Natural Selection Seems Insufficient

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

That guy cant be real. Nobody is legitimately that dumb. I see only one plausible scenario: Homeschooling. He has not answered the question about having been homeschooled, like he didnt directly answer my question about his scientific education. I dont know homeschooled people since homeschooling is not legal in my country, but i have been told that real dumb people can be the result of real dumb (and religious) parents educating them in social isolation.

Every other scenario seems....inconceivable to me (pun intended).

I actually own that one. I get depressed that so many, many people don’t get the reference. I’ve also got one of the ‘You Silly English Kniggits’ shirts and people - strangers, no less -  come up and point out the spelling error.

*sigh*

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

To be fair, he did say he’s ’not well versed in science.’ Which, I reckon, is the reason for his over-arching, mind-wobbling, world class reliance on incredulity.

Boru

In..credible, isnt it?

So in..credible I can hardly conceive it.

Boru

[Belacqua]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

[Ravenshire]

Rocks don't have that

Tell that to the dipshit OP.

[Jal]

[Jal]

I am not an occasionalist, and I don't believe that God moves everything. Human themselves are self-moving in my view, in fact most all living creatures self-locomote.

God simply enacts the forces of nature (gravity, magnetism, electricity, etc).

According to the view you have laid out, the self has no power to locomote.  At bottom, we are independent particles suspended in a vacuum.  It is only through these forces that God mediates that we locomote.  It doesn't sound like you understand your own framework.  That or you believe something counter-factual, that we are held together by something different from and apart from God.  We aren't.

Self-locomotion by free will is largely the crux of my OP. In my view, most particles of matter don't realize this potential, either because (A) God stifles it as part of His design for this world, or (B) because negligibly sentient particles cannot muster much free will,  or both A and B.

As I mentioned earlier, God has liberally/generously awakened/fostered this potential for self-locomotion in small fragments of matter known as souls. 
Which He normally keeps hidden from our eyes and mechanical instruments of detection.

Thus while my body in itself, to use your words, "has no power to locomote" and, left to itself would thus be a mere deterministic domino, nonetheless my soul, self-propelled by free will, animates/locomotes my body.

I thought I made it clear that my whole project on this thread was to postulate a libertarian free will as a necessary corrective to determinism.

Yet oddly enough you keep lumping me with determinism. I really don't get it.

[Jal]

Oh? Did you want me to focus on your genitalia question? No, I don't believe the Father and the Son have opted to endue themselves with human-like genitalia.

Therefore, the Father and Son are not ‘shaped like a man’ are they?

Boru

(Sigh). No need to be this nitpicky? One needn't have genitalia to be generally shaped like a man.  

Suppose you witnessed a murder. The police asked you if the perp looked like a man or a woman. You replied, "Looked like a man to me."

I think that statement would be accurate enough even if you had noticed that this perp had been castrated.

In the Bible, angels on scene were sometimes perceived as men. I really doubt that any genitalia was implied there. 

At least that's my reading. If you insist that the Bible predicates genitalia of Father and Son, I'm not sure I could prove you wrong, because I haven't given it any thought or study.

[The Grand Nudger]

One wonders, if it’s the soul that experiences and doesn’t interact in any detectable way…what the brains and eyes and guts and all the rest are for. Trickster gods are fun.

[Jal]

One wonders, if it’s the soul that experiences and doesn’t interact in any detectable way…what the brains and eyes and guts and all the rest are for.  Trickster gods are fun.

Traditional Christian psychology is sheer idiocy precisely because it can't address that question. If, as they say, the mind/soul is immaterial, how can it interact with a material brain? And how would one impact the other?  If a car accident causes brain damage, the mind's thinking is impaired - so clearly there is interaction and/or mutual influence.

Mutual influence is easily explained in a monistic material pansychism.

God designed the brain for His own pleasure, to foster a dynamic pleasing to Him. (He delights in His clay dolls). In this somewhat aesthetic dynamic, the purpose of the brain is to help ORGANIZE the soul's currents of thought. Although the brain doesn't, to an absolute degree,  rigidly/ deterministically/ exhaustively rule/control the soul's currents of thought,  it at least nudges those thought-currents to tend to flow in general directions/patterns conducive to pragamatically useful experiences such as hunger, thirst, pain, the five senses, conscience, libido, emotions, emotional balance, deductive logic, humor, etc.

You asked about the eyes? That's just an optical intake for the brain, right? The eyes modulate light impulses in expert ways useful to inform the brain of our surroundings, that is, inform the mind/soul which is situated within the brain. (Actually I understand the soul to be distributed from head to toe). 

Guts? Our body dies  (i.e. undergoes mechanical failure) without a digestive system, fuel, oxygen, etc - right?

To summarize, the above hopefully clarifies the mind-body relationship.