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

Leo & Wilma - I'll make the edits later today (have some other things to do right now!).

Recumbentman. Do you have a link for the Dalai Lama comments? I think Hegel was the first one to form the dialectic argement in a refined way like the Dalai Lama (the Delai Lama by the way I think believes that 'reality' is 'formed' by such mental considerations - very interesting!).

Reason and Faith are our internal advisors. We can choose to listen to both or just one. If we choose to listen to both, and they are consistent - bliss. However if they do not how to decide between them? Eg., we might subject them to a formal decision analysis technique say based based on multi-attribute-utility-analysis. This is not always easy though! So it would be better for them to resolve their differences before taking the car out for a drive, so that conflicts don't arise so much if ever on the journey (that's my point).

By the way as for the comment that if the 'friends' are in conflict 'always choose reason or you are in trouble'. Some fundamentalist fideist might disagree with you. For example war is in some peoples mind a reasonable choice of action and in others always abhorent to their pacifist faith. No one said this was easy, otherwise we would be in bliss now.

(Yes Leo I can think of some example apparently - )

Recumbentman,

Addressing the point that internal 'advice' cannot be so neatly seperated, I would agree with this. But I know other folks don't. Some people believe it is possible to live a life of exclusively pure empirical rationality or fideism - or to aim to do so. I think this probably wrong but for fairness sake I allow the possibility (since my opinion is not the issue). However I go onto present the current (actually quite old) theory that there is value in building an integration as an alternative for people to consider.

OK recommended changes made - this is looking better to my eyes also. You guys have done this once or twice before I suspect!

Over to you

A14630410 - Truth and Tolerance - Integrating Faith and Reason

Back in a sec

"As an example consider the question of 'going to war' for some there exists specific circumstances where this is a reasonable course of action yet for others it is always abhorrent to their pacifist faith."

try it this way, perhaps?

As an example, consider the question of 'going to war'. For some people there are specific circumstances where this is a reasonable course of action yet for others it will always be abhorrent to their pacifist faith.


and this one needs tidying up too, I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say here though :

"We can see truths revealed to and accepted in trust by us through religious traditions, some 'common sense' rules of conduct or personal experience, and through this way of thinking make sense of the world and build a faith based worldview. (e.g., this might be the friend that tells us to 'turn left' at a particular junction in life)."

How about this:

'Truth's are revealed to (and accepted in trust by) people through religious traditions, 'common sense' rules of conduct or just personal experience. It is through this that people then make sense of the world around them and ... [does this next bit always happen as a consequence??] ... build a faith-based worldview. (e.g., this might be the friend that tells us to 'turn left' at a particular junction in life).

I think the above conclusion needs to be looked at again.


More later.
W

Recumbentman - I was just reading up on Hegel becuase something you said prompted me to check... the way I present the Entry is a kin dof hegelian tria dialectic, wher we look at the thesis ('fides'), its anti-thesis ('ratio') and then a synthesis ('fides et ratio'). Thanks

Thanks - I have updated with new text - I hope this is clearer

Bounce this thread up on Tuesday and I'll be back. Done this before? Nah...

*points at shiny badges on PS*

Sorry Leo - I did not understand your posting, are you asking me to do something specific?

Wilma, I have been busy tidying up the text to reduce the amount of footnotes in the way you introduced me to a few posting ago. I'm about half way through and will do the remainder later today I hope.

Good to know, pilgrim. I will try to come back to this again in the next couple of days (probably Monday). Keep at it - remember that you are writing for a person who has never heard of this before - someone who will struggle to get their head around some of the concepts. This is why I urge you to keep the language as simple as possible, the sentences as straightfrwar as you can and the vocabulary accessible. The concepts you are presenting do not rely on complication and are detracted from by it.

I think you are doing very very well so far. Keep at it, though .



W

OK - I have the footnotes and links now as advised, and made several passes through to take out or explain better technical passages. It is probably best to be looked at by other eyes now. Over to you

Hoping you guys have some time to give this a look/see and recommend any changes - As you know I'm keen to get this into EG.

There is so much intolerance about these days (even in some of the well written entries on h2g2) I hope this piece will be cause for pause.

And even for some folks to consider this question ... 'rather than always blaming the other for the world's ills - could it be me?'. A question I paraphrase from G K Chesterton.

The title of the talk, 'Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections' will need some punctuation inserted, as it was presented as two distinct lines and makes less sense when the two are run together. Either 'Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections' or 'Faith, Reason and the University—Memories and Reflections' (I think that's the code) or 'Faith, Reason and the University / Memories and Reflections' should do.

This whole entry is still open to question as an Edited Guide candidate, though, on the grounds that it posits a dodgy premise. Your illustration presents faith and reason as two friends giving various advice on where to go. This is not necessarily a good analogy but worse, it seems at odds with the pope's argument.

It is true that we must take a hell of a lot on faith, even in science. As Wittgenstein noted, we have no first-hand knowledge that anything at all existed say 150 years ago. And though I suppose I have a brain, no-one has ever seen it. And so on.

But the back-seat drivers analogy puts faith and reason in an uncomfortably equal-looking position. They are *not* alternatives, as the pope is at pains to say. Rather, everything that faith says must be filtered through the inspection of reason before it is uttered.

Recumbentman - I agree with you - that is indeed what Benedict XVI was trying to say, and this is what I personally believe also. But from earlier comments I have tried to be even handed and present the spectrum of opinion out there. It is a fact that there are fundamentalists from both 'faith only' and 'reason only' camps. And even on the integration issue you have critical rationalism - which is a 'different magesteria' argument. These are options 1 and 2 of the drivers analogy. I then present the option 3 and go into detail on that.

The key point is that I am being even handed. And not pushing my opinion. ot the popes though I do present it, It was made clear to me that this is what h2g2 would only accept! - so please work with me to make it fairhanded, even though we may peronally agree that option 3 is the best way ... OK?

(I'll update the comment as you mention - the punctuation is what you get from teh Vatican site! But it is not infallible as we know - at least on the issue of spelling and punctuation)

Punctuation breaks down in this case: headings that use line breaks as punctuation. That's why they have to be quoted in the form "The Hobbit / or / There and Back Again".

I tested my hypothesis about the example of useing "Friends or Foes" as a way of referencing the 'dialectic' of Faith and Reason. You getlots of hits on the web. Here are 3 interesting examples I liked the 3rd one becuase it uses Indiana Jones as a case example! - I must try harder!

A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey,
by Brian D. McLaren

A New Kind of Christian's conversation between a pastor and his daughter's high school science teacher reveals that wisdom for life's most pressing spiritual questions can come from the most unlikely sources….

***************************

Faith and Reason: Friends or Foes in the New Millennium? by Anthony Fisher and, Hayden Ramsay

"Faith" and "reason" are heavily weighted words. They point to elemental aspects of human existence. The papers and discussions presented strive to clarify and correlate these basic activities or dimensions of human beings. In all the complexities of the possible relationships and interweaving of faith and reason, two kinds of questions keep recurring. On the one hand, what is the value of human intelligence, and how is it endorsed and supported by faith? On the other, what is the distinctive intelligence or rationality of faith, and how does it relate to the perennial search for wisdom represented in its various philosophical forms?

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Faith and Reason: Friends or Foes? by Tim Garrett

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Indiana Jones film trilogy is its focus on religious themes. In the third installment, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy is involved in a search for the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. As the film reaches its climax, Indy must go through three tests in order to reach the Grail. After overcoming the first two obstacles, the final test required Indy to "step out" in faith, even though he was on one side of a cavern that appeared to be thirty feet across, without any visible way to reach the other side. Following the instructions from his father's diary, Indy stepped into the void, and to his amazement, his foot came down on solid ground. It turned out that there was a bridge across the cavern but because the rocky texture of the bridge perfectly matched the facing wall of the cavern, the bridge was invisible from Indy's perspective.
According to this scene, and enforced by general opinion, religious faith and human reason are opposites. Indiana Jones simply could not understand how it was possible to reach the Grail without any visible means to do so; the implication is that his decision to step out was a forfeiture of his intellect. This idea that Christian faith is a surrender of our reasoning abilities is a common one in contemporary culture...
... This reveals a tension that has existed in the church for centuries. Is faith in Christ a surrender of the intellect? Is godly wisdom in complete opposition to what Scripture calls "worldly wisdom"?

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Good afternoon, I'm back for a quick run-thru:

>> All you need to do is apply reason based thinking for those problems that it is best for and faith based for those that are applicable to that 'domain'.<<
-There has got to be a better way of phrasing this sentence.

>>Though sometimes that’s easier to say than do! This is like option 2 in the example above.<<
- my reccommendation: make this one sentence, sans the '!'

>>This is because it's not always easy to know which mode to apply in a given situation (i.e., if the 'car friends' disagree, which friend should you listen to when you have need to make a choice?).<<
- take 'car friends' out of quotes. Also house style says no periods (fullstops) after anything except sentences, so i.e. becomes ie

>>Furthermore to what extent can one say one has faith, if this is merely parsimonious ('carefully and sparingly applied')?<<
- cut out parsimonious. I think you could rephrase this be perhaps less eloquent sounding but more understandable.


>>There are studies that indicate there are significant benefits to a person having an active faith (something that is deeply centered in their psyche) for their personal health2 as well as providing benefits to mankind as a species (leading some to argue that an evolutionary perspective on faith may thus explain how religion came about by natural causes).<<
- Is this relelvent? If so, cut it down by about 10-15 words.

>>Yet blind faith (e.g., reckless trust in divine providence) may lead one into irrational actions that are risky. Therefore having faith and reason 'online' simultaneously rather than flipping from one to another is a goal for many who seek reconciliation between faith and reason, if for no other purpose than to get the benefits without the risks!<<
-online? Again, can you say it shorter? Also, can you do it *all* (even the stuff above) without referring to 'people' or 'many'? Like, "A worldview that combines faith and reason simultaneously provides the benefits of both without the risks of either."

See what I mean?

OK - thanks - it's late here - so I'll make the edits later (even the one about being parsimonious with my 'parsimonious' expressions!). .

There is nothing parsimonious about your expressions. G'night.