The limitations of science (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 16, 2010, 17:37 (5182 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt says that the primal mechanism of religion "provides a means to commune with one another, provides a central focus for a people, a tribe, and allows the self to be subsumed into the whole of the tribe. It is pointless really, in my mind, to ask the question of whether or not these feelings are created or perceived, because the effect of them is real no matter the root cause."-Like yourself, I'm as aware of the benefits of religion as I am of the damage it causes. The bigotry, arrogance and even violence of the bad is balanced by the communality, selflessness and spirituality of the good. As with just about everything else in our human world, it's a mixture. There is therefore no real disagreement between us, but I'd like to follow up on your final point. Firstly, it's not the feelings that are either created or perceived ... they and their effects are both real. It's the source of those feelings that raises the question of reality, and although your beloved Nietzsche would regard the question as pointless, I don't, and I'm not convinced that you do either, since it ties in not only with this post but also with your post on spirituality.-There you mentioned Van Gogh, and you could have mentioned any number of extraordinary people who have enriched our lives. The chances are that at least half of them would have been considered pretty weird in their time and ours. In the religious context, if Jesus Christ had been born now, you can be pretty sure he'd have found followers in some parts of the world, but he would have been locked away in an asylum or assassinated in others. (I'll leave you to work out what would have happened where!) So did his extraordinariness bring him closer to objective reality than our ordinariness? -It's part of our human nature to want to understand the world we live in. The drive for "truth" has led us to astonishing feats and discoveries, and the great mystics and artists and thinkers have contributed just as much to human progress as the great scientists (I know you agree). Therefore I don't see the quest to uncover the sources of our "spiritual" experiences as being pointless. Just as I want to know whether my personal identity is locked into my brain cells or is something independent (a "soul"), I want to know if the source of the real impact of religion is also real ... i.e. is it an intelligent power that exists independently of the human mind (something "perceived"), or is it a projection of the mind (something "created")? No-one would believe in a God if they thought their belief was based on something imaginary! Are the mystics deluded, then, or do they see more than we do? The argument that we shall never know the objective truth is one that I naturally go along with, but a lot of people do manage to find answers that satisfy them subjectively (George and David, for instance), so I'd say the question is not necessarily pointless, because the answer, as you have indicated, can have very real practical consequences.