Hi Krim & all > [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.
DM: Actually some people say this is real squiffy to hang this on Whitehead and I agree. Because Plato sees the realm of ideas as containing fixed and perfect forms like the circle which our actuality copies inaccurately. Whitehead is suggesting that everything must be possible before it becomes actual, but this means that the realm of forms contains all possible forms not some setof ideal forms. > 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. DM: Why? They act, do they act because they have a need to change their state? The notion of inanimate action is one we derived from the creation of machines, how anthropomorphic can you get? Nor do I think that > projecting non-human qualities onto non-human things requires the level of > justification that your position does. DM: How do you create these non-human qualities. This is a fantasy you are having. 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? DM: Was not creating inanimate action a peculiar and SOM driven idea? It allows us to treat nature like a thing that we can exploit and control. > > Furthermore, even attempting to project our own inner states on others is > an > iffy business. DM:Then stop doing it if you think so. I'd suggest we have no choice, I admit it, you don't. You need to think harder to get my point and stop just giving me the same arguments, I get your positon but are you getting mine? 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. DM: DO we have a choice? The only reason we can project the notion of inanimate actions onto certain processes is because they are so static and consistent,but what does this prove. I always go for chocolate over vanilla milkshake but does that prove I am inanimate and driven by laws? Maybe a consistent action only proves that something is being valued as always a good quality action. 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: Yes, up to a point,but we could say the same about humans but that would be odd, and maybe we need to do something to improve how we relate to nature before we wreck it. > > 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. DM:I agree that it offers a challenge that itmay or may not be able to respond to, it is not certain what will result. The term post-secularism is becoming a bit of a new fashion you know. 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. DM: Agree, in the end probably more punch than evolution in fact. Yet it's still with us. For me we need ways to accommodate the religious to get past these,in the end, phoney culture wars. 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. DM: Yes and no. What about divine revelation, can that have a meaning for us moderns? To me all creative thought is a revelation in some sense, as it emerges in a context that cannot determine it & what will emerge. > 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." DM: I think Dawkins is saying 'put up' in my terms or shut up. They certainly do neither and why should they? But equally whilst I welcome all tothe conversation and debate I say that the no one gets to rule out any forms of questioning or criticism as invalid due to some mystical groundless authority either divine or scientistic. 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/
