RE: Does humanity deserve Corona?
March 31, 2020 at 1:14 am
(This post was last modified: March 31, 2020 at 1:18 am by Belacqua.)
(March 31, 2020 at 12:48 am)Succubus#2 Wrote:(March 31, 2020 at 12:19 am)Belacqua Wrote: I'm sorry you haven't studied any theology at all. You don't know what they say.
Would you say that you prefer not to know? Maybe it's easier to keep your vehemence that way.
If you're at all interested, the key is in the Platonic idea of the Good, which takes no action.
The first step in any honest debate is that you have to be able to present your opponent's position in a way he would agree with. This doesn't mean you agree with it, only that you understand it well enough to describe it accurately.
If you can't, then at best you don't know what you're arguing against, and at worst you have set up a straw man.
The Neoplatonic idea of God, as held by Erasmus Darwin and others, is entirely compatible with natural selection. If you can't describe that position then you don't know how to argue against it.
Dude you're a fucking troll.
The history of Erasmus Darwin is fascinating. It can help you to overcome your prejudice.
There is a concept in Neoplatonism called the "Great Chain of Being." It posits that there is no hard and permanent line between species -- there must be a graduated change. So there was a long-running discussion among intellectuals -- Christians, but in the minority -- in which it was suggested that every niche in nature would be filled by some animal, though some of these might have disappeared. It also suggested that over time one species might change, or even become a different species.
When people started digging up fossils of unknown creatures, E. Darwin and others plugged this data into the Neoplatonic theory. As you know, raw data must be interpreted in the light of theory. This analysis allowed Darwin to get right up to the brink of the theory of evolution. In fact it is more proper to say that he did posit a theory of evolution, although he didn't hit on the mechanism of natural selection. But his grandson Charles probably wouldn't have hit on it either if he didn't know grandpa Erasmus's writings on the subject.
Anyway, the Neoplatonic God doesn't guide by putting down a hand and fiddling around. Fortunately the Darwin family was aware of this.
from Wikipedia:
Quote:Erasmus Darwin offered the first glimpse of his theory of evolution, obliquely, in a question at the end of a long footnote to his popular poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), which was republished throughout the 1790s in several editions as The Botanic Garden. His poetic concept was to anthropomorphise the stamen (male) and pistil (female) sexual organs, as bride and groom. In this stanza on the flower Curcuma (also Flax and Turmeric) the "youths" are infertile, and he devotes the footnote to other examples of neutered organs in flowers, insect castes, and finally associates this more broadly with many popular and well-known cases of vestigial organs (male nipples, the third and fourth wings of flies, etc.)
Woo'd with long care, CURCUMA cold and shy
Meets her fond husband with averted eye:
Four beardless youths the obdurate beauty move
With soft attentions of Platonic love.
Darwin's final long poem, The Temple of Nature was published posthumously in 1803. The poem was originally titled The Origin of Society. It is considered his best poetic work. It centres on his own conception of evolution. The poem traces the progression of life from micro-organisms to civilised society. The poem contains a passage that describes the struggle for existence.[11]
The most complete explanation is in Lovejoy's book The Great Chain of Being.