People, Personas, and Politics 29 – Religions’ Accuracy and Utility
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/17
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Rick Rosner: With regard to religion, you have accuracy on the one hand and utility on the other. The window for accuracy is really, really tiny, especially as we learn more about the universe. The window for utility is bigger. The same for philosophy as long as the philosophy does not claim to explain all of creation. Religions tries explain all of creation. Philosophies don’t have to do that.
To the extent that they do do that, it is a small window. There can be smaller philosophies. So there can be a number of—we were talking in an earlier discussion about where the appropriate level of explanation. That you don’t need to go to quantum mechanics to explain everything in the world. Some of the best explanations exist in the context of what you’re trying to explain. So when you’re talking about people falling in love, you don’t have to go all the way back to quantum physics. Particles lock into atom and molecules and amino acids and evolve into – ba ba-ba – without going back to basic physics to explain how people fall in love. You can have different philosophies that have utility and accuracy within their limited domain.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One thing to add to that. It is not boundless in terms of domains as well. There are—so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you examine an issue, whatever scope you’re going for. So you can work within the well-defined parameters. So like, in international relations and geopolitics, people talk about state actors. You talk as if countries have personalities. “China would state that…”, “The United States behaved as if…”, rather than describing, as you noted, how electrons get into locked orbits around nuclei for atoms.
RR: Yea! And every explanation is subject to accuracy on the one hand and scope on the other. They’re kind of mixed. When you talk about America having a personality, you can—that’s subject to being inaccurate because you’re talking about a nation in all its multiplicity as if it’s an individual actor. That is, in itself, an abridgement of a huge amount of information into a singular idea. So that in itself – that abridgement – brings inaccuracy. You can also be wrong in what you’re saying America does. America tends to define its place in the world based on our national pride in polkas. You know like the beer barrel polka. That’s completely not right [Laughing]!
SDJ: Or to your example of people falling in love, you don’t describe the neurochemistry. You use the narrative framework of people and their perspectives about one another and how that works out.
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