Thank you for your thoughts, Fernando -- great question. I'm so pleased you're on board, it is indeed an absorbing topic!
If by "the transcendent" you mean some hidden truth that is beyond any possible knowledge, well -- I don't know if there's something that transcends our ability to know. Its a possibility, I guess. But i don't equate that possibility with the supernatural. I think there needs to be different word than "supernatural" used to describe a concept of the unknowable. Because the word "supernatural" is already taken and in my opinion ruined beyond repair -- it is owned by ghosts and gods, prayer, miracles, eternal life, predestination, faith-healing, exorcism, burned witches, winged humanoids, sin, punishment, heaven, hell, voodoo, desperation for certainty -- our exquisitely mysterious cosmic existence reduced to a banal soap-operatic morality play subject to the capriciousness of fantasy magic. That is the pervasive cultural meaning of the term "supernatural." Any attempt to retrofit it to apply to the epistemological limits of science will only be corrupted, I fear, by the trem!
endous baggage it carries.
If by "the transcendent" you mean a personal experience of transcendence, I would propose that concepts such as transcendence and spiritual are not like wormholes to some alien dimension. They are valid not as evidence of an otherworldliness, but rather they are valid as sensations -- quite wonderful sensations, -- that are based in human biology. Is that a letdown -- a plundering of the magical, stripping it to a mere material process? I don't think so. I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's quote which was an almost direct response to Walt Whitman's poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" ( http://www.bartleby.com/142/180.html ). Whitman's experience of transcendence looking up through "the mystical moist night air" to stare "in perfect silence at the stars" should not have been available to an analyzer of charts and diagrams, but Feynman responds thus: "It does no harm to the mystery, to know a little about it," he says. "I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel!
them. But do I see less, or more?" "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" I guess for me, transcendence is an oceanic sense, a feeling of connectivity, a poetic, a strong emotion that I have experienced, like may people, numerous times. I am not convinced that my sensation of transcendence is but a low-resolution version of some sort of higher order of transcendence that is connected to supernatural forces.
/stephen
________________________________________
From: yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr [yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr] On Behalf Of Fernando Espinoza [espinozaf@oldwestbury.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2014 4:08 PM
To: yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] The Plight of the Supernatural ...
Dear Yasminers,
I thank you for the opportunity to participate in this discussion. I find
the topic absorbing and of enormous interest. I have dealt with the issue
of whether scientific knowledge has limitations in discovering the nature
of reality (a loaded term no doubt), in my book on the nature of science. I
would like to ask Steven, doesn't an attack on the concept of the
supernatural constitute an attack on the transcendent as well? or does he
make such a distinction?
Thanks
Fernando
Dr. Fernando Espinoza
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Education Programs
School of Education-Department of Chemistry and Physics
Link to The Nature of Science: https://rowman.com/ISBN/978-1-4422-0953-4
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