The only "fly in that ointment" is this: Man is not a meat computer!!! (NOR a "meat machine" as he also has been recently described). He is a created son of God from the Beginning. That is, he has a spiritual dimension that never reduces to pure reason and logic, nor to pure material physics either.
Nowadays science has found it marvelously convenient to try to assess man and his position in society and nature in quantitative terms. But man does not bottom out in descriptions that are quantitative.
[Mainly science in recent times has been trying to "get man out of the picture altogether" in order to preserve the putative pristine "objectivity" of science. As if science could exist without a human mind to contemplate it in the first place. The "worst sin" seems to be anthropocentrism, which is postulated as a very grave error (see: Jacques Monod's theory of science for details. Or ask me about that.) Thus in particular, human subjectivity is deeply suspicious to "official" contemporary science, presumably because a man's subjective experience cannot be exhaustively "quantified." But that's an issue for another time perhaps.]
The most important thing about man, if you were to ask me, is that his nature is inherently qualitative — for he was made in the Image of God. And God Himself never boils down to "numbers," and thus He forever is beyond the reach of human logic. And accordingly, so is His image/creature, man.
Plato described man as the zoon noun echon, that is: the ensouled creature, or animal, that thinks. Which strikes me as an amazingly astute insight, for a man who did not know Christ Jesus — Who is fully Human and fully God at once — whose Sacrifice was a revelation of the Logos, the Word of God, Who was God, and Who was with God in the Beginning.... Who is Alpha and Omega, and the effective order of everything occurring in between in mortal time.
If we are unhinged from God's Truth, then reason and logic — having lost their divine ground — will probably get us into a whole lot of trouble pretty soon.
Oh, I see I must correct myself already: We're already in a deep heap of trouble on that score....
Thank you ever so much, dear brother in Christ, for your wonderful insights!
Preach it, sister!
:-)
The more an individual performs like a 'meat computer' the more likely it seems that we will find something wrong. In his wonderful "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" Oliver Sacks talks about two people (twins? I don't remember) who LOVED large prime numbers. He gained access to their circle by joining them with a book of primes, and by offering one in the next order of magnitude up from the ones they has been sharing with each other. They were silent for a long period and then looked happy and said, "Mmmmmmmmmmmmm."
IMHO materialism is incoherent. That is, if it is right, who cares? It is existentially boring (in the technical sense of boring.) Or to put it another way, if it is right, 'right' has no meaning. Heck, "meaning" has no meaning!
Thank you, BB, and thank ALL of you. This is a delightful conversation.