chewybrian wrote: ↑December 3rd, 2021, 7:46 amSy Borg wrote:... eschewing creationism (in all of its forms) does not mean being uninterested in the nature of reality. Quite the opposite. "Secularists" obviously don't all respond as a bloc; it's a diverse group. Still, I'm guessing that most won't tend to observe reality through the lens of Abrahamic mythology, and plenty will want to let nature to tell its own unadulterated story, while accepting that their limited human perceptions create some measure of skew.
I don't see anything contrary to philosophy, for example, about viewing the allegory of the cave from a secular stance. The lesson is then that we need to seek knowledge and prefer it over belief. We need to keep in mind how easily our prejudices and habits can hide the truth from us, and how our senses and even our reason can fail us at times, as in seeing that the sun revolves around the earth, rather than understanding through a lot of observation and calculation that it is actually the other way around.
I would say this is an early description of the cognitive bias of the illusion of objectivity, and has serious impacts on the way we should proceed, especially when judging others. We can learn the importance of using the scientific method, and withholding judgement until all the facts are in, even if it means withholding it for our entire lives. Still, there is nothing wrong with forming an opinion about what we expect to be proven true in the end, as long as we understand it is only a sort of guess, and could be and often is spectacularly wrong.
Yes, Plato was saying we were in the dark, although the fire for him had mystical connotations (as could be expected at that time in history). The idea is not miles from the hypothetical holographic model of the universe, where the 3D reality we know is a holographic projection of an unseen 2D surface.
chewybrian wrote: ↑December 3rd, 2021, 7:46 amI do still see that the door is open for God, and I won't discount the possibility. But, I don't see any basis for confirming or denying God, so He stays in the "I simply don't know" pile, a bit closer to the "I doubt it" side than the "it's probably true" side.
Perhaps none of this feels like "doing" philosophy to Nick, but that is what it feels like to me, contrary to whatever he is doing, running everything out to his preferred conclusion without even marking the steps along the way, much less showing how it could or should be true.
I also remain agnostic. Given the many cultures of the world and their disparate ideas of God, or gods, it seems possible that they are all wrong, but each points to aspects of reality that are currently beyond human understanding.
Nick's attempt to invalidate aspects of philosophy not concerned with religious ideas is just a game of "No real Scotsman ...". What unquestioning belief does is create a parallel bodies of knowledge, based on these beliefs. It's basically world-building, not unlike LOTR, Dune and the many series that followed in their stead.
When a metaphorical fantasy world is built, then a lore is then created - separate from the lore based on scientific bodies of knowledge. Thus we have religious philosophers whose ideas are based on, for instance, Biblical mythology. It is this kind of religious scholarship, coupled with with evangelical experientialism, that Nick claims is missing from "secularists".
While that may be true in general, it is a huge and naive generalisation to posit that a billion or so people are almost identical in this respect. For instance, very many secular people come from a religious upbringing that they later reject. Plenty of secular people are interested in the spiritualism and/or the occult. And, when push comes to shove, putting aside the aggressive bravado needed to fight natural instincts, pretty well
everyone wants to know what happens when they die. When it comes to death, a strict focus on the objective can distract from disquieting thoughts about the subjective aspect. Theists, of course, are so concerned about death that they create stories to take away the sting.
So, if we put together atheists determined to avoid
memento mori with fanatical believers determined to live forever and you get the kind of emotional divisions currently seen in the US and Europe. Instead of talking about killing each other, they'd do better to talk about how it will feel for them personally as they lie on the deathbed, leaving behind everything they thought mattered.