is my worldview naturalistic?
Jul. 28th, 2006 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaI've been flirting with the label of "Bright" (mostly as an act of self-defense, since i have come to consider religion a direct threat to my life, health, sanity, and well-being).
But i'm not sure that my views are actually 'naturalistic,' in the sense that they mean.
I do not believe in anything supernatural. I do feel very strongly though that there are things which rationality cannot explain. Rationality is a product of the human nervous system and therefore contains inherent limitations. To be a naturalist, is it necessary to believe that all natural processes can be rationally described?
Notable Brights like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett actively deny the existence of the mind, claiming that it is an illusion created by the brain's continual revision of an ongoing first-person narrative. Dennett's conclusion is based on the presumption that everything that occurs within our conscious mind MUST have a neural correlate.
This is not a presumption that i'm willing to concede. My theory that mind is a physical field is naturalistic and monistic (i deny the "mind/body duality") but not eliminative or deterministic. Supernatural? Close enough for government work?
My thoughts about god are pretty unconventional too. My attempts to describe god as "meaningfully nonexistent," as something that exists in the potential for things to happen or grow or as a result of the conscious explication of reality out of the holomovement, feel to me now, in retrospect, as somewhat desperate attempts to justify holding out for the possibility of any sort of transpersonal being in the light of serious questions that the idea of god is anything more than a hiccup of the human brain.
Pascal Boyer made a point which sticks with me. On page 158 of Religion Explained he points out that our understanding of god is primarily concerned with god's knowledge of and concern with human affairs. Thus it seems silly or irrelevant to ask whether god knows the state of every machine on Earth or what every insect is up to, or what god is made out of... and these questions seem silly because we think of god primarily in terms of god's relation to us, to other people, and to human society. I think it was this point that nailed the coffin shut, for me.
I don't want to deny the importance of faith or hope, or it's potential for transforming someone's life for the better. But is it necessary to have faith "in" something? Or, alternately, is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist? I have long thought that the whole idea of holding faith hostage to one set or another of poison memes is an intolerable cruelty.
But i'm not sure that my views are actually 'naturalistic,' in the sense that they mean.
I do not believe in anything supernatural. I do feel very strongly though that there are things which rationality cannot explain. Rationality is a product of the human nervous system and therefore contains inherent limitations. To be a naturalist, is it necessary to believe that all natural processes can be rationally described?
Notable Brights like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett actively deny the existence of the mind, claiming that it is an illusion created by the brain's continual revision of an ongoing first-person narrative. Dennett's conclusion is based on the presumption that everything that occurs within our conscious mind MUST have a neural correlate.
This is not a presumption that i'm willing to concede. My theory that mind is a physical field is naturalistic and monistic (i deny the "mind/body duality") but not eliminative or deterministic. Supernatural? Close enough for government work?
My thoughts about god are pretty unconventional too. My attempts to describe god as "meaningfully nonexistent," as something that exists in the potential for things to happen or grow or as a result of the conscious explication of reality out of the holomovement, feel to me now, in retrospect, as somewhat desperate attempts to justify holding out for the possibility of any sort of transpersonal being in the light of serious questions that the idea of god is anything more than a hiccup of the human brain.
Pascal Boyer made a point which sticks with me. On page 158 of Religion Explained he points out that our understanding of god is primarily concerned with god's knowledge of and concern with human affairs. Thus it seems silly or irrelevant to ask whether god knows the state of every machine on Earth or what every insect is up to, or what god is made out of... and these questions seem silly because we think of god primarily in terms of god's relation to us, to other people, and to human society. I think it was this point that nailed the coffin shut, for me.
I don't want to deny the importance of faith or hope, or it's potential for transforming someone's life for the better. But is it necessary to have faith "in" something? Or, alternately, is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist? I have long thought that the whole idea of holding faith hostage to one set or another of poison memes is an intolerable cruelty.
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Date: 2006-07-29 10:35 am (UTC)Ugh. The idea of calling oneself a Bright just rubbed me the wrong way, and after reading this bit I figured out why. You want to talk about a "socially burdensome label", being a "bright" or "gifted" child, that most definitely qualifies. If I could find the slightest hint that these folks were attempting label reclaimation, it wouldn't bother me so much, but it just appears to me to be an attempt to assign a pretty name to secular, skeptial humanism.