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Truth (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Apr 21, 8:08am 3 reviews philosophy, religion, reality, worldviews
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/; Truth via the NYT / Stanley Fish, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Glanzberg
Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth. It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical literature. It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest, and show how they relate to one-another. A number of other entries investigate many of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an overview of the current theories. Truth French Theory in America Many theories about what truth is all about. But all those theories only present hypotheses about what it is and those hypotheses leave us as hungry as ever before for its true meaning. We are able to say the truth about facts happening within our close environment but when we speak about "the truth" in its philosophical sense it relates to something a lot vaster that our environment. Truth relates to our understanding of the global reality in which we are such tiny particles. But we don't understand what is this "whole". We could even add that there is a structural impossibility for a particle to reason its way through the whole and even if such a feat was feasible it would still be a "view" from within or better a "view" seen through the lense of an inside observer. The "truth" about reality, or to say this otherwise, about the "whole in which we are such tiny particles" is conceivable only from the viewpoint of an outside observer one who could relate this "whole in which we are such tiny particles" to its own environment. In other words if we could per any chance induce or deduce that this "whole in which we are such tiny particles" were a pink elephant how would we ever be able to know something about the family of this pink elephant? What I mean to say is that there is a systemic impossibility for us particles to ever reach the truth about this "whole in which we are such tiny particles". What we can reach is an understanding of how we particles relate to the environment within the realm of what is observable to us (in our Island-Universe as per Villenkin). This kind of understanding has a functional value for us but it does in no way qualify as truth about reality. We intuitively understand that our "functional understanding" does not account for the impact on our Island-Universe of all that lays outside of it. But we most often brush away that thought, for, life continues and we know no better. In conclusion our grasp of reality is physically flawed by our impossibility to see further than the boundary of our Island-Universe and it is furthermore systemically flawed by our insider observation. What is presented as truth, by philosophers, logicians, religious thinkers and others, is thus no more than a viewpoint about something that is unattainable. When the men of knowledge of the day share such a viewpoint among themselves it will then be shared further down in a simplified form with all the citizens in their societies. That's when the viewpoint becomes a worldview. The history of man witnessed 3 classes of worldviews: the animist, the religious and the modern. From all possible accounts we are presently witnessing the slowl transitioning from late modernity into early post-modernity. That means that the men of knowledge of our days are debating the contours of a new viewpoint. Once this debate settles a new worldview will eventually be shared globally by all. But patience this takes time...

Eurozine - The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism - Sven-Eric Liedma…: Apr 8, 12:30pm 1 review religion, modernity, worldviews
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-04-01-liedman-en.html; The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism via CQD, in EuroZine by Sven-Eric Liedman
The untarnished optimism for progress has demanded, as we have witnessed, that all of life's and society's integral components be ingested into the same process. The dominating figure of thought was, for a long time, that modernity and religion were incompatible. Today, that notion occurs as outmoded. Religion has a stronger hold now than for a long time in many parts of the world. Often, it is paired with hard modernity. It is warranted here to speak of a renewed enchantment with the modern world. ... reality is comprised of a number of levels where each one has its origin in the closest, lower level, but where each higher lever implies new qualities and conditions which cannot be explained with reference to lower levels. What levels one wants to distinguish relies, in the end, upon the human knowledge. To imagine a creator behind all of this is to set up a simple explanation to something much greater. The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism Great article. The fact is that humans everywhere feel the need to share with others a same view about reality; a worldview. Modernity wanted to replace the anterior religious worldview with rationality but it failed to supply a worldview that all could readily share. Rationality acts like the process of modernity. It is its ideology. It's central idea is that what can't be explained today science will explain or solve tomorrow. Under rationality one is thus left waiting for a future answer or solution. This demands a blind belief in the process of modernity without giving the reassurance one finds in a readily available interpretation of everything. Late-modernity gives us to observe a set of intertwining crises that destabilize our belief in the possibility of a future answer: SIDE-EFFECTS OF MODERNITY,: Environmental Chaos: Climate Change, loss of bio-diversity, poisoning of land, water and air, Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Minerals. Copper. Food. Societal Atomization + ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: Financialization, Outsourcing, Institutional lag and finally disruption of collapse. This is a time when we all feel an urgent need for societal comfort. Fact is this societal comfort can only be bestowed through the sharing of a common worldview.

Religion might keep anxiety at bay | Science Blog: Jan 2, 5:00pm 1 review religion, society, worldviews
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/religion-might-keep-anxiety-bay-15123.html; Religion might keep anxiety at bay in Science Blog about a study by Temple University's Joanna Maselko
According to Temple University's Joanna Maselko, Sc.D., women who had stopped being religiously active were more than three times more likely to have suffered generalized anxiety and alcohol abuse/dependence than women who reported always having been active. ... The study expands on previous research in the field by analyzing the relationship between mental health - anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence or abuse - and spirituality using current and past levels, said Maselko, who conducted the research when she was at Harvard University. Religion might keep anxiety at bay I retain from this article that religious belief (I guess this is valid for the belief in whatever worldview) keeps anxiety at bay. I suspect that those ideologically driven by rationalism will cry fool. But let's quieten down for a minute. This article, and the study it refers to, do not pretend that religious belief trumps rationality. It simply evokes the idea that our existential demons could be soothened through belief thus reducing the risk of falling prey to them. Let us look at this from another angle. - Belief answers our existential questions, what I call our existential demons, it simply erases the questions from our consciousness. Not believing leaves us at the mercy of those questions. The point here is not about the validity of the answers. The point is about being satisfied by a set of answers or remaining continually in search of acceptable answers. It seems evident that having found acceptable answers should have a quietening effect while a non satisfactorily search should have the opposite effect. This also indicates that the believer in rationalism, while not receiving all the answers, can find solace in his belief that science will eventually find the answers, later on, to the questions it presently can't explain. - Belief is shared with like minded people. Those sharing the same beliefs become our friends and we trust in them. This trust acts like a glue that cements the foundation of the societal grouping of those sharing a common foundational story. This has been the case with religions, popular philosophies, nations and civilizations. Modernity has broken the common belief in past worldviews without supplying a new one thus throwing us all, by late modernity, in the cauldron of a major existential malaise that people try to circumvent by returning to past worldviews. But this can't work over the long run, for, past worldviews do not adhere to the facts of the present.

The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy | openDemocracy: Dec 23, 2007 5:51pm 4 reviews religion, society, worldviews
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/faith_ideas/the_new_atheists; The New Atheism and the end of postmodernity in Open Democracy by Tina Beattie
We need to explore some of the complex underlying reasons for the persistence of religion after a century in which it more or less disappeared from view in western politics and public life, and was banished by totalitarian communist regimes. ... The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values. ... As democracy withers and the political forum is colonised by the suave-speaking mediocrities of the soundbite era, ... we in whose names the battles are being fought have allowed our horizons to shrink so that we see no further than the nearest shopping-mall. ... For many others, it is religion - particularly in its more dogmatic forms - that offers a potent alternative; ... instead of confusion, clear rules instead of ambiguity, tight-knit communities instead of shifting and transient relationships; and all this is presided over by a wrathful male God who hates all the things they hate. The end of postmodernism: the "new atheists" and democracy This article starts on an excellent question. Why does religion make a comeback in late modernity? Was it not a given that the higher the level of modernity the less people would recourse to religion? Well now that we are in late modernity we see that this was a fallacy. While asking the right question Tina Beattie does not offer any valid answer. The fact is that we humans: - need to find appeasement from existential questions that harass our minds - do not share a common worldview - can't survive out of our societal bind Science and rationality have not been able to elaborate a simple story, that all and everyone could have shared, answering all our existential questions and we were thus left with the market place for ideas to appease our demons. This has seriously disrupted the cohesiveness of modern societies reaching what we only can describe as an atomization of late modern societies. Once the societal ride becomes rough uncertainty builds up and anxiety plagues the individuals. Without the reassuring warm feeling bestowed by the sharing of a common worldview with the rest of the community the individuals are searching for a foundational story that they can understand and share. Economic globalization and the frenetic generation of new technology has had the effect of destroying much of what was which resulted in incomprehension and fright of tomorrow. People are thus searching for answers that they can understand and share with others. Science and rationality being unable to give such simple answers and stories people turn to religions and sects of all kinds. What is dramatic here is that religions and sects are unable to give actionable answers to their followers; answers that would allow them to understand what is going on out there. Those religions and sects had answers that were actionable in the past in the societal conditions at the moment of their emergence but they fail miserably in the present. What we need to enter postmodernity is a simple foundational story that everyone could share. A story integrating science into the more encompassing fold of the eternal spiritual observations that are shared by all our religions and philosophies: - we humans are very small particles into the vastness of the whole - the vastness of the whole will remain for ever inaccessible to our understanding - we have the power to shape the conditions of our lives within the limits of our environment - material possessions don't procure happiness this is found in the societal comfort procured by the sharing of a common worldview... - and so on

The New York Times & Log In: Nov 24, 2007 1:07pm 1 review religion, science, worldviews
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&...; Taking Science on Faith in the NYT an opinion by PAUL DAVIES
Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe. It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme. In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus. Taking Science on Faith Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life on Amazon a book by Paul Davies Paul Davies makes a good point. Science is based on the same foundational assumption than the religions of the word. "... to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin." And if this kind of blind following in the belief of a beginning of reality is accepted it should also be extended to the belief in an end of that reality. It is noteworthy to observe that Paul Davies does not mention that other foundational systems have no need to recourse to beginning nor end to make sense out of reality. Should science not be better off trying to niche itself inside such non dualist philosophic systems than perpetuating the dualism of the religions of the word?

http://www.thegodbotherers.com/: Aug 20, 2007 4:51pm 4 reviews religion, reality, worldviews
http://www.thegodbotherers.com/; THE GOD BOTHERERS via the excellent SU pages of Droidydoo in thegodbotherers.com/
Early in 2006, two dudes from opposite sides of the Tasman Sea got talking while working together at a factual-television production company on the New Zealand's South Island. Since television is such a dull topic, they generally preferred to converse about "life, the universe and everything" instead. Before long, Josh O and Glenn K discovered they shared many interests; from a fascination with science, communications and 'new media' technologies, to movies, music, healthy fresh foods and tequila. They also share a mutual love of the great outdoors. Most importantly, they're both passionate researchers of entheobotany, comparative religion, spirituality and metaphysics. Glenn and Josh wasted no time in combining these interests and quickly began a systematic search of the South Island's lush pine forests to hunt for what some people claim to be the original biblical "Tree of Knowledge" - the Amanita muscaria mushroom. After finding numerous healthy specimens of this extraordinary lifeform, they launched themselves on a programme of applied psychonautics that continues to this day. Currently residing in Sydney, Australia, Josh and Glenn have now formed The Krawskam Project - a "consortium of two" that is actively seeking to find a means to communicate with the consciousness, energy and information matrix that underpins all aspects of our universe and reality. They believe this Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) is both the force driving humanity's spiritual evolution and the source of life itself. THE GOD BOTHERERS Excellent and hilarious. About the initiation of the post-modern shaman. A question arises in my mind after viewing this trailer: "Is everyone to become a shaman?" Everyone experiences his own road of life but only some individuals reach this stage in their lives when they feel the need to embrace the whole. This movie is about 2 guys who reached that stage. By asking the question "Is everyone to become a shaman?" and giving the answer I gave I meant to question if everyone could possibly reach that point when one feels compelled to UNDERSTAND and SEE reality. It is now evident to me that only a few will be called.

Jaron’s World: Peace through God | Min…: Aug 19, 2007 1:52pm 1 review religion
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/jarons-world-peace-through-god; Jaron's World: Peace through God in Discover Magazine by Jaron Lanier
The idea of God (or gods) also served in ancient times as a way to apply the clan-centric cognition of the human species to the problem of comprehending the dynamics of the world. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, God is the "King of the universe" so God served at least two duties: as clan leader and as explanation of reality. Scientific experimentation need not be a source of constraints that reduce God over time. There are well-established streams of religious thought that treat science as elevating God so as to be concerned only with things too big to be framed by science. But why should a scientist show any degree of acknowledgment, much less friendliness, toward topics that are so big or mysterious that they can almost certainly never be addressed experimentally? It's mean-spirited to fight against that kind of hope. It also reinforces fears that scientists are claiming to be an immaculate, elite population. After all, scientists are also afraid to die, and we haven't necessarily achieved some hypothetical level of perfect rationality inside our own heads. Instead of telling other people what not to hope, a more constructive approach is to learn how to be more articulate about the limits of experimentation. Jaron's World: Peace through God I have often posted about the subject of science versus religion. Both are stories about reality. Religious stories are simple stories at the image of closed systems which means that they are providing answers to all possible questions. In contrast science does not pretend to have all the answers while insisting that, in approaching reality, what counts is the method. The scientific method relies on testing to confirm or reject an hypothesis and the gradual build-up of confirmed hypotheses gives science its body of knowledge. The problem with both approaches lies in the infinite character of reality that gives us to understand its un-attainability. So if the whole of reality is in-accessible our understanding never will account for more than a vision or a perception of that whole. Now, jumping to another plane, we know that the survival of the atoms lies in their collective wholes. Human survival is made possible by their societal belonging. But how is a society to find its unity? I posit that societal unification is realized through the gluing of the individuals in a common worldview. That means that a vision or perception of reality is then shared by all the members of a society. Religion was such a worldview gluing the individuals in the past... but over the last centuries rationality has broken that worldview. In the meantime rationality and science have failed to develop as a shared worldview... For more click on the keywords religion or worldviews in my SU Tag Cloud.

Asia Times Online :: China News - Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia: Aug 6, 2007 9:20pm 3 reviews religion
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IH07Ad03.html; Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia in AsiaTimes by Spengler
Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter's veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history. ... Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves: "What is the purpose of my life?" ... People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature, unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral. Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation. Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia "Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society". Christianity has indeed been the ideological instrument of tribe "unifiers" and builders of kingdoms and empires. But this has been realized at the price of a tabula rasa policy that erased the result of tens of thousands of years of observation that had resulted in a large body of accumulated knowledge in all fields related to life under animism, what Spengler calls traditional society.. Christianity replaced that animistic body of knowledge with a simplistic foundational story that the West still largely lives off today. In short: - History as a straight progressive line with a beginning and an end: * The beginning of the story of human reality is presented as having been unleashed by a "first mover" called god. * The end of that story is a promize to the "good people" that they will join god in eternal happiness while the bad ones shall be suffering for eternity. (in the meantime you better behave and practice the teachings of the creed!) - Reality presented as a cauldron of dualism: * everything is seen as being on the side of, or good, or bad * this unleashes a perpetual fight between good and bad * and humanity is thus being extracted out of its organic life to fight for the good. If you want to see this comment in its entirety click here Loss of certainty and the purpose of life?"

Edge: THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS: May 23, 2007 10:44am 4 reviews religion, power, worldviews
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pagels07/pagels07_index.html; THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS in Edge, The Third Culture, A Talk with Elaine Pagels
There is a Jewish tradition about persecution and about martyrdom which sees dying for God, as they called it, as a way of witnessing God's power. The followers of Jesus argued intensely about that question. And the Gospel of Judas is one of the writings that comes out of these intense, painful arguments involving the threat of violence, arrest, threat of torture and public execution. This shows us what DIDN'T become Christianity and casts very new light on what did. THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS
1. Stories about Jesus were written long after his death.
2. The story of Jesus that has been passed down through history is a simplified and screened history. It is only after emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the religion of the empire that the story of Christianity as we know it today was fashioned through selective retaining or purging of gospels. Among the retained are the ones by Mark, Paul, Matthew,... and among the purged are the ones by Mary Magdalene, Phillip, Thomas, Judas,...
3. The story of Christianity, as we know it, has to be understood in the context of it being transformed into the official worldview of the Roman Empire. It then became a tool for the men of power to glue mentally their citizens behind a unified vision and understanding of reality.
4. The story of Christianity devised as the worldview to be shared by all within the Roman Empire had not much in common with the message of Jesus the first century rabbi.
5. What does it change to know those facts?

The New York Times & Log In: May 2, 2007 5:04am 1 review religion, change, worldviews
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/education/02spirituality.html?_r=1&th&emc=t...; Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus in the NYT by Alan Finder
Peter J. Gomes has been at Harvard University for 37 years, and says he remembers when religious people on campus felt under siege. To be seen as religious often meant being dismissed as not very bright, he said. No longer. At Harvard these days, said Professor Gomes, the university preacher, "There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years". Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus

What's going on? Science and rationalism have never offered a simple and all encompassing worldview answering the many foundational questions that each of us hears popping in his mind at one or another moment in his life. Where does the universe come from? How do I fit in the wholeness of the universe? What is life? Is there life after death? And so on. It is not as if it was impossible to find credible answers to those questions from a rationalist or scientific standpoint but fact is that only those who accumulated a vast body of scientific knowings can possibly find such credible answers. That means that the vast majority of students and should I say the vast majority of citizens do not have the means to find them. Living without certainty in your head about those foundational questions can be distressful, for, you will never find peace of mind and you will also never fully sense the warmth and security offered by in any group or society. Individuals, at the image of atoms, are the components of the grouping they belong to. Atoms of iron unrelated to other atoms of iron are nothing. Their existence is conferred by the iron. The same goes for human individuals. We can't possibly exist by or on ourselves. It's the grouping we belong to that confers us individual existence. And the belonging to a grouping is realized through the sharing of a common worldview. It is as if life or humanity were polar: on one side the group, the society and on the other the individuals. Take out the sharing of a common worldview (belief system) by the individuals or give them latitude to believe in what they want and the grouping starts to disintegrate. Late modernity concludes on such a societal atomization and societies start to disintegrate. The individuals feel more and more ill at ease and experience a growing yearning for sharing a common worldview with others. This is what this article is all about and it is is also what many Chinese are experiencing nowadays after the chaos unleashed on them by the rapid entry of their country into modernity... But beware, for, past worldviews, if they can satisfy the individuals, never will satisfy their societies. Today's conditions on the ground in terms of established knowings are different from the time those past worldviews emerged. And so societies driven by hegemonic past worldviews are bound to lose out to those that succeed to devise worldviews out of present conditions.

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