I recall asking a docent at the Getty Villa Museum that houses antiquities how it was possible that the people of ancient Greece both developed mathematics, philosophy, democracy , etc. and believed that the god Mercury pulled the sun across the sky is his chariot.
He explained, “The situation then was not all that dissimilar to that of today’s United States. Most of our scientists and urbanites are atheists, as were the people who lived in or near Athens. But go out into the rural areas where most people were farmers, where highly educated people are rare, and folks tend to be deeply religious.”
People have been dancing around the faith/reason duality for more than 2000 years. Aristotle worked out the rules of logic around 350 BCE, and Thomas Aquinas assumed the task of using them to prove the existence of God in the 13th Century CE. Descartes came along a couple of hundred years later, and made some improvements on all this, but we’re still left with very little.
As I told my nephew once when he was assigned a college paper on this, “You can’t have your metaphysical cake and eat it too. You either believe in things for which there is evidence, or you don’t.”
Moreover, as shown at left, faith runs headlong into logical inconsistencies.
Wonder who this “patriot” voted for.
At left is how I feel about Trumpism. I may be limited in how I can go about preventing it from entering the world, but I’ll be damned if it will happen through me.
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