Re: [asa] Altruism and ID

Pim wrote:

> Why? I found that quoting from scientific views of altruism tends to
> help my argument. Now I understand that Christianity has a long
> philosophical tradition in this area and it would indeed be
> interesting to see if Christian perspectives can be reconciled with
> science but that's for a later discussion I believe.
> Understanding the origins and evolution of altruism is my direct interest.
>

Generally, if I want to know a topic, I go as far as I can
back to the source of the subject matter and read forward.
On many topics of science, this can involve digging back
at least 50 to 100 years. It is very time consuming, and is
not a light commitment of a couple of books for most
subjects of science these days.

If you add in something that has such a long history of
thought as this, your literature depth is even more
daunting. This is what makes theology studies very hard.
Most of us simply do not have the human capacity to manage
a daytime job, a few hobbies and become deeply read enough
to give such matters sufficient thought and to really discuss
this at the truly necessary level.

There is a good chance our good friend Augustine had something
to say on altruism. It's not like the ancient world was made
up of a bunch of lightweights. They didn't have our modern
science, but I'm often impressed at how sharp as a razor they
were on a lot of things.

by Grace we proceed,
Wayne

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Received on Sat Jun 9 18:23:01 2007