Jon, if you are secure in your own views and you don't agree with Peter's article, then surely what he thinks you think is of supreme indifference to you?

Yet it doesn't seem to be.

George, someone with a PhD in mathematics should be able to clearly explain to the person with a year 7 education just where their error lies in any argument over mathematics.

On the other hand, religion is not necessarily amenable to such abstractly pure reason, as Kant to some extent showed. Therefore, whilst the search for an unbreakable chain of inductive inference to support theological speculations has been long and at times highly rigorous, it has always foundered in the metaphysical bog of subjective experience on which it is ultimately set.

However, mathematics isn't immune to the effect of such numinous revelatory experience, in fact it's been a feature of many of the great mathematical insights and has been remarked on by some of the greatest mathematicians. Having the advantage of seeking only internal consistency rather than any empirical correspondence, mathematics has managed to happily encompass such insights without worrying overmuch about the metaphysics.

I'm hopeful that empirical science, combined with new approaches to metaphysics that flexibly encompass qualitative models as well as mathematics does might bring us close to working out just what it is that religion is trying to explain.

Craig Minns,

Thanks for the insights.

>> someone with a PhD in mathematics should be able to clearly explain to the person with a year 7 education just where their error lies in any argument over mathematics.<<

I agree but that is irrelevant to what my metaphor was saying, namely that a person who is not very knowledgeable in a field should have the modesty not to ARGUE (different from asking for “clear explanation”) with a specialist. Sometimes this explanation is not possible: e.g. I would not be able to explain to somebody whose understanding of mathematics is at the level of Year 7 the difference between homomorphism and homeomorphism.

>> On the other hand … <<

I agree, subjective experience is an essential feature of religion, its mythological or metaphysical constructions being another feature.

I also agree with your following paragraph which, as I understand it, essentially refers to (a higher version of ) the simple fact that before you can understand arithmetics you have to learn how to count apples and bunnies.

I am not sure what the last paragraph means. Religion “tries to explain” what is usually referred to as the human condition. Part of that is an attempt to model in order to explain - through mythologies and anthropomorphic or metaphysical constructs - the dimensions of reality that are not amenable to scientific investigation (dimensions that for an atheist - as I understand him/her with apologies to Jon J - are all reducible to the mental).

Hi George, the assumption in religion is that there are some aspects of the human condition which are not amenable to empiricist analysis and to some extent theologists have made a virtue out of necessity in raising these aspects to be central dogmas. Similarly, science, in its attachment to the centrality of empiricism has to a large extent ignored those aspects or written them off as irrelevant subjective or ignorant misexplanations.

I'm hopeful that won't always be the case, since unlike Peter (and perhaps yourself) I see that as a significant failing of theology and one of the main reasons that it has lost its epistemological authority, which is after all what this article laments. It is also why empirically-defined rationalism has not managed to provide a metaphysically satisfactory explanatory replacement for atheists, despite enormous efforts to do so in philosophy.

Gould's separate magisteria model was grasping at this as well, but I find it unsatisfactory because it effectively gives up on finding a way to unify the disparate ways of viewing understanding.

I guess at heart I'm a positivist when it comes down to it.

The items featured on this reference provide a unique Illuminated Understanding of the quantum world in which we now exist - and in fact always did.
http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html

Craig, what Peter thinks IS of supreme indifference to me. What is of concern to me, though, is that he is given a platform here to put forward in public whatever tedious drivel he chooses, without any apparent editing or filtering of the content. If you or I were to submit a piece of unsubstantiated nonsense like this about our own pet obsessions, it would be sent back with a polite refusal by a bemused moderator. Peter's religious 'credentials', however, get him access to public fora that you or I would be unable to reach unless we had something meaningful to say. It's not a level playing field. THAT'S my concern.

Craig Minns,

Thanks again for your resourceful input that made me activate my own grey cells.

>> the assumption in religion is that there are some aspects of the human condition which are not amenable to empiricist analysis <<

I agree, some Buddhists might not. Empiricists’ approach can only serve as an ANALOGUE for modelling the "supernatural” aspects of reality (the existence of them the believer has to assume) similarly to science's modelling its physical aspects. Only here the criterion of “adequacy” - to borrow from the structural empiricist Bas Van Fraassen - is not of empirical nature but grounded in culture, tradition, sacred texts, mystical experience, etc.

[I’d add to this list Christianity’s UNIQUE multifunctionality as I see it: It is neither just a philosophical orientation that can inspire arts, science and morality (as well as act against them), nor a fairy tale (mythology) to be taken verbatim by the philosophically unsophisticated, nor a mystical experience comparable to the more developed Oriental versions, nor a pain killer (“opium for the masses”). Christianity is all of these things taken TOGETHER, and more. By capitalisation I want to stress its uniqueness only as a whole, admitting that when taken separately each of these features can be found elsewhere in various forms and guises, c.f. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17075#301493. ]

This analogue was to my knowledge first systematically studied by Ian Barbour in his “Myths, Models & Paradigms (1974) that I already mentioned to you in another thread. One can see these analogues without having to believe in the existence of the “supernatural” aspects of reality.

(ctd)