Originally posted by Student X
I've said my peace and advised love and mysticism over reason and evidence.
Indeed you have, and apparently this skeptic will have to remain skeptical.
You are free to disregard it.
Indeed I am.
If the Noosphere has a growth spurt on the horizon, I doubt that skepticism and cynicism will align and harmonize people with it. Love will,
though.
So first it was a horribly wrong (but forgivable) conflation of science and general standards of evidence and reason. Now you deliberately poison the
well by throwing
cynicism into the mix? Not that cynicism can't have its uses, but that's just a shameful irrelevancy.
Skepticism allows a person to keep an open mind without worrying about his brain falling out. It's not even necessarily a bad thing to be skeptical
of love, but there's nothing wrong with embracing it, either. It's part of our species, and much of the human experience is predicated upon it.
But just as it might not be the best idea to apply the scientific method or a logical syllogism in determining whom to love, maybe it's an equally
doomed prospect to think love, the humanities and mysticism can provide answers that reliably separate truth and falsity.
Even if one completely rejects
science as a method, he cannot claim to think at all about any proposition, while simultaneously maintaining
that reason and evidence play no role. He might ignore, misinterpret, imagine or falsify some or all of the information at his disposal, but he
nonetheless applies some standard of evidence just by considering the matter, and he applies some method of reasoning to parse that information and
draw conclusions, whether he would term it "reason" or not. The concern, then, is not whether one applies reason, but whether he reasons well.
