[David M] Well they look very fuzzy to me and Newton and Whitehead, you can try to explain to me why they are not if you like. We are only able to get to the inner states of our fellow humans & their volition due to sympathy and language, without these capacities regarding electrons we may be failing to understand how they 'act'. To me you seem to assume that electrons are bound by laws or probabilities that require no act-ion and no inner response but this is to have knowledge of electrons-in-themselves that we simply do not have. You think I am projecting, I'd suggest so are you, just something anti-human, but noetheless a human conception of the non-human.
More from DM: Sure, I agree. I really get this from Whitehead where he suggest that dropping the assumptions of an inanimate realm helps us to see the non-dualistic nature of life and its development of inorganic capacities that eventually gives us consciousness as incremental and as likely to have some lower level aspect in inorganic processes. [Krimel] I do like Whitehead but there are still problems with his process philosophy. Not the least of which is his endorsement of the Platonic ideals. It has also been suggested that was responding in his later years to the death of his son and was attempting to infuse a sense of divine purpose back into philosophy. Obviously I think this is little more than wishful thinking. I would be interested in a specific citation from Whitehead on this if you have one, though. The point here is one of agency and freedom. Do electron and germs know what they are doing? Could they act otherwise? I think not. Nor do I think that projecting non-human qualities onto non-human things requires the level of justification that your position does. You are espousing some kind of animism here and animism died out after the clan of the cave bears but before the enlightenment. What value is there in trying to resurrect it? Furthermore, even attempting to project our own inner states on others is an iffy business. Even with direct verbal reports from others there are problems of lying or people simply being wrong about their own motivations. Trying to apply this back onto inanimate or lower level biological critters is just foolishness. There are plenty of reasons for avoiding this not the least of which is that we have no means of asking and electron what it thinks or interpreting the emotions nature of its responses. We can predict what they do and how they act very well with law and probabilities. Fanciful projections add nothing whatsoever to this. DM: In the end I may have very little time for most religious thought, yet I think we are far from reaching this end in our societies and culture. What is awful about Dawkins is that he is telling the religious to shut up rather than on insisting that they explain themselves and hear what others have to say. [Krimel] I have no especial allegiance to Dawkins but when he says that evolution threatens the western religious tradition I think he is correct. The western religious tradition is beset on many fronts and this is just one of them. Hermeneutics, which has been mentioned before, is one such front. Once you start to apply literary, historical and scientific criticism to scripture it loses its punch. We can start to pick and choose among passages once we see that the passage were picked and chosen from at the start. Once we show that some of it is wrong then it is not hard to see that any of it could be wrong. If we acknowledge that the 'truth' of scripture must be judged by the same criteria that we judge 'truth' in any other realm then divine authority is meaningless. So to those who appeal to the truth of scripture as arising from divine revelation I would echo Dawkins and say, "put up or shut up." Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
