Alright now.
Bare with me.
I am a naturalist. I have come to learn throughout my undergraduate education that science seems to indicate hat the universe has no teleology in of itself. And it seems that evidence, for all the whining about empricists from philosophers, is the best way of knowing.
Stone cold, science pulls out the numbers, and patterns, makes sure anyone can pull them out if they follow the instructions. Its inspiring.
Science is the best bet we have for truth.
But it needs a little help with meaning.
It leaves us in this malediction: being human.
So what do we do? Well, it seems some of our most ancient ancestors jumped first to making stuff up and believing it with maddening intensity.
Sympathetic magic is painted on the cave paintings. The drawing was an attempt at a magic spell to help with the hunt.
It was ritual.
We know that there seemed to be funerals early in human history. Lets face it folks, in the realm of pure reason and utility, funerals are impractical.
They began as ritual.
I think cave paintings, and funerals, have a few important things in common besides their antiquity, they are both ritual and art. Anyone who does not think there is an art to a funeral has never been to a good one. Good funerals are as moving as any painting or song.
Never forget when a classical piece is called a requiem it was intended for a funeral.
I believe our brains have a built in yearning for depth, meaning, and symbols which transcend the strictest reality. I find this in art.
When I first lost my belief in God, I had an existentialist depression that I could not shake for months. I had an imaginary friend for years, and I had to abandon it, in the depths of my adulthood (how embarassing).
For me as a naturalist, and a secularist, the greatest ecstasy comes when I am deeply engaged with art. Either making it or experiencing it. It is pure and real splendor. The closest I come to heaven on earth.
As a humanist I also find art to be an amazing connection with my species, a way to see how far the basic biology has gone, how crazy the organic maelstrom of information and passion that is art can reach from one soul to another. Of course, strictly speaking, by soul I mean brain.
In short I am nominating art for God’s replacement.
Any one second the motion?
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For some definitions of the word “God” you’re probably spot on. I wouldn’t say art created the universe though.
You say that funerals are impractical. But you also seem aware that they have a powerful emotional component. Isn’t it rather reasonable to have in place a ritual in which people can mourn their dead loved ones? Given that people love each other, and given also that they die after a while, a process to deal with loss seems useful to a human society. A funeral is part of this process. Wouldn’t it be unreasonable to ignore the fact that humans not only have strong emotional attachments to one another, but also that they are mortal?
While emotional behavior and decision making often leads to negative consequences, sweeping emotions under the rug and ignoring the emotions of others may also cause harm. It is better to attempt to control emotions, so that their harmful effects are minimized, while their beneficial effects are recognized and encouraged. Funerals are an example of the control of emotions in a way that may minimize harm, while simultaneously giving people a chance to remember more about the deceased than their death.
I personally find a very deep beauty in pondering art in its myriad forms and reflecting on the subjective nature of existance. Art is the purest manifestation of our deep need, as social animals, to RELATE to each other, and express ideas and concepts. When I listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a piece of art or whatever, I am percieving another beings manifestation of some sort of concept. Whether or not these concepts are ‘objectively real’, I don’t think it matters, but what I feel about it IS real, at least to me, and in that manner, it is transcendant above my subjectivity. If you wish to define god as transcendance, then I agree with you, that art is god.
Sort of! I much appreciated your points and agree with most of what you’ve said. You seem to be saying that if we only had science but no art, it would be an incomplete and unsatisfying picture, unfair to the wholeness of humanity. I’d say the same thing about God: the empirical arguments overlook alot of artistic and aesthetic evidence for God, as well as overlooking alot of God’s character. And if you’re going to argue against God you need to bring some arguments from the standpoint of the arts as well — I wonder if a certain well-known Prussian of Polish descent might have been doing something like that. To me God is the ultimate artist though — the natural world overflows with beauty.
I’d also second Gary’s comment: rites are a critical part of human emotional life. They help us mentally work through challenging transitions in life: birth, adulthood, marriage, death.
From a philosophical standpoint, your arguments are inviolable Rodrigo. But I have to kind of disagree with the whole Science being a stone-cold routine. Pedantry is as much part of art as it is of Science. The majority of artists out there go about their daily job with moderate success just like it is with the scientists. But those who apply creativity to their work, in either field are those we tend to remember the most. I can’t think of any major Scientific discovery that did not involve great creativity.
Honestly, I think calling science pedantic is belittling the work of many. Each of our worlds are as meaningful to us as say the world of Picasso to so many. I think it’s unfair to say that most scientists out there accomplish little in terms of creativity in their daily jobs…but anyway, I’m ranting and I hope you get my point. The only way one can justify this insipid image that Science has is by blaming our schools. I honestly think universities, colleges and high schools make science seem extremely boring but I think you’ll find that the Scientific method is nothing more than a natural human logic applied to lots and lots of data.
What I’m trying to say is, creativity is very much so a part of Science!
Art is very much so a part of our heritage also. I don’t think funerals and cave paintings are forms of art , they both hold a very significant reason in our societies. What we call art today however, is something very different. It is the use of symbols, colours, sounds, and probably limitless abstractions to appeal to our emotions. It involves many of our senses at any given moment and hence can overwhelm us, like in the Stendhal syndrome.
I think art and science are very similar things, they just have a different purpose. But I’m quite certain that either seems drab without creativity, and I can assure you at least Science does not lack it in the current world, maybe it did during the middle ages, but not today.
I have a bag from chapters kept in front of me right now (It’s a big Canadian book store) and in that very pretentious way, it quotes Keats:
“Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather, and a little music…”
Just thought I’d add that on here
Our brains are pattern recognition machines. We look for, and overlay patterns even where none implicitly exist. This is why we have superstition, conspiracy theories, and even the most basic form of intuition.
Art allows us to create and communicate complex ideas beyond our meager linguistic ability. But it can be a fools paradise because the meaning that occurs in our thoughts…. and that gets expressed in art can also have logical holes in it, which we don’t see because we are looking at the pattern as a whole.
Science can’t tell us what something means, because its reductionist by nature. Meaning comes from the generalization, circumstance, and the more importantly, the goal.
“My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”
F. Nietzsche
You say: ‘it seems that evidence, for all the whining about empricists from philosophers, is the best way of knowing.”
and:
“Science is the best bet we have for truth.”
What scientific experiment did you do that told you that science is the best bet we have for truth? Your statement could never be verified scientifically and therefore refutes itself.
In fact, Science only tells us with reasonable certainty what has happened in the past. It uses inductive reasoning. With inductive reasoning, we can never be certain about anything.
For example:
I have only seen white sheep.
Therefore, all sheep are white.
However, with deductive reasoning, we can be absolutley certain of our conclusions. For example:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is mortal.
If the premises are true, the conclusion is guaranteed.
We can also know things with far greater certainty than science when they are what is called properly basic, or intuitive.
For example:
“A” cannot be “Not A”. If you try to prove that statement either true or false, you have to use it to do so. You cannot test it in a lab. We simply know that it is true at face value.
It seems to me that science is, at the very best, third on the list of ways of knowing things to be true.
You have got to be joking!
a) How can you say all Science is based on inductive reasoning?
b) You’re suggesting that the only things we can say are true are those that are intuitive to us. I can see where you are getting that from, but you have to realize the human brain is not a logic machine. It is a machine made to fit it’s enviornment. We do have a logic component in our thinking, but it is only approximate. Computers are tremendously better than us at solving logical equations. This would not be true if what you say were correct. Moreover, I would like to see your tackle on how humans deals with probability. We have a very basic understanding of probability built in, but as most of us realize in grd. 11, our intuitive often leads us to the logically incorrect answers.
I’ve read philosophy only in passing (mostly cause I find it unreadable), but this logical positivism or whatever you’re promoting is very outdated.
I think it would be better to say that science is the best way to model reality. We can show this because science allows us to predict reality, like no other system we have ever created.
The ‘problem of induction’ may eliminate certainty, but we don’t need certainty for most things. We can calculate probabilities and while we may be wrong on occasion science allows for this. Science still wins hands down against all competitors. Understanding the problem of induction is about understanding the limits of science and knowledge, and understanding the basic assumption that science makes, not about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Deductive reasoning is just as useful and just as problematic. Your Socrates example is the ’simplest’ version of deductive reasoning, but the fact is, in real situations, you usually have to deal with multi-part and/or incomplete premises. First principles, or what are called self-evident truths, are much more harder to come by, even assuming they exist in any useful way.
And the fact that something is true by logical definition doesn’t mean it has any resemblance to reality, or any kind of transcendent truth.
A turtle cannot be A bird.
A unicorn cannot be A hydra.
Both are true, but the former has a different truth value since it describes actual things, and not imaginary things. Saying A excludes not-A is simply defining what A is, not proving anything.
There is an old philosophical argument about ‘identity’, which I think you are confusing with ‘reasoning’. Very different.
lol. right. Its the poetic side I am appealing to.
On the contrary, my whole point is we need that kind of thing.
Sometimes it seems that secularists suffer from what I will call the “vulcan fantasy” which is the idea that meeting emotional needs is somehow secondary.
I wrote this ode to Art to discuss how important meaning and catharsis really are. I use funerals as an example of how all this might be hard wired.
I should have probably written all that in the blog, though.
You and I are definitely on the same page.
This piece was definitely not atheist apologetics. The intended audience was a primarily atheistic one. This post assumes no literal God exists, but rather that the need that people experience for religion is a real and ancient one.
I also propose that for me, and many others, art fulfills the needs that religion does for the religious.
I thought about the creative side of science while writing this. I don’t mean to disregard it, but it does not achieve the potential for connecting people that what is standardly thought of as the arts does.
For example, I can see that an experimental design was very creative, and no doubt was rife with ecstasies for the researchers, but it won’t make as much sense in that way to as many people as say a good film.
Besides, in scientific writing all emotional intensity is deliberately filtered out. So science drew first blood in a way.
I have been thinking if I feel really strongly that more creative first person prose should be allowed in papers. I think it would make them more fun to read and I can’t see it harming the communication of the experiment, or whether or not it can be replicated.
Then maybe what you say would be more obvious.
I guess its the fools paradise that I am so enamored with.
You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t to some degree.
“a) How can you say all Science is based on inductive reasoning?”
–Science begins with a hypothesis, which is tested, which produces data. Scientists take that data, gathered under very specific circumstances and make generalizations about the world. This obviously simplified description is the scientific method and it is inductive reasoning.
b) I am not talking about intuition as in ‘women’s intuition’ or ‘a hunch’. Joe provided the term that didn’t come to me last night…’self-evident truths’. Things that we know are true simply upon reflection. An example is ‘A’ cannot be not ‘A’. This refers to the law of non-contradiction (not the law of identity as Joe stated. The law of non-contradiction is self-evident. We can’t prove it logically or test it scientifically, but everyone knows that God cannot exist and not exist at the same time. Either atheists are right or theists are right.
It is only with self-evident truths that we can begin to know anything. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proven and science is left impotent.
An aside…logical positivism is an idea held primarily by materialists who reject metaphysical ideas…hardly something that describes me, a theist.
Abhishek, I think Keats was paraphrasing the Rubaiyat of Ommar Khyyam:
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
–Fitzgerald translation, quatrain 5
I understood who your intended audience was and your assumption, I didn’t take it as apologetics and you needn’t defend anything although maybe I came across that way. I do assume my engagement is welcome on here. Mainly I write to represent a theistic brand of humanism: why believe anything if it isn’t done in such a way that it enriches life and enriches humanity?
I enjoy reading you, although we disagree about some things, because whatever you approach you do it thoughtfully and that is always a credit.
That made me smile.
You bring up a good point. Science as a torchlight is a social endeavour. We rely on the peer review process that an experimental finding can only be cannonized by critique and replication.
But I still argue the fact that we have a vast international network of experts (scientists) who regularly produce leaps in technology, and do a good job of filtering B.S.
Your critique of individual observation is sound, and my rebuttal that the peer review process provides a certain degree of reliability for scientific knowledge is also sound.
For what its worth, when I hear some one say that they promote humanistic theism, I cheer for them.
Are you a fan of Shelby Spong?
Scientists can use deduction as well. Science just hinges on induction because it allows us to go from observed instances to generalized rules or laws.
And I still think you are confused cm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_identity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_non-contradiction
Also, which ‘truths’ can be considered ’self-evident’ has been argued for centuries. Stating that non-contradiction is a self-evident truth is an opinion. For instance: Can a thing be alive and dead? (Ignoring Schrodinger for a moment). Most would say that these are contradictory ideas, you have to be one or the other. However, one could also argue that creating this contradictory binary is artificial. You can’t be dead if you were not first alive and being alive, as a concept, implies a boundary condition. So death is not a distinct concept, its not a contradiction of life, but rather part of the definition of life. There are no As or Bs in nature. We can divide the world up into whatever sized chunks we like, but that doesn’t imply those chunks are anything but arbitrary. Atomism failed.
The most widely regarded self-evident truth in modern times is Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”, but of course, there is disagreement.
The problem with dealing with contradictions is they rely on agreement about what constitutes a thing…. which brings us back to identity. What constitutes a thing.
Using letters to represent objects is simply artificial, the world is not filled with objects, modern physics shows its much more complicated than that. Defining things as objects is just a convenient way of dealing with the world at our level, on the quantum level it makes no sense at all.
Ah yes, the controversial Bishop. I read a little of him in a bookshop in Boulder once but haven’t settled down and gotten to know his work. I will get my hands on something by him soon. It looks to me like there’s alot of growth in the humanist areas of Christianity, perhaps we can expect even more with the current disenchanment and disenfranchisement of the neo-con Evangelicals. (That’s something I’m sure thankful about!)
“Humanity was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for Humanity.” — Jesus (translation mine)
I definitely have sympathies with your theological perspective.
Of course scientists can use deduction. Al I am saying is that the scientific method is inductive and therefore always tentative. It is only through deductive reasoning that we can achieve apodictic certainty.
No, I am not confused as to how to formulate the law of non-contradiction. The following is taken from your own wiki link about the Law of Contradiction:
“Leibniz and Kant adopted a different statement, by which the law assumes an essentially different meaning. Their formula is A is not not-A; in other words it is impossible to predicate of a thing a quality which is its contradictory.”
And the Law of Identity:
“In logic, the law of identity states that an object is the same as itself: A ≡ A”
And my formulation: “‘A’ cannot be not ‘A’”
I am clearly referring to the law of non-contradiction.
There are multitudes of contradictions that cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Your counter-example of ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ is not really counter to the law. A more accurate formulation would be ‘alive’ (A) and ‘not alive’ (not A). Here we see a clear contradiction and the world that we see around us falls into one of the two sides. Things are either alive (animals, plants, bacteria, people) or not alive (rocks, water, air, steel).
Without the law of non-contradiction, we could not know anything to be true or false because we would not be able to distinguish a proposition from its negation. If the data from an experiment say that bacteria can cause disease and that bacteria cannot cause disease, we have made no progress.
Avicenna had it right…”Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.”
Like I said, deduction is useful, but not without its problems. You would not have a computer in front of you if humans relied solely on deduction.(Heh, and you should finish reading that paragraph you quoted from the wiki. You left out the part where it says ‘however….’)
And no, your reference is not clear, ‘can not’ and ‘is not’ are not equivalent. One is predictive the other descriptive. But apart from that, as any can see its a complicated argument that is not as settled as you imply.
As to ‘alive’ and ‘not alive’, there are things we can describe as neither or both. Viruses. Like I said, the world is not As and Bs. Its more messy. Its easy to talk about contradictions when you are talking about artificial concepts. One can do this in mathematics and be completely consistent, and still have a system that bears no resemblance to reality. As long as it follows from its premises it is fine. But mathematics is a model of reality, its not reality.
As to cause and effect, its again, much more complicated, for example when you have a catalyst, or when a bacteria causes disease given certain external conditions. It all depends on what you include in your A, and whether what you include resembles reality close enough. Which it won’t, since you are modeling reality, not recreating it.
So when your rational arguments fail, resort to violence. Hmm… nice.
I agree with you. The Law of non-contradiction is totally artificial and the most fundamental rule of logic that undergirds all that we know about reality. It is not useful at all in describing reality because it is so important in allowing us to describe reality, since reality does not exist. That is why I disagree with you.
–
The Avicenna quote was certainly not intended as a threat of violence…but I suppose that someone who denies the law of non-contradiction would not recognize the difference between a rhetorical device meant to highlight the absurdity of denying the law of non-contradiction and its negation.
Artificial means constructed, it does not mean useless. If it is constructed, it is by definition NOT primary and self-evident. Logic is artificial, it is a symbol system designed around generalizations. And it is extremely useful. You have tried to support your assumptions by implying I have stated things I simply have not.
You were either advocating violence or dodging the argument with inflammatory and completely irrelevant rhetoric. Defining the limits and nature of something is not the same as denying it.
Worship art?
I agree it is often vaguely trying to pass along a message without actually actively saying anything.
If you mean art can fill you up with a sense of the sublime, then yeah, it’s ’spiritually’ important. Perhaps a better proxy for religious feelings of awe than religion itself. No wonder architecture, visual art & music have been pressed into service by religions for so long.