Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 19:53 (5504 days ago) @ dhw

'I have explained that I don't believe that life and the codes for evolution could have come about by accident, and I don't believe in a designer (I prefer this to "God", which has too many associated attributes). You find my views incoherent. This can only be because you haven't understood the nature of agnosticism.'-Well, maybe we have a different notion of what agnosticism is. To me agnosticism means not that you "don't believe" this and you "don't believe" that, but that you just don't know. I guess I'm going by the literal meaning of the word's etymological root. If you say you don't believe this and you don't believe that, even when "this" and "that" are mutually exclusive, well, sorry, that's being incoherent.-I think what you really mean is that you just don't know whether there was a designer for the forms we see in nature or whether the basic laws of nature are sufficient to produce them. I'm just objecting to the form of your nominally agnostic stand. I don't believe it's truly agnostic, in the literal sense of that word, because in my mind an agnostic position has to be fully coherent, and connecting your two "I don't believes" with an and relationship is what makes it incoherent.-Strictly speaking, I don't know either, whether there was a designer or whether it all happened naturally. But I have to face up to my own religious experience, which compels me to believe that there is something real down there in the base of my being that transcends finitude. At the same time, I'm pretty much sold on the scientific enterprise. Being of an essentially philosophical turn of mind, all my adult life I've tried to "face the music" and reconcile these two points of view. -A radical agnostic isn't going to be willing to stick his neck out about anything. I, on the other hand, am willing to sign up to a working hypothesis that eventually we will have scientific explanations for the origin of life and that a "designer" isn't necessary. That's the scientific agenda, and I sign up to it for the strictly pragmatic reason that it has worked more successfully than any other method humanity has ever devised for finding out the way things really work. You are trying to be agnostic not only about whether a designer exists, but about whether the scientific enterprise itself is on solid grounds. You are bothered by assuming the latter. It just doesn't bother me.-Griffin points out that there's a difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Science qua science only signs up to methodological naturalism. It is true that I go slightly beyond methodological naturalism and subscribe to a metaphysical naturalism of sorts. The difference between Dawkins and myself is that I recognize that that's what I'm doing, and Dawkins doesn't seem to recognize that there's a difference.-My process theology is more radical than Griffin's. In reading him, he doesn't seem to be free of the notion that somehow God has a way with natural events that involves efficient cause regardless of whether organisms can respond to him merely as a "lure" in the face of his beauty. My metaphysics does not require this. On the other hand, the closer the arguments in process theology get to Whitehead's core doctrines, the more difficult it is to penetrate into what is really being said. I'm open to the idea that in the very core of Whiteheadian thought I might just not be intelligent enough to understand what's going on, and maybe my ideas are at bottom, incoherent. I've read certain assertions about what Griffin says that seem to deny some of my core beliefs, but in the face of those assertions, for the life of me I haven't been able to find anything in Griffin that actually refutes my own low level ideas about process thought.-But I'm straying off the main point I started with in this post. Maybe it's time to move on and address some of your other points, which I'll do in subsequent posts. I didn't even make it through the first paragraph of your post, but I'm reluctant to finish it off at this point because I may have already lost you and you may not even have read this far.