Ad Infinitum…
The arguments go on, the answers never come!
There’s always a barney, or a debate if you prefer, going on somewhere around here. Science vs Religion, Theism vs Humanism, Church religion vs personal faith, Creationism vs Naturalism vs Intelligent Design, Physicalism vs Spirituality etc. etc. We have the Problem of Evil, the Problem of Consciousness and so on. Lots of words, assembled cunningly or otherwise, into lots of arguments. Lots of claims and counterclaims. Some calling on empirical evidence and the scientific method, others on subjective experience and unexplained phenomena. All using logic to ‘prove’ their arguments while forgetting that logic is only a system and that its outputs depend upon its inputs.
One of the main issues I have with all this is that too many folk are doing this arse about face. They start from a position of knowing or believing something, then construct an argument to prove it. The theist starts from belief, the atheist from unbelief. They go on at great length about physics, metaphysics, the natural, the supernatural, the self, ethics, morals and so forth, they throw in big words like ‘ontological’ and ‘epistemological’ to make everything sound serious and intellectual. They go round in circles and never produce an answer, or they already have an answer and tie themselves in knots trying to prove it’s the answer.
