Posted on 06/20/2007 5:24:39 AM PDT by spirited irish
That is where the idea goes wrong, for both Es and Cs. It is not more or less accidental. We won't get far talking about 'material' until we begin to talk about 'material' per se.
Nothing of the sort. I never suggested anything of the sort. I've just been expressing my view that it's exceedingly strange to insist that Islamists aren't creationists, when obviously they overwhelmingly are. I've no idea how you translated this so.
Yikes, do you really want to get started on what evils Christianity has been a philosophical enabler for?
It seems the idea that there can be a "normal meaning" of words - ie a commonly understood and accepted meaning that everyone agrees on - has been rejected as being unreasonable.
In the first place, there is absolutely no way a human being can ever be "perfectly objective." Objective about what? "Personal bias" necessarily creeps in, because there is no other way for human beings to acquire knowledge -- via sense perception or any other source. The human mind is individuated -- discrete, not a mere flotsom or jetsom of a communal mind, let alone an epiphenomenon of the physical brain.
Each of us has a particular worldview or cosmology. Both of us are equally "observers"; meaning each of us stands on our own turf, in our own spatiotemporal coordinates: We see what we can see from where we stand; we have particular life experiences, and education and so forth. We probably see many different things, from our own unique perspectives. What I don't understand is the reasoning behind the supposition that, because I don't see what you see, my own view is somehow illegitimate, false.
Einstein's Special Relativity comes to mind here. This was the 1905 paper that made E = mc2 famous. But there's much more of interest.
Einstein speaks of different observers as occupying just so many different inertial frames. Inertial frames are such as can be defined and located spatiotemporally in terms of mathematical coordinates. The upshot is that spatially-separated observers who are nonetheless "relative to" or associated with each other, would experience and record different "rates" for their space and time experiences, were they to get together and compare notes. Measurements taken by both their "clocks" and their "rods" would not exactly dovetail. Thus relativity would seem to imply uncertainty, rather than Newtonian precision.
The one thing that Einstein seemed absolutely to hold sacrosanct -- in Special Relativity and beyond -- is that the physical laws of nature -- i.e., Newtonian mechanics -- are (axiomatically) the same for all observers in all inertial frames. Einstein figured (I gather) that the Old One (as he called Him) made a pretty decent piece of work when He made the universe....
Many people think that the "observer problem" -- not to mention the problem of so-called "quantum" uncertainty (aren't Einstein's inertial frames already a sort of quantization of space and time relative to observers?) -- didn't become evident before Bohr and Heisenberg. It seems to me Einstein anticipated them by some two decades.
So where am I going with this, tacticalogic? Something you said set me off on this tangent....
Thanks for letting me rant; and thank you so much for writing!
Blah, blah, blah. Yada, yada, yada.
None of which changes the fact that a person who holds a substantive theological doctrine of creation is meaningfully called a "creationist". And a creationist who substantively rejects evolution is an antievolutionary creationist.
Virtually all Muslims (like virtually all serious monotheists) are creationists, and the vast majority of Islamists (conservative, "fundamentalist" Muslims) are antievolutionary creationists.
Why you would belabor this is astounding.
Again, from your post at 137, early on in this exchange:
Creation is a loving act. Beheading people is not. You cannot hide behind an argument of "moral equivalency," or of groundless personal bias here; i.e., my supposed lack of "objectivity." The distinctions I draw are perfectly "objective." Just open your eyes and look at what's going on. Then if you report back and say there's no difference among religious believers, I'd have to conclude that you are the one who is biased, who lacks objectivity.
The view from my "unique perspective" is that I see you claiming that you can't understand a supposition that you've already made.
Metaphysics Nazi: “No ‘unique perspective’ for you!”
Actually, many of those you label as Islamofascists—perhaps a majority—are in fact secular Communists and Socialists masquerading (and/or treated by the press) as Muslim fundamentalists.
GunRunner-—Yikes, do you really want to get started on what evils Christianity has been a philosophical enabler for?
Irish—Underlying your argument is the second of the two core presuppositions on which every worldview (civilizatiuon) has been founded since the dawn of time.
The first deals with the origins of life and the universe. The second asks: What is the source of suffering (evil)?
Since the dawn of time, naturalism (modern evolutionary humanism) responds to this question by asserting that evil exists external to man. That in fact, the matter deities such as Saturn, Mars, etc. ‘caused’ man to commit evil.
This assumption implies the lack of free will and morally informed conscience in man. Man therefore bears no personal accountability.
The Biblical worldview is completely antithetical to all of this. It tells us that man is created with free will and morally informed conscience. That it is man who freely chooses to either act upon dark impulses or not to.
With regards to your question, yes, men have committed evils in the name of Christianity. But not because the Bible (God) ‘caused’ them to do it as though they lack both free will and morally informed conscience. That is the view of naturalism.
You ought to be asking why the most horrendous evils (human sacrifice, cannibalism, eugenics, infanticide, abortion, slavery, mass exterminations, liquidation of between 100-170,000,000 in 1st 87 yrs of 20th century,etc) have been committed by man in the name of naturalism since the dawn of time.
Since the dawn of time, naturalism (modern evolutionary humanism) responds to this question by asserting that evil exists external to man. That in fact, the matter deities such as Saturn, Mars, etc. ‘caused’ man to commit evil. This assumption implies the lack of free will and morally informed conscience in man. Man therefore bears no personal accountability.
If that is the case, how could any civilization based on a "naturalist worldview" have any kind of system or concept of law, justice, crime, or punishment?
LoL...
My point is simply this: a person whose entire education consists of memorizing the Q'uran by rote has never had an opportunity to cultivate the mind or to engage in a life of reason. The dispute between creationists and evolutionists is premised on reason, on rationality. The vast majority of Muslims in this world -- i.e., those within the orbit of Arab Wahhabism -- are simply irrational. They cannot even get into the debate. You can call them creationists if you want to. I have no objection. Probably that term would mean very little to most of these people.
The exceptions would be such as the "Turk," whose book you cited, and the link to whose website I posted earlier. This is obviously a highly well-educated and cultured person. Which should come as no surprise: Turkey used to be a part of the Christian orbit; Constantinople (now Istanbul) was a highly cosmopolitan city with a rich tradition of scholarship and a culture mainly informed from Christian and Greco-Roman roots. That tradition still has legs in the modern world. Although the Wahhabist infection, a fairly recent phenomenon, appears to be metastasizing in modern Turkey. It now appears that very shortly "secular" Turkey will succumb to a theocracy premised on Sharia. That is the trend in Islam these days: to swallow up cultures premised on liberal traditions that respect education and the life of the mind, replacing them with modes of understanding and social organization that are "reactionary" and primitive.
And you want to argue about whether or not to label these people as creationists? Fine! I have no objection, other than to note that doing so seems pretty pointless to me. FWIW.
My friend, it is you who does not understand it. From what I wrote earlier, you should have noticed that I said that knowledge acquisition was always a perfectly subjective enterprise. "Objectivity" can only enter into the game at the level of the descriptions we make of subjective experiences. If the descriptions are borne out by "facts on the ground," then the objectivity of the statements is validated.
Niels Bohr, recognizing the inherent subjectivity of human experiences of the world, extending particularly to worldviews and undisclosed presuppositions, insisted that science should be epistemologically pure. In effect, this reduces to two points: (1) Don't make claims about things you haven't directly observed; and (2), make full and fair disclosure of all elements that entered into the experimental design in tests of hypotheses, including a complete account of the equiment used, and the basic assumptions that lay behind the experimental design. I gather Bohr figured this would be the best way to "translate" the inherently subjective into something as close to objectivity that one can get -- for the purpose of protecting the integrity of science.
It seems many scientists nowadays fail to take Bohr's advice. And thus we have so many examples of "philosophizing" being done under the color of science. Theories of a materialistic, accidental universe (such as Monod's claim, mentioned earlier) and the common ancestor are prime examples of this phenomenon.
FWIW.
Excellent point, spirited irish: "That is the view of naturalism". And yes indeed, it has a very long history. The modern variants have been particularly deadly.
Thank you so much for your excellent essay/post!
Without any agreement to the terms being used in that description, determining whether those "facts" are born out or not is an entirely subjective proposition.
Tactic..If that is the case, how could any civilization based on a “naturalist worldview” have any kind of system or concept of law, justice, crime, or punishment?
Irish...Yes indeed, there were some good concepts from pre-Biblical times. However, those concepts centered upon and therefore aided and abetted the ‘few’ and not the ‘many.” History of those times speaks of subhumans and of the massive system of slavery in which they lived and died. Gladiators were slaves who fought and died for the amusement of their ‘betters.’ Their lifeless bodies were then tossed into ‘fleshpots’ and cooked as food for the poorest of the poor ‘subhumans.’ Babies were routinely burned to death within the fiery stomach of Molech.
These horrors and much more were committed because the pagans believed that mankind was created by anthropomophized ‘matter’ deities who in turn had, ‘evolved’ out of an eternally existing ‘Original Substance.” In this view, man is an aggressive parasite despoiling his ‘creator.’ The atonement for the sin of living calls for human sacrifice, and various ‘scientific’ means of population control.
It’s man’s duty to ‘die.”
Modern evolutionism is simply pre-Biblical naturalism minus the anthropomorphized matter deities. And as usual, the modern version has been doing everything the pre-Biblical version did: weeding out and killing the aggressive parasites.
"Without any agreement," the human race is lost. For we no longer have any way of making ourselves intelligible to one another, if we begin by saying that there is no standard by which our statements can be judged, in principle.
Are you sure you want to go there? It seems you are advocating in favor of an infinite causal regression that leads to exactly nothing and nowhere.
As against that proposition, may I advance a notion of Eric Voegelin's, that the human psyche -- assuming it has not been tampered with -- has an innate, "indefeasible integrity" in its contacts with/descriptions of nature.
Meaning: We humans seemingly tend to get things right in our descriptions of the universe. Otherwise, the causes that led to our advanced societies would be utterly unintelligible.
Just ask yourself: Why is that???
Short answer: It couldn't (see below). Therefore, under the scenario of the "naturalist worldview," what we in the West call civilization would be impossible.
Yet we see that civilization does occur every now and then. Though it appears to be far more fragile than any of us would have imagined. Possibly this is because people still continue to try to found its ultimate universal principles in nature itself. Which is tantamount to saying that nature is at liberty to make up its own rules as it goes along. Which tells you exactly nothing about the constitution of nature other than that it is a chaos in random distribution, and thus fundamentally incapable of generating universal laws. Thus the statement that systems or concepts of law, justice, etc., can be premised on the assumptions of the "naturalist worldview" is based on a self-contradiction.
Plus the statement does not address Leibniz's two great questions: (1) Why is there something, instead of nothing at all?; and (2) Why are things the way they are, and not some other way?
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