From: safaei@shiva.trl.oz.au (Farzad Safaei)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Subject: Re: Theistic religions ...
Date: 14 Apr 92 03:37:59 GMT
Organization: Telecom Research Labs,Melbourne, Australia


>
>arash@sunee.waterloo.edu (Arash Jahangir) writes:
>
>I was talking about ALL self proclaiming "complete" schools of thought.  Man
>made or otherwise, the results are always the same.  You need to have read my
>first to postings to be able to properly fallow the discussion.  This topic
>has been on for at least a dozen postings.
>

Sorry if I have missed some articles and misunderstood you. 
They tend to get lost crossing the Pacific (or is the route to Australia
through Atlantic and Indian Oceans?), and almost 
invariably arrive out of order and with long delays :-( .
For instance, most likely you have already defined what you mean
by "complete" schools of thought, but I didn't see that article
(if this is a standard terminology, pardon my ignorance).
From what followed, I deduced that you are either emphasising the
infallibility of the source, and/or the fact that if you take one
piece away from the system it falls apart.

I would very much like to know which systems you call complete. 
Is, for example, Aristotelian cosmology one of them? How about
Parmenides' doctrine? The Marx's? Euclidean Geometry?
Logical Positivism? Or, in particular, Logic itself?

>
>If you think that your beleifs are directly from God, "science of history", 
>spirit of the universe, best scientific minds of the world, or for whatever
>other reason infalable (the example of God really fits well but I don't want
>to give the impression that I am purely picking on religion), then NO you will
>close your mind to other ideas since your information cannot possibly be wrong
>(in your own openion of course) then the others must be wrong.  

I beg to differ. Our difference stems, perhaps, from the fact that
somehow you consider Investigation of Truth (or open-mindedness) not to
apply to one of the most important beliefs of the system, namely its source.
The belief that my system has an infallible source is, after all, a
belief in itself and can be questioned. I understand that, in practice, people
may have hesitation in that sort of questioning, but why should
you consider it as impossible. When the accumulated evidence against
bits and pieces of the system becomes overwhelming, you are bound to
question your very first assumption, although one would certainly
hesitate for a long time. 

Even in science, when a problematic detail is discovered, 
such as the Solar neutrino problem or homogeneity (sp?)
of the background radiation, people would hesitate to throw away
the whole cosmology or QM. They try to patch it up for a while, because
you don't want to lose a beautiful and useful theory so easily.
After all you might have missed something or misunderstood the issue.
But that doesn't mean that the "infallibility" of QM will never be
questioned.

>I have even met
>people that when they clearly faced a logical contridiction they simply said
>"well, I know I God cannot be wrong.  I just can't find the error in your 
>argument".
>

Here, as I said before, we agree. In practice dogmatism is, I am afraid,
too prevalent. Whether this "inertia" against listening to other views
is greatest among religious people (using the traditional definition of
religion) or not I don't know. But by above I was trying to show that
there is nothing *inherently*  different between them.

The rest of your article, especially the part about the method of
investigation, I generally agree with and has been deleted.

Best regards
farzad

=====================================================================
Farzad Safaei                              Email : f.safaei@trl.oz.au
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I believe I have found the missing link between animals and
civilized man. It is us.		Konrad Lorenz
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