You wrote,
> I believe the only way to answer the Naturalist is this: Your system
> does not allow you any way to find truth. Ultimately, your entire view
> is absurd. It is chemicals passing judgement--ontological and
> provisional--upon other chemicals. There is nothing more absurd than
> that.
We may ultimately convince Naturalists that Naturalism is inherently
absurd, but I doubt we'll have much impact with the "chemicals passing
judgement upon other chemicals" argument.
A few weeks ago, in this discussion group, we all apparently agreed
(*gasp*) that there was nothing to be gained by arguing against the
"purely random assembly of prebiotic amino acids into complex proteins and
self-replicating molecules" scenario for abiogenesis. Serious proponents
of abiogenesis don't believe it actually happened that way any more.
In the same way, modern Naturalists aren't going to defend the absurdity
of chemicals passing judgement upon other chemicals. Naturalists are
going to defend the idea of chemicals -- highly organized into forms which
can sense the environment, process and store information, and construct
models to test behaviors and predict outcomes of behaviors -- passing
judgement upon similarly organized chemicals. That is where we are going
to have to take our arguments. (Philosophy of artificial intelligence
literature is perhaps the best source for this sort of debate.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can't imagine mastering the skills involved |
here without a clearer understanding | Loren Haarsma
of who's going to be impressed." | lhaarsma@opal.tufts.edu
--Calvin (_Calvin_and_Hobbes_) |