At 12:02 PM 09/18/2000, you wrote:
>Until I read something that FMAJ said in passing I had heretofore thought
>that "The Wedge" was a chapter in Phillip Jonson's newest book (it may
>still be). I did a search on the web for "wedge, discovery institute" and
>got this link:
>
>http://www.infidels.org/secular_web/feature/1999/wedge.html
Perhaps we need something that could be called the "Wedgie Project," in
which we pull up the philosophical/theological "underwear" of design theory
from behind.
I don't understand how this non-materialist, Christian "science" is
supposed to work, since it's based on faith, not on cognition.
Incidentally, for those who are just starting to think about such things
and see that there *have* been problems *associated* with materialistic
world-views, it's important to understand that there are *many*
materialistic world views, and that the moral and social implications of
them differ, often *radically*. The common Christian propaganda claim that
materialism implies amoralism and that it is responsible for the many or
all of the evils of modern society is vastly overgeneralized. It's like
saying that, since one medication may have bad effects, one should not take
*any* medications. Further, *most* people in the world today are hardly
raging scientific materialists, even in the U.S. Most people, in fact, hold
a fairly wide range of non-materialistic, mystical-BS nonsense beliefs,
including such things as astrology, Reiki, psychic powers, the magical
powers of cloths and crap sold in the backs of supermarket checkout-stand
tabloids (National Enquirer, etc.), ghosts, "spirits," God in various
forms, Satan, Rosicrucianism, creationism, numerology, psychic healing,
Wiccan magic, and so on, nearly endlessly. Thus, if we wanted to mindlessly
attribute social problems to something, we could just as well attribute it
to the rampant mystical/non-materialism in our culture.
The real cause is deeper, in epistemology: The willingness to hold beliefs
for which one does not have adequate *cognitive* justification and the
*unwillingness* to adopt beliefs for which one *does* have adequate
cognitive justification. Actually, there's a basic motivational issue here
as well: The voluntary failure to put effort into cognitively facing
reality and into building up (or *re-*building) one's concepts in logically
rigorous, objectively and cognitively sound *concepts* and basic ideas.
This creates a vicious circle: The person is not motivated to volitionally
grasp the world cognitively, and so does not develop the skills and
concepts needed to do it well, and the resulting confusion and intellectual
quagmires then make it seem hopeless ever to rationally understand things
and this undercuts motivation. And, our society in general denigrates
rationality, especially in philosophy (because of the very dominance of
non-materialistic world-views), and so there is very little social support
for rational intellectual development in this area. People end up feeling
that rational thinking is just not worth the effort, because they do it so
poorly. Public schooling also tends to promote this feeling by making
learning and thinking seem like necessarily unpleasant chores that one is
to abandon in any serious form once one gets out of school or college. Of
course, the incompetence and the negative motivation encourages a
null-witted approach to ideas and beliefs, which promotes the hopelessness,
which promotes the null-wittedness.
This is even "rational," in a very shortsighted, short-term way. The cost
of learning to think rationally, and of actually doing so, is viewed
emotionally as higher than the expected benefits of doing so. This view is
false, and this view itself is a result of past failure to develop rational
thinking, but that will not usually be discovered because it effectively
"protects" itself by prevent itself from being examined rationally. A very
vicious circle indeed.
Can the vicious circles involved in this non-thought syndrome be broken?
Yes, but not usually easily, and often not very successfully, because, by
the time a person *does* decide to take learning and reason seriously, he
or she is usually too set in a morass of deeply-ingrained philosophical and
other beliefs that get in the way, and many of those beliefs can be very
painful to give up. A person who grows up with a
mystical/non-materialist/faith-oriented world-view and mind-set will
usually not be willing or perhaps even able to fully overcome it, and
actually learn to apply principles of rational cognition to anything deeper
than scientific issues. It *needs* to be applied most fully to deep
philosophical premises that the person may not even know he *has*, but it
usually will not be; the uncomfortable *effort* involved will tend to
dissuade the person at every step.
But, as a start, here's what I call the primary rule of the *application*
of reason to belief:
Believe all, but *only*, what you have rationally
adequate cognitive justification for believing.
Ideas without adequate justification may sometimes be modified to make them
rationally acceptable. For example, you can qualify such an idea with, "It
is *probably* true that . . ." or with "I sorta-kinda believe that . . . ,"
etc.
Another start is to take the *rational* formation of one's concepts --
especially highly abstract ones -- very seriously. If you don't, you will
very likely end up with large masses of nonsensical ideas based on
ill-defined and poorly-founded concepts.
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