The perfect answer to that question...
Posted on 03/09/2015 6:58:35 AM PDT by Heartlander
No WONDER we feel so desolate.
“A major way to test a philosophy or worldview is to ask: Is it logically consistent?”
Evolution is religion to those who follow it. It is not logical, and they don’t care.
“...the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth...”
It appears that statement is taken far too literally. It could also mean that it responds more favorably to success, irregardless of truth. As an example, some members of society have evolved to rely upon govt to survive, even when there is plenty of evidence it is not in their best interests. Their logical thought process has been rewired to favor dependence.
Perhaps?
Philosophy can lead to great insights into human nature, but it can also take us down some wild and woolly paths into error.
Basically, IMO, ideas should be tested empirically (by that I mean, “do they work?”), and otherwise just be thought of as interesting ideas that have not yet been proven well enough to apply to the living of our own lives, or ideologies. Just my opinion.
The did an experiment with fruit flies and had something like 60,000 generation monitored to see i there were any “evolutionary” changes. None. They were still fruit flies.. Even when they tried to manipulate their genes what usually happened was they died. Don’t know of any mating between different kinds that have worked out either (opening for evolutionary religionist to make a comment)...: )
darwinism has no forward looking spectacles. it has defined away such things. the thing that caused a jungle survival yesterday has no logical reason to cause a veldt survival tomorrow.
This article is nonsense. The brain (along with the rest of us), evolved in response to environmental pressures. That includes meeting basic needs (food, shelter, reproductive opportunity, etc.). One of the roles the brain plays is understanding available alternatives and selecting the outcomes that go to fulfilling those needs. In other words, we don’t have some “truth” gene - what we have is a highly developed capacity for critical thinking. Over time that has taken us from knowing how to select non-poisonous fruit and learning to heat food with fire to cleanse it, to the our current civilization, science included.
Isn't it more fun if you don't poison the bait?
So fine, you are just a self acknowledged ball of environmentally pressured survival instincts. Those of us really enamored of truth per se, and do bookish things that have absolutely no counterpart in the wild at all, will take good note of that and ignore you.
And by the way, environment can equally pressure you to be extinct. If your day is over your day is over.
> (opening for evolutionary religionist to make a comment)...: )
Isn’t it more fun if you don’t poison the bait?
True but discussing evolution is like talking about marijuana on here. It readily identifies the people that will turn Democrat again as soon as the president is no longer an “African American”...: )
What's the downside if you're wrong about that?
What did pot smokers ever do to deserve being compared to Democrats?
The perfect answer to that question...
Without evolution as an “out”, there’s no getting around the reality of a Creator, and our accountability to Him.
I’m a nonattender of your rarefied smart aleck world, I guess.
Pot smoking, before men interfered in a worldly way, was not usually reefer madness, but more absurdly mellow. Whatever condensed out of those clouds of blue smoke, regulatory hypermania was not it.
Being a slave to happenstance means... being a slave to happenstance.
And happenstance does not care a fig about you.
And thus...
nihilism:
the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.
DAWKINS: (snip)"…But yet we have this gathering together of genes into individual organisms. And that reminds me of the illusion of one mind, when actually there are lots of little mindlets in there, and the illusion of the soul of the white ant in the termite mound, where you have lots of little entities all pulling together to create an illusion of one. Am I right to think that the feeling that I have that I'm a single entity, who makes decisions, and loves and hates and has political views and things, that this is a kind of illusion that has come about because Darwinian selection found it expedient to create that illusion of unitariness rather than let us be a kind of society of mind?"http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins_pinker/debate_p10.htmlPINKER: "It's a very interesting question. Yes, there is a sense in which the whole brain has interests in common in the way that say a whole body composed of genes with their own selfish motives has a single agenda. In the case of the genes the fact that their fates all depend on the survival of the body forces them to cooperate. In the case of the different parts of the brain, the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit, presumably in the frontal lobes, that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction. In How the Mind Works I alluded to a scene in the comedy movie All of Me in which Lily Tomlin's soul inhabits the left half of Steve Martin's body and he takes a few steps in one direction under his own control and then lurches in another direction with his pinkie extended while under the control of Lily Tomlin's spirit. That is what would happen if you had nothing but completely autonomous modules of the brain, each with its own goal. Since the body has to be in one place at one time, there might be a circuit that suppresses the conflicting motives…"(end snip)
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