This is more or less ground we've gone over on the board before, but as I'm too lazy to look up my relevant posts myself, I can hardly expect anyone else to...
Gazing Rabbit wrote:
It occured to me a couple of days ago that there isn't any objective trancendant reason for logic to be 'better' than the alterntative (no logic).
Only in the sense that there is no such thing as "objective", period. From our "subjective" points of view however, there are very good reasons for it. Or will you be exiting the room you're in right now by attempting to walk through the wall rather than the open door in a moment?
Logic, or rather the combination of logic and observation which could be called "science" in the formal sense or simply "reason" in the more everyday, informal sense, is simply the sum of our knowledge of the consistant and repeatable aspects of our experience. E.g. your experience tells you that it is easier to walk through empty air rather than solid walls, so by an unconcious logical deduction you conclude that that is probably how you should exit the room. There is nothing really "transcendant" about this; you could just as easily try to walk through the wall, but unless your house was built by an exceptionally shoddy contractor you would spend the rest of your (short, assuming you didn't stop for water) life attempting it without success. And hopefully I don't have to go into a long description of why any organisms that exhibited tendencies towards such behaviors would have been severely selected against in the darwinian sense.
You seem to be mostly talking about the personal uses of logic, so I'll leave the discussion of formal systems to Tamayo :) There is nothing that inherently says we "must" follow the dictates of logic
*, (in fact I would argue we often don't from various points of view, but given our large number of conflicting desires, imperfect information about the world, and the general fuzziness of our thought processes, that's hardly surprising), it's just that it is
useful and consistent, in many senses. Of course, so can be regular religions, magick, et al, so I can't really fault some people for living their lives by them. But logic, or rather "science" in the broad sense, which I would consider the application of logic to experience, seems to me to be by far the most useful tool we have for understanding the universe (or, to be pedantic, our perceptions thereof).
As for the general difference between science and religion, I would say one of the most important is that, however conservative and resistant to major change the former can be at times, it is still fundamentally capable of questioning and refuting its own earlier conclusions in light of better evidence or more useful conceptual constructs, whereas the latter generally has some assumptions at its base that cannot really be changed. Otherwise it wouldn't be "religion", in any usual sense.
Of course, I could be wrong, but hey- crippling ontological uncertainty is what makes the universe go 'round. Or something.
* By which I mean, what "logic" suggests in combination with our desires, abilities, etc., since by itself it doesn't dictate anything as far as our behavior. If it is our desire to die quickly, then running off a high cliff would be logical; if the contrary is true, it wouldn't be.
IcyMonkey wrote:
Hate wrote:
lol teh french sux
lol rite?
Now, now, there's no need for rancor.
The French can't help it if they suck.
Zing! *flees*