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To: HerrBlucher

Webster or whosoever. I care not.

Supernaturalism IS dualistic. The characteristics of mind: immaterial, eternal, undefiled. The characteristics material nature: dense, transient, sullied.

The postulate that mind “contains” nature or predates it is obvious claptrap, a kludge meant to bridge the unbridgable.

The alternative to both these is a natural world that partakes of a total set of characteristics which while knowable are not easily known, and which are neither eternal or transient, immaterial or material, pure or sullied, but which transcends all these imperfect attempts at description.

Call it what you like, this worldview at least has the imprimatur of age.


39 posted on 03/24/2013 7:49:32 PM PDT by John Valentine (Deep in the Heart of Texas)
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To: John Valentine
Supernaturalism IS dualistic. The characteristics of mind: immaterial, eternal, undefiled. The characteristics material nature: dense, transient, sullied.

Well, dualistic and dualism are two different things. Yes the created material world is inherently different than the supernatural Mind that created it, and if you want to call that dualistic then fine. The simple fact that they are different does not make the concept "claptrap."

"Dualism", in the philosphical sense, is a system which would explain the universe as the outcome of two eternally opposed and coexisting principles, conceived as good and evil, light and darkness, or some other form of conflicting powers. This concept was condemned as heresy by Emperor Theodosius I in 382.

With respect to your proposed third philosophical worldview, what Philosophers have promoted this worldview as you have defined it, and what are their key supporting arguments? It sounds to me just like just another way of describing Naturalism, which we have both dismissed as bunk.

To keep this exchange from going on ad infinitum, I will make this my last response. Thanks for the interesting discussion.

40 posted on 03/24/2013 9:24:16 PM PDT by HerrBlucher (Praise to the Lord the Almighty the King of Creation)
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To: John Valentine

Perhaps it is a semantic problem.

One possible way to look at supernatural is not an either or.

It can be include and transcend. As reason includes the purely physical and transcends it; the spiritual includes reason and transcends it.

There are things that can be known by science, but not all; there are things that can be known by reason, but not all..

Each as sphere including the previous, but more - transcending and including.


43 posted on 03/30/2013 10:00:15 PM PDT by D-fendr (Deus non alligatur sacramentis sed nos alligamur.)
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