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To: general_re
From my perspective, and from the perspective of a great many others, there is no "revealed" truth. And how does Voegelin counter that? By telling me that if I believed in revelation...I'd believe in revelation. Not very helpful. ;)

What Voegelin hopes to show you -- or reveal to you -- is the experience of human beings down the millennia, as they have attempted to grapple with the human condition which is still our own condition. Invariably, intellect and transcendence (plus ideation and reason) have been the sources of human understanding of man, his place in the world, and his relations to his fellow men.

Once upon a time, before the concept of radical individualism seized the modern imagination, people understood they were participants in a community of being that had its Source outside the physical universe. Now you may wish to argue that this is a silly superstition. But I would not agree with you. For I have so far been unable to locate reasonable explanations that answer Leibnitz's two famous questions anywhere in the physical world. If we insist the explanation is "there" (which strikes me as a kind of "faith statement"), then neither I nor 6 millennia of human generations have yet to find it. If it's really not "there," then with all our ingenuity, we won't find it "there," no matter how much we want to/"need" to....

Still, reason tells me it must be somewhere. And so if the answer to the questions "Why is there something, why not nothing? and "Why are things the way they are and not some other way?" cannot be found here in physical reality, where can they be found?

101 posted on 12/09/2002 9:21:01 AM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop
If we insist the explanation is "there" (which strikes me as a kind of "faith statement")
...
Still, reason tells me it must be somewhere.

Anyone can do the Voegelin cha-cha - it's easy. Just jump right in ;)

Well, which is it, faith or reason that tells you that the answers exist? Why should deep answers to those questions A) exist, and; B) be accessible to us? These would hardly be the first questions, after all, that are fundamentally unanswerable, either because there is no answer or because the answer is inaccessible to us. Of course, pragmatist that I am, I can't help but point out that an inaccessible answer is equivalent, for all practical purposes, to no answer at all.

What if the only tenable answer to the question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" is "How else would you have it be?" Which may seem trivial and unsatisfying to some, but I don't worry about that. In the grand scheme of things, BB, we are small. And it is a curious sort of egoism for small creatures like us to insist that everything in the universe and beyond be accessible and satisfactory.

Voegelin spends much time asking questions that don't have answers, in the hopes that answers can be teased out of the fabric of reality and spirit - of course, he would disagree that there are no satisfactory answers for Leibniz, I think. But recognizing that some questions don't have answers for us is the beginning of developing a sense of perspective, and an understanding of the place we occupy. Carrying on as though the universe can cough up an answer to why there is something rather than nothing is a way of arrogating to ourselves a place we cannot claim, and a perspective we cannot have.

Some things are mysteries to us. Some things will always be mysteries to us. This is the nature of what it means to be human.

104 posted on 12/09/2002 10:24:45 AM PST by general_re
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