From: STCHRI@SSCVAX.CIS.MCMASTER.CA (DOUGL, APPARENTLY.)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.xcult-l
Subject: Re: Right and Wrong
Date: 16 Dec 92 12:34:10 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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-----She/He/They Said ----
->
->I agree with all to the extent that spiritual consensus on "natural law"
->is RELATIVE (that is, intersubjective).  In every society there are
->different plausibility structures set up to explain phenomena and provide
->plausible answers to life's great enigmas.  If you were to carry such
->notions as a stock market and national enquirer into a dislocated peasant
->commune or aborigine (sp?) tribe, your view would not be compatible with
->their mainstream beliefs of say, astrology, witchcraft, the infallibility
->of the revolutionary leader or whatever.  You would be part of a cognitive
->minority and your views, unless changed or assimilated, would be scoffed
->at or humorously tolerated.  Religion is the individual's or community's
->response or THEODICY (justification of God) to their own socio-historical
->circumstances; as time changes, so does the expedience of truth and thus
->moral subjectivity.
->
->take for example the transition from geocentric to heliocentric beliefs
->about the solar system.  Remember Galileo's final words as he was taken
->off into the dungeons (or house arrest?) after challenging the Church's
->geocentric view, which Copernicus had failed to make accepted; "The earth
->still moves, nevertheless..."--Galileo faced excommunication; it is clear
->today that the Church was dead wrong.
->
->How can we explain truth other than the most expeditious way to live
->life practically (something like a HUMAN'S GUIDE TO REALPOLITIK SURVIVAL).
->Even today, the sciences (the closest to supposed absolute truth) are
->only approximations...
->
->ERACISM
->Adam Karp--akarp@gonzaga.edu


There seems to be a misapprehension going on here to the effect that
somehow morality and science are coterminous = that is, their object is the
same thing, in this instance something labelled truth.

Truth seems to be a category of formal logic and not of morality or even
of science. To dismiss science as an approximation of 'truth' is, I fear,
to accuse it of something it never attempts to do.

Facts - sciences domain - may well only ever be approximations of reality, but
at assumes we accept the distinction between the true and the real. Morality
seems to have as its object the 'reliable' rather than the true while
science approaches predictability, not the same thing as reliability
since prediction strives toward to closed prospect while reliability
seeks to limit variability.

Neither of these are about truth.

Which, allowing for a puckish grin on my part, may be the only
true assertion I can make.

As an elderly Samoan once put it to me when I asked him if
something someone had told me was true-

        "First, tell me why you want to know."


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<-> Douglass St.Christian  <->        ______
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<-> McMaster               <->         \  /  speak
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Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU