Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?
Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 10:14 am
Immanuel Can wrote:"The infinite perspectives of nature"? That must be a metaphor for something, but I can't tell what.Belinda wrote:Immanuel Can wrote:
Nobody can know the answer for sure. My faith is that what we know is a socially constructed reality. However what we can know and the infinite perspectives of nature are not the same .----reality or just a social delusion,----
Literally speaking, it must be patently obvious that "nature" has no "perspectives," to say nothing of the fact that nothing in "nature" is "infinite." The very phrase hast to be an anthropomorphism of impersonal material forces...nothing more. And as Hume pointed out, we cannot get any "perspective" ourselves from "nature," for "nature" has nothing to say about morality at all.
However, if "nobody can know," that "nobody" surely cannot include God, assuming for argument's sake that He exists. If a Supreme Being exists, there's no longer any reason to rest morality at the level of society. For the right answer will be the one that conforms best to what God knows morality is, not merely to what that society contingently and temporarily happens to want to think it is.
We could then look beyond society, and ask questions like, "Does one society (say Western liberal society) have morals closer to the true ones than another (say ISIL)?"
And that would be a very good question to be able to ask, as I'm sure you'd agree. For the alternative, social relativism, implies that there can be no objective value judgment to make against practices like throat-slitting, throwing people off buildings and raping women at will. Those are socially-approved practices in the locales in which ISIL is the regnant culture. So if social relativism is true, they must all be...."right"?
I'm sure neither you nor I would think that. But that is the implication of social relativism. We surely cannot rest there.
Belinda replied:
By "the infinite perspectives of nature" I meant realities other than human social realities.We cannot know anything outside of the realities which we make in common with each other. I guess that you, Immanuel, would not agree for you would claim that God has revealed the true and absolute reality. You have a right to your perspective on reality as have I.
However if you claim to be a philosopher in these pages you need to consider alternative perspectives and judge according to probability, not faith tradition. For instance you have failed to argue convincingly that a Supreme Being exists. So far you have argued from an Originator in time(cosmological argument) and you have argued from Design. Neither of those arguments is very sound. Ontological arguments for the existence of God are more interesting.
We both agree that ISIL is unethical and immoral and that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are more ethical and more moral than ISIL. I am not a social relativist and neither are you. My claim that social reality is all that we can know does not imply that no social reality is better than another. Teachers and liberal priests work to teach people how to enlarge, widen, and inform the social realities that they would otherwise be stuck with.
It is an accident of history that western enlightenment science, and all the world class religious ethics, teach the same realities. Your supernaturalist belief, Immanuel, is a narrative which was formed as a rationale for ethics, I guess in your case, Christian ethics. The supernatural myth is now past its usefulness. You may now understand that someone, me for instance, does not have to believe in a Deity in order to support the same ethics as liberal religionists .