Science vs Faith: What side are you on?

Before we rush into any conclusions, i am not asking that anyone choose one side because if you have been a staple on my blog you would realize that i always prefer a middle more stable ground rather than picking an extreme which requires that we constantly debate out stance against other extremes especially at times when our extreme theories aren't so convinving. So why do i pose the question then? Well i am asking that you tell what discipline dominates your thinking; what set of rules or justifications to you turn to when faced with a choice or otherwise moral decision. Do you look to facts in nature (science) or tend to the holy writings -bible, koran etc (faith) to justify your actions? Personally i choose neither one but use both of them choosing between each one depending on the situation at hand. I know what you are thinking; there he goes again settling for a common ground rather than sticking with one thing but honestly you can't rely on just on discipline to make who you are or at least the source of your justification. You need religion and science to go hand in hand for the a more effective society; a great mind once said " Science produces guns but religion tells you how to use it correctly". The same applies to our society today in respect to laws, rules and norms. We might want to advocate that our legal constitutions are strictly political or selected based on facts but i would disagree with that because it is impossible to have a stance on pretty much everything without appealing to you faith or believe. When a political figure or representative gives his or her stance on thing like taxes, abortion or firearms, their personal experiences as a tax payer, a conscious human with a pre-disposed knowledge on abortion as well firearm violence all come into play. They also call on their faith from time to time making them ponder if the right thing to do is to reform the tax policy, if abortion is murder and if making firearms easily accessible is the best thing for a society where gun violence is always on the news! We try to make out public space as free as possible from a particular religion, faith or belief but in doing so we open our public space to every religious belief and justification out there possible(on the basis of religion). I'm in no way advocating that our society becomes a strictly Christian or Moslem and therefore everyone has to abide to the laws of the Bible or the Koran. What i'm trying to expatiate is that we as members of a public society have to realize that others and us included have various religious beliefs we tend to call upon or use as a decision making rule book thus respect each and every one for that and realize that .....Different do not neccessarily mean wrong.

A supernatural realm?

Metaphysical realists talks about a true world; a world wherein thinks existed in their natural self. In this world, things exist independent of human interventions and perceptions thus apples here are "real" apples as Ernst von Glasersfeld puts it. We could also extend this world to include and support the objective theory of time supported by Henry of Ghent and Giles of Rome which states that time " exists in reality as a mind-independent continuum...". It is my conclusion therefore that the true world independent of our perceptions is one in which time, real apples and the reality of the world exists as what they are; without out interpretaions and perceptions.So here is my question; if this world can't be accessed, can we therefore classify it as being supernatural? Is the true world that contains real apples and time( as a mind-independent entity) metaphysical (as in beyond physical space and time)? How then can we talk of this supernatural world or at least attest to its existence when we don't know it exist or can't talk of it without making it our percieved notion of the world especially since most philosophers and great thinkers would argue that there has to be people present for things to exist (subjective theory of existence and reality) or as Aristotle puts it in reference to time; "for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted...".

Mindful Timing: A reaction to Bejamin Libet

In 1970, Benjamin Libet performed experiments with the brain and he found out that the brain initiates free choices about a third of a second before we are aware of the choice therefore the person decides to act freely before the body initiates the action. This raised the question; " whether we can speed up our minds relative to physical time...[to] become mentally more productive and get more high quality decision making done per fixed amount of physical time". I don't know if i can answer that question but i could try. A 100mph major league fast ball is about 4/10 of a second faster than the blink of an eye and some professional players have made their living being successful fastall hitters. To get to this point softball and baseball palyers have trained and trained from pee-wee till the majors as the velocity of pitches have increased. To my understanding, it takes some mind ability to play baseball; you have to make a choice between swinging or not at a pitch does for a 100mph fastball your thinking or decision making or as the article from the internet encyclopedia of philosophy puts it "initiating free choices" has to be quicker. To follow this train of thought then i will have to agree that we can by practice speed up the decision making of the mind just as the hitter who progress along the ranks till professional baseball or softball has to, to become a better hitter.

What time is it?

Well as I write this blog it is approximately 5:29pm but the answer to the above question is far more complex than a one-word answer; matter fact i don't think there's an aswer! First off, we have to make clear as to what aspect of time we are talking about; psychological (internal time) or physical time (clocks). As a conscious living organism with the capability to interpret and percieve notions, we all have and use an internal time reference (psycholgical time); is that temporal reference we use when we say time goes slower when anxiously waiting for the bus or faster when we are immersed in an interesting book. Likewise physical time is what my initial answer to the question would have been if asked what time is it; it is time in reference to seconds, minutes and hours as well days, weeks, months and years etc. Scientists developed the S.I. Unit scale to avoid the complications of local units of measurments; this scale offered a universaly recognized unit for each measurement. To me, physical time is to psychological time like units are to measurments; its a lot easier to talk of lengths in terms of inches and yards and consequently time could be in minutes and hours. We all our internal clocks to refer to like for example if we can tell if we have been sleeping for a long time or have been waiting endlessly for a bus but it is a lot easier if asked by someone else to say " i have been sleeping for two hours or have been waiting on the bus for the last ten minutes". Therefore the physical time to me is just a way of reading and analyzing psychological time essential in our external world and to make sense of our time-related experiences.

Skepticism and Faith

Being a skeptic entails eing judgemental ( for lack of a better word) about pretty much even when these things could be scientifically or logically explained. To borrow wikipedia's definition of skepticism, "A skeptic critically examines the meaning systems of his/her time, and this examination usually results in a position of ambiguity or doubt. This doubt can range from disbelief in contemporary philosophical solutions, to agnosticism to rejecting the reality of the external world". This begs to question the fact that if they question everything and everyone and certainly ponder on the certainty of human knowledge then they must have a hard believing in history and most of all religion. I mean how can you believe something you didn't experience (no intent on invoking von Glasersfeld) or better yet faith in a supreme being whose existence (no pun intended) we can't attain either by our knowledge or our perceptions. Skepticism was first introduces by Socrates who claimed the only thing he knew was nothing; even that in itself is paradoxical ( because he says he knows nothing thus he knows something-the fact that he knows "nothing") but that if the topic for a different blog somewhere down the road. But back to the question of faith and skepticism. Do skeptics believe in historical events, do they have faith in God or any divine being or gods for that matter? What strikes me ass odd is the fact that skepticism's foundation is linked to the Greeks who to my knowledge were also very godly; from zeus, to atlas, thor and the rest. How can a skeptic justify his belief (if any) in religion and consequently his faith when he restrains from making assertions of things in everyday life; "The hallmark of the skeptikoi (the Greek terminology refered to skeptic philosophers) was caution; they refused to be caught in assertions that could be proven false". ?

Ontological Reality A Myth?

Our perception of the world is the onlys access by which we can experience this mysterious world we live in and better yet these perceptions is unique and different from individual to individual as a result of our background-past and present and in general who we are as a person. This in summation is von Glasersfeld point or atleast one of them and to clarify this stance or the above statement i'll use this example. Lets say we have a questionaire about the MBTA ( Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority) and one of the questions is how safe is the bus/subway? To someone not familiar with the woes associated with the public transport they might say it is easy, accessible and safe ( which for the most part it is) but to me and most people who have taken the bus and trains in boston or atleast have listened to the news over the last few years i'll be a little bit reluctant to answer that question by just a check. After witnessing people being shot on a bus right infront of me my perception of the MBTA's safety is different from that of a person who maybe just started riding the bus a week ago. So my point, well my understnding of von Glasersfeld's point here is that our perceptions will differ from person to person based on our experiences. That brings me to Methaphysical Realism: the epistemological theory that believes in an ontological rality or "true" world independent of our experience. I tend to believe that there's a world independent of our reality but with my limited knowledge on the subject restricts me from proving how i can talk of this world independent of my experience. So that begs me to question, how would a methaphysical realist approach this? What would their response be to the presence of this real world outside my perception when my perception is the only way in which i can access that world? How can i rely on my perception or the perceptions of othere or better yet my perception of other perception ( mine and that of others) when our perecptions differ based on our experiences and there's no way of knowing which is true? This is a lot more complicated that matching a painting the paint on the wall like von Glasersfeld so eloquently attributed methaphysical realism to!!!!

Existence outside Experience

According to von Glasersfeld, we can't speak of our world outside our experiences or better yet a world of real apples; where things exists independent of our perception. Ernst von Glasersfeld proposes that we can only come in a contact with world by means of our perceptions and those we can't talk of something even ourselves without pervieving it. Those how can we talk of something before we percieve it? The moment we start talking about a world where things exist outside our experience we've already crossed over or accessed those things via our perceptions. The world where real apples exist; to borrow von Glasersfeld's example seizes to exist once i talk about it because it becomes a percieve apple and no longer a real apple. With this train of thought it seems like Ernst von Glasersfeld wins no matter what and how. It seems liek we can't access the world let alone the truth of it without percieving it. TO make matters worse, how can we talk of the truth about the world when all we can do as individuals is percieve it. My perceptions of the world differ from each others thus we can't rely on our perceptions to pass judgement on the reality of the world especially since there's no way of proving that, that particular perception is right. so now we are stuck of not having access of to the world we live in but even worse we can't tell if what we percieve of our world is true or not. so we do we go from here? Personally i think i'm worse off now than before when i thought there was a world outside my existence, our world i came into contact with every perception.

What Epistemology and Religion have in Common

Like Religion epistemology and the search for a theory to explain our knowledge and attainement of it is fast becoming sectual. Philophers, Psychologists and intellectual minds from time immemorail have taken sides and formed camps about issues like what morality is, how do we develop as humansn animal ethics and now how we come to know what we know of the world. Locke, Piaget, Vygotsky, Chomsky and others including Ernst von Glasersfeld have chosen various sides as to how we aquire knowledge and as such has become sectual. Like the protestants, catholics, baptists, jehovah witness and adventists of Christianity, Epistemology is following suit and the sad path of the matter is i think this creates a much biggger problem. Rather than trying to solve the problem at hand, this various camps are indirectly creating more problems as they fight against each other trying to decide whose theory is right or wrong.
To quote D.C. Philips, " this descent into sectarianism, and the accompanying growth in distrust of nonbelievers is probablt fate of all large scale movement". The problem of sectarianism is that individuals of the various camps don't believe in each other and rather than fightng towards their common goal; how we attain knowledge of the world or if that knowledge if justified ( in this case), endless hours, man-power and brain power are consumed as we disagree and reject each others perspective.
I think it is time we put aside our differences and agreed to disagree just so we take ten steps forward towards the objective rather than taken numerous steps in other directions except forward!!!