Ray, You don't read me correctly. Brad's Phenomenological approach is not far from my own Neither verbal nor numeric parameters control my thinking. Your strong passions for music, dance, nature... are personal values which were highly influenced by your childhood experiences. (verbal or not) Humans evaluate their experience-and often posit external values which are (it seems to me) anthropogenic colorations of human perception.
----------------------- Brad, I am in agreement with your explanation re agnostic. However, the notion of 'supreme being' is harder for me to fathom than a 'unicorn', which might be genetically created from a mountain goat! With a lack of hard evidence, one needs at least some plausable reasons to posit the existence of something. Teleology is not easy to justify, let alone a director. Wholesystem interconnectedness & infinite possibilities in boundless (spacetimeenergymatter) multiverses allow for anything possible to exist someplacetime. And here we are. (so much for the Anthropic Principle :-) ) Uncertainty is uncomfortable; but existential angst is the result of the realization that we are responsible for giving meaning to life . The desire to pick it off of a skyhook seems a desire for an escape from the responsibility of choosing it ourselves. We can't stand the burden of that freedom. Most accept the values given by their parents and their 'tribe', avoiding this responsibility. Enough of this tangent, which is a stretch to list purpose. Steve -- http://magma.ca/~gpco/ http://www.scientists4pr.org/ Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.--Kenneth Boulding
