Of course this world is - well, at least on the face of it - a mixture of things going wrong (degeneration, disease, death and destruction), and things going right.
There are many ways in which people try to make sense of this.
Should we be most amazed when things go wrong and life is bad; or is it more accurate if we expect things to go wrong, and are amazed only if anything-at-all goes right?
Some people - both religious and mainstream-left-secular - seem to have the assumption that everything naturally goes well, and as we would wish - except when deliberately sabotaged by somebody.
I am not exaggerating - this assumption of virtuous functionality is very deeply embedded in all kinds of people.
The idea is that "things" are spontaneously good, unless or until interfered-with opposed or wrecked.
Other people explain the world almost entirely in terms of either "evil" (e.g. various kinds of selfishness - long- and short-term); or as completely random, meaningless, "things-just-happening".
And there is the conviction of "entropy" (which dominates science), that ordered and functional reality is overall and inevitably, running-down and becoming chaotic.
And there are many theories to say why selfishness and the prevalence of evil and/or tendency to chaos produce (or at least give the temporary illusion of) order and functionality (e.g. natural selection purports to explain the evolution of organismal functionality in terms of and underlying entropic tendency in genes).
There are people who say the world is unmixed (fundamentally); that the world actually is perfectly good/ functional/ ordered/ as-intended, and that evil is an illusion...
And there are also people who say the opposite: that the world is just-is evil, and deluded ones are those who see any real good in anything (e.g. that all apparent good is explicable as a covert or devious type of selfishness).
Clearly this is - and rightly so! - quite a problem for people to sort-out! I mean this is a real problem, and unavoidable; with real consequences necessarily eventuating from whatever answer we deploy.
It is a problem for religious people of all stripes; and it is also a problem for un-religious and anti-religious people.
And the range of answers, and the contradictions between answers, shows that the question cannot be solved by more "information", by observations, "empirically" -- since how we interpret the "evidence" is wholly-shaped by the theories (and structural biases) we use to gather and interpret evidence.
Yet unless we sort-out this problem to our own (genuine!) satisfaction; then the world is fundamentally alien and incomprehensible, and we will probably live in a state of confusion, fear - and maybe will resent our life and the world.
The first and essential step (it seems to me) is to become clear and explicit about what it is we actually do believe on this subject!
Few people know this; and many people deny what seems obviously to be the actual assumptions they are living-by. For instance, many people deny they have any assumptions, and assert that they live only by what is obviously and empirically true.
(They get angry and/or change the subject when asked to reflect on their own assumptions.)
After that first and essential step of knowledge; we can then we can explore our own beliefs on the "nature of things"; testing them for coherence, and checking whether "what we say we believe" really is something we personally find believable!
You may then find, as I did, that the things you believe are things that you found profoundly un-believable; things that could not really be true.
Things you do not actually live-by, and things you do not want to live by.
And that can be the basis for positive change.
Because of the vast range of publicly-asserted "answers" to this problem, each with its body of "evidence"; and because these answers all depend (in a somewhat circular fashion) on the theories by which evidence is selected and interpreted - this is a problem that each must solve for himself*.
NOTE: Rather, each person does solve this for himself; indeed each person already has "a solution" to the mixed nature of reality. The difficulty is that the solution by-which they actually live is seldom clearly known to them, and even-more-seldom is their solution acknowledged. Therefore it cannot be evaluated.
7 comments:
This is an epic précis of human assumption, Dr. Charlton. Pointing out incoherence in human behavior is obviously easy, but your categories seem to get closer to the fault-lines. Two things come to mind. Firstly, most political persuasions appear to assume the all-goes well position. That is, that societies are stable and ordered and become deranged only by the absence of markets / socialism / sovereignty / globalism, or whatever. Secondly, the reigning materialist philosophy is that all things are in decay and life itself will end completely and forever. These two ideas coincide happily at all levels of society. It seems most everyone lives as if they have a 'social self' who will seemingly live forever, and an 'experienced' self, which will eventually die, which is sad, but not, in the scheme of things, of any great importance. Perhaps as important as the loss of a pet cat.
@Crosbie - Yes, *that* is pretty much the Western norm.
A fruitful line of inquiry to be sure! A year or so before my conversion, a ladder fell off a truck in front of me on the interstate. At the time, I said I knew it was going to happen and so relatively easily avoided it. Looking back post-conversion, I would say it was a combination of knowing and being told. It got me thinking about another time, when a rod fell off the truck in front of me and again I “had a feeling” but was in heavy traffic unable to avoid it, and while it damaged my car body it just missed actually killing me or making the car undrivable. I remember talking to a friend (when we were both nearing conversion) about such events, how random chance could not possibly have kept me alive all these years nor could some skill of my own. Yes, ofc we *try* to keep debris off the road or cargo secure or a million other little things that can kill us, but so much gets through our defenses and yet so rarely do we die.
It led both of us to feel very certain that at least at the level of sustaining a particular life, it’s Divine Will that’s the main factor.
And that led to an enormous reconsideration of basically everything, still ongoing!
Yes. We can't reason our way to better assumptions, trying to make assumptions correspond to facts. Our very thoughts depend upon our existing assumptions, which ultimately are just philosophical ideas that we *prefer* to whatever came before. Presumably because they cohere better with all our other ideas. Most people acquire new assumptions socially. We may acquire them in other ways too for example from reading fiction or even from revelation.
@Ron - "Most people acquire new assumptions socially. We may acquire them in other ways too for example from reading fiction or even from revelation."
Yes. I think recognizing this is a valuable first step - because it reveals many assumptions were "smuggled in" under the radar - for example by novels, TV and movies - and therefore often by people who we would recognize as wrongly motivated.
@Mia - It was a very strange experience for me as a scientist, when I realized that all the underlying tendencies recognized by science were destructive. It suddenly struck me that organisms could never emerge in the first place, and couldn't possibly survive all of these assaults - unless there was a positive "tendency"/ force/ power. i.e. Because there is entropy, there must be "negentropy". But that is a double-negative, and the needful force must be positive... so eventually one reaches a personal deity.
The interesting thing is how very long this process took me. Because science operates within assumptions, it is very difficult to perceive these assumptions, and easier to ignore them (because things seem to "work").
So I know very well what it is to refuse to consider the assumptions, and how this state could easily become permanent.
I've known for some time that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is in complete opposition to the whole big bang / evolution fairy tale. However I've noticed that the word wizards now claim that entropy only exists within 'closed systems' and that the universe is apparently now an 'open system'...
Death is evil from the perspective of biological organism who does not want himself or his relatives to stop exist. From biological perspective as a whole death is needed to make natural selection and creation of complex organisms go on. From sociological perspective, death allows for generational shift, new thinking etc. From moral perspective, a lot of people became better persons when they lost ability to commit evil deeds because they died. Also, because of reasons 1 and 2, there are always new people coming, who have unique genes and therefore create unique ideas, behavioural patterns, worldviews and so on
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