On Contradiction. Again. But with Einstein Quotes
10/11/2007 7:43 AM – 8:10 AM
I’ve been thinking about that Einstein quote, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are mere details.” I’ve always liked it, but the idea it seems to convey has been bothering me of late. Then I went to see if Einstein had actually said it (he did. I think) and I found another quote by him: “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
The first seems to advocate a sort of rationalism and the second, well, empiricism. A contradiction in either primary or near primary principals, it would seem. But then I’m trying to recognize the necessity of the occasional contradiction. It’s slightly bothersome. It would be much more helpful if our thoughts about reality melded seamlessly with reality itself. Does nature abhor or admit contradiction? But perhaps both quotes taken together do not constitute a contradiction at all.
“God is in the details,” maybe, but that seems more of a gloss than an answer. Unless one is advocating a sort of neo-pantheism. Like a Gaia hypothesis. Which I still find rather laughable. But considering that I believe that a carpenter who gave up carpentry to be a wandering preacher about two-thousand years ago was actually God who died and then came back to life, somehow forgiving everyone every asshole thing that they’d done in the process, I really shouldn’t be the sort of person to point out the ridiculousness of a given belief system. Or I should be. The thoughts of God are details, the rest is conjecture. But what fine conjecture. We piece together a thousand disparate strings and weave a comic-book tapestry. Then someone points out that this string can’t hold any weight and so we replace it. Or we don’t and die nobly following our lemming system over the cliff. Without our conjecture, we have only a pile of strings, but weaving them together we counterfeit reality. One wishes that one could merely insist and leave it at that without a troubling of conscience. I’m going to go read a Donald Duck comic and pretend that I live in the woods with a hot chick.
posted by Spike at 5:20 AM
2 Comments:
"I’m going to go read a Donald Duck comic and pretend that I live in the woods with a hot chick."
Classic sir, classic.
Since I like your quote, I will list a few quotes that I found, which are quite relevant to this topic.
"Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact. " - Roland Allen
"This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. " - Mikhail Bakunin
"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth." - Blaise Pascal
(Here's one you should appreciate)
"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." - Ayn Rand
"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory." - Alfred North Whitehead
(and my personal favorite)
"What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." - Roland Barthes
I like the Pascal and the St. Ayn is one that I know very well. St. Ayn's a bit off in regards to anything outside of an invented context, ie reality as it is, but it's a damn fine goal to shoot for. Actually the Whitehead quote kinda' serves as an adequate rebuttal to St. Ayn. Whether reality confines to the rules of logic or not, we can't really be sure, it's too complex a system. And if it does we're left with a form of mechanistic determinism, if it don't, chaos (in the real sense, not the "field of" sense). As I said: Donald Duck comic, woods, hot chick.
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