Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Quotes of the day

I heard/read two fascinating quotes today, so I share them with you, dear reader:
"It is better the world perish with the truth than be saved with lies"
from 'The Last Temptation of Christ' by Nikos Kazantzakis

and
"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision"
by Bertrand Russell

6 comments:

Jake said...

Hi Ricky,

My thoughts:

"It is better the world perish with the truth than be saved with lies"

Well I think "saving the world with the truth" would be better than either of these outcomes, which is the claim of the Bible.

But let's suppose you don't believe in Jesus. This quote seems absurd to me. How can you be "saved" by lies? Does this imply that religion is just a trick so we pass our time peacefully on this rock? If religion is a trick and there's no real purpose in life, then why should we value truth so much? On the day our species goes extinct, what the heck is truth going to do for us?

Jake said...

My thoughts on this one. Sorry if my comments are kind of terse. I don't mean any insult to you, but Bertrand Russell seems to have inspired all kinds of ridiculousness in modern atheists.

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision" by Bertrand Russell

Oh the arrogance of atheism.

So you can never be certain about anything else be deemed stupid? The world would be paralyzed with indecision if we never committed to anything because there's a chance we're wrong.

My observation of many atheists is that they're terrified of being wrong. They set the bar so high for proof, that it must be 100%. however, there are so few things that can be proven to this degree. We condemn men to death with less certainty. We accept scientific "laws" with less than 100% certainty.

So Augustine, Newton, Galileo, Mendel, and Dostoyevsky had no imagination? I think it takes a great deal of imagination to attempt to understand the complexity of God.

Many theists have an intellectual curiosity about God, pursuing any doubts and weighing decisions well. I see no incompatibility with imagination and decision.

Ricky Carvel said...

Why should your comments about atheists insult me? I don't consider myself an atheist.

;o)

Big long blog posting on what I actually do believe and why is coming. But may take several weeks to prepare...

I'm just as critical of atheist arguments as I am of apologists' arguments.

Ricky Carvel said...

And while the Bertrand Russell quote may have originally been aimed at theists (I don't know if it was), my fascination with it came out of another interest of mine entirely.

It was regarding people who consider themselves 'experts' in a field of study who are nothing of the kind, while the genuine experts tend to be more hesitant to push their theories forward, because they are the ones who understand the limitations of their work.

Read about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Fascinating. But not necessarily directly related to the main point of this blog...

Jake said...

Great, the conversation was going so civilly I didn't want to ruin it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect does seem interesting. To me the most interesting thing is that it doesn't seem to apply to all cultures. Asian cultures seem to have the opposite correlation between competence and assessment of competence.

I'm trying to to think how to apply this in my life. I work in consulting. And I do NOT see this effect at work. My colleagues and clients (for the most part) are highly competent and highly confident. They are also highly motivated to increase their competence through formal training, experience, and collaboration.

Do you have some particular experience that this effect has impacted your life?

Ricky Carvel said...

I also work in a consulting industry.

I've seen the effect quite clearly in some of the people I've interacted with. Not generally clients. Usually other consultants who don't know or can't admit the limitations of their own competency.