Oh, you said a mouthful there, YHAOS!!! Maybe that sort of a life view can reason about its physical environment; but human beings do not live in the physical environment exclusively. For that would not be sufficient to account for the full experience of the existence in which we (sentient and hopefully rational) human beings actually regularly partake in our own day-to-day lives.
If the physical were "all that there is," then there would be no such thing as history, nor of cultural development (use the word "evolution" here for "development" if preferred), nor of systematic science, nor of philosophy, nor of the arts, nor literature, nor just about anything else of the way human beings actually experience their, er, experience as human beings.
And so I give you a tautology. :^)
Sometimes a tautology expresses something that is manifestly true. If so, you can't scream, "tautology!!!!!!!!!!" in defense against the manifestly true.
It seems we get into all kinds of trouble when we insist on indiscriminately applying Aristotle's law of the excluded middle to all cases. What modern science (e.g., quantum and relativity theory) has taught us is that real life consists, not of a choice of "A" or "B," but that "A" and "B" may be somehow complementary. That, to me, is the situation that both science and philosophy need to pay more attention to.
The "classic" statement of this problem (i.e., "Plato vs. Aristotle") was recapitulated by Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein held that if you have two truth claims, at least one of them must be false.
Bohr, on the other hand, held that both could be true, but not at the same time. Yet together, the seeming mutually exclusive opposites reconcile in a higher-level principle, which he called the "complementarity principle." Thus truth can be perceived by different observers in different ways; but all observations are ultimately reconciled in the higher-level principle.
Which describes a pattern that seems to govern the actual universe in which we live, be it the physical universe, or the universe of reasonable discourse. Certainly, Bohr's take on such questions leaves the exercise of human liberty wide open, and yet ultimately constrained by the "higher-level principle."
Einstein -- and may God ever bless him -- was more of the mind of Newtonian mechanics, at least taking it as his starting point. He quicky had to digress to accommodate his own mathematical thinking, choosing to adopt Reimannian geometry to articulate and express his own reasoning. Suffice it to say his predictions were confirmed on the basis of observation and experiment.
Still, he was never comfortable with his friend's take (Bohr's that is) on the "uncertainty principle." Yet it seems to me, practically speaking, uncertainty is built into the very heart of life; so how can one ignore it?
All of which might sound like a complete digression from the points you raised, dear YHAOS.
Still, I maintain that in order for human beings to live in free societies, this is the very sort of question that needs moast urgently to be addressed. It seems to me that Aristotle's law of the excluded middle is a fertile field for ideology and indoctrinalization. Both close the human future to what is already "known," and make the future "yet to be known" a slave of the past.
The complementarity principle, on the other hand, leaves life "open" -- which is how I think we humans all really experience life, at least if we're paying any attention to our own experience at all.
And so I hope we can dispense with the "food fights" and the "mud wrestling" and just engage in rational disacourse. Perhaps that is too much to be expected, these days.
Thank you ever so much for writing, YHAOS, and for sharing your thoughts....
No . . . not at all. Although I must admit to some surprise at what happens when I push the right button, please feel free to ‘digress’ anytime it fits your inclination. In the meantime I’m sure that Dawkins and those of a like mind regard as mere irrelevant sentiment the observation of Adam Smith that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”
What ever else it has done, or not done, the Dawkins article has surely made it clear that this little ongoing controversy in which we’ve been indulging with our positivist friends, is about more than the difference between Christianity and Materialism or the relative virtues of raptor bones vs philosophy. It must be the case that many of his fraternity find Dawkins an acute embarrassment – for prematurely giving the game away, if nothing else – if not downright horrifying because of some of the ideas he advocates. Just the same, The Masters of the Universe agree with Dawkins that it is just a matter of time before they will know enough about ‘matter in all its motions’ to understand and treat any criminal pathology without resort to actions based on what they regard to be little better that a savage morality. Maybe so, but I can wait until the day actually arrives. In the meantime, ‘betting on the come’ is bad gambling policy, and likewise for extracting premature sociological conclusions from raw scientific data. Facts without Truth will fare no better than Truth without Facts (another tautology?).
”And so I give you a tautology”
Uhhh . . . what tautology is this? Excuse me, but I’ve not identified any tautology (not in the context of your discussion). I cannot accept as tautological, not even in a technical sense, something that is manifestly true. Restating something manifestly true in other words to the same effect, might be tautological, but that does not somehow alter the manifestly true into a lesser article. Sometimes ‘A’ is not only not ‘B’; it is also not a tautology. Puts me in mind of the Marshall Court. When the court found the Tenth Amendment an inconvenience, they were able to remove the obstruction by declaring the Amendment a ‘mere tautology’. And so it has remained, an emasculated tautology, to this day. Gee, I wish I could get things to work that way for me. Anything I don’t like, just call it a tautology.
Don’t count on a cessation of ‘food fights’ any time soon. Dawkins has made it clear that the heat is going to be ratcheted up. Not that he’s opposed to the right of conscience, mind you, just to any effective expression of the right.
When I entered FR this pm I saw that you’ve shifted the issue to another thread. Guess I’ll have to hurry over there and see what else new I can learn.