Posts Tagged ‘Philosophy of Science’

Mr. Kargel: Fellow Seeker

BY: Mark

Ryan Kargel thinks about trees, and sometimes he thinks about faith, and sometimes he thinks about our faith in trees. Or lack thereof. His twitter bio reads: Gentleman ecologist, writer, member of the Sans-Beard Mennonites.

I officially met Ryan a few months ago when he and I and our respective wives took a road trip to Ashland, OR, to cram as much Shakespeare into our bodies as possible over three days (where, among other things, we saw the world premiere of the stage production of Throne of Blood; yes, a theater production of a Kurosawa movie that, in turn, was based on a play–it is as recursive as it sounds). During the drive, Ryan and I discovered that we shared a sense of curiosity about the world and how it works. What makes talking with Ryan fun is that he’s got a name for the Divine Instrument and I don’t, and yet, it doesn’t seem to get in the way of our conversations.

Sometimes it feels good to be ignorant.  It’s easier, because you aren’t aware of potential flaws in your beliefs. You aren’t aware of how relatively small you are, and feeling small is hard to distinguish from feeling unimportant.  That may be why it was so difficult in the 17th century for government and church to accept the Copernican astronomical model, which placed the earth in orbit around the sun.  Surely God made the universe at human scale.  We were meant to subdue it.  It says so in Genesis.  If the earth isn’t the center of the universe and if the universe is much larger than we thought, maybe we ourselves are less central than we thought.

He blogs at http://ryankargel.typepad.com/. The above quote is from his entry of November 14th, 2010, entitled “Almost There.”

John Griogair Bell Offers Insight Into Free Thinking

BY: Mark

John Griogair Bell (curator of hermetic.com), offering commentary on the nature of paradigms and the perils of binding oneself to one above all others.

The notion that all paradigms have limited boundaries of applicability, that they contain their own sets of inexplicability, means that the activity of defending a paradigm as one true anything is inherently nonsensical and illogical and unscientific. And, vehement hatred of other paradigms, or those operating within different paradigms, is bogglingly, self-evidently, torturously backward to the very idea and philosophy of science. It seems to me, that kind of vehement hate is a failure of humanity to live up to the potential afforded by the idea and philosophy of science as a function which liberates them from tyranny of form determined for them by faith.

The full post is called “Paradigms”, and it is a delightful analysis on what it means to be an occulture critic.