Posted on 03/02/2013 3:30:22 AM PST by grey_whiskers
Consider looking at the sky. One can often see a layer of clouds, where the sky is completely clear below a certain height, but the clouds seem to mushroom expansively, all emanating from the same height, as though resting on a great unseen glass shelf in the sky. In other, rarer, circumstances, one may happen to see a column of smoke rising, and abruptly halt and spread out horizontally, as though it has hit an invisible ceiling.
The same thing happens in the mind: one travels along the paths of knowledge, absorbing information and learning all one can about a subject, until either one's capacity is full, or (more frighteningly) one reaches the limits of what one can, or is willing ("...it's late, i'm tired, and there's so much left to do, " as Blaufeld observed James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever) to absorb -- whether intrinsically, or whether it is "as far as one has had the stomach to travel". At this point, the mind retreats from rigorous examination, skepticism, back-checking, and resorts either to approximations, stereotypes, or belief.
I often think that one of the reasons so many scientists and other intellectuals reject faith altogether is that they are fearful of this phenomenon in themselves, and therefore despise and reject it in others: and having had no comparison within their own lives, they falsely attribute all piety and devotion to a mere throwing up of the hands and intellectual surrender: which is to them of all evils to commit, the one they fear most. (Being closely aligned as it is with the prospect of being dominated, and compelled to do obeisance without assent: which is how they also characterize the prospect of Worship.)
Meow...*Crash*
(Sound of grey_whiskers jumping up on the counter and rubbing his cheek along a glass vase, knocking it off onto the floor where it shatters.)
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear grey_whiskers!
*
Thanks to Slings and Arrows for locating the perfect graphic.
De nada.
Great video, thanks for the link. He is a very common sense preacher, with a sense of humor too!
Lucy....thanks for the ping!
Grey.....thanks for the great thread!
To what do you attribute the law of gravity?
Do the laws of nature emerge from nothing? By virtue of a random "natural" or "physical" process? If so, why do we consider them to be "lawful?"
IOW, can laws ever be the outcome of a random, wholly "natural" (or physical) development?
It seems that you, BigCinBigD, are on a very positivist track: your assumption being that only direct observables can be said to exist. The corollary is phenomena in nature incapable of direct observation have no real existence in principle. Therefore, they must be fictions.
But the problem is, the physical laws themselves fall into this category of non-observables. [Not to mention all of mathematics.]
E.g., have you ever "seen" gravity? [Though you certainly seem to believe in it.] Have you ever seen pi?
Just wondering....
If you want to get an atheist going, just start them on "qualia."
Try the wikipedia article for starters.
And then make the obvious segue to beauty, morals, fact vs. meaning (cf regular text vs. xml if you catch my drift, it's still just a hash lookup when all is said and done), and the while "is vs. ought".
All tied in with the soul-mind dichotomy. :-)
Cheers!
Not interested. First of all, "qualia" is a slippery, ill-defined term. Secondly, I'm not here to beat up on atheists.
Though it is true that many/most atheists of my acquaintance are metaphysical naturalists — who insist that everything in nature has a physico-chemical basis and explanation, and that all causation in nature is local and "efficient" in the Aristotelian sense — not all atheists are satisfied with such presuppositions.
Case in point: the self-described atheist Thomas Nagle, whose book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False [Oxford University Press, 2012], acknowledges the following:
With regard to the origin of life ... the option of natural selection is not available. And the coming into existence of the genetic code — an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can read the code and carry out its instructions — seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable given physical law alone.Then we get back to those squishy (ill-defined) qualia. As mentioned earlier, I have never yet come across a precise definition of this term. But it is clear to me that the term refers to subjective mental and emotional states which exist beyond the ability of the scientific method to test. Therefore, since they are immune from scientific direct observation and test, they must in some way be "unreal." And so are to be regarded as "epiphenomena of brain activity," and, as such, have zero capability of "causing" anything to happen in the real world.
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective [sic] by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
But the fact of the matter is these "subjective events" have been shown to be causally effective in scientific studies. [E.g., the placebo effect.]
All of which brings us to the seemingly insoluable "mind–body 'problem'." Which seems eminently unresolvable on the basis of physics and chemistry alone:
If [physico-chemical] reduction fails in some respect, this reveals a limit to the reach of the physical sciences, which must therefore be supplemented by something else to account for the missing elements. But the situation may be more serious than that. If one doubts the reducibility of the mental to the physical, and likewise of all those other things that go with the mental such as value and meaning, then there is some reason to doubt that a reductive materialism can apply even in biology, and therefore reason to doubt that materialism can give an adequate account even of the physical world. [Ibid.][My kind of atheist — an honest man!!! It seems to me sooner or later Professor Nagle will need to ask himself: WHY am I an "honest man?"... I mean, he could have taken the "other" path, but evidently didn't....]
Dear grey_whiskers, I think you want to go deeper into questions of the origins of moral law — not to mention such other critically important things as aesthetics, intuition, seemingly innate ideas such as symmetry, balance, beauty, truth, natural parsimony, etc., etc.
None of these things is explicable in principle by the physico-chemical laws.
But the fact that none can be explained in such terms does not negate their purely existential natural reality and efficacy within the universal cosmic order.
Oh, one last thing before I sign off. Above I suggested the quale (plural qualia) did not have a precise definition. To put that in perspective, recently I came across an extraordinarily precise and universal definition of life, couched in scientific terms:
What Is Life?Just some food for thought....
Life is a phenomenon in which organisms manifest collective and systematic, spontaneous, self-initiated changes serving teleological processes acting against physico-chemical equilibration.... life means spontaneous and teleological motion. [A. Grandpierre and M. Kafatos, "Biological Autonomy"; in Philosophical Study Vol. 2, No. 9, September 2012, El Monte, CA: David Publishing Company.]
Thank you ever so much, dear brother grey_whiskers, for pinging me to this interesting discussion!
Freepmail.
Exactly..
Psalm 19:1-4 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. 2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
Romans 1:19-23 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Your derision is exactly what g_w is talking about and is clearly revealed in your short post.
Luke 16:29-31 29 But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ 30 And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
What Is Life?
I prefer the Dave Barry definition of Life:
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
A few years back there was a *very* erudite and sophisticated philosophical/functional definition of life, which I cannot now find: all I recall is that it was black text on a yellow background. I checked my bookmarks and didn't see it.
If I do, I will reply post-haste.
Cheers!
Do you worship the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Spirited: Pride (inflated perception of self) is the ‘perfect’ anti-God, anti-Truth, anti-higher authority condition. Pride however does not inflate in isolation from hatred of truth, covetousness, resentment and lust for power and domination over others, hence its’ resort to violence.
Violence is not merely the physical but rather always begins within the nonphysical, the mind and will. Thus resentment of ‘other’ (i.e., God and all who worship Him) necessitates the use of psychological violence which takes the form of lies, Big Lies, propaganda of the lie, coercion, terror, slander, ‘politics of personal destruction,’ and destructive ridicule and criticism aimed at deconstructing and/or unmaking the spiritual virtues of ‘other.’
With respect to the God of Revelation, the resentful individuals’ violent, evil intent can be heard in its’ voice, which dripping with contempt, ridicule and derogation speaks in scorn-filled terms such as the ‘Great Flying Spaghetti Monster.’
We all have a Guardian Angel.
You better hope He does. If not, your destiny, already condemned, offers no hope.
BTW, When He made man in His own image, he didn't have a senior moment and forget to make a way He could communicate with us.
Try placing faith in what He provided in Christ on the Cross, tell Him that, and leave the rest up to Him to show you how to grow in Him. He isn't dead. Too many people ignore Him, when He provides so much for us to have a very real direct relationship with Him.
Well, okay then...
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.