🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BxB855.7Mq@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU| sschaff@roc.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Stephen F. Schaffner) writes:
|In article <73878@hydra.gatech.EDU|, cegtitd@prism.gatech.EDU (Tim Dodd) writes:
|[on whether religious talk can be considered meaningful]
|
||| In order to judge whether a particular concept is meaningful, it is not enough
||| to ask if the concept exists.  Even asking the question makes it clear that
||| it does.  One must ask if the concept has any real referents.  If it
||| cannot be shown that such referents exist, then the concept is meaningless
||| as it does not refer to anything.
|
|It's not clear to me exactly what you mean by reality.  Religious believers in 
|general think that God is part of reality, just that he is not demostrable by 
|scientific means.  Is reality to be identified with physical reality?  In an 
|earlier post (which apparantly no longer exists -- is this an ironic gesture 
|on the part of Usenet?) you seemed to suggest that for a word or concept to be 
|meaningful, it had not only to refer to an element of reality, but had to refer 
|to an element that could (at least in principle) be detected.  Is this in fact 
|your position?

Yes.  If God were part of reality, then his existence would be demonstrable.
However, God is *defined* as being non-demonstrable.

|It seems pretty clear to me that the concept of meaning that you espouse is 
|itself meaningless under your own definition (meaning does not, after all, 
|refer to anything observable), and is in fact a philosophical rather than 
|a scientific statement.  

Au contraire:  I defined "meaning" in an earlier post.  It most certainly
refers to something real.

Tim
-- 
Tim Dodd, Research Scientist, Georgia Tech:  cegtitd@prism.gatech.edu