[size=150]…Dedicated to Maia,[/size]
Three Paths to Truth v1.0
Rare is the man who makes Truth into his first Virtue. An entire lifespan is spent acquiring, knowing, and spreading truths. These are truisms and facts taken as common sense by the global public. These are spread throughout school systems and religions, and traditionally inherited by the minds of children. However few except the wisest comprehend the sacrificed time and effort involved. Great feats of intellect create the smallest things: Ideas. Apprehending truth requires great feats of patience, thought, rationalization, and conflict. One man’s truth is pitted against another man. A lifetime of accumulated metaphysical beliefs and presumptions, often contradicts the experiences and conclusions of others. For example:
Some men claim Truth is subjective;
Some men claim Truth is objective.
Regardless there exists three primary and popular routes toward the Virtue of Truth. There is philosophy and its method of doubt. There is science and its method of test. There is religion and its method of faith. Each path is separate, distinct, and viable. Each road can achieve much truth. But if a man travels one road and takes no other then his conception of truth becomes limited in scope. A philosopher will take his singular and specialized perspective as truth while blindly rejecting others. The scientist and religioso will commit the same error. None will open their minds to the others; and one will accuse another of deficiency and ineptitude. However a well-rounded intellect and truly wise individual, must include each road into his adventure toward and assessment of Truth.
Philosophy, Method of Doubt
Philosophy attempts to destroy all truths and traditions. It deconstructs dogma and tears apart presumptions. Philosophy eliminates unnecessary premises. It attempts to hone all focus of thought into a true premise. The ultimate, absolute, and perfect premise of philosophers is an axiom: universal maxims. Philosophy requires an automatic agreement. Philosophy requires a compulsive premise. For example: you read and understand English. This premise is implied by the act of writing and transmitting information by the language itself. If a person did not read and understand English then this information would not become read and understood. Therein the premise becomes necessitated by implied interactions. Reading and writing presumes a shared language or conceptual understanding.
The deepest philosophical doubts lead to the most truthful types of philosophical insight: Cogito Ergo Sum. I think therefore I am. I am conscious therefore I exist as a thinking thing. Across the ages and æons, the greatest philosophers of human history continue to doubt, and therefore reduce, wisdom into smaller and smaller packets of information. Such information represents seemingly self-evident truisms to all. Truism: All organisms with nervous systems embody degrees of consciousness. And consciousness becomes self-aware of its own existence. Therefore organisms can experience life as an aspect of existence. But what is existence without perception and sensibility, except objectivity? This questioning leads to philosophical materialism. Matter and mass exist with or without consciousness and subjective existence. Therefore masses exist as material objects and as a conceptual objectivity.
Can philosophy doubt this? Can philosophy doubt that mass and matter exist? Can philosophy doubt conscious experience?
The greatest feats of philosophy include the greatest feats of doubt. The end of Philosophy is Cynicism, Solipsism, and Nihilism. All of these ends are forms of Reductionism: the reduction and reducing of information by the method of doubt into the “smallest” possible unit. This unit embodies itself as a logical premise and metaphysical belief. It is an idea or meme. All people presume things to become true or false by actualization of thought and belief. These memetic objects of philosophical value represent the premises of humanity.
Science, Method of Test
Science values results. Because results can become measured, recorded, and tracked over time. Mixing science and philosophy produces the ideology of Empiricism. An Empiricist is a man who values both philosophy and science together. Such an empiricist will claim that “a scientific theory is never 100% true”. Science produces results and facts. But we can never hold these results and facts as Truth. Because the empiricist still retains his philosophical doubt as a form of hesitation. He lacks faith, unlike the religious. Results and facts are probabilities to the empiricist, not possibilities. No probability is ever 0% or 100%. However the religioso will represent scientific theories as absolute truth. Mixing science and religion produces the ideology of Intelligent Design. A Creationist is a man who values both religion and science together. The Big Bang Theory is absolute truth to the Creationist, as both a commonly held physical fact about the universe, and as a divinely inspired creative act by God.
But pure science only focuses on methodology, mathematics, and physics. The scientist neither doubts the results of his experiments nor regards his conclusions as Truth. The scientist values data. Information is his Truth. Evidence reveals information. Therefore the scientist produces evidence through experimentation in order to produce and reproduce information. Information neither can become denied nor absolutely believed by people. Because information represents a core aspect of consciousness. This is sense-data: the relationship between an a priori perspective and its a posterori perceptions. A person experiences the world through the medium of sensory information and processes this information into a vivid interpretation. Self-evident experiences are meshed together and merged with artistic interpretations.
Thus science suffers from dialectics. The mathematics of physical sciences must become converted into common languages, without becoming an expressive and emotional poetry. Science must retain the guise of hard-logic, rationality, and non emotive reactions. An emotional scientist is a biased scientist: corrupted, flawed, wrong, erroneous, untrustworthy, outcast by peer review. And peer review is critical for scientists. Because scientific agreements do not revolve around premises as is practiced in philosophy. Scientific agreements revolve around the rigorousness and repetitiveness of measured experiments and results. Peer review and scientific consensus revolves around acceptable and unacceptable information, and the deriving of such information.
The more often and widely performed an experiment becomes, the more its data becomes repeatable, and the more its evidence becomes reproduced by scientific experts and authorities across the world. This scientific consensus and peer review convenes to judge scientific truisms upon their worthiness, to apply to traditional logical axioms as well as popular, contemporary scientific theories.
Religion, Method of Faith
Religion is the most popular and “easiest” path toward Truth. At least it seems easy at first. The spiritually ignorant people of human history retain a common misconception about faith. Truth can become apprehended by just belief alone. This is an error. Faith is a transcendental thought-practice. Religion does not confine itself to beliefs alone; but instead religions necessarily include pre-meditative practices of concentration and comprehension. This is known as ritualism. The Christian religion practices the ritual of prayer. Pagan religious practices include meditations, divination, seance, blood sacrifice and/or other traditions. The Religious acquire their truths by attempting to merge faith and rituals together into one. Religiosos connect belief with realization. Religious realizations are known as epiphanies, revelations, awakenings, enlightenment, and miracles. These visions can become transcribed as Prophesy. A prophet is the highest order in religious societies. A prophetic man successfully merges the world of ideals with the world of reality.
He reverts pluralism into monism. Word is bound to action. This leads to the prescriptive concept of Command.
The religious mindset is typified by his faith in divinity. This divinity can become represented by a deity and deism. Or this divinity can become represented by humanistic Virtues. Paganism is the religious ideology of Virtues. Deism and belief in any Gods, or the abrahamic god, is unnecessary to proper pagans. Many paganistic cults and sub-cultures even directly link their Virtues with a deity. This leads to the concept of polytheism and anthropomorphic deism. Gods are given humanistic or animalistic caricatures. Meanwhile depicting such deities in Christianity is blasphemy. In Islam such depictions are issued a death sentence for blasphemy. Thus some religions promote the depiction of Gods and idolization of deities; the pop-religions of abrahamism demote depictions and idolization. Judaism, the most conservative sect and partition of abrahamism outright rejects idol-worship. Meanwhile shamanism, the most conservative sect and partition of paganism necessarily includes idol-worship, in the form of Totems.
Faith is belief; Doubt is disbelief or unbelief. Thus religion and philosophy stand very opposed to one-another. However both are necessary. Religious people attain positive traits which philosophical people neglect or reject. There are alternative forms of philosophical and religious nihilism. There is a philosophical disbelief and doubting of everything. There is a religious belief and faith in nothing. Nihilism appears at both ends of the spectrum as an absolutism. Philosophers and religiosos tend to meet in the absolution of their ideals. Because both the philosopher and religioso is fighting to defend their own “reality”. But both are approaching this reality or Truth from different directions. Thus philosophy and religion, including science too, can work toward the same goal/ideal, but from different beginnings and values.
The most worthy religious practice is to rend ideality into reality. A prophet idealizes the world and owns it. From this sense of ownership he applies the ideals against the resistance of the world. And he makes the ideal into the real. He converts dreams into reality. He creates a vision and destroys this vision by its realization. Then the cycle begins anew. Dreams are conjured. Then dreams are realized or forgotten.
Religion is this practice, ritualized by traditions, producing different societies from culture to culture.