AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 1:40 am
You are providing me another apologetic for a doctrine which I claim is nowhere to be found in scripture and is a result of flawed dualist thinking. Under the monist metamorphic view, such a question does not even arise because we are not other than God and we are truly bringing self-aware intent into the world-evolving process which was not there before. We do not fall into conundrums such as predestined-foreknown camps of humanity consigned to damnation by a loving God.
Forgive me for being blunt, but I think you a completely missing the difference between our relationship to time and god’s perspective from outside of time. You are not the only one to do this, for some reason people don’t seem to be able to imagine a perspective of being outside time and having knowledge of all time.
Also, to say it’s not found in scripture is strange as it seems very clear to me. For example this clear case from Paul, Romans 8:28–30:
We know that in everything God works for good with [bold] those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son[/bold], in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Ashvin wrote:That being said, I still find your apologetic wanting - any sort of predestination undermines free choice as in meaningful choice. If a political election is rigged so that my candidate cannot possibly win under any circumstances, my vote is meaningless.
No that’s a complete misunderstanding. ‘Knowledge of’ is not the same as influencing. You know that Biden won the last election, does that mean you caused him to win?
Yes but the precise claim of Aquinas' was that another science can be developed under the Spirit's illumination via Reason, i.e. spiritual science. Even if you disagree with Steiner's version, do you agree that such a thing is possible?
One thing to remember is that Aquinas had a different view of what science means than we do, it’s about knowledge that can be established from ‘the causes’, as opposed to speculation. This is different from todays meaning, which is in theory more about repeatable empirical evidence. You could argue that our version of science is a much narrower definition, but interestingly much of what happens in modern physics would probably fall outside of Aquinas’s definition of science. It would fall under “doxa” instead.
I should say that there is a part of me that fully supports your intention here, as my default response is always about what I disagree with. The way our academics and our culture have hived off stuff “we know” through science from stuff we experience “subjectively”, and treated the latter as inferior, is harmful bullshit.
Nonetheless l’m also a realist. We have evolved a huge range of disciples over the past few centuries, and each of them have developed their own partial but sophisticated framework, with their own rules for discerning validity. With the “hard” sciences, there are big areas of overlap where you can match the ‘knowledge’ in one area with the ‘knowledge’ in another.
However even in those areas it still reveals how very primitive our knowledge is. For example, biologists talk about photosynthesis, the basic function without which there would be no life. They have a very detailed story from chemistry about how the sun, water and carbon dioxide capture energy from the sun to produce proteins. But ask three physicists about what is happening and each of them will probably give you a different answer, as they just don’t know how the knowledge from biology and the knowledge from chemistry are working together.
When you then add areas like psychology, sociology, history etc into the mix, this problem is magnified exponentially. Add art, literature, poetry, and it’s exponential on top of exponential. The different ways of knowing by then have such different perspectives, and such different ways of discerning value from not value, that you would need to have specialist subjects about how to correspond the knowledge from each discipline to each other discipline. That would be an extremely messy process, and would by almost certainly be wrong most of the time.
For me this is the biggest problem with your approach. We could speak to a Freudian, a Jungian, an atheist, a Jew, a Hindi and a Buddhist about physics, and we all would know the ground rules. Each of these could be scientists working on the same area, and each would value each others work and opinion. Each of them may have a different conclusion about what the results mean in a wider context, and I agree that this Kantian separation between the empirical results and the wider implications is damaging. The lack of any ontology being applied naturally results in an assumption of the lowest common denominator ontology - physicalism. Of course that’s not the case for many individuals working in science, as they have their own grand narrative of which their work is just a part.
To me the answer is not to try to change the definition of science. As Einstein remarked, the increasing specialisation in science is too far gone to expect anyone to retain the broad horizon of knowledge. Even a polymath has to at some point accept a high level summary from the specialists. Instead the answer must be to challenge the assumed ontology of physicalism, and I think there is hope in this area. That way we have a better chance of the high level summaries having more informed metaphysical assumptions, and we have a better chance of fitting the different high level jigsaw pieces together.
