@Krumple,
Krumple;154254 wrote:Wait a second, are you sure you are getting your definitions right here? Naturalists view, believe humans sprung into existence? I consider myself a naturalist yet I don't think humans developed that way. For me it was a slow and gradual process. The key is that with some monkeys they use their front legs or in human terms, arms and hands to make use of tools. The more you can rely on the tool and not the need of them being supportive limbs like legs, then you make two limbs more useful for utilizing tools. A human that can balance on two legs, run and use a weapon to strike at a potential meal, is just as useful as having four legs and having no tools. In fact you might in some cases say you have better odds of survival if you could use tools. This is evident because of our huge success. As the human developed, we refine and honed our methods and this process repeats, for other things like shelter building. With our growing minds we stumbled upon the idea that we would manipulate certain plants to grow where we wanted them to grow. We could also selectively plant them in ways we wanted them. We did this with domestic animals as well.
To put humans in the most simplistic terms. The human nature is to refine nature. In fact you could label philosophy that same definition.
I still don't think that Darwinist theory accounts for the emergence of H Sapiens, in and of itself. I have discovered I am not alone in this -
opinion is still divided. I think evolutionary psychology and those kinds of disciplines are very interesting, but the attempt to attribute our many faculties to the sheer exigencies of survival is far fetched - for example the intellectual gymnastics required to rationalise altruism in terms of population dynamics. It is not that things didn't evolve, because clearly they did, but I don't believe that the principles provided in OoS are or will be the last word.
We are getting into very technical and time-consuming areas of argumentation here, and though I would love to produce all the arguments and documentation, time does not permit. But the very short version is that in denying the idea of design, or of intention, or of purpose, in the sense of 'telos', a tremendous dichotomy looms between H Sapiens and the universe of which we are offspring. If you say that nature is dumb and blind, which seems an inherent implication of the materialist outlook, then how come we're so smart? Look at the steps involved in getting us from a four-legged gait to an upright primate born with a large cranium, and the impact on infant mortality and other 'negative adaption factors' that must have been in play for those millions of years of development. It is a lot more daunting than the familiar sillouhette of human evolution implies.
Alternatively, how can our intellectual faculties be expected to provide us with any kind of surety of Truth, if they are purely the outcome of the struggle for survival? I would think that the idea of Truth with a capital T would be one of the first casualities of Darwinism, taken as a philosophy. If indeed we are just survival machines whose sole purpose is to obey the diktat of the selfish gene, then all of our attempts to evolve a morality beyond the brute facts of existence and survival don't add up to much. Netszche, Camus and Sarte knew this. Dawkins doesn't get it yet.
Krumple;154254 wrote:There could be a moral law to the universe. I however don't see one. If there is where is the guide book?
All of the ancient moral codes embody mankind's reflections on this law. The Bible, (when NOT in the hands of YEC), does so, as does the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Tao te Ching, and the Dhammapada. These codes still form the basis for the outlook for the majority of people on planet earth, and they aren't going away anytime soon. They have shaped and moulded human culture since before the dawn of history.
So now Project Secularism wishes to redefine religion as a human invention, which (like everything else) is simply a byproduct of the machinations of the Selfish Gene, which arose as a result of purely material causes. This I call 'Darwinian Rationalism'. It annoys me a lot more than Young Earth Creationism, because that I can safely ignore.
---------- Post added 04-20-2010 at 01:27 PM ----------
The entire issue has now been declared 'a scientific question' and therefore only within scope for men in white coats. The various scientific methods, techniques, 'the scientific attitude', thereby becomes the default position for declaring our place in the cosmos, the meaning of our existence, or its absence. Leave to the boffins, the experts, forget about all those fuddy duddy old fashioned religious types.
Well I am sorry but I am not buying it.
