From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri May 11 2001 - 21:38:16 MDT
At 01:58 PM 5/11/01 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
>The drive to
>discover truth is innate and hardwired. Religions insist that they are
>objective truth in order to take advantage of our evolved drive to believe
>objectively true things. Cultural relativists who argue over whether
>tigers are "really" dangerous get eaten.
Trouble with all this is that one can make contrary or maybe parallel
assertions and be no less wrong.
The drive to discover truth cannot possibly be innate and hardwired, since
survival in a hypercomplex world is best attained by pragmatic adjustments,
and hold the grand theory. We know for certain that human minds are very
bad at logic and reasoning (Johnson-Laird, Tversky and Kahneman, et al).
Some religions insist that their doctrines are objectively true in order to
take advantage of a local cultural preference for believing objectively
true things except when the local culture prefers to believe anything at
all that's convenient just at the moment.
And especially:
Cultural anti-relativists who argue the other guy is full of shit gets
beaten savagely, shunned, left mateless and perhaps killed as a real pain
in the ass and know-all-know-nothing.
Sad but true (some of the time).
Damien Broderick
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