Posted on 04/14/2004 6:15:04 AM PDT by Momaw Nadon
Nothing to it. I find that if I keep asking questions, sometimes I get answers. Life is like that sometimes.
How true! Even introspection and reason have their limits. Ultimately, one must surrender/die/become empty/etc., so that we can be filled with the Spirit. There certainly seems to be a need for emptying before becoming filled....I believe the process begins with surrender. Introspection is great, but along the way some things may be beyond our ability to understand but well within our ability to become by abiding in Him (John 15). For instance, I may not understand how I am to witness to a particular person put in my path, but by abiding in Him there will be communication from the Spirit within which goes way beyond mere words or gestures.
Isnt' that really the bottom-line, fundamental problem with man? We fill ourselves up all sorts of junk that do not satisify, and have no room for that which brings ultimate satisfaction: faith in God and life by power of the Holy Spirit. Such things are absolute foolishness to the naturally minded man, but for those of us who have realized our limitations, total surrender to God is LIFE.
But we are not surrendering to just a "higher power." We are surrendering to LOVE itself--love personified! Perhaps that's the truth that we as Christians should be doing our best to communicate: we are not just surrendering to a superior will, but to a superior love...
You're welcome betty! Thank you so much for keeping me "in the loop" with your posts!
My own interest in Needleman began only a few months ago. I was in the local library doing research on the New Age Movement and neo-paganism when I spotted his book The New Religions on the shelf with the other metaphysical stuff. It was very close to what I was looking for: an overview of the various Eastern religious movements that "invaded" the USA in the late 60's.
That book was so well written, and so accurately diagnosed the problems and pitfalls of traditional Christianity and Judism, that I could not believe I never heard of the author before! So I began searching the web and Amazon for other stuff by Needleman, and was very impressed with what I found.
Sadly, The New Religions is out of print. But you can find used copies on the 'net for a couple of bucks, or perhaps find one in the library like I did. It is a very worthwhile read, because one can see where many of his ideas regarding religion and society got their start.
The New Religions Crossroad Edition
Jacob Needleman
New York: Crossroad. 1987
(The book was first published in 1970!)
ISBN = 0-8245-0635-9
I have just finished reading a book recommended by another thread here on Free Republic that is an absolute must read:
C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea
Victor Reppert
Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. 2003
ISBN = 0-8308-2732-3
In this book, Reppert does what I was hoping he would do: he drops a nuclear bomb on the idea that a naturalistic worldview can account for rational thought.
His conclusion: there is nothing in naturalism that can account for it. Moreover, using a purely naturalistic framework, the development of rational thought is impossible.
Reppert expertly develops the idea from Lewis's book Miracles where Lewis first stated that rational beings cannot be a product of a mindless, purposeless system. He does a masterful job, leaving the naturalists no wiggle room for a reply, other than to defend the absurdity that there really is no such thing as rational thought...
I highly encourage every thinking Christian to make Reppert's book a part of your library. You won't regret it.
Steven Pinker opens:
I'm going to discuss an idea that elicits wildly opposite reactions.
Some people find it a shocking claim with radical implications for morals and every value that we hold dear. Other people think that it's a claim that was established a hundred years ago, that the excitement is only in how we work out the details, and that it has few if any implications for our values and ethics.
That is the idea that mind is the physiological activity of the brain, in particular the information processing activity of the brain; that the brain, like other organs, is shaped by the genes; and that in turn, the genome was shaped by natural selection and other evolutionary processes.
I am among those who think that this should no longer be a shocking claim, and that the excitement is in fleshing out the details, and showing exactly how our perception, decision-making, and emotions can be tied to the activity of the brain.
Stephen Pinker closes
I feel sure Prof. Pinker's project must be "exciting" in principle; especially as it is seemingly bent on finding ways to falsify and thus overcome the planted experience of the human race over the course of decades of millennia by now.
Sad you should think so Betty. I find that his ideas compliment our Constitutions principles, that free men should follow the ruled of law, -- not be ruled by the morals of the majority.
But then as a wise man once said: "Some motives are beyond the reach of argument." Patrick, just try to scan the logic of the foregoing passages. Is this really a logical argument? Or is it an exercise in polemics, generated from an undisclosed motive, from a "hidden major premise?"
You found a hidden premise? Where?
Let's walk it through. Pinker begins by casting doubt on the rationality of his anticipated "opponent" (perhaps a "political conservative," or "religious believer"). He goes on to suggest that the "breakthroughs" (precisely what kind of breakthroughs are not described) of the past one hundred years somehow obviate and render null the human existential experience of millennia, as articulated by the greatest thinkers of our race. Western civilization, I gather, is simply expected to concede the floor to a parvenu who got a blueprint for utopia from Hegel or one of his epigones. Yet a scientist is expected to chart his course by evidence. It must be embarrassing to Pinker (assuming he could ever be embarrassed, which is highly doubtful – let alone feel shame) that there has yet to be any successful "utopia" in all of human history.
Ah! His 'hidden premise' is advocating a utopia? Where did he say that?
So I wonder why Pinker thinks he's making any "selling points" here. Still, he urges us to believe that he, who claims to have some kind of warrant from God-knows-whom, (but I could guess) to consign human existence and human nature as mankind has experienced it for virtually countless millennia, to extinction so that a new beginning might be made, is completely justified in proclaiming the seductive, yet completely undemonstrated and yet-to-be-disclosed "virtues" of the "innovations" which lead to this result.
You sure we're reading the same paragraph, Betty? -- Again, -- where is all this said?
What are these innovations? First and foremost, there is the claim that consciousness is merely the epiphenomenon or by-product of brain activity. If that is so, then how do we explain Steven Pinker? Are his public performances really to be understood as demonstrations of the virtuosity of his brain? When did a guy like Steven Pinker ever leave his ego to die, so that his omnicompetent brain function might live? When did Steven Pinker ever say that he could claim no credit for his public pronouncements – in academia, the press, the public forum – because such must justly be credited entirely to the optimality of his brain function? If I believed for an instant that this dude actually believed anything that came out of his own mouth, I'd be a moron.
I think you may be believing a lot more about what you ~imagine~ he has said, -- than his actual writings Betty.
The brain is the single most complex living system known to man. There is not a single person on the face of this earth who understands what the brain is or what it does in all its complexity. We can study the organism. But even here, we get it wrong. For it turns out the brain is not a congeries of local organic sites, each dedicated to a specific, localized, dedicated purpose, such as interpreting "incoming" from sensory organs, such as the eye, the ear, etc. Instead it turns out that the functions of the brain are not localized, but widely distributed throughout the brain; it appears this wide distribution of activity is carried by quantum fields and routinely involves the principle of non-locality….
Quantum fields? Wow! Who's theory is that?
If non-local effects are involved, then it seems this must mean that consciousness is BIGGER than the physical brain, MORE than the physical brain. Seemingly, consciousness takes place at a principal level of reality independent of physical brain function. Which in turn suggests that some principle must exist to coordinate such widely distributed activity – activity which, on Bell's Theorem, may likely involve events so remote that they occur on the very edge, on the other side, of the universe….
Wow again! Same theorist Betty?
Which is the polar opposite, the antithesis, of Pinker's argument: That brain function is a local phenomenon, confined to tight processing units, mute, insensate…material, determined…. The critique could continue on other substantive points. But I think it would be good to leave off for now: Time for a time-out!
Dear Patrick, if you or anybody else out there reading this has further ideas on the present subject, I would seriously be most glad to hear them and think about them.
Betty? -- Have you read Pinkers books?
tpaine: I think you may be believing a lot more about what you ~imagine~ he has said, -- than his actual writings Betty
I think Pinker's claim that "...mind is the physiological activity of the brain..." [emphasis mine] is sufficient to establish the accuracy of betty's characterization of that claim as consciousness being merely the epiphenomenon or by-product of brain activity.
Cordially,
If you subscribe to his theme, and I am somewhat torn by it, but leaning towards it, then all our ideas of morals and scruples and right and wrong are inventions. Delusions.
God does indeed work in mysterious ways, djf. I empathize with your perplexity.
It would be so easy to say, “Well, Clarence Darrow – of Scopes Monkey Trial fame – bought into Darwin’s vision of nature. No wonder he’s a pessimist.” But that wouldn’t shed very much light on the problem….
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution rocked the world of its time: People then were simply not accustomed to thinking of themselves as animals. It went “against religion” and the common understanding of nature, a view that made man preeminent in the natural hierarchy.
That was one thing, a very big thing. Then as if to add insult to injury, Darwin basically said that all of Nature is at war – members of species fighting within their own species, or with other species; entire species fighting with each other, or with the environment itself. It was all struggle and no grace. Only the fit could survive in the endless, bloody-tooth-and-claw competition for the scarce resources needed to live long enough to propagate offspring. Natural selection improved your chances of surviving and attracting a mate. And that’s pretty much the end of the story. Pretty cut and dried, no?
And then, the piece de resistance -- the Creator was replaced by the Common Ancestor, and human beings were told that, hardly having been created in God’s own image, they all had descended (or “arose,” depending on your point of view) from a lower form of being than themselves.
Just want to get the main points of the “culturally insensitive” Darwinist theory on the table here – insensitive because denigrating of the multi-millennia-worth of “unmanipulated” human living and experience as recorded in the astonishing wealth of works of genius that they bequeathed to us now living.
Of course, time has passed since the mid-eighteenth century; and folks have had to make their peace with Darwin one way or another. Personally, I am sure that Charles Darwin could never have shifted the very axis of Western culture as he did if everything he said was a lie. I feel reasonably certain that some of his observations about certain processes and arrangements of the natural world are valid. But I expect, like all human beings, he had his strengths and also his weaknesses.
My evolutionist friends should speak to Darwin’s strengths. Indeed, they are most cordially invited to do so here. My task is to point out the weaknesses I see.
As far back as the very ancient world, human beings understood man in his essential nature as “half beast, half angel” – material and spiritual, profane (i.e., “secular”) and sacred. Indeed, for countless millennia, man understood himself as comprised by and unfolding his existence between these two dynamic “poles.” When Darwin came along and said that men were only animals, a whole lot of people then living believed him. Possibly not a few of them were relieved by this news. In any case, what he managed to accomplish was a reduction of reality to only one of its “poles,” and left the other in total eclipse.
But the fact is Darwin’s assertion proves nothing. And there are still some six millennia of human experience, culture, and history furnishing evidence tending to falsify his thesis. (That’s a BIG subject. Maybe we can explore it another time.)
What Darwin did, when you boil it all down, was reduce all of life to matter, and to consign the fate of living entities to an infinite series of random causes propagating effects that are in their turn to be further shaped by natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All of which somehow ends up being perfectly “determined” in the end, consistent with the original premise -- although this seems to involve a paradox. Yet nobody asks: Which is it? random or determined? Logically, the two do seem to be mutually exclusive. For it seems they cannot be logically reconciled in principle.
Whilst we dither over the paradox, perhaps we should note that a material, deterministic world can have no purpose, just as a machine cannot originate a “purpose” in itself, but must have it supplied from the outside. Still I gather there are people around who, for some strange reason, derive comfort from the idea of a purposeless Nature. [Reality check: Last time I looked, Nature looked pretty purposeful to me….] Maybe that has something to do with the fact that a world lacking purpose obviates any need of human purpose. Moral law is strangled at its birth. Free will and, with it, personal responsibility die with it.
Darwin was very much a captive of the Newtonian concept of the universe. Which is a marvelously solid, sturdy concept, and incredibly dependable and extraordinarily useful to this day, within the scale to which it is eminently applicable – our “normally perceived,” 4-dimensional world of experience (3 of space and 1 of time). It seems to me the greatest challenge for Darwin’s theory of evolution lies ahead: It has yet to engage and integrate the scientific breakthroughs of the last century that deal with scales of reality that are distinctly non-Newtonian: Einstein’s Relativity, and quantum physics. In short, Darwinism needs to be “renormalized” in terms of the two greatest scientific advances of the past century. My guess is a reconciliation with relativity theory can wait: Its scale is largely extra-planetary. But it seems so very clear to me that the quantum world is the crucible of living matter; and so it follows that anything purporting to be a “life science” must take QM’s investigations and insights to heart.
Plus one final note on point (1): To expunge “spirituality” is to expunge consciousness, mind itself. There’s nothing material or deterministic about consciousness. It is the most telling and irrefutable evidence that Spirit is active in the world…. Even Aristotle would tell you that.
(2) To me, a huge defect of Darwinist theory is that it makes conflict preeminent in the development of the living world. But this flies in the face of human observation and experience as is has evolved over time. There is enormous cooperation and dynamic mutuality at every level of even the simplest living organism: Body, organs, membranes, cells, DNA, genome – all living organisms are composites of other living organisms which are themselves composites of other living organisms, from top to bottom right on down the line. (If you’d like to acquire a graphic sense of this description, take a look at pictures of the Mandelbrot Set, and then find a comfy place where you won’t be disturbed for a while and think on what you’ve seen….)
Life emerges from a process of mutuality and cooperation at all the levels of being. Just when we think we’ve finally found something that can be regarded as the ultimate principle of life, something that can act “autonomously” – say, the genome – we discover that it is itself a composite of other parts – other living organisms. Life could not be sustained without mutuality and synergistic cooperation of all these hierarchically-ordered living parts – whether at the organic level of the physical body, or society at large, or the biosystem. Death tends to occur when/where the synergistic mutuality of parts is absent.
Darwinism, having expunged consciousness and “spirituality,” sends moral law -- that law pertaining to the good order of the individual and of the society of which he is a part -- right out the window too. Its value as a conflict reduction/resolution tool cannot be recognized absent consciousness. Without consciousness, morality is eclipsed, and free will and personal responsibility perish for lack of proper nurture. The “survival of the fittest” necessarily emerges from conflict, and Darwinist theory gives us no way to alleviate this grim and perilous condition – although human beings often figure out how to accomplish this end all the same.
(3) Now I invite you to turn your rapt gaze upon our Common Ancestor. Why date the birth of this paragon to the emergence of an hairy pre-hominid, an apish Esau? I mean, couldn’t Darwin have taken the common ancestor back further in time? To, say, the lemur? the primaeval muck? or the first helium atom? There’s nothing in “Darwinian logic” that appears to rule out such possibilities (except, perhaps, that it could care less about physics).
Me, I’d take the common ancestor back to the Singularity that the Big Bang blew into an ordered Universe, a One Cosmos of which we, each and every one of us, are parts and participants.
I mean, if you’re going to pluck a Common Ancestor out of a hat, as it were – couldn’t you find him anywhere or even nowhere? Yet here we have as the father of the human race a knuckle-dragging hominid who just acquired an opposing thumb and recently learned how to stagger into an upright position, on two legs. I must say Charles Darwin had interesting taste when it came to his selection of a paradigm for mankind…. I could say more in refutation of the pure speculation that is Darwin’s Common Ancestor; but I’ll save it for another time, ‘cause my time is just about up in the present writing.
Before I close, I find this troubling:
“The real nature, the one that no matter how moral and pure and charitable you are during your life, you still end up six feet under.”
Yes. I know. But here’s the main thing, djf: It has only been within the past century or maybe a little more that mankind has “universally” imagined death as “final,” as the short route to nothingness, to utter oblivion….
Do you realize how recent an idea this is?
“If you subscribe to [Darrow’s] theme, and I am somewhat torn by it, but leaning towards it, then all our ideas of morals and scruples and right and wrong are inventions. Delusions.”
Ah, the recourse to Feuerbach’s argument: All of spiritual reality, and all that God Himself is, is merely the fantastically unreal projection of the human imagination, frantically grasping for a cosmic security blanket….
There’s another way to understanding this phenomenon – and it is a phenomenon, and we can contrast it with the testimony, evidence, of actual thinking and experiencing human beings going back some 6,000+ years, all of which has entered the “empirical” mainstream by now. And we have more recent independent corroboration of this same point: The extraordinary, shreaking hostility that any idea of the divine evokes from “men of the Left” in our day. Certainly that must count as some kind of evidence….
We humans didn’t create God. That is a complete inversion of fact. It’s not that we “invented” a divinity to talk to, supposedly to relieve our existential anxiety. The real point is, God wants to talk to us. And people can hear Him when He speaks – in a voice so very soft yet clear and distinct, buried deeply in the remotest recesses of the human heart….
Ya know, if you could just give God one single chance of “finding you,” in faith, I think He’d do all the rest. (This test is more for your benefit than God’s. He already knows where you are. The real point is that you need to know that He does.)
Well, them be my thoughts, FWTW. Thank you so much for writing djf.
Betty, let me gloss over the rest of your lengthy and (as always) never inconsiderable post and say; you're out by 100 years here.
Back to shred the rest of it later. :-)
I agree with you right down the line as always. I would also very much like to see Darwin's theory be reconciled with dimensionality (though clearly a part of relativity) sooner rather than later because string theory reaches all levels of physics - quantum to astro.
You are most welcome to try, my friend. :^)
I'm going to bed now. In perplexity because I haven't figured out what part of my argument you have already shredded. Your reply didn't say.
You suggested that, whatever pretext we're supposedly discussing and reasoning about together, I was "out of it by 100 years."
Please tell me: What IT am I out of?
Good night!
Great catch. Thanks for reminding me of "the big picture," A-G.
Good night my friend!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.