Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on December 27, 2010 at 4:47pm

Unfortunately, I get stuck at the point of "Who cares?"  The humanities are not real sciences and can do nothing but contaminate any hard sciences to which they're applied.

• There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute,
  except perhaps peripherally, to their research.

Remove the part, 'except perhaps peripherally', and you've pretty much got it.  What is this guy arguing for, except perhaps applying new-age pseudo-science to physics?  That's the only thing I can read into the article.  Am I taking the article incorrectly?

Permalink Reply by david perry on December 27, 2010 at 5:06pm

The article was taken very seriously by the people who published it. He wasn't even going down to that level of pseudo-science, his target was much higher.
My point in posting this is that atheists can fall into the trap this article outlines when the god people try to use the language of science to justify their views.
This article's target was academic liberal humanities, and by extension, theology is one of those (which unfortunately the article doesn't go near)areas that thinks that dressing up bullshit with big words and out of context quotations is validation of theses which are otherwise absurd.
Finish the article before you read this, the article where I found this posted to begin with. The story about the dinosaur eating the hominid inspired me to post the article this way to see what kind of reaction it would get.(you ruined my little joke)The Sokol article is hilarious once you know what you're reading.

http://democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6789

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on December 27, 2010 at 5:37pm

Ah, I think my eyes must have glazed over, before I got to that part.  I'll have to read it again, after having a mug of tea.

 

I was thinking that theology could fit into the humanities, as he described it, but I didn't see that.  So, I nixed that part of my post.

 

Edit:  yeah, I see some of what you're talking about, in a few of the sections ... about New Age groups grabbing onto Quantum Mechanics and such.

Permalink Reply by david perry on December 27, 2010 at 6:04pm

I would also reverse the rather snide point of the article by asserting it is as pointless to argue with theists using that language. For exactly the same reason; would it be worth anything to write an elaborate article about the tooth fairy? One that isn't a joke? The trouble is, when the god people do the same thing it isn't a joke from their point of view. Which was basically the point of the Sokol article only in reference to the academic humanities. Look how climate science gets degraded by the people that don't want it understood, just as one example.
Letting the non-subject of theology get "re-framed" in the language of post-modernism(let's no go there yet)is silly. It's a two-way street that really goes nowhere in either direction. If you've read some learned articles about "secular humanism" my point becomes clearer.
Regardless of how you frame the language: bullshit is still bullshit, and getting stuck on the language gets you nowhere, which is what theology is all about. Language dense enough to obscure understanding does not constitute validation, the problem is that too many people accept that language as "truth".

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on December 27, 2010 at 6:22pm

That's where my first statement in my initial post was going, before I changed the direction of my post:

Unfortunately, I get stuck at the point of "Who cares?"  Until someone can demonstrate that theology is anything more than Bronze Age superstition carried into the modern era by a hierarchy that loves its power over human minds, I see no reason to hobble physics by tying it to something completely unfounded.

 

The language issue you mention seems to pop up in a situation I'm currently dealing with.  I've mentioned in other threads about this guy I've got trying to argue Thomas Aquinas's five proofs (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm).  The guy is trying to layer on even more obfuscation in the form of additional definitions of God, which he somehow thinks will bridge the gap and prevent the last line of each of the first three proofs from being a bald assertion/Argument from Ignorance.

 

No, that's not the way you improve an argument.  Thomas Aquinas was already too wordy and bullshit-heavy.  You've got to strip away the useless stuff to the core philosophical arguments that expose it as the bad first-cause argument that it is, not layer additional bullshit on top of the existing stuff.

 

The main reason I'm trying to deal with his nonsense is for a friend of mine, who's listening along.  She was unable to make any coherent apologetic arguments for the existence of any kind of God, and she introduced me to him as a proxy.  She seems to be questioning her beliefs a little, since she's gotten out from under her parents' influence and off to college.  I thought perhaps that I could help with the process.

 

Yes, she's cute.  Why do you ask?