Metaphysics from a clean slate

  • This page is part of a group of pages looking at answers to the ‘big questions’. ‘What is the purpose of life?’ and ‘How should I live?’ are probably the biggest. For more on my motivations and approach, see Journey to a Path if you haven’t already read it. As I said there, I looked first at the foundations of logical reasoning, science and philosophy – ‘Metaphysics’, here – and then at the major ‘Established Religions’ to see what might be useful.

Metaphysics

For a long time the purest, most rigorous application of logic was in mathematics and especially in Euclid’s geometry. Formal geometry depends explicitly upon axioms – statements that have been accepted as true without ever having been proved and have been declared foundational. Axioms are, by definition, unprovable (if they were provable, it would show that they rely on something even more fundamental). They are given the status of facts, incontrovertible knowledge, although different geometries (e.g. spherical vs planar) have different axioms, and mathematicians draw freely on them for work on any problem.

Philosophical writing uses a similar scheme of logical argument but the beliefs underpinning it (1) vary from one writer to another and (2) are rarely stated explicitly. Often, I think, it is because the writer is unaware of the fact that they may not be true, or even that they exist. It seems to me that any philosophy needs to identify and justify its starting points before it can proceed safely. If it doesn’t, it is building on sand. I think the underlying assumptions or beliefs should be stated as axioms.    Continue reading “Metaphysics from a clean slate”

Pataki vs Religion

Against Religion

Tamas Pataki

Scribe (2007)

Tamas Pataki could be accused of misleading advertising. His title should have been Against Christianity or Against Monotheism. And his cover image, with its implicit hard-science associations, is misleading too, because he argues against religion primarily on the basis of Freudian theory.

To be fair, Pataki does warn the reader in his introduction that he is going to focus on the monotheistic religions. Christianity (the religion of about 33% of the world’s population) is his main target, while Islam (20%) and Judaism (a mere 0.2%) are often caught in his field of fire but less often singled out. He barely mentions Hinduism (13%) or Buddhism (6%), and in fact his prime argument applies to them poorly or not at all. Continue reading “Pataki vs Religion”

Journey towards a path

  • I wrote this in 2007-2008 primarily for my own benefit but then decided to put it on my website in case anyone else might find it useful. Nearly fifteen years later (2022) I find that I still agree with most of it so I’m moving it across to my new site rather than simply deleting it as I close down my old site.

I seem to have set out on a journey, and to have surprised my family and friends more than myself by doing so.

It is actually more accurate to say I have found time to recommence a journey that began when I was teenager but has mostly been on hold for the last twenty years. (That alone is probably enough to explain why my family and friends were more surprised than I was.) My journey re-started when it did (2006-07), rather than years earlier or later, for a mixture of personal reasons: events just combined to urge me to redefine my relationship with the world.

The journey is a quest for answers to the big questions that most of us ask from time to time and usually set aside. ‘What is the purpose of life?’ and ‘How should I live?’ are the biggest, but they lead to questions about society’s relationship with our increasingly fragile environment.

Continue reading “Journey towards a path”

Terry Lane: God – the interview

Godd Interview coverGod: the interview

Terry Lane

ABC Books, second edition, 2004

Terry Lane prefaces his book with a warning and a plea, and it is only fair to repeat them here: the contents of his book, and therefore of my review, may disturb those who are content with their deeply held Christianity. That was not his wish, nor is it mine, and we would ask such people not to continue.

Lane is widely known in Australia as a radio interviewer for the ABC. When asked casually whom he would most like to interview, he said, ‘God.’ The idea took root and this book grew from it.

Continue reading “Terry Lane: God – the interview”