poke: There’s a knowable “physical” world and an unknowable one beyond it. There’s no reason to believe this is the case.
How would you know? Surely there are a great many things that are unknown and unknowable. The idea that it constitutes a separate “world” is your phrase, not mine.
Moreover, if you believed something like this, you would be able to say “I’m an atheist about the physical world” and we could all agree on that and discuss whether talk of “something beyond the physical world” is coherent.
Er, no. You make the mistake of supposing that this “unknowable world” is just like our own but disconnected from it. Again, I return to my analogy to mathematical objects and the world of Platonic ideals that they exist in. There’s a non-physical “world”, vastly different from the physical world yet intimately involved with it. If the spiritual concepts have any reality at all, it’s got to be something like that.
So, if anyone is still interested in talking about this, how about breaking down this idea into two parts:
standard mathematical Platonism (not a settled truth, but usually considered the default position in philosophy of mathematics)
my tentative analogy between mathematical objects and supernatural entities
Feel free to disagree or question either of these parts, but at least say which one you are disagreeing with.
How would you know? Surely there are a great many things that are unknown and unknowable. The idea that it constitutes a separate “world” is your phrase, not mine.
I don’t know if there is cake in the asteroid belt, and given current technology such a thing is, at this time, unknowable. That doesn’t give credence to the absurd notion that there is cake in the asteroid belt. I have no reason to believe this is the case.
The “supernatural” is a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot less discoverable than cake.
poke: There’s a knowable “physical” world and an unknowable one beyond it. There’s no reason to believe this is the case.
How would you know? Surely there are a great many things that are unknown and unknowable. The idea that it constitutes a separate “world” is your phrase, not mine.
Moreover, if you believed something like this, you would be able to say “I’m an atheist about the physical world” and we could all agree on that and discuss whether talk of “something beyond the physical world” is coherent.
Er, no. You make the mistake of supposing that this “unknowable world” is just like our own but disconnected from it. Again, I return to my analogy to mathematical objects and the world of Platonic ideals that they exist in. There’s a non-physical “world”, vastly different from the physical world yet intimately involved with it. If the spiritual concepts have any reality at all, it’s got to be something like that.
So, if anyone is still interested in talking about this, how about breaking down this idea into two parts:
standard mathematical Platonism (not a settled truth, but usually considered the default position in philosophy of mathematics)
my tentative analogy between mathematical objects and supernatural entities
Feel free to disagree or question either of these parts, but at least say which one you are disagreeing with.
I don’t know if there is cake in the asteroid belt, and given current technology such a thing is, at this time, unknowable. That doesn’t give credence to the absurd notion that there is cake in the asteroid belt. I have no reason to believe this is the case.
The “supernatural” is a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot less discoverable than cake.