Opus 12, Logical or Scientific

What is your philosophy of life?  Most people would say, “Huh?”  Yet everyone has one.  We just don’t think of it that way.  What is important to you?  How do you decide right and wrong?  How do you feel about family, money, career and faith?  This collection of thought patterns make up your philosophy of life.

Most of us have heard the expression “Post-modern.”  This is a philosophical term.  People say we are living in the post-modern age.  That means the modern age is over.  And what does that mean?  It means that we have some basic difference in how we come to decisions and make choices.  In a sense we are turning the clock back and ignoring hundreds of years of thinking.

Before the modern age people in the west looked to the Greeks and the Romans.  In the East there were different sets of philosophers but they had something in common.  They reasoned based on logic.  They would sit down and observe their world, think about it and come up with a logical answer.  Sounds good.  What is there to argue with?

Before I try to answer that let me explain how the modern era differed from the pagan world.  The modern world was saturated with the Judeo-Christian view of God.  He created the world and was unchanging.  Because of that people could assume that the world we live in is not full of little spirits that have to be placated.  God had a set of rules.  Western thought began to try to find out what the rules were.  After some stumbling around they developed what is called the scientific method.  It also had observation and logic but added another factor:  proof through experiment.  As science developed, instead of just sitting under a tree and saying, “This sounds logical” they began to say, “Prove it.” 

I believe it was Plato that talked about abstract ideals that we could never really know.  We could see their shadows and make guesses, but we would always have to guess at part.  Science says we can keep searching until we find what is true.  We can find answers based on evidence, not just what appeals to our logic.

We are now moving back to that pagan view of the world.  There are no absolute truths, everything is relative.  Even the meaning of words are different.  They mean what you want them to mean.  That is why President Clinton was able to say, “That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”  In the long run science as we used to know it will become useless.  I recently read a blog post in which the writer said he would rather have a doctor with a good bedside manner than one who knew his medicine.   Read it yourself. 

Feelings become more important that facts.  Aspirin is more important than antibiotic. 

This is getting a bit long for one post.  I will return later and give some examples of how this works out in everyday life.