> On 29 Jun 2014, at 4:13 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > > As long as quasi-rationalists like you mock the theological field, and > prevent any seriousness there, it will remain in the province of the bullshit > vendors.
The trouble with "thinkers" like Clark is that they are really liars to themselves. Clark is a classic example of someone who has great knowledge of a field but remains a lousy thinker due to his dishonesty and his selective perception. Because it is actually kind of impossible to lie to oneself, the only way to work the magic trick is to utter the lie in public (under the guise of "rational thinking") in the hope that clever use of selective perception and bullying tactics, vulgar language, colourful metsphors and analogies etc. will rally a bunch of sheeple behind him as some form of support. In other words, he believes that the more he persists by denying what he has understood all too well but would prefer wasn't within the scope of the possible (because it doesn't suit his personal taste) - the more vulgar his use of language, the more bully-boy his style, the more tortured and affected the use of analogy (often borrowed from Dawkins who often borrows from Bertrand Russell) the more he feels he has won some kind of intellectual point-scoring match. Clark is the kind of individual that believes progress is always a kind of battle against an opponent or an opposition. He is great at physics and related fields and in those posts we stand back in awe of his command of detail. Knowledge of a particular field or fields, however - I will never tire of saying - does not make you the Supreme Commander Of All Thinking. Such individuals have a well-known behavioural pattern: an intense emotional need to be seen to be right about everything but probably have never had an original idea in their life because they never risk anything; they only ever go to the safe havens. The fact that Clark keeps showing up in discussions where he is clearly out of his depth merely reinforces this impression. "These guys over here are talking about something I understand but hate because it's not something that an instrumentalist Aristotelian physicalist mainstream scientific thinker like me should have to put with." I never miss reading posts by John K Clark. He is the perfect model of everything that is ineffectual with the thinking system that humans use. But he does know an awful lot about physics, to be fair. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
