Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:31 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 5:19 pm
Not entirely wrong, of course. In a sense, you can call Christianity a "construct," in that it does indeed order one's worldview.
But that begs the most important question: Who "constructed" it?
Did men, in their devious ways, come up with it? Or was Christianity as plan "constructed" by God Himself? Which way was it?
Saying "It's a construct" won't answer that question, will it?
When I use the term 'construct' it is because I am inclined to a comparative religion orientation.
Yes, I know that one well. It's when the Humanist metanarrative is seen to be the controlling one, and each "religion" is treated as some sub-phenomenon, a particular manifestation of the general human impulse to believe things...but I think you're a little different from that one, because you write:
And all I can say is that "men in their devious ways" (to quote you) are the vehicles (lenses) through which whatever is brought into our world is brought into our world. They themselves both clarify and obfuscate.
And interestingly, that seems to point to a belief in some ultimate source prior to the various "religions" being compared, something "brought into our world," as you put it, rather than merely
generated among men. In that, you're different in your orientation from the "comparative religion" view usually is articulated.
The implication being that a 'clarified vessel' will impose less distortion. But distortion is inevitable, in my view.
That's probably right. There's no reason to insist that human epistemology is ever perfectly accurate to ontological reality. Some amount of "distortion" is just likely to be brought in with human recipients, isn't it?
But here's what we must ask ourselves: are all "distortions" so serious that they amount to full-on obscurance of the ontological reality behind it all, or are some "distortions" less serious, less obscuring, than others are?
We might also ask, can "distortions" be corrected for? Can one start out with a less-than-perfect view of the ontological reality, and get progressively better at seeing beyond the "distortions"? Or are all distortions just permanent and irremediable? (That latter would, of course, seem less likely, wouldn't it? We would need some reason to think the "distortions" were inherently permanent. After all, we can correct much about bad vision with eyeglasses; why would we assume it was simply impossible to correct vision of religious truth?)
Finally, we might ask, is there a starting point with sufficiently less "distortion," such that it would allow a person to get started in the vision-correcting process? Would there be a less-that-perfect realization that would still be adequate to allow an ordinary human being to start to become more aware and more accurate in his or her vision?
These are some questions that, it seems to me, hover around your description of the situation.
Not all "constructs" are false, you know. The Scientific Method itself is a "construct." That is to say, it was a pattern of thought invented by a particular person (Francis Bacon) at a particular time (the 17th Century). It involved a voluntary narrowing of human attention to matters of material manipulation, and the exclusion from the field of view of such things as, say, "tradition," "received opinions," "non-testable theories," "metaphysics," and so on.
The methods of science developed out of a sense of
need and
necessity:descriptive systems that were more true, more precisely tied to accurate view.
Well, certainly we had a "necessity" of that sort for a long while before we got the proper solution. It turns out that Bacon really did do something, something we simply did not have before, no matter that we had felt the "necessity" since ancient antiquity.
We had tried all kinds of stuff: tradition, witchcraft, astrology, guesses, superstition, intuition, magic, and so forth, as a way of getting a handle on the natural world. But none of that was yielding reliability. The Scientific Method really came in like a mental bomb. It didn't immediately eliminate all of that, but in the areas in which science's efficacy was inescapable -- that is, in the material world -- it simply overwhelmed the competition with such force that the various scientific and technological revolutions burst out on its heels.
And it wasn't just "description." All the old ways also were "descriptive" in some ways. It was a disciplined paradigm, a whole new way of addressing the material world and rendering it pliable to investigation. Moreover, it had within it the means of how to reject unhelpful "descriptions," in preference for those that would turn out to be true.
But Bacon began with a metaphysical postulate: namely, the assumption that the natural world was given to us by a rational, law-loving God, and thus we could expect it to respond to reason and to have laws and regularities we could test. That sort of confidence never came from, say, a polytheistic or non-Theistic worldview. Neither of them give us any reason to hypothesize that natural laws should exist, or any reason to believe that rationality should be able to unpack them. What polytheism teaches us to expect is an irrational world, where many spirits and demigods war idiosyncratically for power, and human beings are lesser beings caught in their strivings. What non-Theism teaches us to think is that the world is an accident...and accidents are, by definitions, things with no rules (i.e. not "on-purposes," but accidents), with no rules or laws, and in which everything is simply contingently and uniquely the way it is, however that may be. So if all we'd had are the polytheisistic or anti-Theistic religions, or Atheism, we would most probably never have had science
at all.
This is why, for example, the more ancient, well-inhabited places in the world, such as China and India, did not discover science. They had their own
ad hoc "technologies," to be sure, like gunpower or cloth-making; but only in a very limited way. They remained backward countries, in spite of the fact that we know they not only had many people but many highly intelligent people under their regimes. What they lacked, and what Western Europe, starting with Bacon, was able to have was the systematic methodology that allowed technologies and discoveries to be integrated and expanded through discipined hypothesizing and testing.
But with that said it is hard for me to see the methods of science as a 'construct' similar to that of the constructs of metaphysics.
Well, science's
sine qua non is the material world. It cannot ever seem to do any more than peck around the edge of the metaphysical realities. That's science's limitation. But if we could find such a method for the metaphysical world, it would no doubt be a great boon to the progress of human knowledge -- ultimately, an even greater boon than the opening up of the material world thorough science.
But absent such a "metaphysical method," we shall still have to continue to deal with metaphysical realities. So some other approach is required. And since we human beings have no such mundane method on our side, we shall have to look for any unveiling of metaphysical realities to something first "breaking through" to us from the other side.
In other words, if man cannot find God, can God find man?
...the methods of science, and the views that arise from them, seem to me more 'deconstructive'.
In a sense, yes: scientific method is a means of "taking things apart" to describe the causal chain that produces them. But once we see the mechanics underlying a phenomenon, we can use that to construct things as well. That's how science led to invention. So science has a constructive element as well.
Yet 'scientism' can develop into a sort of pseudo- or imitation-metaphysics, but its 'explanations' cannot really operate as explanations.
Quite true.
"Scientism" is an assumption, an overly-enthusiastic pulling of all things "real" under the umbrella of material science, premised on an optimism that if material science worked for material things, it must work for metaphysical issues too, or else those issues themselves cannot be "real." So its explanations of metaphysical realities, when it has any to offer at all, are invariably reductional...and often insultingly simple.
So, for example, Scienti
stic people insist, gratuitiously and prior to all proof, that "mind" must end up being nothing but "brain." Or that "self" must end up being merely a collective term for "prior material causes." Or that "ethics" must either be some feature of the mechanics of reality, or some mere description of sociological convention, or (failing that, as it always does) must not be a real thing at all.