the only way we can know God is to know Her directly.
On the other hand, "Science is adept at detecting and measuring that which is not directly detectable" - when you say "science" is adept" it's not clear what you refer to.
Science only has one ultimate tool for directly detecting anything - human perception. Technology doesn't "detect" - it responds blindly with read-outs, which human minds analyze.
That's it - human perception (of the most ordinary, superficial kind, as scientific education does not include a single class in refining perception) and analysis (also of the ordinary kind, that all scientific training refines it). The fact that the greatest scientists regularly make philosophic pronouncements that would be given a failing grade in an advanced placement high school philosophy class indicates that the training of the mind found in scientific education is extremely limited.
Going beyond that, philosophic education in the modern age mostly offers a different kind of thinking but hardly more than a refined version of ordinary human analysis.
If we are going to go "beyond belief" it might be wise to take a look at the forms of intuition refined in contemplative traditions around the world, which even with a limited glance would show the ease with which one can know and see God, and the impossibility of even defining the pure "matter" or "physical stuff" which so many philosophically illiterate scientists take to be "Reality."
I often forget that people read something like this and take it as a critique of science.
No.
it's a critique of scientism.
The mechanical method of empirical investigation developed over the past 4 centuries is one of the greatest methods to have developed in the past several thousand years to explore one very limited aspect of nature, that which can be measured, and analyzed according to the predominant consciousness structure of the past 2500 -4000 years.
Scientism is the belief that this method confers some kind of authority to make metaphysical statements, and beyond that, to pronounce on mystical and contemplative revelation. This is not just dogma but delusion, just as much as the idea of some kind of purely "physical" standalone "stuff" can only be called delusional. Or as Sri Aurobindo put it in "The Life Divine," "a nightmare, a phantasmagoria."
Spot on! I was thinking along similar lines--how could things just HAPPEN unless they were guided somehow? I like that you point out the consistency of phenomena as well. BTW, G-d is nonbinary.
the only way we can know God is to know Her directly.
On the other hand, "Science is adept at detecting and measuring that which is not directly detectable" - when you say "science" is adept" it's not clear what you refer to.
Science only has one ultimate tool for directly detecting anything - human perception. Technology doesn't "detect" - it responds blindly with read-outs, which human minds analyze.
That's it - human perception (of the most ordinary, superficial kind, as scientific education does not include a single class in refining perception) and analysis (also of the ordinary kind, that all scientific training refines it). The fact that the greatest scientists regularly make philosophic pronouncements that would be given a failing grade in an advanced placement high school philosophy class indicates that the training of the mind found in scientific education is extremely limited.
Going beyond that, philosophic education in the modern age mostly offers a different kind of thinking but hardly more than a refined version of ordinary human analysis.
If we are going to go "beyond belief" it might be wise to take a look at the forms of intuition refined in contemplative traditions around the world, which even with a limited glance would show the ease with which one can know and see God, and the impossibility of even defining the pure "matter" or "physical stuff" which so many philosophically illiterate scientists take to be "Reality."
I often forget that people read something like this and take it as a critique of science.
No.
it's a critique of scientism.
The mechanical method of empirical investigation developed over the past 4 centuries is one of the greatest methods to have developed in the past several thousand years to explore one very limited aspect of nature, that which can be measured, and analyzed according to the predominant consciousness structure of the past 2500 -4000 years.
Scientism is the belief that this method confers some kind of authority to make metaphysical statements, and beyond that, to pronounce on mystical and contemplative revelation. This is not just dogma but delusion, just as much as the idea of some kind of purely "physical" standalone "stuff" can only be called delusional. Or as Sri Aurobindo put it in "The Life Divine," "a nightmare, a phantasmagoria."
Spot on! I was thinking along similar lines--how could things just HAPPEN unless they were guided somehow? I like that you point out the consistency of phenomena as well. BTW, G-d is nonbinary.
I love that - G-D as non binary. Thanks for setting me Spaight - I mean, straight (wait, is it ok to say "straight" in this context?"
No problem. LOL.