Fishermans_Worf t1_it3kukf wrote on October 20, 2022 at 6:01 PM

Reply to comment by anarchietzsche in [Peter Harrison] Why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it by BasketCase0024

The Munchausen trilemma does neatly show the metaphysical impossibility of knowing anything for certain though it is somewhat self defeating. If all arguments and knowledge are based on unprovable assumptions—so is the Munchausen trilemma. The assumptions it makes are reasonable... but... that's its point. Reason depends on assumptions.

My question is—once you've reached the inevitable metaphysical conclusion that no truth is perfectly confirmable—where do you go from there? You must make assumptions to live. Presumably you assume you exist or that oxygen is necessary for life.

Does the uniform lack of absolute certainty affect the relative merits of arguments for truth? If not, can you say that having faith in something you directly experience and can confirm through repetition is the same as faith in something you've been told but cannot experience or test? You can't say either are True—but can you justifiably lean in a direction? Can you approach the truth? If you can approach the truth, are there methods that appear more likely to lead you in the correct direction?

IMHO—the idea that we cannot know anything for certain merely pushes me further towards worldviews that are inherently self questioning rather than ideological. Reason demands to be abandoned if it can be shown to be unsound.

anarchietzsche t1_it4y87r wrote on October 20, 2022 at 11:36 PM

Well, that's Kierkegaard's position - when you're presented with the choice between selfish hedonism, reason, and the spiritual life, we're given a contextless question with no way of building context or understanding why we have to make a choice without relying on one of the above categories to build context.

Instead of viewing the spiritual life as ideological, we might see it as submissive in the face of overwhelming knowledge - we are finite and in the face of the infinite, so we can't possibly begin to create justification within our finite spheres of understanding. See the contrast between Kierkegaard's treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac and Kant's - if we side with Kant (the ethical/reasonable thinker), we basically deform the infinite into a greater (but imperfect) version of ourselves.

So, although ideology definitely plays a part, I see the spiritual thinker as someone who admits they don't understand and can't understand something because they are limited by their finite nature. You might also think about Lovecraft here - on being confronted with otherworldly horrors or four-sided triangles, how can we begin to create explanations for something that lies outside of our abilities to reason about?

Although it sounds like crackpot nonsense at first, the bigger question really comes down to whether the limits of our language and understanding as the limits of our world are the limits of the world. If we're not careful, we're at risk of claiming beyond what we can.