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• Thursday, November 20, 2008 07:38 AM

  @kuhnigget

  Kuhnigget, I have been enjoying your posts too.

  In reply to your last, I guess I was impressed (over-impressed?) by Karl Popper's three-world analysis. There are three Worlds, Popper said: World One, which is the world of nature, ancient, given, indifferent, infinitely intricate and vast; World Two, which is the world of human (and to some extent animal) consciousness, with its perceptions, feelings, motivations, memories, and ideas (Popper does not contest that World Two evolves from World One), and World Three, which are our ideas, feelings, etc. embodied in laws, codes, languages, art-forms, journals, buildings, artifacts, machines and inventions of all sort, which are made from the interaction, as it were, of Worlds One and Two, but which come to constitute a world of their own, and the one we actually live in most consciously, and which feeds back to the other two Worlds ever more, with every passing decade. Unlike theists and deists, I think God belongs to/in World Three. So yes, you can do well without thinking the God-thought (or doing the "God-thing"), I agree, just as you can do well without music, poetry, the latest "news", entering this or that building, or (up to a point) human law. I guess I look around at religious belief and go, "you know, there's something there I don't want to dismiss."

  —michaelben Read michaelben's other letters
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