More Notable Quotables...
"Freedom is not one moral value among many, but the necessary condition for all morality. Without the possibility of acting other than one did or does or might act there is no responsibility and without responsibility no morality. Freedom derives from choice, and choice in turn from awareness." - Allen Wheelis
"Why is 'one plus twelve' an anagram of 'two plus eleven'? The truth is that not everything has a reason behind it. We should not assume there is someone or something to be blamed for every pattern that strikes us as significant. But we have evolved to have what the psychologist Bartlett called an 'effort after meaning'. We have always done better to find meaning where there was none than to miss meaning where there was." - Nick Humphrey
"As we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us." - Steven Weinberg
"Unnervingly, there is literally no form of experience or behavior too horrible to get selected for if it differentially enhances the reproductive fitness of genetic vehicles." - David Pearce
"Americans seem to have a very difficult time recognizing that there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing. Somehow we believe that an attempt to inform ourselves about what leads to evil is an attempt to explain it away. I believe that just the opposite is true, and that when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our own worst enemy." - Kathleen Norris
"Freedom is not one moral value among many, but the necessary condition for all morality. Without the possibility of acting other than one did or does or might act there is no responsibility and without responsibility no morality. Freedom derives from choice, and choice in turn from awareness." - Allen Wheelis
"Why is 'one plus twelve' an anagram of 'two plus eleven'? The truth is that not everything has a reason behind it. We should not assume there is someone or something to be blamed for every pattern that strikes us as significant. But we have evolved to have what the psychologist Bartlett called an 'effort after meaning'. We have always done better to find meaning where there was none than to miss meaning where there was." - Nick Humphrey
"As we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us." - Steven Weinberg
"Unnervingly, there is literally no form of experience or behavior too horrible to get selected for if it differentially enhances the reproductive fitness of genetic vehicles." - David Pearce
"Americans seem to have a very difficult time recognizing that there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing. Somehow we believe that an attempt to inform ourselves about what leads to evil is an attempt to explain it away. I believe that just the opposite is true, and that when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our own worst enemy." - Kathleen Norris
posted by howtolive.org at
12:04 PM
2 Comments:
In what is apparently your current state of mind, all things are possible and interesting.This is not a virtue of logic or rationality; it is a virtue of imagination.Hold onto it dearly because if you persist in your stated purpose, your imagination is the baby you'll need to salvage from the bathwater. I applaud your efforts and hope that you will have a fruitful journey. Toward that end I offer a few thoughts on the subject.
1. Whether or not there is anything beyond our universe(in the grand sense of our ability to perceive or measure) is utterly irrelevant, and most likely uninteresting except for flights of fancy. Why? Because, by definition, it cannot affect us. The very instant that it affects us or becomes tangent in any way to our universe, it ceases to be THAT and becomes THIS. And THIS is the province of science. Anything that is defined as supernatural or metaphysical cannot be studied or understood by science, but who cares? No theist is interested in God's hobbies. It is the interface BETWEEN the natural and the supernatural(i.e. so-called miracles, etc.) that people are concerned with. In short, if there is a God who exists beyond the physical laws of our universe, it does not matter UNTIL He acts on our universe at which point He or His act is by definition part of our Universe and even if not constrained by our universe's physical laws, He or His act is certainly subject to our scientists' scrutiny. Read more at naturalism.org.
2. Your conscious or subconscious endorsement of the legitimacy of the evolution/ID "debate" if not your tacit endorsement of ID itself, is clear through your repeated use of the term,"design" throughout your site. I would predict that, if you are not being disingenuous, you probably believe that some kind of god or other-worldly force does exist and has either allowed or controlled the process of evolution. If I am correct in that prediction, please re-read #1 above after reading this.
If your position is that "God"(or whatever) must exist because of the overabundance of order and apparent design in the universe generally and in biological systems specifically,think about this:
a.this is what is known as the argument from personal incredulity. "I, personally, find (it) difficult to imagine therefore (it) must be false." or conversely,"I find (it) easier to believe than something else so (it) must be true." Obviously, this can have no explanatory value to anyone, including the person making the argument.
b.If your argument is that the universe and the biology found in it are too complex to have occurred via any means other than through the design of some vastly superior being you have explained precisely NOTHING. You are in the grips of an infinite regress. If the universe is so complex as to require a designer, then by the same very argument, THE DESIGNER ITSELF REQUIRES A DESIGNER (presumably the designer is at least AS complex as that which was designed).
3. You may also have bought into the statistical hat trick suggesting that the universe is too statistically unlikely to have occurred via natural means(trick #1 is the use of the code term "by chance"). Ponder this: The odds of something happening that DID HAPPEN, no matter how unlikely, are precisely 1 in 1.
By
Chris, at 12:02 PM
Fantastic comments! Thanks for taking the time to write. Once I've had a chance to process this I'll plan to post about it.
By
howtolive.org, at 11:23 AM
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