On Saturday, November 29, 2014 7:38:54 PM UTC, John Clark wrote: > > > On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 11:03 AM, spudboy100 wrote: > > >> The word "purposeless" is purposeless unless there is a referent. >>> Purposeless for who? Maybe the universe finds me to be purposeless but I >>> don't care any more than the universe would care if I found it to be >>> purposeless; we both just ignore the others opinion of and continue to go >>> about our business. >>> >> >> > But the universe is stronger than you are >> > > But I am smarter than the universe. Lots of people are smarter than me but > the universe is as dumb as a sack full of rocks and at least I'm smarter > than that. > > John K Clark >
I should think we'll need an origin-of-life answer to scientific standards before we can start finalizing on the assumptions underpinning all that. Opinion: this matter has been caricatured as a debate between creationism and naturalism. This isn't a logically reasonable position simply because, even from a perspective of natural selection, the point at which natural selection begins to act, and why...or what is the pressure driving a force of natural selection, is unresolved until we actually begin to approach a convincing explanation of life. At the moment, the price of separating 'origins' from life - by talking about self-replication as the origin of natural selection forces - is tantamount to 'backing off' all the really hard questions to a nebulous period prior to life. Which has been damaging to scientific discovery in historically observable ways, with historically observable roots that fall short of the values, let alone standards, of science. We'd have to go back to the stand-off following Darwin's publication. That battle - at the time with Christian values - was effectively won in the 19th century. Yet science and its supporters continued to thrash away at religious belief when arguably a more magnanimous conciliatory framework would have been far more appropriate. Assuming the goal was for science to be left in peace. There was no way for Christian faith to take back the ground, because science was by then all over the world, and its product had become fundamental to the relative wealth and status - and military might - of nations. It was desirable, but not critical whether or not classrooms in every district taught evolution. Science was driven by small intellectual elites from the beginning. The behaviour toward faith backfired in science in ways that are still being felt today. By pushing faith into a corner, science created a dogmatic culture within its own interior that allowed a small cadre of 'darwinists' to effectively control the direction of enquiry. Anything remotely that appeared to question the detail of a natural selection worldview was policed as suspicious of being creationist at root. By the same turn faith was pushed ever further back, toward the limits of science itself. Origins. This same cadre did not think this through, and did not see it coming clearly until it was upon them. By that time, too much was at stake for them to concede any ground...even ground that was scientifically reasonable to concede. Therefore they had no alternative but to conjuren up a fallacious argument that 'origins' was not a scientific question. As a result no work was done that might have been, on anything pertaining to 'origins'. It is no coincidence that the sheer vertical brick wall science now finds itself up against, is all about origins. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
