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Naturalism and Relativism
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17420 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1990 |
762 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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Carl F.H. Henry's article, "The 1990s: Projections for a New Millennium," raises a number of profound questions. Although Henry is correct in finding a relationship between the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and liberal democracy and in recognizing the excesses of a certain type of relativism, which he fails to distinguish from other types, his dismissal of naturalism and religious ecumenism is divisive and highly problematic.
The Judeo-Christian tradition, with its prescription of a covenant binding humans to God that is superordinate to the state, has on many occasions buttressed liberal and democratic traditions. However, the same tradition also has supported the Inquisition, the extermination of the Albigenses, and the Crusades. Furthermore, the attraction to democracy and human rights that the Chinese students supported in Tiananmen Square was quite unrelated to a supernatural religion. This suggests that the premises we find in the Judeo-Christian tradition that are supportive of liberal democracy are embedded in a framework that can support nonliberal institutions and that liberal institutions can inspire support in their absence.
Thus, although the support for liberal democratic institutions that can be found in Judeo-Christian premises may not exist with the same strength in other religions, these traditions are likely to have aspects that can be brought to support such political systems, once their preferability on other grounds is recognized. If this is so, there is no need to make invidious distinctions with respect to other religions, even those with quietistic premises according to which the individual finally becomes part of the whole. My experience with proponents of other religious traditions under the auspices of the Internationals Cultural Foundation - an allied enterprise - strongly suggests the possibility of ecumenical support for liberal democracy.
Although a certain type of relativism has been destructive, a naturalistic relativism that is based upon a correct understanding of natural science is capable of steering a path between that destructive type of relativism and the absolutism that Henry perceives as the only alternative. He should reflect upon Bertrand Russell's theory of types and relativity theory before he promotes such dichotomous alternatives.
According to Russell, a proposition need not be self-referring. The proposition that the world is divided into two classes - those that are members of themselves and those that are not - need not refer to itself and, thus, there is no logical paradox. Putative self-referring propositions of the type employed by Henry to dismiss the concept of relativity are analogies by proportion and, hence, metaphors that will not support deductive conclusions.
According to the special theory of relativity, time is always relative to an inertial system. Therefore, the concept of simultaneity does not apply across such systems, and it is possible for observers on each of two independent inertial systems to assert correctly that time is going more slowly on the other. Although the same equations apply to both systems, the absolutism projected by Henry's argument is incompatible with both relativity and quantum theory.
It is also the case that empirical naturalism is not reductive to the existential manifestations of behavior, unless Henry is using that
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