Replies

Attributing supernatural causes to explain natural phenomena has not resulted in better knowledge and application of that knowledge about the physical universe.

I'm very sorry to say, dear allmendream, that here we do part company.

It seems to me the best knowledge of the world we have from the scientific side has come from world-class thinkers engaged in the explication of natural phenomena — Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, oh so many others to be grateful for!

What all these men had in common, each in his own distinctive way, was the understanding that the "universe" was One single ordered (that is to say, hierarchical) manifestation of divine Being — however to be sliced and diced in doctrinal dispute.

I do not know how to "explain natural phenomena" without reference to a relatively "supernatural" criterion of explanation. "Relatively" here meaning that the phenomenal world, proceeding ("evolving") along the "horizontal extension," finds its intelligibility (meaning at any given point) only along the "vertical extension."

IOW, fact is what it is — naked event having no meaning or value. If all of life, of all the world of experience is, is a succession of — heaven forfend!!! — purposeless events, then how can we even speak about a world of Reality?

According to materialist theory, consequent existence occurs only along the "physical," horizontal extension, or plane. Another postulate of this theory holds that all immaterial, non-physically-realized (i.e., non-directly-observable entities) do not really exist. The theory concedes, however, that randomness, in principle, is inexplicable — thereby further conceding that it cannot promote itself as any kind of model of logically effective causation in Nature. IOW, the inexplicable cannot explain anything.

At the same time, it seems clear from what you have written that you, dear brother AMD, have religious notions and aspirations. And I wonder how you hold the two "spheres" together in your mind and spirit, when they seem so mutually opposed in mind.

It seems the only way to get out of this paradoxical dead-end is to imagine the world has a vertical extension imaginable as a different dimension of Time, supervening on the events of the world which we call facts. We need that dimension to think: The meaning of things is not just another fact, evolving along a horizontal timeline in a locally-caused event-line, ad infinitum — and don't even ask what it means.

Which is why I believe down to the bottom of my soul that the current popular idea of religion and science — "faith vs. reason" — as antithetical, mutually-exclusive entities is totally bogus.

To me, they are the fundamental complementarities of our world, of our being, of our understanding of the Cosmos.

But try to locate the "cause" of that idea along the "horizontal extension!"

Thank you so very much for writing, dear allmendream!