Problems and Mysteries

The debate about whether God is real misses the true nature of the question. Here’s why.
By Marc Gellman

The French existentialist Gabriel Marcel in his book "The Mystery of Being" helpfully distinguished between two types of questions: problems and mysteries. Problems are questions about things outside of us that we lay siege to. When we answer them correctly they go away forever.
...
Mysteries are not questions we constitute (those are problems). Mysteries are, according to Marcel, questions within which we ourselves are constituted. Mysteries are not problems that have not yet been answered.

I think this is just word play. Historically we have often thought we were constituted of different "mysteries" that turned out to be "problems" after all. Belief in a god or the supernatural is the same sort of thing. The question isn't "Is there a God?" the proper question is "Why do we think gods (or ghosts, or ESP) are real?"

Time to start reading Dan Dennett's: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

:-Dan

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Just fooling around with blogging pictures.

:-Dan

Another Dan quote:

“I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking 

 

Penn has left my head

I miss him already.

Penn Jillette closed down his radio show (always a podcast for me). I cannot express how important it was for me to listen to Penn scream "There is NO GOD!" at the top of his voice.
I was well on the path to becoming vocal materialist by this time, but I was alway looking over my shoulder, to see Penn running ahead with such unbridled joy made me look forward.
He always brought a smile to my face, made me think, and warmed my heart, even when I could not agree with him.

I'm pretty sure I'm sad, still too soon to tell. I had a sense it was coming. I'm afraid watching Identity will be no replacement at all.

As a random example of the quality of Penn's discourse, I recently transcribed this quote from a show that aired a few days ago:

"You aren't supposed to deliberately misrepresent the world to your fellow human beings."
-- Penn Jillette (www.pennradio.com 2/28/2007 (26 min into the podcast version))

I hope someone with greater skill than I (and more time on their hands) puts together a few CDs with the "Best of Penn Radio". Clearly we would need "Penn Troubled by Frosty" and MANY others. I think I have them all either in my iPod or on backup DVD. Many if not all are still online somewhere.

:-Dan