Philosophers have given up asking the big questions as unanswerable

Friday, May 11, 2007 The Cosmic No: Truth and its Oppositional Opponents

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

The typical contemporary intellectual is a proud cynic. As such, his artificially inflated mind revolves around the low-hanging fruit of what it can easily disprove and what it does not believe. Yes, it's a Tree of Death, but the mind must eat something. Being that the lower mind can disprove most anything it can prove, this simply redounds to one of the many flavors of nihilism -- for there is only one One, but numberless zeros.

A bare acquaintance with the history of philosophy proves this beyond doubt. Philosophers cannot even agree on the questions, let alone the answers, so it becomes the proverbial "journey of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." In the absence of religion, there is simply no way to exit this closed circle of thought, for religion is nothing more or less than a leap through the hole that has been conveniently planted in the (vertical) center, or "heart" of the cosmos.

To be perfectly inaccurate, there is an upside-down Tree of Life that grows from this hole, its roots aloft, its branches and leaves down here below. In fact, for the most part, philosophers have given up asking the big questions as unanswerable, the result being that contemporary philosophy has become analogous to the drunken Dupree who looks for his keys under the street lamp because that's where the light is.

People ask why I gave Dupree a miner's helmet for his last birthday, and this is why. Now, when he's stumbling around looking for something in the middle of the night, he can pass beyond the horizon of the dim little 60-watt out in the garage. Is there something comparable to a miner's helmet for the human mind, so that we may carry our own headlight with which to examine truth, instead of restricting truth to the narrow area that is lit up by the scientific method? Few scientists even think about metaphysics, but science is implicitly rooted in what is called ontological monism.

As such, it begins with an a priori faith in the idea that the world is materially and logically self-sufficient, and that no outside causes need be evoked to explain or account for anything. Therefore, the materialistic scientist necessarily believes in a closed system from which it is impossible to escape:

"Any scientific inquiry is carried out under the rubric of rational thinking, which has a limited domain of application (an epistemological horizon) that predetermines its ontology [emphasis mine]. It is always difficult for science to transcend this horizon and to judge its ontological statements from the outside, from the epistemological frame that transcends the world (into the realm of existence not embraced by science), because this 'outside' is not identified by science as a comprehensible, objective reality" (Nesteruk)... posted by Gagdad Bob at 5/11/2007 07:01:00 AM 57 comments links to this post