re yeah right in article mimsy umd edu mangoe cs umd edu charley wingate writes and what about that revelation thing charley if you re talking about this intellectual engagement of revelation well it s obviously a risk one takes i see it is not rational but it is intellectual does madness qualify as intellectual engagement too many people say that the concept of metaphysical and religious knowledge is contradictive i m not an objectivist so i m not particularly impressed with problems of conceptualization the problem in this case is at least as bad as that of trying to explain quantum mechanics and relativity in the terms of ordinary experience one can get some rough understanding but the language is from the perspective of ordinary phenomena inconsistent and from the perspective of what s being described rather inexact to be charitable exactly why science uses mathematics qm representation in natural language is not supposed to replace the elaborate representation in mathematical terminology nor is it supposed to be the truth as opposed to the representation of gods or religions in ordinary language admittedly not every religion says so but a fancy side effect of their inept representations are the eternal hassles between religions and qm allows for making experiments that will lead to results that will be agreed upon as being similar show me something similar in religion an analogous situation supposedly obtains in metaphysics the problem is that the better descriptive language is not available with the effect that the models presented are useless and one can argue that the other way around namely that the only reason metaphysics still flourish is because it makes no statements that can be verified or falsified showing that it is bogus and in case it holds reliable information can you show how you establish that this word reliable is essentially meaningless in the context unless you can show how reliability can be determined haven t you read the many posts about what reliability is and how it can be acheived respectively determined benedikt
