The "Threat" of Creationism, by Isaac Asimov

Internet ^ | 1984 | Isaac Asimov

[js1138]

Most people are brainwashed into thinking they MUST be altruistic...

And you lecture me about unproven assumptions.

[cornelis]

learn something outside your narrow prejudices

bb really is one of the most gracious debaters on this forum and I am happy to say so. She keeps a level of decorum without which society is impossible. As Flannery O'Conner said (I paraphrase) "Love fails--it always does--and that is why we need civility. Let's be human before we ever start bringing incense to the throne of reason.

[Alamo-Girl]

Please accept my applause and agreement on your defense of betty boop!

[Phaedrus]

I will follow your link. Ensconced as we are in the material and bathed in Western Culture, it is extremely difficuly to rationally conceive the immaterial. I fight the tendency to see everything in material terms all the time. But physics unerringly points toward it. I conclude that our inability to comprehend and reconcile reality has much more to do with being human in this time and culture than with the nature of reality itself.

But I am beginning to sound like a broken record ... ;-}

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for your reply! I'm very glad you'll be taking a look at that article. It is concise, out of its 50 pages, the last 13 are source references (LOL!)

I conclude that our inability to comprehend and reconcile reality has much more to do with being human in this time and culture than with the nature of reality itself.

I agree. Our lives are full of distractions and misrepresentations. Illusions are so common with "special effects" - we tend to dismiss them and presume there is a material explanation. Sigh...

[balrog666]

A truly excellent post. Bravo!

[PatrickHenry]

Altruism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive.

If pressed, I think LogicWings would say that he's talking about compulsory altruism -- such as that which is inherent in the welfare state. Voluntary benevolent acts are no problem, and many make a great deal of sense.

First, self interest is not automatically identical with selfishness. Self interest can and must include maintenance of the community in which one lives, just as housecleaning, though work, improves our level of comfort.

Same issue as above. I might voluntarily give to support a school, or to establish a scholarship. One might give to suport medical research. Again, no problem. But when I'm taxed (forced altruism) to support welfare queens, I'm the victim of evil -- no other way to look at it. Also, while I'm on the topic of "voluntary" benevolence, if I've been brainwashed into believing that it's my duty to ignore my own needs so I can support welfare queens, I've been the victim of kooks.

Second, self interest is subjective, and many people enjoy being altruistic. Christianity seeks to foster this in people in whom this motive is latent.

Once more, voluntary benevolence is fine with me. But there are some people who interpret scripture to support hatred of wealth. There have been "bible communists" throughout history, including the Mayflower passangers (who, to their great credit, had the good sense to abandon it after their first disastrous year).

[cornelis]

The one characteristic of your wonderful post is that it smuggles in the historical without clarity. Both you and I should know that clarity ought to be the chief characteristic of the age of science and logic.

You toe the line of a dialectic between faith and reason--a very useful dispute. It assumes the two positions of faith and reason as fundamental. This is the position you have pounded into your head and tout it when you want it so: "the two will always be in conflict." But when useful, you will be monist, for in your world reason must be ascendant, except when chance happens to show up, whatever that is.

You say: The fact of the matter is it was logic and reason, not religion that are the parents of science. Huh? What is a parent? A genesis? Is this a metaphor interrupting the order of logic? Are you trying to say history is logic? Get this straightened out before you confuse all these bumbling posters who are under your poetic tutelage. Historically, religion was inseparable from the birth of science--prior to Socrates and Plato, both of whom retained a profound understanding of the limits of logic. But better not talk about Plato for he would pound your arrogance: "Oh well, answered my own question." Aristotle then? No, you want to talk about Aquinas while arguing for the parents of science. Your argument is framed anachronistically. When exactly was science born? When? And if reason and logic are the parents, who gave birth to religion? Is this genealogy of yours--this parentage of logic and reason-- is this what you call a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? For sure this is a mass confusion, a confusion very typical of today's journalism, most of which is propaganda.

Religion has fought every scientific advance, every step along the way. Yeah right.. This is so demonstrably false. OK class, back to logic 101: "All men are wise" and "All cows are brown" etc? What you should have said is religion has fought scientific advance. Or, science has fought religious advance. Both are historically true. And this one is true too: you fight religion at the expense of logic and history.

If evolution is proven correct, God is disproven. Only if you are a monist belonging to your school. Draw the map of reality and you can prove anything. Anything. You can even prove or disprove your own existence--as you wish, draw your map. *God forgive these Creationist shysters for doing the same.*

It was the womb of Christianity that kept Europe in the horror of the Dark Ages for a millennia. All I will answer to that is this

Aquinas made the mistake of trying to logically prove the existence of God False. He did no such thing. I see so many statements from ignorance. One thing that Aquinas did read was Aristotle. Aristotle said first principles are not proven. Can't be proven. The five ways make God's existence logically consistent. You see, Aquinas does not share your dualistic monism. He will not make logic the cause of existence, as in the Cartesian method. He will not make logic the first principle. (Dataman caught you on this). In your world, reason = existence. Therefore, anything that reason proves, exists. All else is antithetical (and on a better day, non-existent by insistence). And if the likes of you had lived at the time of Aquinas, they would have begun with your first premise and ended up proving existence from your logic. In other words you would do exactly what you claim Aquinas failed to do. But he did no such thing. You might rather join up with Abelard.

the moral influence of the concept of God was falling away from Europe. And you say, this proved true. What are you proving? To use your language: what also proved true was the rise of Christianity, whether Nietzsche postdicted it or not. What's your point? Is your monism a deterministic fallacy of the Latin kind? post hoc ergo propter hoc?

And now, just like Marx and Nietzsche (famous conservatives!) you try to answer to the problem of creating an ersatz morality. And like Nietzsche and Foucault, you argue that all what the others want is control. To which the words of Bob Dylan: "you gotta serve somebody." And you call in reason like a self-service station. How convenient. In your world, otherness does not exist as it makes way for your expansive reason, fueled by you high octane will.

you cannot do anything for yourself, only for others. Thus one is a complete slave to others. This is in utter contradiction to the principle of Capitalism, which holds one is responsible to oneself, for oneself. Here's where your dualism springs up again. Logically, a contradiction. But why ought the existence of otherness or plurality be a contradiction. Why does your monism push against your dualism? Why does the service to another logically (or did you want to argue existentically?) negate the existence of the self? Or vice versa? All this springs from your dualistic conundrum coming under a monistic domination of LogicWing's reason. The twisting and the convolutions that your logic goes through attempts to disprove the unprovable and while asserting the unprovable as the provable. This self-destructs the concepts of logic, facts and reason in the process because it reduces existence to thought. Read your Aristotle. Read your Kant: a hundred dollars in your mind don't put any in your pocket. The inability to see the fallacies inherent your accusations is the same inability to understand what has occurred in the history of logical thinking.

[Condorman]

Invisible placemarker

[cornelis]

Do you suppose you are winning this "debate" with betty boop? You're not. You're attacking her and mistaking graciousness for lack of depth in the process. You accuse her of being an agglomeration of filters, yet that is precisely what I see in your posts. And those filters are not always consistent, one with the other.

Righteo!

[unspun]

This is an irrational statement, not derived from reality.

[unspun]

LW, logic is like house building. It can be highly well crafted, whether elegant or elaborate, but if it is not built on a sound foundation, it will be found a failure from the beginning.

But then, you don't seem to admit to a beginning.

[cornelis]

logic is like house building

I like that analogy and use it. Religion, too, is like house building. Or economics. Or politics. Sometimes the building is described in terms of systems which aspire to universe building. But that endeavor mistakes the material for the product. The principal difference between ancient and modern can be understood with this analogy. Modern philosophy (which influences scientific thinking, especially in the areas of dispute) has presumed to identify the material for the product. While the ancient recognized it had to build a shelter in a world of danger, the modern view arrogates to itself a self-designated power to encompass the universe with its building and thereby equate its discoveries with the domain of existence. What is irrational in the old view is in some sense to be feared. What is irrational in the new view is to be ridiculed at all costs. It cannot allow an outside, only an expansive inside. When cracks appear, as in the naive belief of religion, for example, the only recourse for the master inside the house of reason, is blinds.

[unspun]

Yes. And tragically, people's inner darkness is, in the eyes of God, suitable only for the outer darkness. Emotional gusher that God is, He will only keep the light lit for those who accept His reality and lovingcare, for those who would not attempt a shield against The Light.

[cornelis]

Some see it that way.

[vishnu2]

Your argument is nonsense. By the same reasoning, who created your intelligent entity? And who created the intelligent entity who created your intelligent entity? Etc. into an infinite regression.

[unspun]

Maybe interesting to some, maybe not, but here...

So, if an imagining cannot exist without being informed by reality, it must carry information about the nature of reality with it (even though imaginings can be so very fanciful, compared to what is necessary for living beings to survive and thrive).  But then, why do we take a bit of reality and imagine with it, even when we don't have physical experience with what we imagine?  Reasoning the way an evolutionist researcher does when he finds bones, teeth, hair, etc.: What is the purpose of the human imagination and what does that in turn tell us about ourselves?

On human imagination and human imaginings... part 2 of 2

(As I explained in posts between my part 1 & 2, I am speaking of the principle of purpose, but not necessarily in terms of teleology --thought I am not making the arbitrary mistake of ruling out ultimate purpose.  I am speaking of this principle as one in common between evolutionist and creationist research in order to detemine why attributes of living beings exist, as a clue to origins and understanding how life fits together in the here and now.  For "purpose," one could substitute, "functional relationship," or "orientation" between a being and all with which a being interacts, or which in any way is a part of its environment.)

So, with that in mind, what is the purpose of the imagination?  What does that tell us about our environment and about ourselves?

Imagination, why?:  In order for us to understand what exists and to interact and function with what exists, volitionally and creatively.  And why do we imagine, exactly what we imagine?  Because those things we imagine, are rooted in reality and matter to us.  I think that just about all readers will agree that the environment that we navigate by means of our imagination includes the physical world around us, so I won't go on about that.  But certainly, in the "imagining of our hearts" all sorts of matters are felt and considered, accurate and inaccurate, matters having to do with not only "material" things, but with other beings and events and a panoply of abstractions and emotions about it all.  If I'd start to describe that, I'd loose all but the most gracious reader and I may have to reach for the aspirin bottle myself, even if I did have a good sleep last night.

That's nice.  Then, what is the whole reality upon which our real imagination reflects?  Well, I'll ask it this way: What kinds of things constitute the fulsome or holistic set of realistic imaginations that you have?   If your imagination is a reflection of reality (accurately or not, from one moment to the next) and your imaginations deal not only with what you experience as physical reality, what is the rest?  Is the rest to be declared "unreal" simply because you have no direct experience with it, while someone else may have?  Even when imagination is used by a scientist for the purpose of formulating his next physical experiment, he needs his imagination to get to the truth.  Clearly, we need our imaginations, in order to understand as much reality as we may, as well or as faultily as we may.   Clearly, this reality includes matters with which, in one way or another, we are beyond having objective experience, at the time we imagine them -- or we would not have had the abilty to conceive of the experiments we have thus far made, to determine what we have found.  I won't say there aren't other uses, but this one I'll emphasize: Whether by postulate or by a wild imaginary swing of intuition, imagination is for meeting what is beyond our previous experience and comprehension.  

So, we need our very real imagination, in order to grasp real things beyond our objective experience --because they matter to us.

Now, what are the things that matter most, to us?  Clearly, what is most important to you is what relates to you.  So what is most relational to you?  Now I'm getting to your empirical dream/vision/experience, ms. boop. To beg the question, it dealt with spiritual beings, beings not of our space/time/energy.  But as you best among FReepers know, these two 'characters,' real as I believe them to be, were not the subject or chief substance of your vision any more than the house slave was the essense of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," that you memorized.  The subject and essense of this opus done with betty b's real conscious self, and her real imaginative heart is a person, abundantly clear -- and one who claimed not only to be a person but who claimed to be PERSON.  

Oops, did I just beg the question?  But, how much did I, to say that?  betty says that she had an experience which her conscious self knew to be real.  Her consciousness is very well practiced in distinguishing between reality and fantasy and this was so real and experiential to her conscious self that it would be dishonest for her to deny it.  Her consciousness is an objective reality, and her imagination is too, and both testify to her that this was empirical in the realms of what each deals with.  Furthermore, it made perfect, functional sense to her after the experience ended, though she doesn't comprehend every single facet of it (just the way we don't comprehend every single facet of anything else we experience).  

To go a step further, did this experience effect what most matters to betty, what is most relational to her?  That's what she says and she's the one who had the experience.

Now, others have had similar experiences and the problem is that not all of these experiences are consistent with each other.  By testimony, these such experiences have been with various kinds of messengers and voices and many messages have been at odds with many others, a major breakdown.  But there is a set of these experiences which are consistent with each other and which are a part of a system of understanding which would say that counterfeit spirits also exist, which will also effect humans directly.  (Further, there are many other evidences and corroborated testimonies which have supported this particularly consistent set of experiences and understanding, and no evidences which disprove it.)

Why would the part of betty which deals with maintaining what she knows and separating this from what she does not know (conscious) and the part of her which deals with reflecting upon what is relationally most important to her (imagination) tell her that she had a real, knowing, and unique experience about exactly what is most important to her?

As we have heard from many witnesses, there is a person... the person... I should really just say, there is PERSON (as Descartes should have appreciated, calls Himself "I AM THAT I AM").  He claims to be THE CONSCIOUS, THE IMAGINATION, who fills heaven and earth, yet is not of this world, who is beyond beginning and end, and who is beyond our comprehension but (listen scientists) who claims to reveal and convey His matter to those who accept it.   Ever wonder as I used to, what in the Sam Hill this "glory" is, that seems such a word of self-aggrandizement and megalomania by this Deity, when we are told in something called the "Holy Bible" that all of what we do is only to be of and for God's glory?  Megalomaniacal?  Hardly.  Glory means "matter" in ancient Hebrew -- a good dictionary will say "weight."   In the Bible, when God's glory is addressed, it is concomitant with pure light. This insertion of meaning would tell us that since all is His, as betty b's dream attests, we are only in our thoroughly right conscious mind and only have the right, fulsome framework for the functions of imagination and all that is "us" when we accept His substance in the picture (all of the picture).  His is the very substance of being by which we were created to relationally commune, individually as certain as a child is from his parents, and collectively as certainly as a bride is of and for her husband and vice versa.

How would the relationship between CONSCIOUS and our conscious, IMAGINATION and our imagination connect?  Directly maybe?  I'd say so.  Stuff like physical "matter," energy and ultimately perhaps even time would just get in the way of this kind of relationship, though it is affirmed in this relationship that the bridge to the physical world was thoroughly crossed as well, glory to God.

Sigh. There, I did it, I blurted out the gospel... shoot... well something about the nature of the good news, anyway.

We may believe and know as a much underrated empiricist with direct much direct experience named John ben Zebedee emphasized again and again, that God is CONSCIOUS BEING and has all the right PRETERNATURAL STUFF (GLORY) and accepting Him and His experientially conveyed data beats the alternative, to say the least.  Furthermore, like us (whodathunkit?) what He creates, He creates from His IMAGINATION, a very real imagination creating a whole bunch of stuff that is very real on a whole bunch of levels, in a whole bunch of ways, but a bunch of stuff that is consistent and has integrity, as He is and has.

There exists no other 'philosophy' which deals with every bit of who we persons are and every bit of what we relate to and how, and which is not disproven but maintained by every kind of study (all kinds of humble and intellectually honest study).  The truth is out there.  The truth is here.  Truth happens.

So, it is wonderful and important to study how fossils lay in the strata of the earth and how DNA is processed and what the implications of this may be, and so it is, to study the levels and interplay of the great dance within the Russian dolls of quantum mechanics, and of what layers and substances make up man himself, but what "matters" most?

Well, what mattered most in betty b's dream?  

There is a subjectivity upon which all our objectivity depends.

Arlen - unspun

________________________________________________________
PS: In addition to conscious and imagination, I've referred to "intention," in the above (volition, will) as have others. But, I haven't found much treatment of human consicience in this thread (thought I haven't read every bit of it).  There is a thread running in FR about God, morality, and human conscience -- Morality: Who Needs God -- more on the many traits of man, having to do with his spiritually relational life, meant for the relationship that matters most.

[balrog666]

How many angels can dance on the head on a pin in betty b's dreamworld?

[PatrickHenry]

Come on, gentlemen. BB has always been a lady in these threads. Dispute her ideas if you wish, but lay off the personal attacks. I have a cyber-crush on her, and I want her to be properly treated.

[unspun]

As many as God chooses, at any moment.