Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Esquilax]

Hey Esquilax, I hope your day went well? I've had a long day today, I'm tired, but I wanted to give you a partial response to our dialogue.

Yeah, I completely missed this. My bad.

The “Mr. Scientist” thing? Pffft! That’s my own personal incredulity; it’s not an argument. I do hope you understand my joke though? It’s an equivocation, “Mr. Scientist” might as well have said “just because.” Evolutionary psychology could not possibly be contradicted; it espouses unverifiable narratives of cultural and human behavior that amounts to nothing more than fluff and ‘ad hoc’ nonsense.

Unverifiable? I would argue that it has been verified, to the extent that it could be; we understand how evolution works and imposes upon the behaviors of animals, and we can observe this in nature. Rattle snakes evolve with the rattle, but without the instinct to use it, because in their given environment it's better to remain hidden. Hell, the best example I could give is birds in highly populated areas modulating their behavioral patterns to better take advantage of the humans around them.

We know it happens with other animals, and we're animals to, and so there's no reason to believe that it would somehow skip us. Now, there's an element of guesswork involved, sure, but let's not pretend that it isn't driven by evidence and data, here. When we can see other animals, even closely related species, selecting their mates based on certain markers pertaining to health and so on, why would we believe that there's one species out of the entire biological history of life that's for some reason immune to the same drives?

Yes, things evolve, I agree. I’m not arguing against evolution per se, I’m arguing about the substance of the mind and how evolutionary psychology has it’s propositions “profoundly backwards.”

If the mind is simply matter than the mind becomes nothing more than a mechanical process that reacts to certain stimuli in the brain, and it would mean that some form of determinism is true. If that’s the case, than anything we say or believe is the result of heredity and our environment; it would effectively nullify science because we would be measuring our own sense impressions, not the external world.

I disagree with your premise but, funnily enough, accept the conclusion. Though there's simply no reason to believe that emergent, advanced processes cannot arise from material mechanics as you suggest, we are only measuring our sense perceptions. Quite a lot of the scientific method is devoted to stripping out observer biases and nullifying the ways our senses can be fooled in order to more closely align the results of experimentation with reality. To presume that your senses present a one-to-one model of the real world in any case would be foolhardy, and besides, I spot a flaw in your model too: even if your mind is some special, magic thing that isn't a product of a material brain, it doesn't follow that this mind is at all connected to reliable sense organs. In the world as you perceive it, people still have non-functional sense organs sometimes, people still experience hallucinations, and they still need to correct for their faulty senses in other ways. Even if my mind is special magic, I still have to wear glasses to correct for the fact that my eyes still don't present an accurate view of the external world.

Not to mention, the idea of a non-material mind doesn't absolve anyone of the problem of hard solipsism either. We're all in the same boat here, materialist or not.

This isn’t “imperfect evidence,” you’ve totally switched to a metaphysical position about science. You might as well be appealing to your own cognitive ability on this one because you assume that other’s can be relied upon. You’ve exited ‘empirical rationalism,’ and entered into a metaphysical presupposition. It is one thing to infer from the past to all future cases, it’s another to be able to justify that position using science.

Observation lies at the heart of empiricism; when all the observations we've ever had point to consistent and reliable natural laws it is a bigger leap to expect that they won't continue the same patterns into the future. That would fly in the face of what data we can gather. Now, you might be inclined to point out that I'm still assuming the accuracy of my senses, my memory, so on and so forth, but I reject the problem of hard solipsism as useful at all. Regardless of the ultimate reality of my perceptions I'm still bound by the laws of the world, as are you, as are we all. We need to take some things as axiomatic in order to function, and this is true for all of us.

Help me out here; explain why you believe this to be a “dishonest equivocation?” Because it would seem you have some sort of double standard as to what’s “rational” to believe.

Within the context of the axioms that we are forced to use, we can gather data and observations that lead to conclusions; where it concerns the physical world we at least have a basis for thinking that it exists at all, and observations about how it behaves. These are things that we simply don't have for other considerations, like god.

It’s not that I’m simply not listening to you, it’s that I have reason to believe you’re wrong. Video recordings, writing, audio are all taken in as ‘sensory input’ and you assume that our cognitive faculties are capable of more than ‘sensory impressions.’ I’ve made this statement before; it’s a presupposition of science, we could not do good science apart from it. You have not provided “evidence of the reality of the past,” and my point still stands that apart from evidences it is rational to believe some things.

It's a presupposition of being alive. We've discussed axioms before.

Hey! how would you feel about an "open dialogue," we could make a new thread for you and I. Or, there's always the option of a private correspondence? In any case, you're bright guy; fun to talk to. If you're ever in the States (I'm assuming you live outside the States?), specifically Wisconsin we should get coffee, my treat.

Yeah, if you wanna make another thread go right ahead. There's even the debate area, if that's your bag. And I'm in Australia right now, alas.