Truth and morality

Posted on Feb 13, 2010 19:34 UTC
Mahabaratham, is it an epic?

I am a newbie at this podcast thing, and I see these are pretty old discontinued podcasts, and I am not sure about your current ideological orientations. Assuming they haven't changed, I have a couple of criticisms to offer about some of the points you have made in this first episode about historical accuracy and morality. But since you have paraphrased Cho for the most part, I guess my criticisms are directed more at him than you.

It is true that scientific truth keeps changing as new evidences come up. But that is the whole point of scientific research. And thats exactly what differentiates science from faith- you keep updating your view, instead of putting "faith" in something which makes you feel good. No respectable historian will ever dispute genuine evidence based-FACTS that emerge from research, while their INTERPRETATION of the implications that those facts have on the narration of history might change based on their own ideological leanings. The basic assumption that Cho makes in putting forth this argument is that 'a disbeliever is a equal and opposite entity of a believer', meaning the disbeliever has an agenda- that of believing in something else. Which is not true going by the definition of a rational disbeliever.

The second argument by Cho about the benefits of believing that Mahabharata is true. And that notwithstanding the fact that I disagree with the contention going about in the background that "there are EQUAL reasons to believe in the historicity as well as disbelieve" (this goes against the scientific method, and any kind of rational discussions. I mean, what stops one from saying that about absolutely anything that comes to ones mind, no matter how crazy or incredible it is? And by the way, why is it that people have different standards for study of history on one hand , and all other kinds of scientific research on the other hand??). I will pose it as a question: Why does one have to fool himself to BELIEVE in the historicity of the story in order to derive morals out of it? At a more fundamental level, if one has the capability of identifying the good morals and bad morals in a story, it means that he/she is already capable of generating such morals without the help of such stories, let alone believing in their historicities.

Digressing, on the question of morality, one of the main arguments one can give against religion is its presumption about being the sole source of it, or in other cases, claiming that belief in something lacking evidence and deriving morality go hand in hand and one cannot exist without the other.