Determining truth & reality. Philosophy v Religion v Sci

Post Reply New Topic

If science wins out, then religion will get quantified, and explained away. If Religion wins out, then whatever religion deification force created science. Philosophy is just a means to go between the two and figure ways to figure things out.

Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive. The two concepts never have been. This isn't to say that people won't be dicks about it.

I guess a purely scientific approach is fine for some folks. But I need more. I don't reject science, I just find the purely scientific approach very cold and lifeless. And the religious zeal that the Science worshiper is just as off-putting as any fundamentalist christian.

The only point I really want to emphasize here is the difference between spirituality and religion. They are by no means the same thing.

I consider myself a spiritual person with my own viewpoint on the unmeasurable (as of yet) parts of the universe. And I will have nothing to do with the control structures of of organized religion.

Just a question for the science only folks, do you concede that there are still a great many as of yet undiscovered aspects of reality that are still some time away from us being able to measure and experimentally verify? Not just things we don't quite understand yet, but also things we don't know that we don't know? You can't possibly say that the early 21st century is the zenith of scientific knowledge, can you?

This may come as a surprise to you, but I agree with you.

I have nothing to do with organized religion but I am loosely speaking a Zen Buddhist Atheist. I was actually a monk in my youth. I probe (external) reality with the tools of science and (internal) reality with the tools of meditation and mindfulness.

Well Tallyman..it appears you may be in 'good' company...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAaW6BYhfNM[/youtube]

When I go to church and see the Jesus statue hanging there mostly naked in a Yoga pose on the front wall..NOw that the Catholic Church has finally moved to progressive enough to remove the cross..

i think to myself..oh my god..he would turn over in his grave..if he knew that people were worshipping the flesh of his body..

When all the f**k he was saying..is bliss is in the now of the moment..not yesterday..not tomorrow..or not after death..

But something about 40 days..and meditating in the desert..can bring a realization like that..

IN mindful awareness...

But not much political power in the church ..with Zen Buddhism..huh....

NO not much...

So we've got what we've got..

Which is basically nothing but a fairy tale without the moral of the story.....

But wait..some people understand the real deal...IS ALL....

And if you made it through the video..it lends the song Kashmir by Led Zeppelin

a 'whole' 'new' meaning...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvmuDH8cgG0[/youtube]

I vote philosophy, because science is a subset of philosophy, just like logic and mathematics. Truths can be determined on purely logical grounds without recourse to natural science.

Philosophy would be hard pushed to come up with wave particle duality, quantum mechanics and relativity! At best they would be very vague notions that would not be usable in the real world. Philosophers can't even agree how many teeth a horse has.

The dichotomy (or trichotomy) between science, philosophy and religion is caused by the fact that the human intellect(in itself a mechanical process) is unable to perceive the higher dimensions necessary for reconciling the apparent contradictions.
The particle/wave duality in quantum mechanics is a good illustration of the fact that something which appears contradictory can still coexist. The same goes for the understanding that All equals Nothing.

You don't need religion or spirituality to appreciate the wonder of existence. You just don't. In most cases you are just repeating someone else's view of it anyway. And that repetition is, from what Ive seen, usually not helpful for actually appreciating the wonder yourself. It's just the repetition of dogma.

As for Jesus being a Buddhist. I think it's very unlikely but it reinforces the point that Jesus, if he existed, made an error in not recording his own views.. Caesar also made claims to earthly and divine authority but Caesar could write and made sure to get some of his own views out there. Jesus, who may or may not have claimed to be god himself, didn't write a thing down and entrusted his message to a group of other illiterate men. Many decades later a few anonymous Greek writers cobbled together various contradictory versions of the message. So stay in school kids!

Absolutely!! ! We know there are more dimensions, but we really have no clue how to quantify (or even adequately explain them in non-mathematical terms). We know that something out there ignores the limitations of the speed of light as we observe it. We know that in a true vacuum, particles come into existence without the requirement of energy or matter (which we also can't adequately explain. There are so many things that we have only just recently discovered that we don't know, with much more to follow.



You absolutely cannot.

It is an exciting time, as we are beginning to discover many things we did not know to even look for. Technology (and all the sciences) are making progress at a significantly higher rate than even a short time ago. Whole new subsets of physics have come into existence in the past few decades alone.

Zenith? No.
The most scientifically advanced in human history (so far)? Yes.

This is just the beginning of a massive frenzy of discovery brought on by building on previous discovery and facilitated by our recent technology advances (specifically computers and the internet where research and data can be shared and mathematical functions performed rapidly that would have otherwise taken up huge quantities of valuable research time). Another thing to consider is the population increase. With a higher population that is more efficient with its time, the number of people and the number of man-hours dedicated to the sciences makes for an exponentially increasing knowledge base for the next generation.

nice parable
I put mix of all the above, although I would also include talking to a mate at the pub.

Religion because it offers answers to life's questions

Philosophy because it questions the truth of the answers offered by religious dogma.

Science because it explores the questions posed by philosophical questioning to see if truth can be proved.

Talking to a mate in the pub because the truth is less important than sharing a drink after a hard days work and through this a deeper truth is revealed.

This is utter and complete nonsense. Consider yourself banned from WrongPlan... Oh, wait...


... make it so.

Not a fair poll, religion isn't a tool.

Apples and unicorns.

the view that science is a special way of looking that reveals what reality is like 'to itself', independent of any point of view, is at least unscientific. that anything describes, approximates, or reflects reality is a metaphysical claim with no practical consequences whatsoever. to treat as true has consequences, but the mere state of being true, in the sense of corresponding with reality, is not even philosophically interesting, as far as i'm concerned, since we have no way of determining whether the best of science, philosophy, or religion ever comes any closer to corresponding with reality than any random psychotic word salad. all that we do determine is which views seem coherent with those we are presently inclined to believe, which seem most sensible to treat as true in particular contexts. so it seems to me that the aim of inquiry as the search for truth, as opposed to the search for increasingly refined (in terms of applicability), practical conceptual models for deciding what to treat as true and when, is slightly misguided.

All of the above.

The saddest mess, in my mind at least, is just how much information is out there and how many answers people really could have if they were willing to do the work and actually sort through it. Seems like each isolated camp has it's own vocal minority that jeers any attempt at comparing facts, figures, experiences (repeatable and otherwise) across disciplines in a public manner. You'll always have closet mavericks who'll spend all day, all month, all year reading and researching when they're not eating, sleeping, or working; all in order to reinvent the wheel that the next closet maverick is creating. It's kinda sad to see that it needs to be that way but we're still very much at that place where the concensus status quo is something along the lines of "Here are the answers we give you - look no further". Sadly, most people won't.

To say a little bit on all three:

Science - it weeds out both a lot of superstition and perhaps things that would have been called superstition if they hadn't been repeatedly demonstrated in a lab. It's a very slow moving process but they payoffs are that, for what we have clumped together in terms of data and compared like to like, we're about as sure of ourselves as we can be. The downside I'm noticing culturally - people are lazy. Reality, at least from my cuky viewpoint, has a lot more stratification than science is able to contend with (like it can give you the ability to do something but is utterly powerless in telling you whether you should). When people get too reduxed into it you end up with the culture of "If it won't won't make me slim/buffed, won't make my members bigger, stand attention longer, won't make me rich, or won't get me high - what good is it?". It's a wonderful process for getting more out of the world we live in and figuring out how to do just that, just that again - it can't give us guidance on how to implement and enjoy it's fruit. When we subjectively make ourselves completely subservient to it we effectively render ourselves automatons and the cart is leading the horse rather than the other way around.

Philosophy - Unfortunately a very shifty label as in the line between religion and philosophy, really more philosophy and mysticism, blurs all the time. I don't know what the current cultural flavors are within philosophy so I really can't comment much on it's vices. The main problem I've noticed occasionally with people who are philosophy buffs is you can't get them to think; they seem to quite often have canned answers to things that they bring up as if you just made a chess move and they'll sight a famous so-in-so vs. so-in-so defense from 1973 where what you just said (or what they're lazily trying to cram it into being) was rebutted in another person's thoughts. I suppose the danger of music theory making utterly awful musicians with no concept of emotion or dissonance left in their composition can go for people who get sucked in too deeply with philosophy.

Religion - The problem with it that I have to say right up front - at least in the west it doesn't lend well to comparison. Even in the east you can't say there aren't supremecism issues within the cultures or how they handle their dogmas. It's funny that even within various theosophies and synchretisms there was a feud between western and eastern mystery traditions where the Theosophic Society really acted as if their blend of eastern mystery was superior to that of the west and was acting on a lot of bragado as if it already saw victory in taking over and purging the western mysteries and religious traditions. This is where I have to bring it back to say that mysticism is probably the closest thing you'll get to a spiritual science, not that it's a science in the way people would generally think of it but it's a pretty deep group of people who push themselves to be as objective as they can and compare as well as they can things that border on the damn-near ineffable, quite often which cross over that boundary and they're really at a loss quite often for how to share beyond that point. What's really fascinated me on this particular end - all the research that's gone on among western mystics to assess things like what people would call psychic development (whether you believe it's really 'supernatural' or just people giving themselves synaesthesia). The ground model seems to go back quite often to Plato, Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, and it all seems to sum up pretty redundantly that all things come from the one, are aspects of the one, and can return to the one and open our capacities much wider in due process of retracing ourselves deeper and deeper into our subconscious and archetypal thinking. Watching what people come up with or experience across the board who are in various Golden Dawn diaspora type groups it's pretty shocking that it gets so little attention.

Math, but your assumptions have to come from somewhere. The question then becomes which assumptions have the greatest utility.