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It is a pastime of mine. 

Skatehousemedia

easily

My whole family will be based out of NYC this time next year. I’ll be there full time as well.

I’m gonna quote this essay to expand on my post.

…Again I need to emphasise that the basis for the Platonic world view is a fundamental distrust of reality (observation, sensations). This fundamental distrust of reality leads to all kinds of weird wacky things, like this gem that my wife came across one day. On a basic level the Platonic (or Platonic like) world view leads people to assume that in order to learn anything “real” or of value, they must disassociate themselves with reality (the physical world). This was the motivation behind the drive to use “experimental drugs”, such as LSD, in order to experience things that could not be “experienced” in the physical world (this was explained to me by a philosophy student who “had friends that did drugs”).

There are other implications to this but to sum up it, is enough to say that even though the Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to the world both consider the physical world to be “messy” at first, the Platonic approach feels that the “messiness” prevents the discovery of the world and thus in the ideal case we must remove the influences of all the “messy” stuff from reality, including our senses and anything that has to do with our “physical” bodies. The Aristotelian approach recognizes that the world is difficult, and while simplifications (math, equations, words, language) can be used to make it easier, the simplifications are just that, a simplification and not an ideal. Thus a Platonic approach demands that new knowledge comes from the ideal world (Plato’s world of Forms), while on the other hand the Aristotelian approach assumes that knowledge comes from observation (sensation) of the physical world, and is verified again by observation. All knowledge according to the Platonic approach, by definition, is not verifiable in the Aristotelian sense, but is entirely determined by whether or not one can “think correctly” about it.

So how does this relate to the original motivation for this post involving the “conflict” between science and religion? On a fundamental level science takes an Aristotelian approach to how we learn and find out things about the universe. It asks, “What do we observe and how can we explain what we observe?” While science (and physics in particular) takes an Aristotelian approach, it is not exclusive. We still see a substantial amount of Platonic thought in science, but it is not as common as it is in other fields of research (Math is one that is substantially Platonic).

Perhaps the most prominent place Platonic thought shows up is in religion. I should emphasize that there is nothing about religion that demands Platonic thought, but at times it does seem rather conducive to Platonic thought as it mostly deals with things that are not (obviously) related to the five senses (I put the “obviously” in there because I disagree with that assertion). But if we are working under a Platonic world view then it makes sense that if one considers the mental or the abstract (the Platonic Forms) to be the most pure and perfect then that is where one would consider their God to be. This leads to the argument that God does not partake of the physical world and does not have any part in it other than being the unmoved mover (important note, there is an important distinction here between having an unmoved mover, as was Aristotle’s concept, and thinking of God as the unmoved mover). In the end religion (and other “intellectual” fields, such as philosophy and math) became dominated by Platonic thought, while Aristotelian thought dominated science. Again this was not an exclusive domination (nor even correct) but that is the way it stands today in our society…

Which one are you?