Posted on 10/28/2006 3:22:14 PM PDT by betty boop
I deduce Bohr and Einstein are BOTH right.. in attitude..
That is, faith, should be an operator in any formula.. as, by the way, it is in the presence of infinity.. For what is infinity except faith in that beyond your conceptual grasp..
I observe, My personal situation like that.. I look at my body that is obvious and wonder about my spirit which seems to be.. Can't prove my spirit is infinite but I can prove my body isn't infinite(to myself).. by the very seemingly real subject of death.. That I observe(things that die)..
"The Observer" is indeed the prime requisite of any conversation.. For the observation post drives any deductions.. And how can any two humans occupy the same exact observation post?.. i.e. Einstien and Bohr's views of physics and other things....
Relativity and Quantum Theory are tails wagging "the GoD"..
The Bible might be the best "science book" of ALL...
I know, I know, I'm taking my meds..
Alamo-Girl, I didn't know you were into these areas. I agree entirely with what you say.
Worth reading for the situation we find ourselves in are the later books of Alastair MacIntyre, written after his conversion from Marxism, especially his two key books, "After Virtue," and "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" He plausibly suggests that we have three camps or communities in the contemporary western world: traditionalists, modernists, and postmodernists, and that they all talk past each other because their fundamental premises or axioms are from entirely different worlds and do not overlap.
We have certainly witnessed that phenomenon on numerous Darwin threads in the forum, where the Darwinists simply repeat the same mantras again and again, rather than respond to their opposition's arguments. I think that was because they simply couldn't SEE the arguments. Their world view (Weltanschauung) doesn't permit them to. Their answer is pure and simple: Darwin is science; if you disagree with Darwinism you are hopelessly ignorant; so we will turn to the activist courts to prevent you from passing your superstitious ignorance on to the next American generation.
Another book I'd recommend is by Thomas Nagel, who is said to be one of the three or four top living philosophers.
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel
He is an agnostic, but he is also a truth seeker, as few philosophers are in today's academia. His book "The Last Word" is an effort to understand how, in a purely material world without God, there can be such a thing as universal knowledge. And why does the order of the universe seem to correspond to the order of our thinking? He comes very close to admitting what he cannot, as an agnostic philosopher, admit: that the only way to account for universal knowledge that can be communicated in objective language is religious. Indeed, that something like the Logos is necessary. He does not make that jump, but his book has been much discussed in religious circles by Christian philosophers, for example in a Catholic academic journal I get called, coincidentally, Logos.
Although somewhat off the immediate subject, two other books I have found extremely valuable in thinking about the nature of reality are Lynch's "Christ and Apollo," and Ralph McInerny's "Aquinas and Analogy." The latter is highly specialized but I think more important than most academic books. Incidentally, McInerny also writes detective novels.
Much of this boils down to the meaning of the word realism. In classical philosophy, the real is what lies behind the phenomena. In modernist philosopy, the real is the material. But modernist philosophy is incapable of sustaining that argument, and degenerates into scholastic specialization that has made most academic philosophy departments completely irrelevant to the real world.
I should add that postmodernist philosophy is even more hopeless. It posits that there is no objective reality; everything is relative; "truth" is meaningless; and therefore that the purpose of academic argument is to change the language so that everyone is forced to agree with what you say.
That's basically what Heidegger, who lies behind the more popular Derrida and outweighs him, did. It has been said that if you spend enough time trying to understand Heidegger, it will drive you mad, which was evidently his intention. At least, to drive you out of the real world and into his world.
We have shaken down this very misunderstanding of the term "realism" on a previous thread. And it is an important one, because if the correspondent can get Plato off the table, he can fabricate his own "reality" to justify himself (at least in his own mind LOL!)
Thank you too for all the great reading suggestions - which I'm sure betty boop will also be interesting in reading.
You might be interested in knowing that she and I have just completed a book of our own addressing these very issues.
Thanks, Alamo-Girl. I should have addressed my earlier posts to all of you.
I'm fascinated to learn about the projected book. I happen to be in the field of English literature, and have touched on these matters in some of my books, but have not had formal training in philosophy, which is probably just as well, all things considered. There aren't too many places that teach it properly.
But I was fortunate enough to have had a course at Harvard that let Plato and Aristotle speak for themselves, and another course that let the medieval philosophers speak for themselves. The latter was taught by Henry Osborne Taylor, a proper New England WASP who nevertheless had a real sympathy for Catholic medieval thought and civilization, and recognized that civilization was transmitted and rebuilt by heroes like Gregory the Great, Boniface, and Thomas Aquinas. That put me onto further reading on my own.
Thank you for your reply, Dimensio. Seems like impressive evidence!
Still, it seems to me that each of the items on your list is open to question, or other interpretation. For instance, the fossil record. I understand it still has "gaps," but people are working to "fill them in" by searching for more fossils, especially from those time periods when the fossil record seems scant (e.g., the pre-Cambrian). But it seems to me that you can pile up all the fossils you want to; but that wouldn't SHOW a transition of one species into an entirely different species. Such a transition would have to be observed before we can say that it really occurred -- at least if we are going to be as "epistemologically rigorous" as Niels Bohr says a scientist must be. Because something seems intuitive enough -- and granted, macroevolution seems "intuitive" -- is not enough to establish scientific rigor.
I'm not aware Bohr directly spoke to macroevolution theory; but then I'm still studying him. (If you know something about any statements he's made on that subject, I'd be grateful if you'd fill me in.) However, based on what I do know so far, he was famous for saying that valid science is all about making descriptions of the natural world, and you can't describe what you haven't actually seen.
But maybe this is what constitutes a difference between physics and biology. Still, they are both branches of science, and both are informed by the scientific method.
As for DNA relics across species, here's a "what if" for you: What if all living species share a single, I almost want to say (but won't) universal common genome as the basic stuff of life? And that there is another, as yet undetected principle at work here (e.g., successful communication of information) that "customizes" the expression of the genome for each individual species? -- undetected because not looked for? It seems that could explain why humans and the higher apes express the genome almost identically; and it could obviate the necessity of saying that apes gave rise to humans.
That's just a conjecture, of course. It's occurred to other people as well. Are Darwinian theorists interested in looking into a proposition like that?
Ditto for the population studies. I don't know what light such truly shed on the problem of one species arising from an entirely different predecessor species. The studies may be perfectly valid for microevolution, yet not necessarily furnish evidence for macroevolution.
But then, I am a very skeptical person!
Thank you for writing, Dimensio!
Friedrich Hayek also calls the problem a prejudice. He says it is an abuse of reason. He wrote a whole book on it: The Counter-Revolution of Science. Studies in the Abuse of Reason.
It's been a while since I read it, but I should look at it again. Part deals with scientism. If you haven't run across that word here before you can read about it on this thread. It describes scientism as that bias or prejudice that insists that "that truth and knowledge of reality can be derived only as outcomes of the scientific method."
Hayek himself quotes Adam Smith on the abuse:
Systems which have universally owed their origin to the lucubrations of those who were acquainted with one art, but ignorant of the other; who therefore explained to themselves the phenomena, in that which was strange to them, by those in that which was familiar.
Those who only do biology and no philosophy would have difficulty getting through the book. But I'm sure that the philosophy of science should eventually become part of their studies and that students should not follow any teacher who would suppress that part of science as being irrelevant.
Hayek describes scientism as follows:
a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it.You'll that this lists at least two things involved: the omission of information and the unwarranted application of a method or principle.
Oh, is that ever a fact, Alamo-Girl! I simply loved this observation:
Much of this boils down to the meaning of the word realism. In classical philosophy, the real is what lies behind the phenomena. In modernist philosopy, the real is the material. But modernist philosophy is incapable of sustaining that argument, and degenerates into scholastic specialization that has made most academic philosophy departments completely irrelevant to the real world.Amen to that, Cicero!!! Kudos!
Plus I'm grateful to you Cicero for the book recommendations. I've read A. MacIntyre's After Virtue, an excellent work. Seems the others you name are "must-haves," as well!
Cicero, please keep me on your ping list for whenever you ping.
Thank you all, Alamo-Girl, Cicero, cornelis, for this fascinating discussion!
Although not so specific as Hayek, I think Alfred North Whitehead also had a sensible approach to the virtues and the failings of the scientific revolution and its aftermath.
Not sure if you saw my post #141, which I neglected to address to you and Betty Boop.
Jeepers, Dimensio, I didn't hear cornelis claim any such thing!
You know, apologist, the evolutionist's statement itself seems to be inherently "metaphysical" -- though of a bastardized sort, it seems.
Cogent and concise, hosepipe....
Yes, out of "First Reality" into a "preferred" alternative reality, or "Second Reality," as Robert Musil, Heimito von Doderer, Eric Voegelin, et al., have termed it. Second realities, in principle, are flights from first reality and usually boil down to "contempt for reason" -- aspernatio rationis as your namesake put it. In classical times, such flights were regarded (e.g., by Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Cicero) as cases of pneumopathological disorder.
Heidegger, I gather, was just all hyped up on the disorder of the Weimar period, and actually helped set the stage for Hitler.... he "softened up" the German people for their future destruction with his irrational confusions.
I've put in a little time, at least, on people like Descartes, Gides, Camus, Sartre, and Derrida, but I draw the line at Heidegger. What he means by "being" is not what I mean by it, I'm quite sure. It's got to be "being toward death," or something of the sort, but I don't find that very helpful.
I've met Derrida, actually, but didn't quite know what to say to him. That St. Augustine had already answered his problems about absence and differance in The Confessions? Fortunately he was surrounded by young women eager to butter him up.
That's hardly surprising, Cicero. He lives in a second reality and (evidently) you don't. There is no common ground for discourse in such a situation.
Still, it might be fun to see how he would "deconstruct" one of the greatest philosopher/theologians who ever lived. I mean, by Derrida's rule, the text (Confessions) must stand completely on its own, without recourse to the author's motives in writing, or his intentions.... But if this is so, then why would anybody go to the trouble of writing a book in the first place????
Talk about irrational!
You wrote, "Fortunately [Derrida] was surrounded by young women eager to butter him up." Yes; and probably he was perfectly willing to return the favor! :^)
Ever seen a picture of Steven Pinker? (I saw him on late-night TV once.) Jeepers, the guy looks like Adonis, or an angel of God. I bet he doesn't have any problem "meeting girls" (that is, assuming he likes girls). Sometimes I wonder whether guys like these cultivate such outrageous public speech/public personae because it helps "to attract mates" in due Darwinian style....
So maybe "girls" are attracted to "irrational" men???? Yeah, that's what I call "fitness value!"
I'm sorry for saying such silly things; but to me, Derrida and Pinker are just plain "silly" themselves. And I wonder why some women can be so gullible.
Thanks for writing, Cicero!
But surely not "soul" mates, I would hardly think.
Actually, I hate to be crass, but I think they were probably more interested in getting a good job recommendation from a big name guru than anything else. Graduate students.
Actually for you to put the matter that way makes me the crass one! :^)
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