philosophical followup

[chelidon]

For you hard-core philosophy junkies out there who are also into religious/spiritual exploration (you know who you are), I just ran across this paper: IMMANENT DUALISM AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DUALISM AND MONISM: THE WORLD VIEW OF MAX WEBER" which has some pretty fascinating stuff scattered in it. It's on the site of the American Scientific Affliliation (ASA), a Christian group which explores the intersection between science and Christianity, usually in a very thoughtful, reasonable way. For instance, this is their attempt to describe the Evangelical response to evolutionary theory, which I thought was a much more reasonable attempt to reconcile the two approaches than many I have seen lately.

Article abstract: Exploration of the roots of accumulating environmental degradation has reached to the very foundations of Western civilization. The dominant critiques of these foundations primarily focus on two cosmologies: monism and dualism. The purpose of this paper is to examine these foundations from a Weberian perspective and to offer a little known alternative: immanent dualism. This alternative cosmology suggests that religion could help reorganize late industrial capitalism.

Comments

[coraljune.livejournal.com]

Gosh, it's like Christmas reading your posts today!
Thanks! More later, after coffee...

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Yer quite welcome. I don't personally feel there's any inherent contradiction between science and religion, as long as religion doesn't hold to dogmatic literalism, especially when that literalism has to do with written materials prepared by fallible human beings hundreds or thousands of years ago, based on the framework of knowledge they had at the time.

It's always seemed quite pompous to say that while your deity is an infinite, infinitely powerful being, all you need to know about he/she/it can be explained and contained in one finite book of a few hundred or thousand pages, which was written by fallible, finite human beings and translated and retranslated across various languages by yet more fallible, finite humans. I woulnd't think an infinite deity would let itself be limited in that way, even if it could.

There is so much grandeur and mystery and wonder in the universe, I'm not sure why we as a species often seem to feel such an intense need to contain and limit it.

[ardaraith.livejournal.com]

really just wanted to say 'hi'
i saw someone riding a bike near the house the other day that looked very like you.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

hi backatcha -- hope you had a good Italy trip. That would be a heck of a bike ride from here to Austin ;>

[coraljune.livejournal.com]

There is so much grandeur and mystery and wonder in the universe, I'm not sure why we as a species often seem to feel such an intense need to contain and limit it.

Indeed. I think Claudia summed it up well in her writing on Time when she said: (smile, we humans are so concrete!)

And on the topic of science and religion, these very things have been figuring prominently in my thoughts of late. I don't know if the above reference to the "contradiction" between them was an answer to my post looking for answers, or simply appeared, quite fortuitously, as a reasonable embellishment to the Weber article. Either way, it is good for me to have heard, especially now. Thanks for sharing. :)