The difference of Man (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 17, 2013, 12:56 (4298 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I will not accept chance as the force that inexplicably put together the mechanisms for life and evolution, any more than I will accept an equally inexplicable, self-made, self-aware, eternal maker of universes and evolutionary mechanisms. But once those mechanisms were in place, busily combining, adapting and innovating, I have no more reason to believe in directionality than I have to believe in randomness. As I have said repeatedly, the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution itself does not seem to me to denote a single goal, and so I find your divine teleology no more (and no less) believable than the view that the mechanisms simply followed their own random course, or they were imbued with an inventive "intelligence" of their own, or a possible designer fiddled around with his building blocks to see what he could come up with.-DAVID: My bold. Who did the imbuing? Chance? Please explain imbued.-Permeated, inspired, filled...in the same way as I might say your writings are imbued/filled with a sense of divine purpose. It doesn't mean that God comes along and does your writing for you. (My writings are imbued with a sense of my own ignorance, so who does the writing?) However, I will answer your question in the only way I can: I do not know where this intelligence came from. I do not believe in chance, and I do not believe in a self-made, self-aware, eternal, inside-and-outside-the-universe designer.
 
In the meantime, perhaps you have forgotten that the trigger for this discussion was "the-great-ape-taxonomy-debate", the point of which escapes me. So let me ask you once more how you define "primate", why you think the term degrades us, and why you think people who are sceptical of your "very special", divine teleology would be converted to your opinions if only you could make them refer to us as humans and not as primates.