"The BBC reported that the pope “admired the statue but merely touched the sword.” I think it is a great thing these two men met, and that King Abdullah came bearing gifts. But what would have really caught my attention — and the world’s — would have been if King Abdullah had presented the pope with something truly daring: a visa.
You see, the king of Saudi Arabia, also known as the Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina, can visit the pope in the Vatican. But the pope can’t visit the king of Saudi Arabia in the Vatican of Islam — Mecca. Non-Muslims are not allowed there. Moreover, it is illegal to build a church, a synagogue or a Hindu or Buddhist temple in Saudi Arabia, or to practice any of these religions publicly.
As the BBC noted, “some Christian worship services are held secretly, but the government has been known to crack down on them, or deport Filipino workers if they hold even private services. … The Saudi authorities cite a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad that only Islam can be practiced in the Arabian Peninsula.”" Friedman
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Tom Friedman is hard at work in this column (as usual) at convincing humanity of its homogeneous future. He desperately wants to see mankind in this way and hopes and hopes that the sense of separateness that prevails in so many people across the world is going to disappear soon. One wonders if he is thinking of ALL groups that way. This egregiously utopian view of the future places him squarely in the Jacobin neocon "camp." There is no real evidence that this process is approaching "fruition" or even that it is seriously underway in many parts of the world. Economic integration and a desire to enjoy the benefits of technology do not necessarily lead to cultural homogenization. Some people prefer their traditional ways. Our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last five years should have taught us that, but it has not. In the case of Friedman his insistence on this idea, despite all evidence to the contrary, is special pleading whether he realizes that or not. Since he expects that mankind in all its variety will come increasingly to see its differences as unimportant it is natural that he should dream of a future in which the Saudi king would invite the Catholic Pope to Saudi Arabia. Friedman has been in Saudi Arabia many times and should know that popular opinion there would overwhelmingly reject such an idea, but, that matters not to him. He continues to pursue his dream.
David Brooks of the New York Times remarked on the "Newshour" a while back that "people" do not care about theology. By this he meant that Governor Romney’s chances of becoming president of the United States are not damaged by his adherence to the Mormon religion. Brooks said that what "people" care about is the social behavior of the members of religious bodies and that since Mormons are notably responsible and patriotic folk, the general public would not care about what it is that they profess as divine truth.
Brooks and Friedman have missed something in their discussions of religion. They have missed a simple truth. MOST PEOPLE WHO PROFESS RELIGION ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN THE TRUTH OF THEIR GROUP’S TEACHING ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE. They do not see their sect, denomination, church, etc. as a mere vehicle for the expression of social concern for the welfare of others.
Orthodox Christian theology proclaims the majesty of a triune God. Muslims and Jews do not. Mormons believe in something altogether different.
Members of those groups (if they are truly members and not just "life cycle" auxiliaries) are capable of accepting each other as "good people" and fellow citizens. They are NOT CAPABLE of accepting the truth of groups who deny the essential beliefs of their own group.
That is what was meant in the recent pronouncement from Rome of the limits of Christian-Muslim dialog. Dialog among all religious groups is desirable as a means of establishing a harmony of the peoples, but there are limits imposed by THEOLOGY beyond which such discussions can not progress.
Friedman and Brooks should know that. pl
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11friedman.html?th&emc=th
Here is a serious question for the Col.: Taking the statement “Economic integration and a desire to enjoy the benefits of technology do not necessarily lead to cultural homogenization.”
Which of these two states, economic integration or cultural homogenization is the more likely to lead to the more peaceful coexistence between people? Or, has the corporate mindset that now steers globalization corrupted the ideas of nation states to the degree that the question is no longer relevant?
In discussing the difference between cultural and universal values, two points:
QED: Cultural distinctions are important; but physical reality trumps culture.
i agree w/ your main point. the moustachoied one and the brooks guy are full of it.
if i could digress and address an ancillary point. i come from a split home, a Roman Catholic mother and an Eastern Orthodox father.
“Orthodox Christian theology proclaims the majesty of a triune God. ”
I knew what you meant. But my first impression was that it was an unfortunate phrase.
There is (Eastern or Rum for Roman) Orthodox Christianity as opposed to Roman Catholic (and its splinter Protestant offspring) Christianity and their concept of the trinity is subtly different.
The Orthodox claim to be unitarian believing in one Godhead but w/ three aspects, a belief also espoused by Isaac Newton. Whereas I believe the Roman Catholics actually believe in three personages. In the Aramaic, the Holy Ghost, is the roh? mutaqads, or the holy animating spirit. It has always been hard for me to see that as a separate personage.
Under the late Pope, there had been a liberalization, a doctrine had emerged that heaven was not a physical place, but closeness to God, and hell was separation from God. That closeness to God or salvation could be achieved with any appropriate religion, even proper minded atheists can achieve salvation. (depending on how the Godhead is defined, of course)
This view agrees with the esoteric Druze religion which believes in incarnation. What kind of heaven or hell is there for reincarnates- closeness or separation from God.
Now the Latter Day Saints view is very very complicated with two actual Gods Elohim who resides on the planet Kobol and Yahweh of the Old Testament who they say is actually is the same as Jesus Christ and they made Adam from the Archangel Michael. And it even gets more non-mainstream.
Is the American public ready for such views? They are exposed to the “milk” but not the “meat” of the religion. But the views are harmless since they are not violence promoting views and do not lead to any practical action.
I personally would not have any qualms voting for Romney but were it not for his zealous NeoKon warmongering views.
In discussing the difference between cultural and universal values, two points:
QED: Cultural distinctions are important; but physical reality trumps culture.
Will
“orthodox” as opposed to “heterodox” not in the sense of being the doctrine of the eastern churches.
“The principal disagreement between Western and Eastern Christianity on the Trinity has been the relationship of the Holy Spirit with the other two hypostases. The original credal formulation of the Council of Constantinople was that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father.” While this phrase is still used unaltered in the Eastern Churches, it became customary in parts of the Western Church, beginning with the provincial Third Council of Toledo in 589, to add the clause “and the Son” (Latin filioque) into the Creed. Although this was explicitly rejected by Pope Leo III, it was finally used in a Papal Mass by Pope Benedict VIII in 1014, thus becoming official throughout the Roman Catholic Church. The Eastern Churches object to it on both ecclesiological and theological grounds.” Wiki on the Trinity. pl
DK
“Cultural distinctions are important; but physical reality trumps culture.”
Really? I have seen too many men willing to die for their beliefs to accept that. pl
Theology 101!! Another great thing about this blog. Just back from Mass–I wonder if our pastor knows about wikepedia.
IMHO, people who believe in a homogeneous world cultural are usually driven by a lack of cultural identity within themselves.
Mr Friedman has stated he does not keep Kosher, therefore so must all Jews.
It’s a narrow view of the world that only sees trees and not the forests.
Wasn’t the split between the churches really about the rivalry between Rome and Constantinople?
Again, the trees versus the forest approach.
Sort of seeing Iraq (tree) and not worry about the other factors like Shias/Iran, Sunnis/AQI/Non-Shia Arab world and Kurds/Turks (lots of forests).
So if Romney was a Mormon, wouldn’t he be leading the Republicans right no based of his record and experience?
What would you do if you were in a forest of Apple trees and then out of no where you saw a Mango tree?
Friedman and Brooks don’t get it about theology because they may not have any real theology of their own. They probably don’t think that a metaphysical or spiritual description of the nature of reality has any relationship to what they perceive as reality. I.e., they are unreconstructed materialists, dinosaurs even. Since early 20th-century physics has ruled their worldview limited and not really correct.
I do not take a stance on Roman vs. Orthodox views of the Trinity. I was taught by my Rum Orthodox (Melchite) grandmother to cross self with an additional touch to the sternum “All One God,” and that works for me.
My creed would probably sit well with Thomas Jefferson or the philosopher Spinoza. Perhaps it’s the obstinate Protestant in me, or the native Californian ethic of smorgasbord spirituality, but I find little conflict in loving the saints and the Father, Son and Ruh-al-Quds, while accepting the validity of other theological viewpoints, and other religions, as part of the endless aspects of the One. Doubtless my views would be considered syncretistic and get me burned at the stake in quite a few places and times. Thank God for California and freedom of religion.
This is why I care very much about the provisions in our Constitution that guarantee us the right to practice and believe as we please, or not all.
“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called…”
Perhaps Sun Tzu’s idea of the sheathed sword is consistent with that saying from the Gospel but I don’t really know.
I have little aptitude for theology but a few years ago, a Trappist monk/priest recommended to me a book on the Trinity entitled God For Us. It was written by a first rate scholar named Catherine LaCugna. This Trappist who recommended the book didn’t necessarily agree with the book in its entirety. But since he has dedicated his life to the “Triune” experience, I figured out of respect for his immense sacrifice, I should at least give it a gander. I found the experience worthwhile.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Us-Trinity-Christian-Life/dp/0060649135/ref=sr_1_3/103-9067905-1002227?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194804288&sr=8-3
my bust Col., you were entirely correct in your usage. thank you for elucidating the filioque clause I’ve tried reading the wiki article on the trinity, I don’t think i’m smart enough to be a scholarly Xtian. To think of it, “I am not smarter than a fith grader.”
It is a frosty November afternoon, and I have to walk my dog, but, to make a long argument short, this begs the question of why someone comes to believe this and not that in the first place.
Dear Sir,
Will you be posting “Dear Hearts Across The Seas” this year? I took the liberty of doing so on a comment at No Quarter. It is indeed a beautiful piece of writing on a profound subject that is all too appropriate. And to all the veterans here – thank you.
….a desire to enjoy the benefits of technology…
The first strategy is to simply reject technology beyond a point (we have an example of that in Eastern Pennsylvania, I believe).
If a society is to be a producer of technology and not merely a consumer/importer, then the infrastructure that supports science is necessary. It means teachers and students of science and researchers are present.
Science as a living discipline tends to undermine any religious group’s teaching about the nature of the universe. At a minimum, it induces skepticism.
Now, a society could segregate its scientists from the rest and also try to keep the masses uneducated to keep science from eroding religious faith.
Or a society could choose to remain only a consumer and never a producer of technology. But then, apart from extraction of natural resources, it has little to offer the world.
(IMO, these last two strategies are in use in various countries today.)
Outside that, once you find that your equations that describe some/any/all aspects of the universe do not require God, and that no support can be found for what is in the religious text, then whether you continue to be religious or not, the room for other people with other beliefs has been made. The triune god or the single god, it is all the same.
The final alternative is that science makes a society militantly atheistic.
So there are chances that a society may become more liberal or perish. Friedman is not entirely off his rocker.
I’d also note that technology is a liberator. Forced human labor vanished in part because of technology. That women can enjoy a practical equality with men, IMO, is also in part because of technology. It is hard therefore, to block technology in general.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away”
– Philip K. Dick
DK: It’s worth noting that under this definition cultural and religious differences are part of physical reality.
my bust Col., you were entirely correct in your usage. thank you for elucidating the filioque clause I’ve tried reading the wiki article on the trinity, I don’t think i’m smart enough to be a scholarly Xtian. To think of it, “I am not smarter than a fith grader.”
btw – Re “The Church of What’s Happening Now” – I believe that the late Flip Wilson as Rev. Leroy, raised more than one set of eyebrows – with his take on those of the cloth whose interest may have been more on the collection plate than on spritual and religious matters. What a great show that was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flip_Wilson_Show
“Dialog among all religious groups is desirable as a means of establishing a harmony of the peoples, but there are limits imposed by THEOLOGY beyond which such discussions can not progress.”
A simple example:
Transubstantiation
Calvinists are too keen on this idea.
“The bane of our age is not intolerance, but a fuzzy-minded wishy-washy
kind of tolerance based upon the notions that there’s something good
about everyone and deep down everyone is just like us. Well, there isn’t,
and they aren’t.”
— S.M. Stirling
Michael Murry & Arun:
You are worng on Science:
Science is based on a set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the world which themselves are beyond Science itself. Science is built on non-Reason.
It is not science that makes people atheistic, so to speak – it is the increase in the collective powers of humanity.
Why doesn’t the US media and academia engage more Muslim scholars on subjects like this? My guess is for the same reason that Dougie Feith had little use for Col. Lang.
pl “Some people prefer their traditional ways. Our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last five years should have taught us that, but it has not.”
How many of the Neocons have served in the military or have children or close relatives directly under fire?
Here’s a theory, the more your ass is on the line the steeper the learning curve.
“Science is based on a set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the world which themselves are beyond Science itself. Science is built on non-Reason.” Babak Makkinejad
The process of determining a natural cause for an observable event in the natural world is methodological naturalism or Science.
Asserting that there is nothing BUT the natural world is philosophical naturalism, not Science.
One of these two approaches to understanding our existance is metaphysical, which is your point. But one, also, is not.
geez, it’s been a friedman unit, or longer,since i’ve seen smart people discussing friedman.
on the matter of “MOST PEOPLE WHO PROFESS RELIGION ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN THE TRUTH OF THEIR GROUP’S TEACHING ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE”,i speak with some of those people from time to time, and i’m not at all sure that they’re at all clear on the specifics of their specific groups’ teaching.
which doesn’t affect the reality that friedman is an idiot. it’s nice, though, to see the brooks idiot being bundled with.
Babak,
science is based on the assumption that the physical world can be quantified, described and predicted. I fail to see how this requires metaphysical assumptions or resorting to non-reason, so perhaps you could elaborate.
Whatever the metaphysical situation of science it sets out a competing view of the universe and how it operates. Much of that view nullifies most traditional religious views of the universe and our parts in it, how it operates and how it is to be understood. The fight is about “believability”, what is “real”. Wherever the scientific worldview is genuinely understood this dilemna emerges.
A common point in the philosophy of science once it proceeds to pragmatic concerns is that a scientist does not need to know anything about the philosophy of science before doing the method of science. Method and philosophy occupy different domains.
From an anthropological perspective this becomes readily apparent because the fundamental commitment to empiricism is the precedent to all philosophizing ‘after the fact’ of the investigation or experiment, about said investigating and experimenting.
How far in front is the practical method? It’s measured in millions of years. I’ll gloss the details but the first science as-it-were proceeds from being able to recollect where the spear most effectively cuts down the large game; where confluences of seed and leaf are likely to congregate and under what conditions; what configurations of landscape offer the best protection at night; etc.
One crucial element to this is that one needs a sleep state through which yesterday’s details can be safely stored in memory for recall and manipulation tomorrow.
Operationalizing and manipulating recollected experience is the foundation of trial and error and the two support fruitful “proto-science” without any hint of philosophizing, let alone symbolization.
As for religion, with it too one can step back through time to the archaic past where it no longer exists.
All systematic foundationalisms disappear when you step back far enough. Obviously they are late arrivals where they do pop up in the actual scale of the history of homo sapiens sapiens, and the hominids.
I’m grateful for the mention of C.S.Peirce. Nowadays religion as a behavior is studied as a matter of psychology, anthropology, and especially social cognition. The main take away from this is that almost every ‘religionist’ picks and chooses from the impress of systematic propositions, conveniently adhering to some and ignoring others.
You can test this easily by asking anybody what their foundational propositions are and I guarantee most people will not have closely considered the ramifications of their favorite propositions.
It is true enough that a believer cannot logically have it both ways, but so much for logic! If you believe your God stands above all creation than those who think otherwise simply haven’t come around to your so called correct understanding.
On the other hand religions persist despite the logical contradictions. So: picking and choosing trumps theology. The theologians are few.
…in a nutshell.
Eric Dönges:
The concepts used in the physical science are all undefined – they are philosophical – in fact Metaphysical – categories that presume an specific metaphysical system; in the case of Physics that being mostly (but not exclusively) the metaphysical system that postulates that the world is made of particulates.
Furthermore, concepts such as particle, mass, energy, space, time, field, wave, causality are undefined in the sense that they cannot be reduced or defined in terms of more elementary concepts. They are themselves not subject to scientific analysis; the human mind intuits them.
There is more that I can write on this subject but it would take me hours.
Take a look at the books: “The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physics” (Burtt), “The Concept of Mass” (Jammer), and “The Analysis of Matter” by Russell to name a few. This is a vast subject.
Science cannot supply True Knowledge.
When we try to look “objectively” at human agency in the world, and in particular at the interpersonal (and international) consequences of human actions, we can’t avoid seeing a breakdown in the allegedly neat and tidy borders between the religious and the rationalist, scientific world-views.
Using reductionist techniques, the scientific method has had huge success in uncovering the mechanisms that operate at the basement level of reality, especially in the phenomena described (almost) comprehensively by physics and chemistry. Unfortunately, reductionism has proven nearly useless as a tool for explaining much of human behavior. Something essential is lacking.
Nietzsche tried to provide a tool: his ideology of the will to power. But one problem is that he arbitrarily excluded, by definition, the possibility that a will to power higher than the human version exists. And yet it is looking clearer by the day that there may well be one, and that this would be true even were that power not actually grounded in the Divine, as the monotheistic religions all teach it is. Here the only honest positions are either a frank faith or agnosticism. Atheism is a position it is possible to hold only in bad faith.
When we fail to act as though our neighbors *are* ourselves, or part of who we are, we fly in the face of Reality. Nietzsche’s zero sum will to power game is a delusion.
For several years I have been trying to convince people that the religious references that preface and are included in Achminidads speeches and writings are not just boilerplate, but are meaningful and important parts of his personality, belief system and negotiating posture. His first letter to Bush needs to be read and interpreted by a Muslim religious scholar and not a State Dept political officer. At least one DC think tank has considered this idea but on the whole, we will never understand the government of Iran without a religious context.
Dear Babak, once one starts capitalization, Truth, Knowledge,Beauty, or even Best of Show, any counter argument is useless. However, consider it is only is a few decades that we have had much beyond interiority and written records to help our peabrains figure out things. Give it a couple of months longer.
Charles Sanders Peirce said that people who think they don’t have a metaphysics, just simply have a bad metaphysics.
The metaphysical principles which underlie natural science are masterfully laid out from Copernicus through Newton (and thus through to the present day) in the seminal book THE METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE by E. A. Burtt, who taught at the University of Chicago and later Stanford (revised 1932, and still in print by Dover Books.) Well worth reading, and don’t weigh in on the subject until you do.
Western secularists believe that science refutes religion, but this is a very specific misconstruction. (It is also somewhat self-limiting, and we shall see.) It is not merely that the metaphysics of science is unresolved (and even on its own terms, it has run into a crisis in quantum physics.) Still with a bit of broadening, scientific metaphysics could easily include religion. Our real situation is that science and religion answer completely different questions: so our epistemology (not our metaphysics!) is actually dual in nature.
The biggest problem is the different understandings of what religion is. It arose to explain and celebrate mystical or spiritual experience. It was then afterward extrapolated to explain why things move in the physical world. When modern science arose to explain the physical world, religion wasn’t useful for that. It had only mystical experience to cling to — and that experience, full blown, comes few and far between. On the other hand, given the great success of physical science, it was presumed by its later exponents be able to explain everything else as well. (Newton, for example, did not make this mistake. Although neither did Einstein.) And indeed, if you ask any secularist, science now “explains” mystical experience as abnormal psychology or hallucination.
The result is one of the few big failures of modernity: an almost total forgetting and loss of the spiritual path.
Because the religions lost it, too.
This is an unexamined turn of events. The spiritual path goes on in people regardless, and since science provides no useful explanation to anyone in the midst of it, the vacuum was left to fill by traditional religions.
But there is one important new twist: In the modern period, the popular theologies have become literal, after the rhetoric manner of science.
It is important to understand that until the early modern period, theology (and most common speech about anything, for that matter) was not literal but largely metaphorical in nature, and not merely among the learned.
Christians, for example, argued sometimes violently whether Jesus was truly a god or merely a great rabbi until Constantine decided the question by decree because the battling bishops were bloodletting in the streets, and causing too much unrest in his empire.
But even after that, Jesus remained partly a metaphorical figure. They don’t let it out to the plebes, but if you dig deep enough in modern Catholic theology you will find the esoteric understanding that the entire Jesus story is a metaphor for the changes of the real spiritual experience, which is entirely wordless in its nature.
This new literalism has some bearing upon current events, because it is the backdrop of the Islamic, as well as the fundamentalist Christian, critique of modernity. It is no coincidence that educated scientists such as engineers fall into this, especially when provoked by despair and desperation. It is precisely the secularists who, when they fall, fall hardest into the error.
Babak, “Science cannot supply True Knowledge.”
It depends on what you mean by true knowledge. I would weigh in to, not-so-philosophically, suggest that science traffics in the tentative, yet, at the same time if it’s knowledge falls short of true knowledge defined in a certain way, nevertheless science is remarkably effective even within necessary constraints.
As far as the regress to apriori foundational certainties, tis an old conundrum. But, there are many perspectives which deal in not resolving the paradox (between uncertainty and effectiveness,) rather these opt for some kind of purchase on the effectiveness side.
A soup recipe is a fine everyday example of a hypothesis about reality and its operational unfolding toward an anticipated experimental result. Why the kitchen experimenter ends up with bisque given the uncertainties of time and space (etc.) wavering below the level of the recipe is mysterious…
and tasty.
I agree with your comments. I read a poll that said almost a majority of people polled would not vote for Romney because he was a Mormon.
A few things. First, I rejected Christianity and became a Muslim years ago. The whole “trinity” issue was one of the major reasons behind this.
To each their own, but I cannot get past the idea of a God being divide into three aspects, no matter how it is packaged and sold, never mind the idea that God would actually have a son.
The idea of God having a son is completely a pagan idea and violates the very basics of the Old Testament and Jewish belief.
Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
Having said that, I reject the idea that anyone has the right to force their religious beliefs on others. Whether it is Ann Coulter wanting to invade the Middle East and convert everyone to Christianity, or Muslim whackos with the same idea.
As to Saudis never wanting the Pope to visit Saudi, I am not sure I buy that. I am married to a Saudi lady and know more than a few Saudis, both “regular” Saudis and members of the Saudi government.
I dont think the average Saudi would mind a visit by the Pope as long as there was not a request to visit Mecca or Medina.
One aspect of Friedman’s article that goes astray is his idea that Muslims besides Saudis might somehow allow non Muslims into Mecca and Medina.
Long before the al-Saud family took power in the Kingdom it was an agreed upon aspect that non Muslims cannot enter these two cities. I think you’d find the vast majority of Muslims would agree with this idea no matter who was in charge in Riyadh.
As to the building of churches and synagogues, or practicing other religions, in Saudi Arabia, there is no a Qur’anic injunction against it. Rather The Qur’an obliges Muslims to protect churches and synagogues BEFORE mosques in times of war. Hence, it would seem from a Qur’anic perspective there is an assumption that there will always be churches and synagogues in Islamic lands.
I would support the building of churches and synagogues in Saudi itself, not in Mecca or Medina of course. As a Muslim, I think this is the “Muslim” thing to do.
Of course such a freedom could only be passed to “People of the Book”. Then, what that term means would come into play. The majority of Muslims would agree that it extends only to Christians and Jews.
As a side note, there are churches actually going up all over the Gulf and older ones being restored. Saudi is the only place in the Gulf this is not happening.
Babak’s wrote “The concepts used in the physical science are all undefined”.
Not so — one only needs to find the proper language for their efficient expression. That language is mathematics and most physical science concepts relevant to real-world phenomena are clearly and unambiguously defined within that framework.
The resulting translation to English (or whatever one’s favorite language might be) is of course more problematic, which leads to the general tenor of the resulting discourse here. But that’s not a problem of definition: it is a problem of translation. And accurate translation is a much taller order, as anyone versed in multiple languages has learned.
Physics exists independently of culture, and independently of humanity or even of life on earth. Its postulates (or at least, the settled ones: we can safely leave string theory out of this mix) are readily encapsulated in a completely self-consistent manner in various arcane and not-so-arcane areas of mathematics, and these defining principles also exist independently of our cultures.
They are often useful to our cultures, but that is a question of utility, not of definition.
What is most important to appreciate is that all of this is substantially irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Culture exists largely independently of science (it must, since science is only a very recent human development where culture is ancient, likely as old as mankind itself), and thus culture must be respected as a motivating force in the human world, as the Colonel has so aptly described here.
Culture doesn’t need physics to be important to humanity. Physics can help sometimes, (one might abandon a culture when forced to by the brute threat of a nuclear attack, for example), but the Friedmans of the world ignore culture only at their (and our!) peril.
“It is not science that makes people atheistic, so to speak – it is the increase in the collective powers of humanity.”
Mainly the power systems that give us the illusion we are not in the dark.
Did not read Manchester’s book.
WRT geography and not upon culture – exists between “plains people” and “hill peoples.”
Is it a distinction: geography versus culture OR culture as a function of geography?
Don’t need to look to Spain, or Morocco, or British Isles. Hills versus plains people can (or could at one time) be observed on a leisurely trip through Maryland on old Route 40. The hills are a hive of truly private enterprise practiced by intensely religious people. My uncle, dad, and father-in-law had many stories about rough justice (including unauthorized capital punishment) and irregular economic activity (mostly applied distillation technology and untimely harvesting of game). Or Maine – compare Aroostook with Washington County (home of H. the poacher).
By way of either-ors, I wonder if mainstream(ers) versus margin(al)s might be a real and more useful dichotomy.
I am a secularist. I do not believe that science explains mystical experience as hallucination or abnormal psychology. I don’t believe that it explains it at all yet. The ones who believe that science has settled religion’s hash for good are just looking for a new Bible. Science is a process of building ever-more-useful models of reality. If we could comprehend the world in all its fullness we would not need to abstract it into models. But we can’t and we do. No matter how extensive and elaborate our models become the essential and eternal gulf between the thing itself and our concepts of it will always contain a mystery of infinite-because-unknowable proportions. There is plenty of room in there for religion and with no inherent contradiction with the notion of science. The model will never merge with its object.
Cieran:
Mathematics cannot define mass, force, particle, field, space, time, etc.
Mathematics is a specialized symbolic language that incorporates within it the rules of deductive logic.
Whether human sciences exist without humanity is something that I cannot decide; I have no evidence. It will be useful to discuss this with sentient aliens and decide if they also use categoris such as ours to comprehend the universe.
In physical sciences, a subject that I am more familiar than other areas of empirical sciences, one can find quite a bit of non-sense in the physical theories. They are neither consistent internally (just look at the Quantum Theory of Fields) nore consistent with each other such as the case with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Culture, i.e. the way people live, incorporates science within it. The empirical sciences of the last 500 years; invented mostly by Europeans, are a subset of other sciences that existed prior to them. Sciences such as Mathematics, Logic, Taxonomy, Medicine, Mechanics etc.
And in fact, I disagree with you that Physics is independent of culture – Big Bang as the Creation ex nihilo!
I agree with you regarding Friedman though, but he is not an bad man – only misguided (another one of those lost children that I mentioned in a previous posting).
Cieran, Stewart Brand offers the following diagram for how we work:
Layered as follows,
Fashion, moving very quickly
Commerce, moving quickly
Infrastructure, moving along
Governance, moving slowly
Culture, moving very slowly
Nature, oh, so slow
“This is a cross section of the pace layering of a healthy civilization. …The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.”
A better chart of this may be found on the Edge website under the section “What is your algorithm?” which includes several other equations by smart people.
Babak:
With all due respect, mathematics can most certainly define such principles as force, field, space, etc. I make a comfortable living wielding exactly such precise definitions.
It not only defines these notions pragmatically, but is also provides the deeper insight that expressive languages can yield for well-defined terms (e.g., force and space can be viewed using the same abstractions, which results in new insights about their nature by virtue of their similar abstract representations).
Converting this natural mathematical representation to something we can chat about here without problems of definition is virtually impossible, however (e.g., consider Taleb’s recent “The Black Swan”, where he had to expend many, many words to attempt his definition of otherwise-straightforward mathematical principles).
And therein lies the problem.
And I would reiterate that science did not exist until a few hundred years ago. What you call “the empirical sciences” are not sciences in any modern definition of the word (i.e., as process or product) — they are closer to the much older notion of “learned craft” or “skill”… hence your need for the “empirical” qualifier.
But we already have some good definitions for that long-standing field of human enterprise…
From the Greek translation of that term we get “technology”, and from the Latin, we obtain “engineer” (among other most interesting words). I would suggest that these are closer to what you are looking for here, as both “technology” and “engineering” fit the characteristics you attribute to science, e.g., lack of precise definition, strong cultural context, etc.
And what do you know — yet another problem of cultural definition…
Cheers!
Jederman, You state that the world cannot be comprehended in all its fullness. Every mystic on record since the beginning of time, in any tradition, profoundly disagrees. Please explain how science would even begin to consider this as NOT an abnormal psychology or an hallucination.
Also, one of us has the wrong definition of “secularist.” I took “secularist” as a person who believes in the worldly as OPPOSED to the spiritual.
However, if you take the position that things themselves are unknowable and there is an eternal gulf between things and our concepts of them, you are stating Kant’s metaphysics in a nutshell.
Now, although Kant was a Christian, that doesn’t similarly make you a theist. But you are certainly expanding the definition of “secularism” to include a metaphysics in which the choice “worldly vs. spiritual” is completely unprovable. There’s no way to know what or why the gulf is, for example. Choosing one explanation or the other is in the nature of a “belief.” I don’t think that’s secularism.
You write that “there is plenty of room in there for religion with no inherent contradiction with the notion of science.” I agree with you, however for a reason that may be completely opposed to yours: I think our knowledge is essentially dual in nature. And we are not getting out of it. We are the nexus of two types of thing. I think Descartes believed this, and maybe Einstein and Plank did too.
Babak,
I’ll start my reply by agreeing totally with you that “Science cannot supply True Knowledge” – not because science is based on non-reason, as you claimed in your initial post (a claim which I completely reject), but because science limits itself to that which can be objectively tested and thus it does not even attempt to answer a number of important questions. Of course, there are a lot of scientist philosophers that then try to use their scientific knowledge to attempt to tackle these issues, but that is not science proper, in my opinion.
Furthermore, concepts such as particle, mass, energy, space, time, field, wave, causality are undefined in the sense that they cannot be reduced or defined in terms of more elementary concepts. They are themselves not subject to scientific analysis; the human mind intuits them.
By your reasoning, mathematics would also be metaphysical, and based on non-reason – even more so than science in general, since almost everything in mathematics is an abstract concept that only exists in the minds of mathematicians. A good number of these concepts are fundamental in the sense that they do not depend on anything else for their validity.
In physical sciences, a subject that I am more familiar than other areas of empirical sciences, one can find quite a bit of non-sense in the physical theories. They are neither consistent internally (just look at the Quantum Theory of Fields) nore consistent with each other such as the case with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Does that make science as a whole based on non-reason, or wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that these specific theories are either incomplete and in need of more work, or perhaps wrong altogether ?
And in fact, I disagree with you that Physics is independent of culture – Big Bang as the Creation ex nihilo!.
Physics *is* independent of culture, but it’s study is not. I think the main difference between cultures in this regard is how much trouble a scientist is likely to find himself in if he or she publishes work that contradicts the belief system of those in charge, and if there is any study going on in the first place.
Lee,
I’m not sure which mystics would claim to comprehend the fullness of all things but perhaps they do get closer than the rest of us do. Ecstasy or Samadhi may not require complete knowledge.
I am not suggesting anything about the nature of the unknowable gap between model and object, just that it exists. I might not believe that there is anything in there besides the facts that have been filtered out by my way of observing the object and thinking about it. (If I believed that, would that make me a secularist?) Others might choose the gap as the object of their meditation. Yet others, abhorring the vacuum, might find the uncertainty to be the kernel of their belief in a higher being. We seek to shrink the gap, but is it a thing that is really reduced by increasing our knowledge? I am saying that we can’t really get our arms around the gap because of its very unknowableness (I know it isn’t really a word).
I am not sure that our knowledge is dualistic. It strikes me that the fact that what we do not know is so important to us makes our sense of reality dualistic. I guess that could be said to be a meta-knowledge and we may, in fact, be in complete agreement.
Cheers