h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Pilgrim4Truth,

In response to your Post 37, reading this thread I think people have already been very constructive in their advice to you. They've explained about the Edited Guide and what you would need to change in order for this to be accepted for inclusion in it.

I've tried hard to understand what you're saying here. It does seem, however, to be a piece leading up to putting forward one theory - in my own words, that of Faith and Reason working together - and it currently doesn't read to me like an impartial, factual account of the theory. (As far as theories can be factual - if you see what I mean!).

The ending quotes rather a lot from the book by Pope Benedict. You may share his views but this suddenly makes the piece more about what he thinks and less about a more general philosophical theory.

Post 23 has useful thoughts on how this could be made more EG-appropriate

JulesK

Thanks - the entry is about faith and reason. You can have;

a) faith, but no reason,
b) reason, but no faith
c) faith and reason but not together (in separate domains so to speak)
d) an integrated faith and reason

I believe it’s possible to be able to hold either of these 4 "worldviews" and this should not to be disrespected (their "truths" should be tolerated). Perhaps I can and should point that out more.

As for the comments from Pope Benedict. These are more from his Academic Philosophical background than anything else. They are not specific to Faith in Christianity (though no doubt for him this is so). They deal with three generic aspects of the question "why bother seeking integration of faith with reason?", ...

1/ Reasoning that the highest ethic of an individual’s liberty and freedom must be maintained at expense of their responsibility to a form of objective law is a concept that you have to be careful with (e.g., freedom of speech having some limits to prevent inciting racial hatred or violence).
2/ Building social theory by reason alone (with relativist moral values) has not been successful process in the past century, and maybe simply futile given mans finite nature. Having some aspect of moral truth being held objective is a better working foundation (e.g., the inviolable dignity of an individuals human rights)
3/ Reason needs Faith (and vice versa) at the level of giving the whole process of "life, the universe and everything" meaning and value.

These points are independent of what particular "faith" you might apply. It might be a kind of Scientific Naturalism or it might be a traditional Monotheism. Picking which Faith system to use is a different subject.

Even though I am anti-pomo (as most of it is utter bilge) I am not a zealot. Neither am I threatening you. What I have been trying to do is to make you understand that this entry, whatever its merits as a philosophical argument might be, IS IN THE WRONG PLACE. The EG does not deal in discussing novel and refutable propositions but these are the staples of philosophy. The EG deals in established fact, period.

Now like I said, if you want to put this on the table for discussion then use Ask h2g2. But if you want YOUR opinions and feelings to be treated with respect, don't tell others to 'lighten up'. I can't think of a better way of achieving the opposite, to be honest.

The way the Entry is now (in its current form) it talks about an integration that is actually out there in practice. My intention is to make sure it in neutral and free of personal opinion/bias. It's a work in progress though - I hope to refine it with help.

The position is one of looking at Faith and Reason and their integration in the way many established academics already have made (you dont like me "dropping names" but I could give you a long list).

On h2g2 you have entries on Free Will & Determinism, Objectivism, Post Modernism, etc., etc. These positions are no less debateable than that being written up here. You mention you are Anti-PoMo and claim it is bilge. If all other ACE's took their personal prejudice to the Philosophical entries in h2g2, you would not have ANY h2g2 Entries in that section.

As a critic I think you need to open your mind, keep constructive and look to help me fashion this piece to have it entered - even if it does not personally align with your worldview. Be Tolerant.

Otherwise you are claiming a personal veto over everyone else - and I dont think anyone made you the "Ayatollah of EG".

I think what you mean is 'Peer Reviewers', not ACEs, because FM isn't what we call an <./>ACE</.> here.

Thanks for the clarification - I am still a novice here, and seem to have jumped into the deep end a bit. Maybe I should have started off with something simple like an Entry on Scientism or Fideism. But I went for something I feel passionate about, that can be a good thing or bad.

No, nobody made me the Ayatollah of h2g2, but whoever it was who made me gave me a good brain and it is able to see perfectly well that POMO is mostly obfuscatory jargon. When a journal (Social Text) publishes an article that is deliberately bilge because it is unable to distinguish it from the 'real thing', then that says a hell of a lot about the other material it contains. There is no point in being so open-minded that our brains fall out. There is also no point in maintaining that no objective truth can be arrived at through reason, which is exactly what you seem to be proposing, and so by implication that every 'truth' has equal value.

Now, when you first wrote this entry, it was largely incomprehensible to anybody without a thorough grounding in philosophical traditions. It is now, admittedly, much more comprehensible, but it is not written for the lay reader and still seems to be advancing a proposition rather than relating a well-established argument. *My* entry on the Sokal Affair *was* written for the lay reader, if you read through it. It also related a *real* scandal, and there was very little within it that could have been disagreed with.

However, your entry seems to be advancing mainly your own views. This is not to say that they are misguided or objectionable in any way. But they are evidently *your* views or if not, highly contentious. I don't believe that Wittgenstein proved *anything* but you say that 'our human language is subjective'. And subjectivity in language has nothing at all to do with the Uncertainty principle, which says that you can measure the position or momentum of a particle but not both simultaneously.

The proof of the fact that you are in fact advancing your own argument is the statement: 'In summary therefore to get to objective truth we need to be tolerant to be able to see the benefits of the reason based and faith based approaches.' Like I said previously, whatever you have done to this essay to make it more readable, it is *in the wrong place* and it will *not* get picked for inclusion in the EG. Better that you should put it in a place where people can treat it as a speculative work and talk about it in that spirit. Search for Speaker's Corner, the Forum or Ask h2g2.

"If all other [scouts] took their personal prejudice to the Philosophical entries in h2g2, you would not have ANY h2g2 Entries in that section."

I don't think that's fair. Personally, I find the so-called philosophy of Ayn Rand to be morally and intellectually bankrupt. I find it offensive on nearly every possible level - frankly it and its adherents turn my stomach. But I've got no objection to there being an entry on 'Objectivism' in the edited guide, because it tries to explain what it is in a reasonably neutral way. I don't think it's a very good entry, but it's an adequate one.

This entry is much improved on the original version in that it's now largely comprehensible. The problem now is that I don't think it's particularly clearly defined in where it's going and what it's trying to do. The opening is strong, but then it goes a bit rambly and a little non-sequetiery in places. I can't see the links between Wittgenstein, Heisenberg, and Sartre at all.

Also, it makes some very strong and very controversial claims - e.g.

"We can see "truths" revealed to us through religious traditions or personal spiritual experience"
Well, some people claim to see truth in this way. Some may be right, some may be wrong, or all may be wrong and there may be no such this as the spiritual.

"this is called a "Logical Positivist worldview" "
Not really. My understanding of LP is rather different - I don't think it's a claim about scientific method, but a claim that scientific method and notions of verifiablity should be extended beyond science - if something cannot be verified, it is meaningless.

"However other truths (particularly "human truths" relating to our beliefs of goodness, beauty and justice for example) are more clearly subjective and harder to pin down. For example a person declaring that they believe that "murder is always morally wrong". For the individual it may be a true statement, but for others it may not"
This is massively controversial. Why think that morality may be one way for one person, and another way for another? There's no reason to assume that morality is objective.

I'd also dispute the claim that faith is required to avoid relativism and subjectivism.

What I would suggest is picking a small area and exploring, in detail, what all of the arguments are around that area. One entry is never going to be enough to take on everything that's hinted at here.

Logical positivism, from a scientifc viewpoint, simply states that we should only bother ourselves with concepts we can show to be true. It differs from Popper's later idea of falsification, which asserts we can never show anything to be true, only false, and that scientific concepts lend themselves to falsification.

However, proving something objectively false is perfectly feasible. It simply requires evidence. It is a fact, for instance, that the Sun does *not* orbit the Earth. This requires no faith whatsoever, merely a confidence in one's own evidence or that of others.

By the way I am not so much as PoMo that I believe that every 'truth' has equal value. Leaving the jargon to the side I am personally tolerant of other people "truths" though I do not feel that I have to accept them. And as for the Objectivity of this world, well you can believe …

a) that you can get at Objective Truths through Reason alone,
b) or that you need Reason AND Faith for that purpose.
c) Or you can believe that we live in an Existential universe, where nothing human has Objective "meaning" or "truth".

Each has well established Philosophical traditions – what I am advancing is not my personal pet theory. I don’t think it's for you to say which established Philosophical tradition is suitable for h2g2.

I appreciate your comment that “the entry is now much more comprehensible, but it is not written for the lay reader”. I'll work to improve that aspect. I accept that the Entry needs to be non personal and factual about a current position and not a novel theory. At least to the same level as other Entries in the Philosophy section.

I reject that I am advancing my own views. The Encyclical "Fides et Ratio" of John Paul II puts out a position the same as I have here. It has been picked up by Benedict XVI, and was the subject of his Regensburg address that caused such a furor (for other “out of context” reasons). It's the position not just of Catholics but a whole raft of Theologians and Philosophers from many diverse traditions. It goes back to Augustine who introduced Platonic thought into Theology and Aquinas who introduced Aristotelian thought. Perhaps a few billion people believe that rationality and faith can be integrated in this way. It simply won't do to say it’s my personal worldview that I am writing about here.

Why don’t we work together to put on the guide good Entries and let folks decide for themselves?

Well, now it's in a form I can read without going over each sentence six times it makes a lot more sense.

The quotes from Pope Benedict at the end lead me to believe, however that they are the point of this essay, rather than putting forward an idea which is debated/debatable. But that could be because I am not exactly a fan of Popes in general and this Pope in particular.

On another note: this would be more readable still if you could break it up into sections with a few headers.

And may I add generally: it's also a good advert for the Writing-Workshop

With regards to you comments about Logical Positivism and Popper's Critical Rationalism...

Sure the points you make are broadly representative of those positions as classicaly presented. But you may not be aware of the current Realist and Anti-Realist debate in Metaphysics, to get a feel for this you can see the article in edit on h2g2 about Intuitionism and the Law of Excluded Middle (based on Sir Michael Dummett's work)

See ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A9742214

The point is evidence is not certainty. For an Objective Truth proposition in Logic a variable can be p=1 or 0. This means Truth is Real and Objective. When p=x when it is a variable based on evidence for the proposition you have an Anti-realist position.

If you drop a slice of buttered bread from a table you may get a result that is not 50:50 buttered side down/up over a given number of trials. When we assert that process is purely random it is mostly becuase we make a leap of faith that asserts p over many experiments would be 0.5. It is not becuase we have tested it (though I have seen a program on Discovery channel that tested this and in some circumstances the Aerodynamic properties of buttered bread result in p = NOT 0.5 .)

Objectivity of Truth through Reason alone is in debate now, and has been for some considerable time. Get used to it.

Thanks Sho. I am planning to revise the version shortly to do what you have suggested and also include feedback from other comments. Please dont get hung up on the Pope's comments becuase the come from a particular person you may not admire. I can put them in my own words, my point of referencing them was merely to show that the ideas where not novel and personal to me.

it doesn't put me off, as such, it's just that I find it very difficult to read/listen to words when I know they come from the/a Pope. I'd probably be just as critical if I didn't know - but as you know, it is difficult to be sure.

"I reject that I am advancing my own views."

So, if you're not advancing your own views, you are at least advancing some contentious and highly subjective views, albeit shared with a coterie of others, namely that there is a vacuum in objective truth that only faith can fill. But, according to your own reasoning, that small consideration shouldn't really stop this from getting into the EG as we can't come up with an objective view of truth anyhow.

PS: you state:
'Objectivity of Truth through Reason alone is in debate now, and has been for some considerable time. Get used to it. '

So, is 1+1=2, or is 1+1=3? What should I get used to, the idea that mathematics is wrong or that both propositions are equally valid?

Sorry to butt intothis conversation, but I have an opinion on this which I think is pertinent. While I do not pretend to have a background in philosophy or fully comprehend the hitory and nuances of the entry and the theories put forward, I do feel very strongly that this is a topical and rather necessary presentation for the EG, no matter how controversial.

I am assuming it is the EG we are aiming for. So what we need is for all first person references to come out (all 'we' and 'I's) and we need a little more introduction to terms before they are used, as well as a clearer structure to the entry. All suggestions of the author siding with one or other side of the arguments presented and theories put forward need to also come out.

For it to be within EG parameters, the entry needs to be factuall *and* well balanced. This does not mean that it must be dry and non-committal, though. Many entries which are very opinionated *do* make it into the EG, so I think it is rather disengenious to throw it out just because the subject matter pees us off and goes against our own beliefs.

I do think that it ought really to have gone into the EG Writing Workshop, but now it is here, I am sure we can keep plugging away at it and straighten it out. I think p4t, you have made a start on restructuring it. Now you need to address the other issues to bring it in line with EG requirements.


W

Obviously people write about what they're interested in and what they are passionate about, and the key is to explain a theory rather than advance it. At the risk of being accused of shameless self-publicising, I tried to do this with my entry on Rawls at A3136042. I think Rawls is right about most things, but I wrote the entry merely to explain - it's the difference between 'it is true that' and 'Rawls argues that'...

Well, if the entry could be reorganised to follow that format, and if the very contentious statements were removed or at least contextualised as opinion, then it would make a better EG entry.

I think we can call a time out here. It's pretty clear that this entry won't be undergoing any significant changes, and it's perhaps unfair to demand them of a contributor who doesn't wish to make them.

Likewise, this won't be going into the Edited Guide because it doesn't match our guidelines for writing to a lay audience, we already have a number of entries on different aspects of faith and this does come across as leaning more towards the Personal Theory end of the discussion.

That's not a criticism of the content, just a statement about its suitability for the Edited Guide.