I picked up on that right away just because “scientism” is one of my interests. Prompts like “Science will eventually answer all the big questions” or “Science can explain music and art” are dead giveaways.
This one! I had such trouble with this! Muttering to my tablet, I asked, “In what ways?” Physics? Psychology? Anthropology? YES, it can! The meaning I attach to music and art (the Arts), NO. I probably just marked the middle for that one, intending my answer to say, “BOTH!” and probably having it registered as, “Neither.” Or as @MarkD said, “Meh.”
No one would wan tme on their survey design team, I”m afraid.
: (
But I always feel like they should have asked for my input . “This question is unanswerable!”
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Haha. I’m a Wittgenstein fan. This article is great:
Wittgenstein’s Forgotten Lesson: Wittgenstein’s philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times.
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That’s helpful, Jay.
Makes me think of : Wissen vs. Kennen vs. Verstehen
Kennen doesn’t translate properly from German for this, but German understands what your quote from Wittgenstein is about.
I played briefly with a remarkable high-school aged orchestra, and after I had quit, visited one of their rehersals.* It was the first time I heard Beethovan’s 7th, 2nd mvmt. I almost swooned. It’s now one of my favorite pieces, but I can hardly endure listening to it. (I have to pull myself together just thinking about it!)
I’m sure psychologists can explain what’s happening, and then they also can’t.
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I think 4Chan would need something more like full Level A Hazmat Gear.
I have; in the process of dropping it into the recycle bin. We kept getting them (and three other magazines) for a previous resident (and not even the most recent one) for years at our previous residence.
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I answered yes to both of those. I guess I look at
It like science is the interpretation and explanation of the natural world and that eventually all of it will have that answer. Maybe even how god came into being. I also believe that music and etc is probably based on science as well. That nature and nurture leads to why one likes country and one likes metal. Or why one likes coke mods than root beer. It’s not like someone really chooses to prefer one over the other.
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I liked that as a spectrum. Makes more sense than one ranging from scientism to religious fundamentalism which aren’t really opposites. All they suffer from is irreconcilable similarities; both insist the answer is obvious and easy to ascertain while reaching different conclusions. Pluralism and scientism disagree in both those ways.
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Of course there are scientific explanations of the origins and evolution of “spiritual awareness” and religious beliefs. I’ve written about it a bit as a necessary step. The capacity to think about concepts like “god” required a lot of evolutionary development, both biologically and culturally.
The unanswerable question is whether those processes were purely “natural” or God-guided. Since I hang around here, I think you know where I land on that spectrum.
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Unanswerable or unanswered xd.
I’m at the same gap as well. Since it’s currently and for the foreseeable future unanswerable, I just accept that it’s there as a gap and continue on. Plus, even if they were not good guided, I think it could still have simply happened and that the god was simply just waiting.
Then reached out to humanity. Maybe even reached out to different groups in different ways and one of those ways was reaching out to Jews, or general Mesopotamians, through the belief of Yahweh. It gets beyond theology to just purely speculation and I presume a fruitless meditation.
And how unexpected is someone like me on the internet redirecting the question to the unobservable nature of an uncaused cause.
Now that you have me looking more closely at which neighbors are all where, I see that I’ve failed to understand something about how the axes work.
I took the vertical axis (up being more ‘substantive’, down being more ‘functional’) to mean that the upper quadrants would be more for those who thought there was actual ‘substantive’ reality attached to at least some religious claims, where as the lower two quadrants would see religion as only existing for its functional effects (makes people feel good, etc, … meets perceived emotional needs). As such, I would have thought that the new atheists would be in the lower quadrant, not the upper ones. I mean - yeah, those who are hostile to religion probably deny much of any claim on functional legitimacy as well, but surely they would all the more deny any of the claims on substantive reality!?
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I’m wondering how I’m in the same neighborhood with the N.A.s.
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Do you have … something to confess? 
I’m pretty satisfied with my neighbors. Just Darwin and Einstein. I should learn a lot.
Best of all the certainty obsessed atheists are in the opposite quadrant. (Now if I can just shake the certainty obsessed believers.)
Edited to note it wouldn’t be Darwin flanking me but one of his better interpretors, Gould.
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I’m astounded–I’m between Huxley and Freud! But I think that’s how it’s meant to work–none of us is sure, and it’s supposed to make us think. Depending on the question or the field addressed at the time, we might feel more comfortable with one interpretation over the other–but that can mutate. I’m glad God is more patient than I am in that area–he has to be, given the lack of clarity!
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Of course I do, but what that would be (what incurrs guilt) depends a great deal on whom you ask. So, once again I’m in a quandry. It’ll all come out in the survey, right?
It can mutate! That’s for sure! Let’s see how it mutates this morning.
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Now you have me curious if I took it again just how much the result will change.
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I just redid it. Nearly identical results.
Reading the explanation more carefully of the Y axis, as @Christy had mentioned, was helpful. I do consider the content of religious belief a lot, but I don’t think the survey gets to the implications of that.
I think it was @SkovandOfMitaze who was surprised that my results were not closer to yours, but sticking to the axes descriptions, I think we see differences on the graph that you and I have talked about already. I’m somewhat more inclined to see science as explaining a lot of things that we both value intuitively. I always want the answer “BOTH” but it’s nearly never available.
And we have also established that you find the content of belief much less important than I do, but we both value how one lives one’s life.
This time, I also captured shots of all the questions as I took the survey, and the write up at the end. So I have the content of the website, if I need to hash over anything again.
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Agreed so perhaps some differences should be expected or could even be predicted?
I found myself choosing responses further from center, I think because I’ve become more sure and settled in my own criteria for answering.
This time I took note of the questions where I selected the center response, something I tried hard to void. There were just 3: #4, #17 and #26.
My location moved closer to center horizontally and a little less so vertically.
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Okay - I had to go and retake it this morning, just to get to the textual explanations that I failed to read the first time. Now that I took the time to read the explanations they gave for each axis, it makes a bit more sense, though I still think it’s interesting that New Atheists are in the upper quadrant rather than in the lower one.
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