This is a response to the initial question.
Firstly, let me define sanity as the ability to perceive that which is true.
There are (at least) two possibilities in the ordering of the universe:
1. There exists an abstract quality called "truth" to which everything can be compared.
2. There is no quality of "truth" and everything is subjective.
If the first is true, then we may say that sanity is based on how close we are to that abstract quality of "truth." The problem lies in determining what is "true."
The other option is that there is no way to know if you are sane. This makes everyone's individual beliefs more powerful than any declaration of "truth."
Of course, the inability to determine truth makes outcome 1 basically the same as outcome 2. Enter science.
Science is a system that is focused on knowledge, namely that which we may know. If we accept that the method of science may eventually (and when I use eventually, I use it like one uses "limit as t goes to infinity" in calculus) allow us to understand this abstract quality "truth" then we can use science as our measuring stick. Therefore, we can use science to judge the sanity of a person.
However, there is a pitfall in this method of determining sanity. Enter Kansas person. Kansas person says that God is working behind the scenes. Lottery ticket is not chance but divine intervention. Enter science. Science says.....? Science says that religion falls outside its parameters. It cannot judge whether a religion is “true” or not. There is no basis on which it can make this statement. It can say with relative certainty that there is a mechanism that drives tornadoes, or that there is no voice that is detectable on any current device speaking to you, or that the lottery is certainly based on luck. But it cannot disprove a declaration of faith. And if it cannot disprove it, it has no standard on which to judge it.
So however much one does not believe in a deity, one cannot truly cast aspirations on the sanity of those that do without compromising the method with which they do so.
So in conclusion, neither you nor the Kansas people can be shown to be crazy (unless they are really schizophrenic) using the method above. It is, unfortunately, an unsatisfactory answer. :(
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1 comments:
Martia,
I believe that I have a few questions about your definition of sanity. When the Earth was thought to be flat, were the people who thought it to be flat insane? Was the person who first thought that it was round more sane or less sane than the original "flat-thinkers"? What if the person who thought it was round was a schizophrenic killer who could have just as easily thought that it was a rectangle?
I believe that in your definition what you are missing is the separation of the process of analyzing information and the error or lack of the information itself. Sanity should be related with the processing of available information rather than be based on the end result alone.
For example, it is foolish to think that everybody in the current age is more "sane", because of scientific advances, than people 2000 years ago. The difference in the "closeness to truth" here lies not in people's ability to discern the truth, but the information that was available. Therefore, we should judge sanity as the properness of processing of available knowledge rather than how close we are to a subjective truth.
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