🚀 go-pugleaf

Tim Dodd, cegtitd@prism.gatech.edu, writes:

>  How do we decide if a statement is true?  We devise an empirical test 
>  and let reality tell us if the statement is accurate.

Sure, if you can.  When did you last try the Eotvos experiment?  Or did 
you (heavens forbid!) take the results of that experiment "on faith"?  And
do you have a good experiment to test superstring theory?

>  Religious thought is typified by "mystical mode".  In this mode of 
>  thought, it is recognized that there exists a level of "truth" or 
>  "reality" to which mere rational thought does not have access.  

There certainly might be levels of reality to which neither experience nor 
experiment have access.  That isn't the same thing as the limits of ration-
ality.  If a proposition isn't falsifiable, it isn't science.  But that 
doesn't say whether it's true or false, or even rational.  According to the 
Gospel of John, Jesus said "Before Abraham existed, I already was."  Science 
cannot touch that one, but it's a simple statement of fact, either true or 
false, with nothing "mystical" about it. 

>  These two modes of thought are mutually exclusive.  Neither can encompass
>  the other:  they cannot be mixed.  You can think mystically or rationally,
>  but you cannot do both at the same time.  

I don't see that much difference.  I can read one of St. Paul's letters with 
the exactly the same thought-modes that I read a physics book or a computer 
manual:  with every attention to detail, and with the DEFAULT assumption that 
the writer knows much more about it than I do (yet).  What is this saying?  
Do I understand it, or did I miss an essential point?  Is it internally 
consistent, and is it externally consistent with other things that I know or 
believe?  If I am having trouble with it, might that be because I have some 
prior mis-conception that is getting in the way?  Or might it be because I 
lack the necessary background?  If so, where can I get the background?  And
if I decide to reject it as pure baloney, on what basis?

Where's the "mysticism" in all that?

Ben