(September 29, 2014 at 8:17 pm)Dolorian Wrote: Was having an exchange with someone recently about my de-conversion and among the things he asked was...
Quote:What do you make of the strange coincidence that man stands apart from creation, encompassing it and acting as a sub-creator? The idea that man can seemingly explain everything but will never fully explain himself and the bizarre correspondence between reality and his mind? ...what Walker Percy describes as being Lost in the Cosmos?
Aside from there being a bit of an argument from ignorance mixed up in there. Personally, I don't see man as standing apart from "creation" but rather continuous with and fully encompassed by nature. The bizarre correspondence between reality and his mind, I see as being sensibly explained by evolution both as a product of our adaptation to the environment in one sense (our brains accurately interpreting what we perceive) and also as a by product of our more developed brains (our capacity for beliefs, advanced abstraction and concept formation). The same goes for our acting as "sub-creator". Is it an strange coincidence that we are very much the only ones that ended up like this? Sure, but it hardly amounts to anything more than that.
Would be interested in other perspectives on this question.
We have more intelligence resulting in better and better technology as time moves on.
The question "Is it a coincidence than man stands apart from creation" Straight away assumes two things, that there has been a creation, and that man does stand apart from whatever the creation is.
I would say, look at it from another perspective.
Is it a coincidence that man behaves EXACTLY and precisely how you would expect any other ape to act if over time natural selection resulted in less physical strength and more intelligence and tool using abilities ?
Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.
Impersonation is treason.
