Re: The Problem with Religion
Reply #13 –
The problem with religion is that it's misunderstood. But it's not religion's problem. For example science is also misunderstood. People misunderstand the purpose and scope of science and the same with religion. Big things are not easy to understand.
To me understanding is important. This has led me to religion, because religion helps to understand and cope with more things than science and philosophy combined ever could. Religion is not about faith for me, but about understanding, about knowing. Those who think religion is about faith and believing may well misunderstand me now. It's okay. Big things are not easy to understand. I don't understand religion completely either. For example I honestly don't understand the church-going part, the liturgy, congregational activity. But church-going seems to attract many, so it must be lack of understanding on my part.
I hope honest atheists also acknowledge when they don't understand things. With an honest seeker's attitude, some amazing answers open up.
Here's one insight into philosophy (religion is completely philosophical for me) for those who are interested. There's this word 'nothing'. But there's a serious difference between the physicist's nothing and the philosopher's nothing. The physicist's nothing means 'can't detect anything', but the philosopher's nothing is the true nothing, whose detection is a logical contradiction of terms by definition: 'Nothing' is that which doesn't ontologically exist. Then again, 'nothing' is conceptually there among the metaphysical categories - in the category of non-existence. Existence is another metaphysical category that includes everything that exists.
The difference is subtle, so it needs further clarification: The physicist's nothing exists, but the philosopher's nothing doesn't. The physicist's nothing exists, because he has his instruments somewhere attempting to detect something, but when nothing is detected, the physicist says: "There's nothing there." So, for him, in that place (which exists) there's nothing. For the philosopher, however, if there's nothing, then even the place doesn't exist where to perform the experiment. The philosopher's nothing means true radical non-existence. If the place exists where to perform the experiment, then it's definitely 'something' for the philosopher, even when nothing is detected there.
There are some important corollaries to this. The (non-philosophical) physicist doesn't speak or think about things that don't exist. He only speaks and thinks about things that exist. Among things that exist there is empty space where "there's nothing there". So, the physicist speaks in terms of objects that can be detected. When it cannot be detected, it's 'nothing' for him.
The philosopher, on the other hand, is well aware of the category of non-existence and can freely speak about it. Non-existence is a whole metaphysical category which, by definition, cannot be empirically detected - even more, to talk about such detection is a logical self-contradiction. The other major metaphysical category is the category of existence. In this category, the philosopher places the physicist's nothing as 'things that cannot be detected'. The logically opposite class to this are 'things that can be detected'. Both classes of things exist, but one of them can't be detected.
The physicist, if he is non-philosophical and careless in logic, may easily equate existence with detection and, conversely, non-detection with non-existence. For him existence means the detectable objects. The common sense is on the side of the philosopher here: Yes, there obviously are things we don't know about yet. Among the reasons why we don't know about things we don't know about, non-existence is one, but it's not the only reason. Another reason why we don't know about some things is because we haven't detected them yet, just like a cautious physicist may suspect.
Still, there are more reasons for non-detection. Another reason can be a wrong presupposition. Some things don't exist as objects, yet they definitely exist. For example, there are qualities of things, such as shape or size that can be expressed numerically, but shape, size or numbers themselves do not exist objectively. They cannot be placed in the category of non-existence. They are indispensable in our analysis of detectable objects. In fact, those qualities are so important to us that we have an objective mode of existence for them - language.
So, there are modes of existence. Objective existence is not the entire existence. There are ways to explore the non-objective mode of existence, but this is out of reach of physics. As I observed in the beginning, the philosopher discerns a clear distinction between non-existence and undetectable existence. This distinction is indiscernible for the physicist, if he is not a careful enough thinker, but I suppose I have shown clearly enough how this distinction itself is important.
These kinds of distinctions are arrived at by means of logical and conceptual philosophical analysis. The metaphysical categories is an example of such analysis. It's a way to "detect the undetectable". There are even more ways, but when you are materialistically and atheistically bent, you would not be interested in those ways. Reductionist materialism does not admit logical and conceptual analysis as a valid form of proof. This is the problem of atheism: Simply not interested in the entire realm of existence. "When it can't be detected, it doesn't exist."