Re: Materialism

Susan Brassfield (susan-brassfield@ou.edu)
Tue, 26 Oct 1999 16:55:52 -0500

Bertvan:

>Many of the staunchest Darwinists seem hung up on religion.

it is mostly biblical literalists who continue to snipe at evolution. It is
they who are in the dialogue with people like me. If it were Outer
Mongolians who were making silly claims about the history of life, then
Darwinists would seem to be hung up on Mongolians.

> They have
>rejected some simplistic view of God, perfectly understandable by the mind of
>a child, which satisfied them during their childhood. In it's place, they
>have substituted an equally simplistic view of nature as a complex machine,
>perfectly understandable by the mind of a scientist, and which can be reduced
>to mathematical formulas.

you are assuming that Darwinism is the direct equivalent of atheism. It's
not. If it were there would be no Christian or theistic evolutionists and
there are quite a lot of them.

>As if there were only two alternatives. Free
>will, mind, consciousness, the origin of life, and the infinitely complex
>design of nature (which Darwinists have to keep reminding themselves is
>merely an illusion)

science finds "design" undetectable. You can see an illusion. You can't see
something you can't detect. And actually abiogeneticists seem to be honing
in on the origin of life. "Free will" is a religious issue that science can
never address. Mind and consciousness are things that can be studied and
are. I don't keep up with that stuff, though. I haven't read anything about
it since college.

Your mantra seems to be along the lines of "don't look, don't ask, don't
wonder, don't investigate, don't learn." Even after reading your web page I
can't quite figure out why.

Susan

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"Life itself is the proper binge."
--Julia Child

http://www.telepath.com/susanb/