Posted on 10/28/2006 7:47:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
I am taking the poster at his/her word ... there is a sincerity in there, if one looks closely, that's why I posted the sentence I quoted from TrisB. I get maligned regularly for my thoughts on dimensioanlity and reality, so I don't risk anything here at FR by sharing more detailed thoughts. But this newbie is taking a risk to post personal thoughts and we ought remmeber that ... even as I meanspiritedly chided the poster for cloying comments. I reacted to insults toward you and had to make a bit of a punt there. The issue of free will is a sticky one as one grows older and fills up with cares of this world.
That was my frustration on all the Darwin threads for the past year. One could point out that Michael Behe and Phillip Johnson, among others, had made statistical arguments against the Theory of General Evolution, using principles accepted by materialist scientists, but the Darwinians simply never would address the issue.
Alasdair MacIntyre's "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" is all about people talking past each other. He identifies three communities which use different languages based on different assumptions: traditionalists, modernists, and postmodernists. Or one might give them philosophical names: realists, materialists, and relativists. The Postmodernists have drawn (incorrectly, some say) on Foucault to argue that words can never accord with things, and therefore that there is no such thing is truth (to put it in a nutshell). Postmodernists attack modernists from the other side, and have no use for anything like objective science.
From the realist point of view, however, modernism and postmodernism are self-contradictory, because neither can explain rationality in terms that don't make it merely an accident of matter or an arbitrary opinion of the individual or the community.
"Evolved from a retarded fish-monkey, right Mr. Dawkins!?"
Thanks EV.
That is true. Just the fact that we exist at all proves that God is merciful! Or he has quite a sense of humor...I do believe it's both.
Being nothing more than a humble citizen of a great republic, I would not presume to instruct you in anything, especially in any matter of importance. But, can you explain a few issues to me? Not as a matter of argument, but simply as instruction.
Can you explain ‘randomness’ and, as a way of contrast, ‘chance’? I would like both to mean the same tomorrow as today, but I understand that the receipt of new information may cause either or both to mean something different at some future time.
Is ‘Free Will’ a fact or an illusion?
*Other than possibly in a contextual fashion, do you make any distinction between the human “mind” and the human “brain”?
*If the scientific mechanistic view of life (including, therefore, the human brain) is that of an array of unguided chemical reactions and random neuron discharges, then what sort of positive knowledge beyond the physical environment can be claimed, and by what rule of logic can such a life-sense declare that it is anything but helpless to believe other than what it does believe?
* Have ethics been disproved by Science, as some scientists (for example Harvard professor Steven Pinker in his book How the Mind Works), and other experts, argue?
* If not the case, then what are the ethics of Science, what is its ethical rationale, and whence come the values upon which its ethics are based?
And, finally, some rather fundamental issues:
* Can a causal chain be of infinite length?
* Can there be something that is the cause of itself?
* Can an infinite temporal regress of events exist (other than as a mathematical proposition)?
* Has mathematical deduction determined, with reasonable conclusiveness, that the premise of first cause arguments is valid?
* Before answering the above, will we find ourselves engaged in the tedious business of untangling the nuances of concepts such as being, existence, and essence, and therefore become so engrossed in consequent arguments that we never get back to the original propositions?
If “What you see is what you get” is all there is, then let’s keep dancing.
Thanks for the ping to your engaging challenge!
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