Mxmsj: Created page with "Our imagination is conditioned to re-present sensible things to our minds. '''Reification''' means "treating as a thing what is not a thing." '''Reify''' comes from the Lati..."

2015-07-04T13:20:51Z

Created page with "Our imagination is conditioned to re-present sensible things to our minds. '''Reification''' means "treating as a thing what is not a thing." '''Reify''' comes from the Lati..."

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Our imagination is conditioned to re-present sensible things to our minds.

'''Reification''' means "treating as a thing what is not a thing." '''Reify''' comes from the Latin word, "res, rei," which means "thing" in English. Ugly English words formed in the same way would be ''thingification'' and ''thingify.''

Examples of realities or aspects of reality that we tend to reify:

* God
* Heaven
* Hell
* goodness
* grace
* love
* evil
* sin
* darkness
* cold
* nothing
* truth
* justice

All sensible things are composed of matter-energy and located in space-time.

We can ''think'' of "nothing," but we cannot have a proper ''image'' of it.

Our imagination always supplies a theatrical background for things we want to think of.

We must ''think'': "Before creation, there was no space-time or matter-energy. There was no vacuum of space. There were no force fields." When we ''think'' these truths, our imagination keeps on supplying pictures that are inconsistent with the truth we are trying to contemplate.

Mathematicians and scientists are trained to distinguish between concepts and the pictures that represent aspects of the concepts. We need a similar discipline when we try to do theology.

[[Category:Epistemology]]

Reification - Revision history

Mxmsj: Created page with "Our imagination is conditioned to re-present sensible things to our minds. '''Reification''' means "treating as a thing what is not a thing." '''Reify''' comes from the Lati..."