File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0201, message 80


From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: RE: BHA: Down with theocracy!
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 06:02:28 -0000


Hi Tobin,

I think I agree with everything you say below.  I think (but am not sure) I
agree that most of the events that led to humanity were just simple chance.
That seems to leave us with the view that powerful structuring principles of
reality began with humanity.  The development of humanity through history
has and will be a long struggle to create more and more rationality in
reality, unless we destroy ourselves, and that rationality is human, not
divine.  Since all the available evidence points to the truth of this, and
we humans are the ones who provide and reflect on the evidence, there
doesn't seem to be any need for God.  So  am I right in thinking that
Charles Sanders Pierce is calling on us to have faith in our own material
minds and bodies?  Wouldn't it have been better if he had said "Have
confidence in your material minds and bodies!"?  Kant's "dare to know" also
does without the reference to faith.

Best regards,

Phil

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> [mailto:owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of Tobin
> Nellhaus
> Sent: 17 January 2002 02:46
> To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: BHA: Down with theocracy!
>
>
> Mervyn wrote--
>
> > The universe has to be 'just right' in zillions of ways for the
> > evolution of self-conscious life to occur - consider, e.g. the existence
> > and position of the large planets which absorb asteroids, preventing
> > them from hitting the earth. For this and all the other necessary
> > conditions to happen by sheer chance, and not because there is an
> > intrinsic structure of possibility, would require an infinity of trial
> > runs.  So if you don't accept 'God', it's transcendentally necessary to
> > postulate an infinity of universes to account for the 'just rightness'
> > of this one.
>
> This wildly underestimates the vastness and age of the universe.
> There are
> people these days arguing that bodies are so sophisticated, they had to be
> designed by some greater intelligent being (so-called "intelligent design"
> theories), and so the theory of evolution is wrong.  But this flies in the
> face of the evidence, and procedes as though there aren't
> zillions of insect
> species etc (in fact we know about only a fraction of them).  Variety is
> *everywhere*.  Is there "ubiquity determinism"?  Yup.  But that
> doesn't mean
> each of the tiny events that led to us follows some overarching
> determinism.
> Most of them are effectively chance.  If one of these little
> events happened
> to be different, well, life on Earth would be different.  Or not at all.
> You seem to be saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
> "Just right" indeed....
>
> T.
>
> ---
> Tobin Nellhaus
> nellhaus-AT-mail.com
> "Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>
>
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>



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