So, to rebut my post, a board member quoted a Harvard social science Ph.D
..That is a failure to realize that the longer one spends in university in the social sciences, the less wisdom one has! More knowledge, perhaps
..but less wisdom.
Why?
1. We have the Enlightenment, and, concomitant, the French Revolution, to thank for the concept that reason should be the guiding principle of life. To clarify, that means reason to the exclusion of morality. Early on, reason had been regarded as a powerful tool for knowing truth, goodness, and beauty. But, with the Enlightenment, and the split that emerged between facts and values, only the kind of reason associated with science was considered appropriate to understand and control the world.
a. "The Cult of Reason (French: Culte de la Raison) a was an atheistic belief system established in France and intended as a replacement for Christianity during the French Revolution."
Cult of Reason - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. But reason cannot indicate which uses of nature, of the world, are good or humane. Reason may point us in the direction of achieving our goals, but cannot determine which goals are right to pursue in the first place: it ascertains what we can do, but not what we should do. What works, but not what is good. Facts, but not values.
3. Consider this concrete example of the above:
Was it the reason associated with science, or was it moral values that produced poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs,
attack submarines, napalm, inter continental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? Which was it?
Berlinski, The Devils Delusion
4. If you are a philosophical naturalist (="nature" is all that there is), then what sense do you make of ethics? Is morality natural? As the philosopher Simon Blackburn puts it in his Ruling Passions, the problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part. "The task before us is to try to squeeze morality into the disenchanted natural world; as Blackburn says, this is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order. (i.e., God)
John Piippo: Naturalistic Ethics & Boiling Babies for Fun
a. But, examples of morality intrinsic in nature are as rare as hens teeth. What is left? "God is the source of morality, because morality is grounded in the character of God the moral law is a feature of Gods nature. Morality, is ultimately grounded in the perfect nature of God." (Ibid.)
5. Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty noted the change in authorship of morality: The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. Last Words from Richard Rorty | The Progressive
While Rorty considered this a great advance, consider how this fits the actions of Nazi Germany, in tune with its free consensus.
6. Faced with the poor results from reason sans values, many attempted to reinstate an earlier view, via what existentialists called a leap of faith. I hope that one would see the irony, or the closing of the circle, by the incorporation of faith back into behavior.
The phrase was, in fact, a trademark of sorts of the first existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, himself a Danish Protestant. They endorsed a split between science as fact, and religion as meaning, asserting that religious statements demanded an existential leap.
Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge, p. 121,123,126.
Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
Why?
1. We have the Enlightenment, and, concomitant, the French Revolution, to thank for the concept that reason should be the guiding principle of life. To clarify, that means reason to the exclusion of morality. Early on, reason had been regarded as a powerful tool for knowing truth, goodness, and beauty. But, with the Enlightenment, and the split that emerged between facts and values, only the kind of reason associated with science was considered appropriate to understand and control the world.
a. "The Cult of Reason (French: Culte de la Raison) a was an atheistic belief system established in France and intended as a replacement for Christianity during the French Revolution."
Cult of Reason - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. But reason cannot indicate which uses of nature, of the world, are good or humane. Reason may point us in the direction of achieving our goals, but cannot determine which goals are right to pursue in the first place: it ascertains what we can do, but not what we should do. What works, but not what is good. Facts, but not values.
3. Consider this concrete example of the above:
Was it the reason associated with science, or was it moral values that produced poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs,
attack submarines, napalm, inter continental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? Which was it?
Berlinski, The Devils Delusion
4. If you are a philosophical naturalist (="nature" is all that there is), then what sense do you make of ethics? Is morality natural? As the philosopher Simon Blackburn puts it in his Ruling Passions, the problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part. "The task before us is to try to squeeze morality into the disenchanted natural world; as Blackburn says, this is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order. (i.e., God)
John Piippo: Naturalistic Ethics & Boiling Babies for Fun
a. But, examples of morality intrinsic in nature are as rare as hens teeth. What is left? "God is the source of morality, because morality is grounded in the character of God the moral law is a feature of Gods nature. Morality, is ultimately grounded in the perfect nature of God." (Ibid.)
5. Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty noted the change in authorship of morality: The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. Last Words from Richard Rorty | The Progressive
While Rorty considered this a great advance, consider how this fits the actions of Nazi Germany, in tune with its free consensus.
6. Faced with the poor results from reason sans values, many attempted to reinstate an earlier view, via what existentialists called a leap of faith. I hope that one would see the irony, or the closing of the circle, by the incorporation of faith back into behavior.
The phrase was, in fact, a trademark of sorts of the first existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, himself a Danish Protestant. They endorsed a split between science as fact, and religion as meaning, asserting that religious statements demanded an existential leap.
Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge, p. 121,123,126.
Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
