So what am I doing?
Having delivered myself of some crankiness (warned ya), I figure I should let you-all know what I'm really up to.
I'm working on a book -- tentative title: "Your Metaphysics is Too Small"
The basic idea is that the metaphysics that Christianity has been using since the Year One is that of Aristotle (with a bit of Platonism here & there). It essentially describes the world as being 3-1/2 dimensional (up/down; left/right; in/out -- and one direction [forward] of time). This metaphysics also carries over into Science, and definitely into the Weltanschauung of the "rational humanists" (who are often devotees of Scientism).
Modern Physics talks about up to 11 spatial dimensions, in order to make things work. If we look carefully at the traditional language used to describe God, there are hints that He must be at least a 5-dimensional being, if not a 12-dimensional one. What I plan to do is to work out a metaphysics that describes the world in a manner that science will be comfortable with, and which has room for God -- even if it does not give a recipe for how to _become_ God.
As part of this effort, I am also going to be taking a close look at Aristotelian Logic -- specifically his "Law of the Excluded Mean." What that says is that a proposition may be true or false, but nothing in between. Or that something may be good or bad, but nothing in between.
This is intuitively and obviously false, to every adult person. Binary logic is easy to work with, and children of a certain age love it. It does not, however, adequately describe the real world.
The only propositions whose truth or falsity we can determine unambiguously are trivial ones. On even cursory analysis, every interesting or important proposition reveals itself as a congeries of smaller propositions, each with its own truth-value, or importance. Carried far enough, the analysis will reach simple (and trivial) propositions -- but not necessarily in a finite amount of time.
Having reached the uttermost levels of trivial truth/falsity, it is not obvious how to get back to the original proposition -- and make a useful decision. One of the ways proposed to handle this gaping hole in logic is "Fuzzy Logic" -- to give propositions a real number between 0 and 1 to indicate their truth values.
If one can calculate how "true" (or fast, or important) something we are interested in is, then we have a fighting chance to make a useful decision, without squeezing everything into an artificial duality. It also avoids the problem of being cornered into choosing between two equally unpleasant conclusions -- i.e. we get a "None Of The Above" choice, and can back it up with a consistent logic.
Another viewpoint is that of Buddhist Logic -- which says that, in addition to "True" and "False", there are two more possible truth values: "Neither True nor False" and "Both True and False" In the case of a flipped coin, we usually think that it has two states: Heads or Tails. Actually, it has 4: The two usual ones, which are far and away the most common; the case where the coin lands on its edge, without falling over -- which is equivalent to "Both True and False"; The case where a magpie (who like shiny things) flies by just as the coin goes in the air, grabs it and flies away -- equivalent to "Neither True nor False".
I will frankly admit that I am a conservative and traditionalist Old Catholic clergyman, and that what I am doing is trying to formulate a metaphysical possition that will make sense of God and mankind's relation to Him in language acceptable to modern people. History has shown that, by and large, Aristotelian metaphysics no longer enlightens or uplifts modern, educated people.
Whether I succeed, I will leave tot he judgment of the reader, when the thing gets published.
I'm working on a book -- tentative title: "Your Metaphysics is Too Small"
The basic idea is that the metaphysics that Christianity has been using since the Year One is that of Aristotle (with a bit of Platonism here & there). It essentially describes the world as being 3-1/2 dimensional (up/down; left/right; in/out -- and one direction [forward] of time). This metaphysics also carries over into Science, and definitely into the Weltanschauung of the "rational humanists" (who are often devotees of Scientism).
Modern Physics talks about up to 11 spatial dimensions, in order to make things work. If we look carefully at the traditional language used to describe God, there are hints that He must be at least a 5-dimensional being, if not a 12-dimensional one. What I plan to do is to work out a metaphysics that describes the world in a manner that science will be comfortable with, and which has room for God -- even if it does not give a recipe for how to _become_ God.
As part of this effort, I am also going to be taking a close look at Aristotelian Logic -- specifically his "Law of the Excluded Mean." What that says is that a proposition may be true or false, but nothing in between. Or that something may be good or bad, but nothing in between.
This is intuitively and obviously false, to every adult person. Binary logic is easy to work with, and children of a certain age love it. It does not, however, adequately describe the real world.
The only propositions whose truth or falsity we can determine unambiguously are trivial ones. On even cursory analysis, every interesting or important proposition reveals itself as a congeries of smaller propositions, each with its own truth-value, or importance. Carried far enough, the analysis will reach simple (and trivial) propositions -- but not necessarily in a finite amount of time.
Having reached the uttermost levels of trivial truth/falsity, it is not obvious how to get back to the original proposition -- and make a useful decision. One of the ways proposed to handle this gaping hole in logic is "Fuzzy Logic" -- to give propositions a real number between 0 and 1 to indicate their truth values.
If one can calculate how "true" (or fast, or important) something we are interested in is, then we have a fighting chance to make a useful decision, without squeezing everything into an artificial duality. It also avoids the problem of being cornered into choosing between two equally unpleasant conclusions -- i.e. we get a "None Of The Above" choice, and can back it up with a consistent logic.
Another viewpoint is that of Buddhist Logic -- which says that, in addition to "True" and "False", there are two more possible truth values: "Neither True nor False" and "Both True and False" In the case of a flipped coin, we usually think that it has two states: Heads or Tails. Actually, it has 4: The two usual ones, which are far and away the most common; the case where the coin lands on its edge, without falling over -- which is equivalent to "Both True and False"; The case where a magpie (who like shiny things) flies by just as the coin goes in the air, grabs it and flies away -- equivalent to "Neither True nor False".
I will frankly admit that I am a conservative and traditionalist Old Catholic clergyman, and that what I am doing is trying to formulate a metaphysical possition that will make sense of God and mankind's relation to Him in language acceptable to modern people. History has shown that, by and large, Aristotelian metaphysics no longer enlightens or uplifts modern, educated people.
Whether I succeed, I will leave tot he judgment of the reader, when the thing gets published.
posted by Sam'l B. at
10:35 PM
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