Common Ground (General)

by dhw, Friday, January 23, 2009, 19:10 (5781 days ago)

I have been pursuing linguistic problems, and also asked George if there was no difference in principle between inorganic processes, such as avalanches, tsunamis etc. and "life, reproduction, organs, senses, consciousness". - First of all, my thanks to George and David for their responses, and in particular to George for the website references ... though unfortunately I missed the Miller programme. As is so often the case, however, there is a misunderstanding here, as I'm not trying to discover the point where the inorganic turns into the organic. What I'm trying to do is work out the common ground that precedes the parting of the ways, and remove some of the linguistic pitfalls. - This may turn out to be a dead end, but I'd like to keep trying. There is a clash between George's atheism and David's panentheism, with one major difference concerning the origin of life (hence my desire to distinguish between the inorganic and the organic). George believes it came about through a combination of chance and the laws of nature. David believes it came about through design. Over and over again, all of us, even atheists, find ourselves compelled to use words that suggest design, although George is scrupulous in excluding any suggestion of consciousness. If we consider the "laws of nature", which some would say entail a greater or lesser degree of randomness, we may reduce the gap between the two sides. A crucial area of David's argument has always been that we must stop attributing qualities to whatever brought about the combination of materials which resulted in life and evolution. Well, Nature has no attributes. If, then, we argue that life is the result of natural processes, the only difference between the two sets of beliefs will be that David attributes consciousness to Nature and George doesn't. It's important to note that this is far from being the same as Pantheism. We are not talking here of God (because God entails attributes). We are talking only of the circumstances that brought us into being. - What's the point? It has the priceless advantage of taking religion, and even panentheism v atheism out of the discussion, at least initially. Each subject can be focused on individually, without any of the outside associations that automatically tend to creep in. For example, our current discussion on the "paranormal" can be reduced to what may or may not constitute natural processes. Belief in the communication of information via a NDE or a dream will not then automatically be associated with belief in an afterlife, or in the supernatural. There will be no stark choice as offered, for instance, by George in his post of 19 January at 10.36, between "natural occurrences" and "Acts of God". That should not, of course, stop theists from giving us their religious angle, and it should not stop any of us from speculating on possible implications, but in each area of discussion we shall be forced to consider what we understand by the "laws of nature". And let's face it, the expression leaves us with a great deal of what the Wikipedia article on dark matter calls "terra incognita". - As I said above, this may not lead us anywhere, but I'm opening a new thread as it takes us away from "Evolution".