The Anomaly that is Man

[downbeatplumb]

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Was having an exchange with someone recently about my de-conversion and among the things he asked was...

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.

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We're just another ape.