B: Some Preliminary Notes I

I believe that my "take the world as I find it" comment from the other day may have inadvertently supplied me with a place to make a fresh start with all of this.  It is, in summary, the same basic position that I have advocated all along here, but I think it solves a few problems with my original approach.

1.) It dispenses with the adversarial approach, which I think really only works if your adversary is clearly defined and clearly recognizable.  If I say, "This is my problem with Creationists" or "This is my problem with evolutionists.", people know what I'm talking about, and they're quite ready to take up their torches and pitchforks, either to follow me or storm my door, depending on where their sympathies lie.  But to pose an adversary like "Opponents of Reason", would, I think, leave most people either scratching their heads or at least unenthused.  I think, in effect, it would come off sounding like I'm railing against any random asshole who disagrees with me.  "These people who like piss flavored jelly beans must be stopped."  Yeah, that's not gonna work.  There are people antagonistic to reason, and I see it frequently, but it has to be addressed in some other way, and not be the main thrust of the piece.

2.) It helps somewhat with a boot-strap problem that I was having with my original approach.  I was trying to establish objective reality on the grounds of reason, all while trying to prove the efficiency of reason in dealing with objective reality.  The problem, obviously, is that this argument proceeds on the basis of its own conclusion.  It seems I can't have my world and eat it too.  It seems that the proposition of objective reality has to be given prior to reason, as the foundation of it.  This would mean that objective reality has to be given on the grounds of choice, a choice to "take the world as I find it."

Needless to say, I'm not thrilled about this approach, and the obvious implications of it.  I find the word "faith" just as repugnant as Vincent finds the word "truth", and oddly enough, for much the same reason (some common ground there?).  It seems to me that faith would imply that doubt is the default position and it has to be surpassed in favor of existence.  I could just as easily claim the opposite, that existence is the default position and doubt never has to necessarily enter the picture.  Faith would also seem to imply the belief in something in the absence of evidence, but yet this issue transcends evidence.  It is the basis of evidence.  How can you have evidence that there is such a thing as evidence?

I hear myself saying these things, and I realize how familiar it all sounds, how much like the arguments for religion that I heard for years, "transcends evidence" indeed.  And yet, I can't help feeling that there's something I'm missing here, something that tips the scale in favor of choosing existence, something that justifies the choice.  Of course, that kicks me right back to reason.  *Woof*  I feel as though I've sailed to the edge of the cosmos and I'm rebounding off of my own reflection.

This will take some work, but this where it has to start.