...I printed & am reading your fascinating links--thanks! But, I confess, I'm not getting very far because the ideas take me a zillion directions. It's kind of the 'embarrassment of riches' problem.
OK, I just have to insert some beginning thoughts here, even though there's so much more to go through.
First of all, the word
constructivism is just numinous to me. More on that later. I think it's a key idea.
This is from the first post on your epistemology link (you have to click a link on the post to get there):
Quote:
The problem isn't just with the tendency to parse the world into dichotomies, but also the general tendency to see things as *conflicting* opposites--in other words, to hold conflict as nearly the most basic organizing category of experience.
That, I think, is a very pervasive and harmful tendency of human nature--perhaps one we are in the process of evolving away from.
It might be better to see the world in terms of dynamic axes. In other words, to not think of "black" and "white" but instead of a "dynamic black--white axis".
--John Uebersax PhD
Epistemology | Google Groups |
In the context of this discussion, that immediately brought to mind something I said on another thread:
Quote:
Actually, I think religion and science are evolutionary drivers of each other!
Quote:
Albert Einstein:
Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame.
| Or, as someone else said:
God is pressure.
Creation / Evolution Debate and Spiritual Development |
This reminds me of something Steven Strogatz discusses in his book
Sync, namely Zhabotinsky soup, a chemical oscillator which "changes colors back and forth, rhythmically alternating between sky blue and rusty red dozens of times, before eventually relaxing to equilibrium," and seems an evocative (but not perfect) metaphor for religion and evolution being evolutionary drivers of each other, at least to me.
Hip Forums - So...What Exactly IS; Zhabotinsky Soup? Archives
What I'm saying is that
I see Religion and Science as evolutionary oscillators, which create a "pulse of propagating excitation" back and forth, and this accounts for the emergence of science in the West.
I don't mean religion reduced to absurdity, e.g. snake-handling, burning-witches-at-stake, or giving-till-it-hurts religion, but
religion [awe, wonder, aesthetic sense, imagination, intuition, human propensity to "see-things-whole," reach-exceeds-grasp, contemplative religion] as an emergent co-equal evolutionary force with science. In that sense, it's hard to really separate religion from science, it seems to me.
That's my hypothesis and I'm stickin' to it...until someone beats it outta me anyways.
