/lit/ - Literature

>>16013463
https://youtu.be/zkPOHB2rRkc
How is the following for a rebuttal?

Scientism will fail as an ideology because, in its rational/empirical pursuit of knowledge, it misplaces the actual necessity of an ideology: to comfort its participants. Stating the argument (as he does in the linked video) is to refute it—he admits that Enlightenment ideology has no hope for the participants (the universe follows no course or plan, there is no necessity for utopia to appear or for souls to migrate somewhere better in the hereafter, the soul isn’t even real so we go nowhere when we die) All responsibility for cultivating a better future is placed on the individual’s shoulders with every decision he makes; no assistance from a Holy Spirit or any ancestors or what have you. And he admits at the outset that people are generally irrational: I mean people off the streets, in the fields, joe sixpacks, not high minded web users or the audience in the video.

This is the calamity of late capitalism: faith has been relegated to the private devotions of the home, similar to household deities in Roman metropolitan life. The public sphere shares no story wherein they may place themselves and become a whole, and the void has been filled with obsessive pursuits of social mobility and compulsive consumption habits that have brought our global ecology within an inch of its life.

In "Systematic Theology" (Vol. 1), on page 205, Tillich writes:
> God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond
essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him

What did he mean by this?

Then he writes in the next paragraph:
> The method of arguing through a conclusion also contradicts the idea of God, Every argument derives conclusions from something that is given about something that is sought. In arguments for the existence of God the world is given and God is sought. Some characteristics of the world make the conclusion “God” necessary. God is derived from the world. This does not mean that God is dependent on the world. Thomas Aquinas is correct when he rejects such an interpretation and asserts that what is first in itself may be last for our knowledge. But, if we derive God from the world, he cannot be that which transcends the world infinitely. He is the “missing link,” discovered by correct conclusions. He is the uniting force between the res cog;tans and the res extensa (Descartes), or the end of the causal regression in answer to the question, “Where from ?” (Thomas Aquinas), or the teleological intelligence directing the meaningful processes of reality-if not identical with these processes (Whitehead). In each of these cases God is “world,” a missing part of that from which he is derived in terms of conclusions. This contradicts the idea of God as thoroughly as does the concept of existence. The arguments for the existence of God neither are arguments nor are they proof of the existence of God. They are expressions of the question of God which is implied in human finitude. This question is their truth; every answer they give is untrue. This is the sense in which theology must deal with these arguments. (Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press. 1967)

Is he right?

Also, in this thread, we talk about Tillich in general, and related (Whitehead, existentialism and so on).