Wednesday, March 19, 2014

"Something unknown …

… is doing we don't know what." Bryan Appleyard — God the Teapot. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



The quote is from Sir Arthur Eddington — a far more accomplished scientist than Richard Dawkins — and I think it is as true a statement as one is likely to encounter. Anything humans get involved with can be put to a bad use — religion, science, a hammer. At their best religion and science in their quite different ways can help us come to terms with the mystery of being. At their worst, they nourish some humans' bottomless appetite for self-righteous aggression.

Russell as a thinker has seemed over-rated to me since I was 16 and read Why I Am Not a Christian in the Holmesburg Library. His attempt to rebut Aquinas's argument from cause was that he could easily imagine an infinite series of causes. Even at 16 I could see that the question did not have anything to do with what he or anyone else could imagine, since I could easily imagine that Russell had not written that sentence. Moreover, I didn't think that he or anyone else could imagine an infinite anything, infinity being beyond the capacity of a finite mind.

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