the existance of God to myself, that's good enough for me.
The opposite of Reason is "I believe in God because my parents did". That's not reasonable.
Does this mean you think you have only yourself to credit and thank for your ability to reason? If it's not a "gift," then how did you come by it? By means of theft -- as with Prometheus, who "stole the fire of the gods?" Or by that never-ending piling up of accidents breeding ever more accidents that is known as "natural selection?" How can reason -- which is structured and orderly -- be the product of sheer randomness?
Have you ever really given this issue any serious thought at all?
You assert that animals "use" reason. Alternatively, one might say that they use "instinct" -- "progammed" into animals by the same Source that "programmed" man for reason.
That animals learn language is a completely unfounded canard. After all this time, I think we could expect to have some poetry out of the higher apes if that were the case.
Tool using behavior by animals appears to be of a rather low-level kind. There may be a crude type of learning involved; I don't know. But for the most part it seems to be the sort of thing that a parent animal transmits to its young by example, not by reasoning. As far as I know, there is no animal species which has yet managed to construct, say, an Eiffel Tower.
Pack hunting for certain species can be quite easily explained as an instinctive, and not a learned behavior.
I wonder which of us is spinning the more egregious "myth" here.
BTW, you seem to be using that term with a certain amount of disdain or contempt. Am I right about that?
"The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is the... main scientific prop---for scientific naturalism. Students first learn that "evolution is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what that "fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of mindless material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random variation. So God is totally out of the picture, and humans (like everything else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe. Do you wonder why a lot of people suspect that these claims go far beyond the available evidence?"
Orthogonal means metrical or space relationships that are attributes of the domain of discourse that can be varied irrespective of each other's current values. I first heard the word when I was being taught chess: the bishops move diagonally, and the rooks move orthogonally. So they're compatible in that they represent mutually independent variables.
Very amusing. A proof you claim you once had is not a proof by any sensible measure; by it's nature, a proof is something anyone can verify. Mystery proofs have not been published to the public do not make it into the game. If I get to count proofs no one can see, then, obviously, everything has been proved, but the dog ate the homework.
Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives(no govt religion--none) who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality... UNDER GOD---the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change. These were the Classical liberals...founding fathers-PRINCIPLES---stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH(limited NON-intrusive PC Govt/religion---schools)!
Evolution...Atheism-dehumanism---TYRANNY(pc-religion/rhetoric)...
Then came the SPLIT SCHIZOPHRENIA/ZOMBIE/BRAVE-NWO1984 LIBERAL NEO-Soviet Darwin America---the post-modern age
Well, it's a bit of a fuzzy concept in ordinary use, but in math, it refers to the indepedence of parameters of an equation.
Let's make up a chesslike game with a more indicative example. Suppose the rook can only move a number of squares related to, say, how many squares he last moved a bishop.
In the original chess rules, the number of squares the rook can move is orthogonal to the behavior of the bishop, in our new game, it is not. The idea of the word extends beyond merely physically perpindicular, and is, by my lights, a pretty useful and compact word.
So if you say you fell down the steps as a child but you can't prove it, it never happened? Brilliant.
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