We need to ask Sikora a simple question: If the world is governed by chance, how do laws arise? By accident? And then: If law is "accidental," then how can it be law? And if there is no law, then how can the world be the way it is, and not some other way?
I wonder if he would understand such questions. He is evidently no systematic thinker, rather a sort of "machine" or mechanistic thinker of a type to which David Bohm alluded, in Wholeness and the Implicate Order [1980]:
Consider ... an attempt to assert that all of man's actions are conditioned and mechanical. Typically, such a view has taken one of two forms: Either it is said that man is basically a product of his hereditary constitution[***], or else that he is determined entirely by environmental factors.[***] However, one could ask of the man who believed in heredity determination whether his own statement asserting this belief was nothing but the product of his heredity. In other words, is he compelled by his genetic structure to make such an utterance? Similarly, one may ask of the man who believes in environmental determinism whether the assertion of such a belief is nothing but the spouting forth of words in patterns to which he was conditioned by his environment. Evidently in both cases (as well as in the case of one who asserted that man is completely conditioned by heredity plus environment) the answer would have to be in the negative, for otherwise the speakers would be denying the very possibility that what they said could have meaning.... [p. 65f][***] Don't ask anything about heredity (DNA) or the environment — you know, stuff like how did they arise, why are they the way they are and not some other way, etc.??? — they are "just there," evidently induced out of a magician's magic hat....
I hate to be unkind. But I do believe it is fair to say this Sikora fellow is a smug, self-satisfied moron. He went to college and managed to be made stupid....
Global Warming.
Excellent points, dearest sister in Christ, thank you!
"If the world is governed by chance, how do laws arise? By accident? And then: If law is "accidental," then how can it be law? And if there is no law, then how can the world be the way it is, and not some other way?"Beautifully put. I would add one more. If there is no law, why does he act as if there is?
He must presuppose invariant laws of thought and morality or his utterances amount to meaningless gibberish. However, the existence of unchanging, universal laws of thought and morality are simply antithetical to an atheistic premise of matter ever in motion governed by omnipotent chance. He is oblivious to the problem:
"I quickly came to enjoy the deep and abstract thinking required of the class…"
"...we examined each side of the argument"
"...I came away with two conclusions. One, no higher being would ever tolerate millions of people being killed over the right way to worship him. Two, the differences between each religion made it unlikely that followers of both could be accepted into the same afterlife, meaning that, if there were a God, millions would be left out of eternal life—in my view, an unjust punishment for having the “wrong” belief."
"I had enough qualitative reasons for not believing in God."
"We also expanded our knowledge by reading a number of evolutionary passages, including a section from Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene (emphasis on gene). His work, in addition to meticulously explaining how natural selection works down to the genetic level, offered a solid explanation of how life began without a creator."
Looking beyond how idiotic his statements are on their face (i.e., natural selection working down to the genetic level to generate "explanations", or creating life, or his moral conflation of Islam and Christianity) either his philosophy classes were not very good or he wasn't paying attention because he apparently is ignorant of even the most basic problems of metaphysics and epistemology.
Cordially,