2021-01-27 - Moral Truth and Science

My formal education consisted of 2 years of hard science as a preparation for an engineering degree. Electrical engineering was my initial aim as science seemed to offer an absolute knowledge and electricity seemed at the time to be the physical universe's most fundamental property. Colliding into the nihilism in what Lincoln referred to as "The Doctrine of Necessity" - all there is are insensate atoms, the only true gods, basically Plato's cave where meaning and love are the shadows viewed by the benighted - the amoral universe is the light of day for the few who escape to face the truth. I shifted my studies to Psychology for a semester, but sensed its claims to legitimacy unconvincing. Then to Philosophy and Religion where life's meaning is explicitly studied. My main professor was editor of a small academic journal whose subject was "Science and Religion". Among the courses I remember were one on Liberation Theology where we read Mary Daly and James Cone. James Cone even visited our little class one day. I don't remember anything specific about the visit other than it was cordial. I wrote a paper for that class stating I thought his book wasn't much more than a conflation of "black" skin pigment with some sort of "black" consciousness. His thesis seemed to be that Jesus had black skin pigment, because his teachings revealed an awareness of "black" consciousness. I thought he was just riffing on a word that has two meanings. Mary Daly's writing seemed to be notable in that it was full of transgressions to modesty veiled in academic garb I hadn't seen before.