Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Logic based on different sets of assumptions (reposting) Message-ID: <5135@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Fri, 1-Mar-85 01:40:56 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.5135 Posted: Fri Mar 1 01:40:56 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 1-Mar-85 01:40:56 EST References: <589@pyuxd.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 161 Okay Rich, this article got here. Here goes. I have tried to tell you in the past that a religion does not imply a belief in God. I am going to try again, but again I think that you are barking up the wrong tree with respect to every mystical tradition I know of. But here goes anyway.... Since there is no hard evidence to support the existence of a deity, one would normally work (in a typical analysis of a non-religious oriented phenomena) from the assumption that the thing for which there is no evidence does not exist. Without evidence showing proof of a thing's existence, or its observed effect on the "physical" world, via Occam people would generally assume that it does not exist until evidence of a viable nature presents itself. The *possibility* that it may exist is left open, but such a possibility evinces itself if and only if evidence is presented to support it. Delete the word ``deity'' and replace it with ``religious experience''. Now we have something which is verifiable. You can hook up mystics of all flavours and have them go into trances and measure things like Alpha waves, and lowered heart beats, and lowered blood pressure, and increased electrical activity on their skin. You cannot read their minds and find out what they are subjectively experiencing. It is interesting that all mystics seem to talk of the same feelings, despite different religious traditions in which to find a context fot their experiences. Religious experiences are direct, and (I believe) do not involve concept formation. Instead they are direct sensation/impression of divinity. When it comes time to think and reflect upon ones experiences, though, one must think in concepts which are reprentations of reality *in* the mind. The represenation is not the experience, however. Every religious system can serve as a vehicle for understanding and contemplating such experiences. if you use a system which has a belief in a deity who is external to the world, it is not surprising that one would interpret one's experience as ``I met God''. If one uses another tradition one can describe the same (well, close enough in description that I presume they are the same) experience as ``I am God'' or ``God is me'' or ``Everything is God'', or even ``Life is Good'' or ``The Universe is Confident''. However, obviously some people do believe in the existence of a deity despite the lack of realistic evidence. One can only assume that 1) these people have a different set of criteria for acceptability of evidence, and/or 2) they have some vested interest in believing that particular outcome of analysis that they believe to be true. Quite possibly both. I think we have shown endless times that the nature of the subjective evidence offered in favor of religious belief is tainted: How come your subjectivity shows a different world view than someone else's? Which one is right? WHY is his/hers wrong and YOURS right? Bingo. Now we hit the point where I think that both you and the Christians are wrong. You are thinking in your concepts. they are thinking in their concepts. Both of you mistake your concepts for reality *which* *is* *something* *else* *altogether*. Then there is the endless argument over RIGHTNESS. You both are right. You both are wrong. In so much as you cling to your concepts rather than to your experience, you are distorting and thus wrong. There is no way to avoid this and still think. You are thus right. It is only when you insist that your concepts adequately describe reality (in the sense of being comprehensive, rather than, say, useful) that you are making a fundamental WRONG sort of error. If he/she is being deceived, how can you be sure it is not YOU who has been deceived? (Not to mention the way the brain is known to impose patterns onto events/phenomena/observations that upon closer examination are shown to be quite wrong---like "recognizing" someone at the airport and realizing that it wasn't them after all.) Mystic traditions call this ``self-deception''. They warn about it a lot. Some traditions say that you can never be sure that you are not being deceived, and others claim that freedom from self-deception is the mark of enlightenment -- and when you are enlightened you, and everybody else will know it. The best you can do is compare your experience with others. It also helps to have a good guru/spiritual leader. But the system isn't perfect, alas.... With that in mind, the only other reason that such people might readily accept the notion of the existence of a god is precisely because they already believe it to be so: they hold the existence of god as an assumption, an axiom, and work ALL analysis of the world from there. "Why is life full of problems? Because god designed the world that way knowing that it would be best for us not to have a perfect life but rather to struggle and learn." Contrast this with the simpler, less presumptive notion that life is full of problems because all those problems are simply a part of the natural flow of things, based on what we observe and codify as physical laws. We experience them as problems because they conflict with our wishes for a world ordered around our lives, and because such conflicts are inevitable in a world with trillions of organisms and objects caught up in the "natural flow". As opposed to assuming, for whatever reason, the existence of an ultimate "good" force that "designed" the universe to be a certain way. This notion that what we preceive as problems are as a result our desires to have the world ordered around our lives, rather than ``the natural flow''... gee, that could be taken from any Buddhist text you care to mention. It describes viparyasa rather well, if perhaps too succinctly. I contend that all such analysis of the world by religious believers, and the answers offered in such analysis, stem directly from an a priori assumption of the existence of god. Lewis' works are prime examples. Jeff Sargent, for example, has used the phraseology "Why would you want to believe that human beings are 'nothing but' lab specimens?" (... when you have this other possibility to believe instead.) "Wanting to believe", the desirability of holding certain beliefs as opposed to others owing to their intrinsic "aesthetic" value rather than their veracity, becomes a factor in forming belief systems for certain people. Given that one has the hard thing, called a religious experience, to think about, it would be very unlikely if the desirability to certain beliefs played no role. This seems essential to the process of concept formation, though, and not particular to religion. Thus my question is: why DO you presume the existence of god as a given (obviously I and many others simply do not), if not because you have some vested interest in believing that it is so, what I have endlessly and perhaps monotonously labelled as WISHFUL THINKING? I don't, of course, but what I want to ask you is how do you explain religious experiences? And, of course, if yo think that your concepts are RIGHT, how can you prove this? Given that we are dealing with two forms of logic, one of which starts off making the assumption that god exists and the other of which does not, a person using one form of logic cannot possibly convince the person using the other form of logic to accept his position. This is not always true, because the two forms of logic and their two sets of assumptions are NOT disjoint sets. In fact, for most reasonable people, they are practically equivalent, with the addition of the a priori assumption of god being the only major difference between the two sets. Conclusions drawn from the two sets of assumptions, however, can and will (and do) wind up being radically different. The "impossibility of convincing" that I mentioned above only comes into play when the "extra" assumption has a role in the formation of some conclusion. Why are you so involved with your concepts that you think that playing logic games with them is productive? Go out and meditate for a while.... :-) Beyond this you talk about things which can and have happened when people confuse their concepts for reality. Here I agree totally. But you missed part of the argument... Laura Creighton utzoo!laura