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Aswad -> RE: Why Atheism Scares People (5/23/2012 10:10:23 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: vincentML
You might also say that God works his wonders in great and mysterious ways. [8|]
If I were living in the Dark Ages, I might, sure.
Or if I was a moral absolutist with an itching cognitive dissonance to scratch.
But, as I said, this is where the boundary thing comes into play. I don't ponder questions in isolation. No issue is perfectly seperate from every other, just as no man is an island. Interactions in systems generate complexity. Which is why Occam's Razor is so imporant, and so rarely understood. The set of solutions that can generate a graph of the observed degree of complexity from the smallest number of nodes is the one that has the least entropy, as do the individual solutions in the set. That is Occam's Razor in a nutshell. Three way poly between Alice, Bob and Charlie involves six relationships: AB/BA, BC/CB and AC/CA. Since human relationships are subjective, it's fair to treat each relationship as seperate from its converse, after all. Moving up to five way poly, we have twenty relationships instead. Less than twice the number of people, yet more than three times the complexity. Doesn't take a lot of people to get very complex. Same thing holds for physics, theology, or anything else. In that regard, you can call Occam's Razor a metaphysical principle, in that it states something that isn't confined to a single level, but rather an observation about the underlying mechanism, likely to be portable to any universe you could arrive at by changing the fine tuning, at the very least.
Isolating the individual questions in theology makes things simpler. As a psychiatrist, you want to work with Alice. But as a couples therapist, you want to work with her four poly spouses, because you need to see all twenty relationships to form a whole picture. If you're interpreting some detail of theology, you may want to confine it to a single issue, yes. But if you're looking to grasp the functioning whole of a religion that has evolved over millenia, with editing and reediting, translation and mistranslation, additions and omissions, and a myriad other issues, you're going to have to propagate inquiries across subject lines.
Maybe Alice has a habit that causes Bob's anxiety, which in turn makes him lean on Charlie, causing Deborah to feel that Charlie is lacking the energy to be attentive to her needs, but she sees why and harps on Bob, who complains about it to Alice, who gets torn up over it because she really likes Deborah, and then Alice gets depressed about that. You can slip Alice some antidepressant. That has a low success rate. So you have to cast a wider net. You can treat Bob's anxiety. That has a higher success rate. You can tell Charlie to set more boundaries with Bob, which will make Bob worse with an unknown outcome, but will give Charlie the energy for Deborah to be happy again. You can tell Deborah to be more understanding, or at least to harp less on Bob, which will likely make her passive-agressive since you didn't really solve the problem for her. Or you can work on Alice's habit, and stop the whole problem at the source, the first domino in the chain. But you can't do anything but medicate Alice if all you're looking at is Alice being depressed over a conflict in her relationship. Assuming you don't just throw in the towel and tell her to leave, that is. Which just breaks up what could be a wonderful dynamic if she got rid of the bad habit, something you'll have to couch carefully when telling her. And you can't see the potential in the dynamic without looking at all of it, either, which is why some people are more inclined to throw in the towel than others: they don't see the potential there.
By introducing all-encompassing intent, you are using an assumption of conventional theology that I reject as equivalent to Alice's bad habit: something that it is advantageous to be rid of. It is, of course, possible to posit reasons for shit happening above and beyond the ups and downs of the great adventure. But it will suffice to posit that God didn't intend every tiny detail of a reality that sustains a form of life that had presumably not existed prior to said reality.
Maybe he just saw that it was good....
It is, isn't it?
quote:
Of course we should be aware of epistemological limitations and perhaps they do enhance our adventure but sometiimes reality is just too obvious. When one is standing in front of an oncoming train one does not debate whether he can fully grasp reality.
Reality is always too obvious, even when you're aware of the limitations (dare I say especially then). Reality is perception, and it is dealt with in a subjective manner, regardless of belief. I can't say that it's part of my belief system to sit down and ponder reality in front of the oncoming train. I get out of the way of an unwanted future, then I get on with my walk and continue pondering. I'm more likely to ponder what I'm going to do in my reality than its nature, but I do both. I find that this works pretty well for me. Kind of like how appreciating art is satisfying, even if we can theoretically get by without ever doing anything that would be atypical for a rat.
What's obvious to me, is that my main problem with this reality, is humans doing stupid things.
The rest, that's kind of vague and open to speculation, like theology.
IWYW,
- Aswad.
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