Ch 16, A mad world (A mad world)

by dhw, Saturday, December 08, 2012, 14:44 (4367 days ago) @ hyjyljyj

Hyjyljyj (referring to the concluding sentences of the "brief guide"]:
This is just absolutely brilliant, especially the italicized part.-Thank you for your praise. You are only the second person outside my personal circle of family and friends to have found something in the guide to praise! Matt (= xeno) was the first ... he liked the section on animals. It was, of course, savaged by atheist websites, whose members automatically assume that an attack on their Master, Dawkins, can only be Creationism in disguise. -Hyjyljyj: BTW, is one still agnostic who has made a firm decision to side with the design camp over the random-chance camp? I'm more in favor of design also, but only because everything "appears" to me to have been designed. Things bear the hallmark of intentionality rather than haphazardness when, for example, a tiny animal is capable of constructing a perfectly symmetrical web of a material five times stronger than steel from inside its abdomen, then knows to sit and WAIT for a meal to fly into it rather than go hunt like most other animals.-It's all a matter of definition. As I'm sure you know, T.H. Huxley coined the term agnosticism to mean the impossibility of knowing whether or not God exists. In epistemological terms, of course, no-one can "know" such a thing, which makes us all agnostics, and so in modern times ... to the disapproval of the purists - the term has increasingly been used to denote neither belief nor disbelief in a god or gods. It's purely negative. The next problem is what is meant by god(s). Most religions associate the term with a supreme being (or beings) that deliberately created the universe and life ... and the monotheistic religions add that this being is eternal. The key word for me is "deliberately", which means that this being must be self-aware. I will come back to this on the threads.....Chimp vs. human brain, and Panpsychism.-The spider example certainly illustrates intentionality, but this surely lies within the spider. The question you and I have to face is whether the mechanism that enabled the spider and every other living creature to devise and develop means for its survival was deliberately created by a self-aware supreme being or not. If your preference for design over chance leads you to genuinely believe in such a being, you are a theist. If you remain open-minded about its existence, you are an agnostic. In my own case, I find it as difficult to believe in such a being as I do to believe in chance, and so I neither believe nor disbelieve. Ergo, I'm an agnostic.