Seminar on the Renaissance and Bertrand Russell Book 3 chapters 1-9

This seminar was very daunting and eye-opening for me. Before this I hadnot quite grasped any of the ideas that i had read about, however coming away panicking (majorly) has made me focus more on ingesting the ideas rather than just reading them. Hopefully this way i will actually understand what we are talking about next time! And, shock horror! maybe even contribute!

From this seminar i became very interested in the ideas of logic and the search for truth, a topic which seemed to become very popular during the Italian renaissance. The Church's loss of power seemingly meant that thought could become less rigid and more original, allowing more enjoyment in debate which had previously been incompatable with orthodoxy. This incompatability stems from the fact that religion is very set in its ways (dogmatic) with a set hierachy meaning that debate and thought were not exactly celebrated. The discussion of this interested me because i have often thought of religion as almost dictatorial, but not really been able to define it as concisely as the word "dogma" does.

Therefore the emergence of philosophy as open minded and free, looking for understanding rather than rules, is novel and clearly a major part of the renaissance period. In this way, philosophical thought is detatched from religion and acheives as a result a sense of progression and acheivement, while religion remains static and inflexible, stamping out free thought and intellectual growth.

This all just about makes sense to me, however i am stumped by the concept of "truth". Surely there can be no such thing, given that all thought, debate, "facts" etc is all just ideas? It is THOUGHT and how can this ever be difinitive?? This idea is especially strong in Russell book 3 chapter 3 when it is revealed that in fact, Gods ideas may or may not be corrupt, therefore everything that people have been investing and beleiving in for years has been thrown into doubt. I find this confusion and uncertainty very hard to get around, as how can we ever be certain of anything?

Linking this to the science-religion debate, there can never be absolute evidence of religion or thought, and scientific ideas are constantly being revised and overthrown, leaving no certainty. Science is constantly contradicting itself, and one of the major problems with religion is that there are no solid hypotheses to test and no reliable way to test them if there were. For someone like me, with an overly scientific outlook, this makes religion very hard to trust and interpret. For instance, there is the debate over "original sin" and even sin in general; is it simply a controlling device, invented to create stability in humanity? Or is it, as philosphers have challenged, indefinite and not really there (which suggests that we can do anything, creating problems of social stability and shaking the foundations of our governments and lives). All of this different, contradicting and downright confusing arguments boggle my mind. Hoefully in the next couple of weeks i will understand more!