I take both your points as given (from reasoning).
I've just been reading this new series of books on Myth, which begins
with Karen Amrstrong's A Short History of Myth, in which she takes a
long walk through the way myth has operated from the Paleolithic to
today. Of the modern period she says, the triumph of reason & science
has cut many off from the uses of myth, understood as story & not as
science. Her point about what Alison calls 'the dress of reason' is
intriguing: for she sees the scientific approach partly obscuring the
way of myth, the power of metaphor, etc, so that (as a 'short history'
must simplify) 'Creation stories had never been regarded as
historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you
start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and
bad religion.'
Her book is about what myth-making, which she finds now in the arts,
can still do for us, but not as science, &, as a very short overview,
it does a pretty good job for Woolf's Common Reader (if such still
exists).
Doug
On 25-Oct-05, at 3:31 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> On 26/10/05 12:56 AM, "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> But see where it ends up - if you surrender the epistemic authority of
>> science, you don't get Feyerabend's discursive democracy, an anarchy
>> of overlapping voices each constructing its own partial vision of the
>> world. You get whatever the pressure groups of the religious right
>> decide, in their very far from non-judgmental view, is the *absolute*
>> truth, and you are left with nothing you can use to contest their
>> genuinely and nakedly arbitrary assertions of authority.
>>
>> I would say that epistemic authority can be otherwise than arbitrary -
>> it can be based on proven expertise, and mastery of a field of
>> knowledge - and that to treat the exercise of such authority, in
>> making informed judgements about the validity of statements and
>> standpoints, as if it *were* purely arbitrary is to demonstrate a
>> total contempt for such expertise, and ultimately for serious learning
>> of any kind.
>
> Yep. But the Intelligent Design thing, like all those arguments, is
> based
> not on reason but Faith, which trumps all discourse. But they put on
> the
> dress of reason, as if that were enough, which it seems to be. The
> evolution
> of PR spin has had a lot to do with this as well.
>
> I've had that surreal experience of being told by a racist (someone
> complaining that all Aborigines are social welfare cheats rorting the
> system. &c) that I am, as a chardonnay-sipping elitist, suppressing
> their
> right to speak by telling them that the rumours they are retailing as
> fact
> are not true.
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
The blank page
as merely an interval or
an intrusion. We could not rescue it
nor could we huddle, as if the page were
big enough.
Kathleen Fraser
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