Truth and Consequences
I've been wading though Guide for the Perplexed and have been thinking about the Nature of truth and the conflict between revealed and Logical truth that Maimon and I'm sure Aquinas and others had to try to resolve for themselves.
Maimon does the squirmy dance, since he's a big fan of Aristotle, that goes like this. Anything in the Bible that is contrary to logically established fact must be read figuratively. However, where a theory has not been proved and contradicts the Bible, duh, the Bible is authority. Anything which logically seems to contradict itself is simply a result of "well, God wanted it that way."
To be honest I don't have a problem with either revealed truth or Logical structures, but I pity the poor mediaeval and later fools who tried to marry them. Story, as those of you who wrestled through the early part of my blog when it was for a class know, for me, has its roots in shared truth as a way to pass cultural memory. Logical truth on the other hand has a strict set of rules based on demonstrable fact. Sorry the two are oil and water. Neither necessarily gets one to truth with a capital T.
They are both vulnerabe to assumptions. As Euclid taught me, give me the right set of definitions as my starting point and I can prove anything. To wrestle with the problem of Science vs religion is in some sense wasted effort. Which leads to Truth? Simple both and neither.
Let's review shall we.
The world is 4000 + years old: sorry we have a chain of recorded events that lasts longer than that.
All man is decended from Adam: sorry we've found eve and she's kinda a monkey.
On the Science Side
Eggs have too much Cholesterol: Bzzt alot but not as much as first thought
The Earth is the center of the universe: off by the small matter of a gazillion light years
The minute you think you know something and do not test it for relevence and accuracy, you are on the assumptive fast track to flat world syndrome.
Maimon does the squirmy dance, since he's a big fan of Aristotle, that goes like this. Anything in the Bible that is contrary to logically established fact must be read figuratively. However, where a theory has not been proved and contradicts the Bible, duh, the Bible is authority. Anything which logically seems to contradict itself is simply a result of "well, God wanted it that way."
To be honest I don't have a problem with either revealed truth or Logical structures, but I pity the poor mediaeval and later fools who tried to marry them. Story, as those of you who wrestled through the early part of my blog when it was for a class know, for me, has its roots in shared truth as a way to pass cultural memory. Logical truth on the other hand has a strict set of rules based on demonstrable fact. Sorry the two are oil and water. Neither necessarily gets one to truth with a capital T.
They are both vulnerabe to assumptions. As Euclid taught me, give me the right set of definitions as my starting point and I can prove anything. To wrestle with the problem of Science vs religion is in some sense wasted effort. Which leads to Truth? Simple both and neither.
Let's review shall we.
The world is 4000 + years old: sorry we have a chain of recorded events that lasts longer than that.
All man is decended from Adam: sorry we've found eve and she's kinda a monkey.
On the Science Side
Eggs have too much Cholesterol: Bzzt alot but not as much as first thought
The Earth is the center of the universe: off by the small matter of a gazillion light years
The minute you think you know something and do not test it for relevence and accuracy, you are on the assumptive fast track to flat world syndrome.
1 comment:
Truth is arrived at by authentic subjectivity. We cannot say that everything is relative, and that there are no right answers, because that leads to nihilism, and it makes decision-making impossible. We find the truth when we attend to all the facts without bias, ask the right questions, intelligently reason about the answers to those questions, formulate hypotheses about what is the possible correct answer, and then move from that. Failure to act at that point is to abdicate responsibility. Science and reason are strange bedfellows but you are quite right, we must learn to learn from both without always trying to force reconciliation.
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