Thanks, VR -- I'll go check out #250. BTW, this wouldn't be the first time good stuff got junked here. Sadly. I don't hold with banning ideas, let alone people who don't share my point of view. As to my "fuzzy logic," I'll try to clarify it, in due course. Thank you for writing. best, bb.
When postings are removed for content (rather than style) and when people are banned for their views rather for advocating illegal acts or the such, Free Republic runs the danger of having an Official Position and thus being liable for postings of its members. (After all, the Moderators could have removed other posts.) In the scientific threads, there isn't much problem other than making Moderators look silly. However, there have been threads (for example, the List-Of-Suspicious-Middle-Easterners thread or the Anthrax thread) where people have been accused (rightly or wrongly) of committing or plotting or desiring a crime to be committed. Thus the Moderators (and Free Republic's Owners) may find themselves in the position of having to check out postings even better than the Star did about Franklin's drinking.
The real problem is the linking of what I would term "Conservative" principles: limited government, low taxes, non-oppressive regulation, strong defence, etc., with such things a faces on mars, anti-science, anti-various-ethnic group ideas, and such. Many people I know will not support conservative causes (like tax cuts) because they attach scientific ignorance to those who recommend such cuts.
Good grief, VR – I didn’t hear any “whining” going on. But then, we all come into this game wherever we come in – that is, with whatever presuppositions we happen to be dragging along as baggage at the time. I thought that what Phillip Johnson was doing in this interview was condemning rationalism of all stripes. And that would particularly include not only the type of rationalism based in naturalistic methods (science) (its great apotheosis being macroevolutionary theory); but naturalistic philosophy as well, in its vain attempt to establish a truthful account of Being on the basis of “pure reason.” Though on first appraisal they appear to be quite different things, each is the product of the same defect in reasoning. Thus the distinction that Esoteric raises, while interesting in itself, isn’t what Johnson’s critique is really about.
He’s objecting to the common defect, not to any particular way in which it may express in various schools of thought, or in day-to-day human living for that matter.
So, what is this fatal “defect?” In a nutshell: Conclusions are only as good as their premises. If the premises are ill-founded, then the conclusions on which they depend are not to be trusted as truthful. If we should trust them nonetheless, we get a “false reading” of reality.
Maybe more on that in a minute; but first let’s pick up the train of the conversation:
Now, Johnson rather deliberately limits the scope he seeks for supernatural explanations to the subject of origins. Why?
Well, if I’m reading Johnson right, he’s not limiting anything, he’s merely noting the tendency of a whole lot of people these days to limit reality to what they feel “comfortable with,” on the basis of what they call “reason.” I imagine that, in your mind, perhaps “reason” by definition is not in any way conformable with issues pertaining to “supernatural reality.” So, let’s just dump supernatural reality.
As to origins, maybe Johnson has just bothered to read Aristotle, and has understood how perennially relevant Aristotle’s critique really is, unto this day, in understanding the Reality in which we all participate.
The rationalist approach “to truth” seems to take an a priori premise as its standard of truth: Nothing exists in this world, in this universe, except what “unaided reason” can know. Period. End of story.
Do you realize what a “heavy censoring job” is involved in an operation of this type? Good grief, the “typically modern” understanding that results from an enterprise like this absolutely invalidates the experience and testimony of human generations going back six millennia at least.
Suppose you went to the doctor with a problem for which he could not immediately suggest a natural explanation. Suppose further that, if he was stumped for half an hour, he felt obligated to announce a supernatural explanation and treat you with spells and incantations.
Spells and incantations have been abolished with, and quite effectively replaced by, the arrival of the Prescription Pad, which is the “modern day innovation” of a quite ancient practice. But doctors still don’t know everything. Never have, never will. Like all the rest of us, in whatever discipline or line of work we pursue.
The point is that, if Johnson didn't restrict supernaturalism to an area nobody ever really has to deal with, anyone, no matter how friendly his predisposition might have been, would see what an utter crock it is.
The most telling phrase in this sentence, VR, was your reference “to an area nobody ever really has to deal with…”. Well, certainly no one who minds about being indiscriminate regarding the truth of reality, which drives straight to the heart of how a human being understands the context in which he lives his life, and really knows life as such by experiencing it, deep down at the subjective level, which is where the felt sense of “personhood” lives… Yeah, that guy doesn’t much “have to deal with” whatsoever… he’s just coasting….
Another point is that science doesn't really exclude the possibility of finding evidence for the supernatural at all, although Johnson is shrilly claiming that it does. The problem, and Johnson may at some level realize this, is that is hasn't done so and probably never will.
Are you suggesting, VR, that science’s future respectability at some point might depend on a recognized ability to plumb the supernatural? (I rather doubt you mean this.) In any case, this would be a serious “retasking of science,” now wouldn’t it? Not a good idea! As for Johnson’s manner of speaking in this passage, I didn’t sense any “shrillness” at all. Indeed, I thought he was merely trying to get the rest of us “on the same page,” so that a fruitful and truthful discussion might ensue….
If it is not yet perfectly clear to the reader wherein the “defect” that Phillip Johnson identifies consists, I will state it in the negative: We must not think that our thinking circumscribes Reality. We must not allow the totality of the All that Is be reduced to its ephemeral, transitory representation in merely phenomenally occurring forms, and make this Form stand for the Substance of Reality. Form is created, and as such, logically, is not ultimate in the great scheme, the great hierarchy of Being. Of which we are all participants. Must run for now. Thanks for the fair hearing, VR. best, bb.