23 June 2016

Definition of theology

What is the definition of theology?

Believe first, ask questions later.

Why am I a non-believer?

Because belief obstructs the view.

I prefer to ask questions straight away.

See also:

Absolutely Divine Everyday

07 June 2016

Aristotle deleted

Just imagine: you receive an e-mail from someone called 'Desert Scorpion' with the message that Aristotle's lost writings, including the dialogue De Philosophia, but also lots more, have been miraculously found in the Syrian desert, accidentally unearthed by a drone-fired missile.
Unfortunately, the scrolls fell into the hands of Islamists, who burnt them as unislamic.
To prove that they had had them and rub salt into the West's wound, however, they painstakingly photographed and digitized all of them, and put them on their web-site for propaganda purposes.
U.S. cyber-warriors took down the Islamists' web-site, inadvertently destroying also all the happily rediscovered, digitized Aristotelean manuscripts..
But shortly before this U.S. cyber-intervention, an alert individual calling himself Desert Scorpion had downloaded all the rediscovered Aristotle and encoded it in a blockchain.
Desert Scorpion then sent out an e-mail en masse calling on each recipient to respond, thus securing the existence of the invaluable philosophical documents. If a dozen people worldwide didn't respond by a certain date, the digitized Aristotle would self-destruct, he said.

But you're short of time. You really, really mean to get back to this very important link, but forget. You have super-urgent things to do. Almost all the other recipients of the e-mail are also too busy. There were only three clicks by the deadline to save the digital files. The long-lost, but now rediscovered, Aristotelean treasures self-destruct due to the blockchain algorithm.

"That's the way the cookie crumbles," you think to yourself when, weeks later, you recall the ignored e-mail. "Who needs Aristotle, anyway, now that we have modern science?"

Science doesn't think

In  his 1954 lectures, Was heißt Denken?, Heidegger famously said,
"Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht."
(English: "Science doesn't think.")
Is that a way to make friends and influence people in this day and age?
Depends on who your friends are.

Bertrand Russell says in his ABC of Relativity: Understanding Einstein from 1925,
and scientists as well as analytic philosophers agree:
"Common sense imagines that when it sees a table, it sees a table. This is a delusion."
This pronouncement is a consequence of seeing the world through the peep-hole of mathematical formulae.
Is Bertrand Russell your friend?
He himself is certainly a friend of mathematized science, which rewards all its loyal vassals by imbuing them with hubristic self-confidence.

Further reading: the Appendix 'A demathematizing phenomenological view of quantum mechanical indeterminacy' in The Digital Cast of Being
Hear also Analytic P. and Willy P. absorbs Bertie.