Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00126)

On Tue, 7 Jan 97, liesel@dreamscape.com (liesel f. deutsch) wrote:

>Tom Robertson wrote:

>>Human beings have no choice about philosophical laws.  Their beliefs >>about them are unique mixtures of truth and falsehood, but the extent to >>which a belief is true or false depends on the objectively-existing laws
>>themselves, not on the subject who has the belief.   

>Na, Tom, that's not the way I see it, sorry. I think philosophy, logic and
>math are built on some basic assumptions that human beings made to start
>with. We all need to live by a belief system, but we don't all base our
>belief systems on the same basic philosophies. 

You are referring to human perception of truth and I am referring to truth.
Everyone's basic philosophy is a unique attempt at conforming with the true
one.


>>Human beings have discovered some laws of logic and of mathematics. 
>>We may use them, but they exist independently of us.  They cannot be
>>changed.  

>Laws that have changed recently: A quark can be particles or waves; time,
>space and matter are interrelated; in view of the pictures sent back by the
>Hubbel telescope the universe looks quite different now than it did before;
>the origin of the universe was the big bang; when we see the light of a
>distant star, we see light emitted perhaps thousands of years ago.

Again, these are all examples of changes in human perception.  The
principles behind the reality that they are perceiving never changes.


>Something exists independently of us, but since we can't perceive the >whole thing, we don't really know what it's like, we can only tell what it >seems like to us. 

To some extent, it must be a matter of faith.