ID as a Cultural Phenomenon (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, October 02, 2009, 12:59 (5530 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt: The common ground between many religions abstracts out to nothing more than very general concepts [...] The subjectivity provided by theology prevents you from moving beyond generic and abstract concepts and that is what makes them meaningless. [...] Think about political speech. The more general they are. The less they say. [...] Yes, 90% of the world believes in some kind of soul + ethereal presence. Yet none of them can come to any common agreement on what exactly they are or mean.-First of all, my apologies if I put words into your mouth. I used "invalidates", but "makes them meaningless" is not, I agree, quite the same thing.-You've used politics as an analogy, but again we're approaching the subject from completely different angles. You seem to be looking for precision where there can't be any, and I'm simply stating a possible explanation (no more than that) of mysteries. I certainly don't expect you to provide answers to these questions yourself! My analogy would be ten witnesses to an accident giving ten different accounts. The fact that their reports are different does not mean that the accident didn't happen, or that there is no objective truth beyond their subjective accounts. In other words, I'm suggesting that all these different religions and concepts may be seen as attempts to grasp the same ungraspable truth. Common agreement on the details is impossible, because if there really is a "soul" and an "ethereal presence" they are almost certainly beyond our philosophical and scientific reach. For a materialist, that makes them into fairy stories, but for a neutral like myself, they are no more and no less a fairy story than inanimate matter coming to life and giving itself evolutionary powers. My plea is not for belief in a soul or in an ethereal presence, but for open-mindedness towards concepts that have permeated human cultures since time immemorial. It's just possible that your "90% of the world" (I haven't counted) has cottoned onto something that your 10% has lost touch with.-The "Roman arches which evolve naturally as well as artificially" are a hilarious misunderstanding. I would call them "natural arches", so I was trying to figure out how the Romans could have devised arches that grew of their own accord! However, I would say this is a somewhat disproportionate analogy. If the statistics behind the chance formation of your inanimate block are "staggering", the statistics behind the chance formation of your living, moving, seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, reproducing, remembering organic machine are so staggering that they totter off the statistical stage and collapse at the bottom of the pit of can't-stagger-any-further statistics.